DEAD RECKONING by Sam Llewellyn

Sam Llewellyn is an author I discovered in the late 1980s as a teenager.  He wrote a series of suspense novels set in the British fishing village of Pulteney.  The novels all have sailing as a backdrop, and by my recollection none of them feature the same protagonist.

I recently reread Dead Reckoning, which is the first of the Pulteney sailing novels published in 1987.  It is narrated by Charlie Agutter.  Charlie is from an old Pulteney family, and he makes his living designing racing yachts.  The novel opens with Charlie receiving a summons to the village’s lifeboat.  A sailing yacht has been caught in The Teeth—a dangerous stretch of reef just off shore.  The stranded yacht was designed by Charlie, and is one of only two produced with a new light weight rudder, but even worse the dead sailor at its helm is his brother.

It appears the rudder failed and a heavy sea dragged Aesthete into the Teeth where its hull was cracked like an egg.  The accident hits Charlie hard.  He and his younger brother were close and his business is threatened with collapse due to the perceived failure of the new rudder.  Charlie is certain the rudder was sabotaged, but the saboteur is a step ahead and he can’t prove it.  The mystery is as much motive as whodunit.  Charlie isn’t sure why the rudder was tampered with, and if it was murder for its own sake—to kill his brother or the other man aboard the yacht—or an attempt to destroy him and his business by undermining the rudder design.

Dead Reckoning is a wonderful suspense-adventure mystery.  It was fairly (and correctly) compared to the work of Dick Francis by critics when it was released.  A slim line suspense mystery with a sport setting.  In this case yacht racing, but it is as much an adventure story as mystery, and it is seemingly influenced by the Alistair MacLean style adventure thriller.  It is heavy on description, setting (weather is always an adversary), action and suspense, and light on dialogue and whodunit ponderings.

Pulteney is a perfect setting for the story.  It is a boom town that was once a place where fishermen made their living from the sea, but it has been bought up by wealthy professionals and industrialists who use it as a place to moor yachts and brag about to their friends back in the city.  The rub between the old and new residents creates its own tension as Charlie works to solve the puzzle and catch the killer.  He walks a tenuous line between both old and new, and isn’t quite trusted by either. 

Everything works in Dead Reckoning, but what sets it apart from its peers is the seamless weaving of both the culture and sport of yacht racing.  The plot cannot be extricated from its background, and one without the other would be completely useless.  The setting is exotic and familiar at once, and the characters are smoothly realistic in shades of both likability and familiarity.   

Dead Reckoning was published more than 25 years ago, but it has held up remarkably well, and Sam Llewellyn is back on my list of favorite writers.

Zingers 2: More First Lines With Grab

We all know the rules: the first few sentences of a novel have to reach out and grab us. If they don’t we generally pass on the novel and move down the shelves until something does grab us. Here are three more novels with openings that not only have grab, but have stayed with me since I first read them. Interestingly enough, they all are mystery novels.

1. Sweating, thirsty, hot, uncomfortable, and tired to the point of explosion.

Cynically I counted my woes.

Considerable, they were. Considerable, one way and another.

I sat in the driving seat of a custom-built aerodynamic sports car, the castoff toy of an oil sheik’s son. I had been sitting there for the best part of three days. Ahead, the sun-dried plain spread gently away to some distant brown and purple hills, and hour by hour their hunched shapes remained exactly where they were on the horizon, because the 150 m.p.h Special was not moving.

Nor was I.

Dick Francis was a favorite writer of mine in the mid-1990s—heck, he still is, and this opening from his novel Smokescreen is why. His writing is interesting, his voice is very working class, and his mysteries are top-notch. Not to mention they are exciting as hell.

2. Around eleven that night, the hostess broke out the Johnny Mathis and the Frank Sinatra, and everybody quit talking about their kids and their jobs and their mortgages and their politics, and got down to some serious slow dancing out on the darkened patio in the warm prairie night of summer 1961.

This is the first paragraph of Ed Gorman’s novel Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool featuring part-time P.I., part-time lawyer, and full-time small town fix-it man Sam McCain. The Sam McCain novels are a melancholy journey into a past that no longer exists, and the opening line from Everybody's Somebody's Fool fits the mood, temperament, and relaxed sorrow that is woven into each novel of the series.

The Sam McCain novels are my favorite P.I. series still being produced—the most recent, Fool’s Rush In, is scheduled for release later this year. I hope! It was originally scheduled to be released in March, but according to Amazon.com is now scheduled for the end of August.

3. I’m sitting on the porch of a bungalow on the Yucatan Peninsula with lit cigarettes sticking out both my ears.

This first line from Charlie Huston’s super-cool novel Six Bad Things begs the question: What? It also makes me want to read further, if for no other reason than to figure out why the guy has lit cigarettes stuck in his ears. And the great thing is, the novel only gets better.