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Fishing Expedition
In James W. Hall’s Hell’s Bay, somebody’s gonna get bit
 By
John Hood
Here’s the setup: An iron-hard dame and her recalcitrant
ex-lover pilot a tricked-out houseboat into the thick of the
Everglades’ still surprisingly primordial 10,000 islands. On the
craft: the dame’s slow-witted brother (who happens to be a
master chef); a blowhard captain of industry and his
cantankerous daughter (who happen to be at each others’ throats)
and a big-city travel writer and her large-mouthed lensman (who
happen to not give a shit about anybody but themselves).
Sounds idyllic, right?
Wrong.
This is James W. Hall we’re talkin’ ’bout — a cat whose tales
are far from idyllic. And this is Hell’s Bay (St.
Martin’s,
$24.95), the place where the swamp secretes a very special
something.
And that something is phosphate, or at least the phosphatic
leftovers. See, that captain happens to be head of an outfit
called Bates International, king of the companies that best rape
Florida’s midland. In other words: He believes the world is his
oyster, and he’s gonna eat it up in one gulp.
But don’t think for a minute that the captain or his company’s
ever been content with a mere mouthful, let alone a massive
violation. No, once they’ve victimized the landscape, they leave
behind mountains of radioactive waste just so those who live on
the landscape get to be vics as well.
It’s ugly, it’s gruesome and it’s all true, despite the fact
that this is fiction. Go ahead, Google phosphate mining and see
if I’m lying. Then check the disease rate of those who dwell
near the depths that have been dug into our world.
Hall, who was tipped by a whistle-blower who found that
bureaucrats have no chance against bureaucracy, takes the sad
truth of a very heavy matter and spins it through a story that
encompasses greed, guts, double-dealing, triple crosses and
enough so-called unforeseen circumstances to make your blood
boil. People get pushed, people get prodded and people get
shoved, right over the edge of whatever humanity’s left.
And, of course, people get dead, in some of the most diabolical
ways imaginable. Not everybody deserves it, perhaps, but, hey,
such is life.
And nobody living is immune to death — even the man named Thorn,
Hall’s erstwhile anti-hero, who here returns with a heroism only
a reluctant warrior can muster. Faced with a finality that few
can fathom, Thorn stoops to the occasion and goes lower, harder
and deeper than even his most accomplished adversary.
Refreshingly, for all the bad guys, Thorn’s most formidable foe
is a gal who’s lost more than most and been trained to win
regardless. Another warrior, see? Brass-tacked, bare-boned and
trained by the good ol’ U.S. of A.
But this expertly trained dame is not driven by slogan or
platitude or some wind-blown stars and bars; she’s driven by
loss, a loss so profound and elemental that even the evilest
swamp creatures allow her a pass. So too do some of her
compatriots, chief among them a black female small-town sheriff
named Timmy, who’s loyal to a core she can only question.
Which is kinda the whole point of Hall’s wham-bam murder
mystery, to raise the most unanswerable questions imaginable,
among them: At what point are we justified in breaking the law?
To what extent is murder permissible? How far can we go before
we’ve gone too far? And, who the hell are we to judge anybody?
Sure, it’s a fishing expedition, and sure, some people are
destined to get bit, but if you don’t get your ass out on the
water where the wild things are, how the hell are you gonna
reel?
James W. Hall discusses and signs
Hell's Bay, at
8 p.m.
Friday, Feb. 29, at
Books & Books,
265 Aragon Ave.,
Coral Gables. For more information, call 305-442-4408.
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