Randolph Crew is an Auburn graduate, a retired Marine pilot and a licensed counselor who is now having a good time writing. This cozy is the fourth in a series featuring boy detective Nate Hawke. Crew’s cast of characters have come to Gulf Shores for a vacation in the summer of 1956, but with a particular goal in mind.
Nate is perfectly happy with his new stepfather, Dan Lewis. Nate’s father was killed in Korea several years earlier and mother has grieved, recovered and fallen in love with Dan. Nate’s sister Becky, 15, who worshipped her father, is a snotty teenager. She complains about everything, especially her stepfather. Their week at the beach is meant to be a “bonding” experience: Dan is informed on the workings of family dynamics. He will be patient, “show her nothing but love and kindness,” but it won’t be easy.
On crossing the bridge into Gulf Shores, Becky says “Eighteen hours of driving for this.…Skinny pine trees, ragged palms, and a hundred degrees in the shade? Some vacation.” She doesn’t like the little beach cottage they settle into, either. The faucet initially gives out brown water. “Okay, that’s it, I’m hitchhiking home.” Becky is spoiled, miserable.
Like many readers, I think, I enjoy novels set in places I know well. I can walk the streets in my mind, visit the restaurants, parks, public buildings. Crews knows Gulf Shores, but this novel is not just pre-1979, pre-Katrina, nostalgia, before the side-by-side condos and thick traffic. This is 1956. Crews supplies a map and about the only familiar business is Hazel’s Nook. There is a bait shop on the future site of the Pink Pony Pub.
Soon, Nate and Becky meet the local teens, a very mixed bag of nice kids and aspiring delinquents, but within two days their vacation changes drastically. Nate, out for a run on the beach with his dog Superman, comes upon the dead body of a local girl. Dan, a professional detective, really does not want to get involved but the local police are hopeless, seaside Barney Fifes, or worse.
They have no energy to collect pieces of evidence, no sterile evidence bags, no notion of chain of custody, no fingerprinting kit. The coroner’s office is elsewhere and slow. And, no surprise, the police immediately arrest the obviously innocent Black man who cares for the grounds at Fort Morgan.
Nate’s sleuthing will take them around the beach and up into Foley, where there were, even then, stores, a pool hall, a public swimming pool. Dan and Nate will encounter the ladies of Gulf Shores society, such as it is, and uncover the hot little jealousies, infidelities and feuds, the “evils” that Agatha Christie told us abide even in the sleepy village.
