This month I’m looking at adventure stories, one nonfiction, one fiction.
I have read only one book by David Grann to date, but I want to remedy that shortcoming quickly. Just a few days ago I finished The Wager, and I’m afraid that even its Grand Guignol subtitle (A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder) can’t do justice to the harrowing true story that Grann has researched and rendered so skillfully. The Wager was a ship assigned in the early 1740’s to a fleet tasked with generally harassing Spanish vessels on the high seas and specifically finding and capturing a galleon full of treasure. Unfortunately for the captain and crew of The Wager, the ship sank as it tried to round Cape Horn, and the survivors landed on a bleak, inhospitable island off the coast of Patagonia. So far you may be thinking, yes, okay, Ernest Shackleton redux, but you should stop right there. Shackleton managed to save every member of his crew. The men and boys of The Wager were not so fortunate, and one of the many great coups Grann manages is to distinguish individual characters as if in a novel and to keep us in suspense over which of them will survive.
One character we know will survive is 16-year-old John Byron, a midshipman who would grow up to have a distinguished naval career and to become the grandfather of George Gordon, the poet Lord Byron. John Byron, like the ship’s gunner, John Bulkeley, kept a journal of the voyage and the ordeal, and Grann meticulously incorporates their eyewitness accounts into his narrative. David Cheap, the captain of The Wager, also kept records and also becomes a prominent figure in the cast. What we get from this book is not merely the expected astonishment over the power of the human will to survive, but also a vivid history of what life was like for British sailors in the middle of the 18th Century. (Hint: it’s not comfy.) Whether he’s teaching us the origin of the term “under the weather”—sick sailors stayed belowdecks, where wind and rain could not reach them, so they were hence under the weather—or showing us the injustices of the press gangs or depicting in gruesome detail the horrors of scurvy, Grann makes every page an educational and eloquent pleasure to read. We turn those pages quickly.
Several months ago I decided that it was past time for me to get acquainted with Joe Pickett, C.J. Box’s likeable game warden who has now appeared in 24 mystery novels. Happily I chose to read the books in order of appearance, and I’d recommend the same practice to anyone like me coming late to this series. (I’ve never seen the television adaptation on Paramount Plus, now in limbo after Season 2, and I’m in no rush to get there. The books are plenty vivid.) Having just finished Number 4, Trophy Hunt, I’m looking forward to the next in the series, which I’ll pick up in a couple of months after I do some other reading. What’s best about Box’s protagonist is that he’s not a macho superman. He’s plenty tough, of course, but he can also feel queasy at the sight of a gruesome crime scene, and he can make, and admit to, mistakes. Another asset is that he lives with three intelligent, feisty women—his wife and two daughters—and the family story can be just as appealing as the mystery. In fact, Joe’s precocious daughter Sheridan maybe deserves a series of her own when she grows up. I will confess that I found Trophy Hunt to be inferior to its three predecessors because of the supernatural elements Box decided to introduce into a very fussy plot. This novel felt like one that he’d had to rush in order to meet a publisher’s deadline—I have no evidence of such, but the book reads like something that could have used another couple of drafts for tightening and clarification—and I got downright impatient when I could so clearly see a looming plot twist even though Joe Pickett was somehow blind to it. In a couple of weeks I’ll hope to meet C.J. Box in San Diego when I’m there for Bouchercon. I will spare him my quibbles over his fourth novel and will congratulate him sincerely for his ability to render both the wilds of Wyoming and a cast of appealingly dynamic characters so deftly.