Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"Money it's a crime
Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie
Money so they say
Is the root of all evil today"
--Pink Floyd

"It's odd how a shocking sight can shake your mind so you don't at first register the whole, just the small, almost comical details. Like the hand complete with fancy gold wristwatch, wedding band and neatly clipped fingernails we saw bobbing on the water's surface as we came toward the pool. Above it, swathed in a shawl of brown seaweed, a rubbery-looking shoulder peeked out, white as a girl's. Above that, a bloated face the color of slate; two sightless eyes, open. And there in his neck, what was that? I saw a dark-rimmed hole."

After David, a fourteen-year-old aspiring journalist, appears repeatedly at his doorstep, Rubin Hart, who is now in his eighties, eventually begins to recount the thrilling story that defined his own adolescence. Back in the late 1920s, it was the era of the liquor Prohibition; Mr. Hart travels back in his mind to those days and retraces the course of events that starts with an after school stroll along the shoreline; two boys looking for washed-up lobster pots. (Returning a pot to the owner meant a ten-cent reward.) On the beach with Rubin at the time was his best friend Jeddy McKenzie, son of the town's police chief.

Beginning with the grisly discovery (and subsequent mysterious disappearance) of that body, Rubin Hart's personal story involving rumrunning in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay relentlessly unfolds. There are fast boats and dark nights, danger, deceit, death, a large cast of characters and, of course, easy money.

"Their eyes was statin'
They was waitin'
To get their hands on some easy money"
--Ricki Lee Jones

As the author explains, "The first rumrunners were local fishermen who wanted to make an extra buck for their families. They'd sneak cases of booze onshore off boats that brought the stuff down from Canada or the Bahamas. But there was too much money to be made, as there is in the drug trade today. Hardened criminals came in and formed gangs. People were shot up and murdered. The business turned vicious."

In the manner of Chris Crowe's memorable MISSISSIPPI TRIAL, 1955, a fictional account of the events leading up to the death of Emmett Till, Janet Taylor Lisle's narrator tells of the legendary Black Duck, a rumrunning boat that really existed.

"She was half phantom, known all over Narragansett Bay for her daring runs and yet rarely glimpsed by ordinary folk. Her skipper was too smart and her crew too skilled. She'd eluded the Coast Guard and the Feds for years, and made a laughingstock of local police who tried to track her movements."

And just as we'll never know the real details of Emmett Till's torture and murder, following his kidnapping in the middle of the night in 1955, we'll never know the truth about whether the Coast Guard crew--who had been tipped off to the Black Duck's whereabouts that night in 1929--really fired a warning shot first, or simply decided to execute the Black Duck's crew by raking the pilot house with machine gun fire when it came into view.

Through the stories and interactions of dozens of memorable characters--including gangsters, grocers, big sisters, sleezy lawmen and the down-and-out bayman Tom Morrison--Janet Taylor Lisle provides readers an exceptional sense of life in New England coastal towns during the era of the rumrunners. And the story will surely instigate comparisons with and debate about today's Drug Wars. But, most importantly, Lisle crafts an exceptionally well-written thriller and mystery that will have readers scanning the horizon for ships anchored beyond the 12-mile limit, just as I found myself doing this afternoon out at the coast.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com