BILL WEBB

JAMES W. HALL*

HELL’S BAY
JAMES W. HALL
St. Martin ’s Minotaur February, 2008

Nice guys don’t just finish last, their friends and lovers often wind up dead. That’s reality in the world of Thorn, James W. Hall’s loyal, loner, nice-guy fishing guide who nobody in their right mind would want to stand anywhere near.

HELL’S BAY is the 10^th installment in what is fast becoming the defining series for modern Florida crime fiction. Such a discussion invariably dredges up comparisons to John D. MacDonald’s seminal hero, Travis McGee, but while Hall may have drawn inspiration from his predecessor, in truth he may one day surpass him in the canons of crime fiction. Indeed, it might already be the case. The man with one name, Thorn, with no past after his parents died in a car wreck on the way home from the hospital with their baby boy, an aging beach bum fisherman who knows South Florida like the wrinkles of his own palm and can barely afford to buy himself a beer, this unlikely character has evolved into a metaphor for Florida itself: beaten, battered and badly used, but still alive and still fighting back.

HELL’S BAY finds Thorn hiding from the world. He has lost yet another love, yet another quirky friend is dead because of Thorn, it just seems better to hide and do what he does best, sit on his porch overlooking the Atlantic and tie fishing flies. Indeed, it has become something of a running joke with Thorn’s (remaining) friends that it’s not healthy to be anywhere near him. The guilt weighs heavily on his soul.

An old flame, however, wants him to get out again, come back to life. Ridge, the only female fishing guide on that stretch of coast, has a dream to build a luxury pontoon boat that would take vacationers deep into some unknown lakes hidden in the Everglades . She has commissioned an aerial map of the area that has never been compiled before and, if she is right, there are un-fished lakes just waiting to be explored. It’s a lure that not even Thorn can resist. He signs on as first mate is excited again for the first time in a long time. Naturally, this is a very bad idea.

The first passengers are...let’s say people Thorn never knew existed, much less expected to meet. From the very beginning there are ominous signs that this trip isn’t going to be a joy-ride.

The recipe for one classic thriller contains the following ingredients: Four passengers, Thorn and Ridge as crew, two assassins, one dead old lady, Thorn’s best friend Sugarman investigating her drowning, a black, female sheriff of questionable motives, more Machiavellian twists than even Machiavelli could have dreamed up and, most importantly, one absolutely brilliant writer to bring it all together. It’s a typical Thorn novel.

There seems to be a growing sub-genre, or perhaps even a sub-sub-genre, of noir mysteries set in post-war European capitals. Graham Greene’s THE THIRD MAN used Vienna as a character as much as it did Harry Lime, Elizabeth Wilson’s THE TWILIGHT HOUR could not happen anywhere except 1947 London, and now Berlin is the setting for its second stylish thriller in as many years, with Dan Vyleta’s PAVEL AND I, following Pierre Frei’s brilliant BERLIN. And really, the allure is obvious. Devastation, desperation, degradation, ingredients just asking for a story to be woven around the rotting corpse of a continent laid waste. A place alive with crime and only because of crime, where anything is possible, perhaps even probable.

PAVEL AND I is set in very late 1946 and early 1947 in the one capital more devastated than any other, the capital of The Third Reich, Berlin . Life is cheap, sex is cheap, food is expensive, cigarettes are money. Living in a battered flat is Pavel Richter, a former American GI with a shady past, suffering from kidney disease and writing poetry. What is he doing there? Why is a GI slumming in the British sector of a city struggling to come back from the dead? Don’t expect an answer.

Do expect a cast of equally damaged characters weaving through the narrative in ways you will not expect. A boy shows up: Anders, a twelve-year-old trying to survive in a pack of other children who rob and cheat to eat. Pavel reads to him and the boy likes it. There is Sonia, a piano playing whore who lives on the floor above and is mixed up in spying and intrigue, a virtual slave to the grossly obese British Colonel Fosko. There is General Karpov, the suave, cold Russian who wants to know what Pavel knows. And there is the dead midget, brought to Pavel’s apartment by a soon-to-be-dead friend, whose tiny body is on everyone’s mind. And there is the narrator, a torturer and executioner, who tells the story from the disconcerting viewpoint of First Person Omniscient.

If PAVEL AND I is ever made into a film it should be shot in black and white. There is no color here, no joy, just shades of gray. There are no heroes, not even many likeable characters. But there is fascination and there is talent to spare. A tremendous first novel that will gather accolades like shards of broken glass littering the once-fashionable Kurfurstendamm. PAVEL AND I is not to be missed.

The post-Vietnam U.S. Army was a mess in the mid-1970's. Demoralized by a lost war and Watergate, held in contempt by many, rudderless and paranoid, it was a conglomeration of military angst trying to find its course again. But despite the recent setbacks it still had missions to perform around the world, the most important of which was guarding the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea. That was the job of the Second Infantry Division.

Jill Matthewson was the first female MP assigned to this unit at the very beginning of the integration of females into traditionally male roles within the Army, and she has gone missing. At the request of her Congressman back home, 8^th Army Headquarters in Seoul has agreed to investigate. Enter CID agents George Sueno and Ernie Bascomb, military cops extraordinaire.

Arriving at Camp Casey, the home of the Second Infantry Division, Sueno and Bascomb are immediately made aware that they are not wanted and are welcome to leave as soon as possible. Corporal Matthewson is AWOL and that’s that. Oh, and that private who is dead, Private Druwood? Training accident. Nothing to see here, move along. The cover-up is obvious, the fix is in, the MPs of Second Infantry have investigated thoroughly and the case is closed. Bye, Agents Sueno and Bascomb.

But Sueno and Bascomb are cops to the core and they don’t play games. They want to know what happened. And almost as soon as they begin to poke around accidents begin happening all around them, accidents that could easily leave them dead.

This book is about Korea in the mid 70's, the people, the customs, the places, the traditions. The author knows his stuff and isn’t afraid to weave his immense knowledge into the narrative. Corruption is everywhere, from the Korean government to every single U.S. Army officer in the book; the only honest folk are the two cops and the working class peasants trying to get by in a police state. And that’s where the book begins to bog. Without a doubt the author knows everything necessary to write a beautiful, convincing tale of murder and greed in an exotic setting. His ear for dialogue is excellent, he knows when to give information and when to drive the narrative. But as the book goes on it becomes clearer that his main intent is to indict the U.S. Army for any and every sin known to Man. And at the very last, almost as if he hasn’t beaten the reader over the head enough already, he refers to the ‘8^th United States Imperial Army.’ He does everything but call the Army ‘running dogs.’

In the storied history of crime fiction there have been some notable Asian detectives: Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto to name only two. Cast as inscrutable, all-seeing, calm and clever, they were very popular in the 1920's and 1930's, both in print and in film. And now along comes another Asian detective, Inspector O, to follow in their footsteps.

Or not. However clever Inspector O might be, and to survive in his world he must be clever, he is anything but inscrutable or calm. He is a North Korean and, as might be expected, far more interested in navigating the tricky bureaucratic waters of the world’s last Stalinist state than in actually solving crimes.

One of crime fictions’ greatest strengths has always been its ability to whisk readers along to places unknown for adventures beyond knowing, to understand strange cultures and explore new cities. Suffice to say, Pyongyang, the North Korean capital city, is unlikely to be familiar to very many mystery fans. This fact alone would make the Inspector O series almost a must read. Happily, there are also many other reasons.

Inspector O is called upon to solve a bank robbery. Not such a big deal to western readers, except

North Korea

has never had a bank robbery before. Indeed, the whole concept of banks is new, and the idea of finding out who would rob one is a complete unknown. But there it is, O is ordered to solve it regardless, and that brings on the first major question for him: does anybody actually want this crime solved, or is that just for show? Soon enough it becomes clear that someone in government does want the crime solved, but someone else does not, and a third party is somewhere in between. Who is what, who matters and who doesn’t? These are the important questions for O; facts relating to the bank robbery, and subsequent murders, those questions aren’t nearly as important.

James Church is the pseudonym for an expert on North Korea whose real name must be protected and it shows in his casual expertise in a culture most westerners could never comprehend. With a dizzying cast of characters in the most isolated and exotic of locales, a plot that twists and turns like a narrow Korean highway and spare but powerful prose, the author makes it quite clear from the outset that he is in command and that he knows what he is talking about. HIDDEN MOON is almost compulsively readable, an absolute gem and HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.