On the Rocks (2013) by Sue Hallgarth
Good Reads meta-data is 255 pages, rated 3.06 by 70 litizens.
DNA: O’ Canada.
Genre: Krimi.
Verdict: Willa can do it!
Tagline: Button, button, who’s lost a button.
It is the summer of 1929 and Pulitzer winning novelist Willa Cather and her paramour Edith Lewis escape New York City’s heat and humidity by retreating to a cottage they have built over the years on Ile de Grand Manan of New Brunswick (which has the distinction these days of being the only Canadian province that is legally bilingual). Others also flee summer heat to areas and islands in the vicinity like Campobello. (If you know, you know.)
While the resident islanders (numbering about 3,000 per Wikipedia today) don’t always like these outsiders, their money is good and they don’t stay long. Ergo there are accommodations and supplies for them. Since most, if not all, the outsiders are women, many islanders resent them even more for having money, wearing trousers, drinking alcohol, building their own cottages, driving cars, smoking cigarettes, and breathing. Still a truce obtains most summers.
That truce is strained when an American stranger just off the ferry falls to his death and the Republican rumour mill runs over time blaming his demise on the coven of witches that are everywhere, among them Cather and Lewis. ‘They caused his death, and that is murder,’ is the text. Not that any of these rumour-millers knew or cared about the victim, but his demise offers an excuse to vent their pent-up animosity.
The local plod is on his own and though level-headed he cannot do everything at once: keep the peace, investigate the death, fend off bootleggers, interview twenty of more people who may have seen the victim on the day, go over the ferry records of passengers, and more. Yes, in 1929 exporting forbidden alcohol to the United States is big Canadian business. Fortunately, unbidden, he gets some help from the energetic Lewis and the insightful Cather.
While I found the start slow with its perseverating asides on literature, social mores, and history tedious, even though I found most of them sympathetic, they were not why I was there, yet I stuck with it and was glad I did. It had some very nice touches.
Warning SPOILERS ahead: the surrender of the torch was one, another were the many loose shirt buttons. There were also some nice images as in overhearing ‘a silent conversation.’ It makes sense in context.
I bought this book at the Willa Cather Museum in Red Cloud (NB) nearly ten years ago and finally got around to reading it. There is another novel featuring this duo by Hallgarth.
By the way, I am sorry to say that on Hallgarth’s website Cather’s Red Cloud home is said to be in MN (Minnesota), whereas in fact it is in NB (Nebraska). (Yes, I know, there is a Red Cloud in Minnesota, but that is not where she lived.)