James Wilson Hall

• Born: 1947
• Place of Birth: Hopkinsville, Kentucky

TYPES OF PLOT: Thriller; amateur sleuth; psychological; hard-boiled; private investigator

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Thorn, 1987-

Contribution

Like , , and , James Wilson Hall mines the creatively fertile—and increasingly bizarre—territory of South Florida for his crime stories. Like his colleagues, Hall often focuses on issues that affect his adopted state: pollution and the adverse effects of tourism and technology. Hall does not preach about the various evils, but demonstrates their results by incorporating them as plot elements in his thrillers.

Hall’s characters are diverse and fully rounded physically, emotionally, and psychologically. His series hero, Thorn, just wants to be left alone to fish and contemplate life but invariably gets dragged into complex situations that he wriggles out of by a combination of native intelligence, physical prowess, and determination. Unlike many other thriller writers, Hall is extremely adept at drawing sympathetic and authentic female characters who are just as capable (or just as foolish) as his male characters. Protagonists and antagonists are usually introspective, continually challenging their own motivations and reactions to events.

Dialogue throughout Hall’s novels—obtuse, profane, and often humorous—is believable. Narration, depending on the circumstances, varies from blunt and fragmented to poetic; Hall waxes especially lyrical when describing the weather, the terrain, the native wildlife, and the many moods of the ocean.

Hall’s novels have found a large, diverse readership and have appeared frequently on both domestic and overseas bestseller lists. His books have been translated into a dozen languages, and several have been optioned for film. After receiving numerous critical accolades, Hall garnered the Shamus Award in 2002 for his Thorn novel Blackwater Sound (2001).

Biography

James Wilson Hall was born in 1947 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, the son of a realtor. An avid, if indiscriminate, reader from an early age, Hall devoured everything from the Hardy Boys series to books by . In high school, he was an athlete, starring in basketball and tennis. During his senior year, he attended Riverside Military Academy, where he received an appointment to the Air Force Academy at graduation. He rejected the appointment to attend Florida Presbyterian University (later Eckard College), intending to become a minister, but later switched his major to literature. As an undergraduate, Hall married his high school sweetheart. He also received a scholarship to the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference between his junior and senior years in college.

Hall worked a variety of jobs to help pay for his college education, including landscaper, lifeguard, yacht washer, go-cart mechanic, and ranch hand. Following graduation, Hall attended Johns Hopkins University and received his masters of fine arts in 1969. He received a doctorate from the University of Utah in 1973. Hall landed a position as teacher of literature and creative writing at Florida International University in Miami, where he has remained ever since, and is now a tenured professor. Hall’s students have included such successful authors as , Barbara Parker, Vicki Hendricks, and Christine Kling.

Hall has contributed poetry and short stories to publications like Antioch Review, Georgia Review, North American Review, Poetry, and Southern Poetry Review since the 1960s. He published his first poetry collection, The Lady from the Dark Green Hills: Poems, in 1976. He followed with The Mating Reflex (1980), Ham Operator: Poetry and Fiction (1980), and False Statements (1986).

Hall’s first novel, Under Cover of Daylight (1987), introduced his series character, Thorn, a professional fisherman and lure maker with a dark past who inevitably becomes embroiled as a reluctant amateur sleuth in various cases, often of an environmental nature. Hall continued the series, producing nonseries crime novels as well, including Bones of Coral (1991), Body Language (1998), and Forests of the Night (2004). He has also published a collection of short stories, Paper Products (1990), contributed a chapter to the collaborative effort Naked Came the Manatee (1996), and released Hot Damn! Alligators in the Casino, Nude Women in the Grass, How Seashells Changed the Course of History, and Other Dispatches from Paradise (2002), a collection of humorous essays from his late 1990s stint as a columnist. Hall’s crime fiction has frequently made the bestseller lists, and he has achieved a measure of critical acclaim as well, receiving a John D. MacDonald Award, a San Francisco Review Critic’s Choice Award for Gone Wild (1995), a nomination for the Dashiell Hammett Prize for Buzz Cut (1996), and a Shamus Award for Blackwater Sound.

Analysis

James Wilson Hall’s early and acknowledged crime-writing influences—Ernest Hemingway, John D. MacDonald, , Carl Hiassen, and Elmore Leonard—are evident, particularly in his early work. From Hemingway, he borrowed a terse, lean, tough style. John D. MacDonald lent dark humor, a focus on South Florida, and a love for the environment. Ross Macdonald brought a lyrical quality and a concentration on the theme that the past can exert a profound effect on the present. Hiassen and Leonard added their talents in characterization, realistic dialogue, and unexpected plot turns.

It is to Hall’s credit that he has taken the best aspects of these writers and made them uniquely his own. His larger-than-life characters stick in the memory primarily because they have been given a psychological dimension that adds considerable depth—a feature often lacking in the casts of plot-driven thrillers. Suspense heightens because major protagonists and antagonists, ticking time bombs of hidden psychoses, are unpredictable, out of step or out of touch with the rest of the world; the reader never knows when their pasts will catch up with them and cause an explosion. Good or bad, his characters have some quality—guilt, lapsed memories, uncertainties, irrational fears, compassion for animals, a love of words—that makes them sympathetic, if flawed, and human.

A sense of place is key to Hall’s work. South Florida—a modern ethnic melting pot with a fragile ecology subject to the depredations of greed, corruption, and attendant violence—is portrayed so sharply that it becomes a character in itself. These stories, which delve into pollution that imperils wildlife and human life alike, the adverse effect of millions of visitors on the environment, the treatment of ailing patients, or the negative results of technology, would not be the same if played out elsewhere.

Stylistically, Hall has, after echoing the techniques of other writers, found his own voice, a blend of the blunt and the beautiful. He usually writes in third person, past tense. Sentences are typically short, punchy, and full of slang and street language—except when they deal with nature, at which time they lengthen into picturesque, evocative descriptions. Literary devices, such as similes and metaphors, are used sparingly but effectively. A patina of humor, sometimes dark and ironic, sometimes wistful and nostalgic, coats much of Hall’s writing, giving an extra layer of meaning to his work.

Bones of Coral

The nonseries thriller Bones of Coral concerns Shaw Chandler, a longtime Miami paramedic who, called out from the firehouse one night, finds his father—a fugitive confessed murderer, whom he has not seen for twenty years—dead of a gunshot wound, a supposed suicide. Suspicious of the nature of his father’s demise, Shaw takes a sabbatical from work to visit his mother Millie, an alcoholic dying of cancer in the Florida Keys. He reunites with Trula Montoya, his childhood sweetheart and a former soap opera star who suffers from a mild form of multiple sclerosis; she is one victim among many stricken with the disease, which several scientists have attributed to the illegal disposal of toxic substances in South Florida.

Based on actual research into a genuine environmental problem, Bones of Coral presents a fascinating cast of memorable, subtly shaded characters, including Trula’s father, Richard Montoya, a former biolab science officer who runs a facility for injured wildlife; former naval officer Douglas Barnes, an emotionless, iron-handed control freak who manages a waste recycling plant where one can dispose of anything, for a price; his retarded, physically imposing son, Dougie, who has no pain threshold, composes childish rhymes, and at his father’s command eliminates people who pose impediments; and Dougie’s girlfriend—and briefly wife—Elmira, a red-headed hooker, who will do anything her husband requests.

Buzz Cut

Buzz Cut (1996), a Thorn series thriller with a subtext, features South Florida-based fisherman and flytier extraordinaire Thorn and his lifelong friend, private eye “Sugar” Sugarman. In this instance, the subtext concerns relationships: Thorn’s casual relationship with a live-in woman; Sugarman’s estrangement from his mother, Lola Jack Sugarman Sampson, now married to a tycoon who owns a fleet of cruise ships; Lola’s strained relationships with her two natural children, Sugarman and Butler Jack; and the longstanding enmity of Lola’s absconded stepdaughter, Monica Sampson, toward her wealthy father.

The essential plotline, as befits a swift-paced read in which large numbers of people are placed in peril, concerns a scheme hatched by Butler Jack—a villain with a social conscience who intends to use his ill-gotten gains to provide support for orphaned children worldwide—to extort millions from his stepfather. If Butler does not receive $58 million, he will use remote-controlled or time-delayed devices hidden aboard a cruise liner to blow up the ship with thousands of people aboard. Sugarman, in charge of security for the ship, enlists Thorn’s aid to stop the threat, an almost impossible task on such a large vessel containing so many places where something could be hidden.

Filled with colorful shipboard scenes of tourists frolicking and gorging themselves, poetic descriptions of the mood of the ocean and lingering sunsets, and hard-boiled depictions of extreme violence—because of the effects of Butler Jack’s weapons of choice, a commando knife and a jury-rigged stun gun that delivers 400,000 volts—Buzz Cut chugs along like a runaway dreadnaught. The prose of the straightforward narration, told from a variety of viewpoints, is choppy, laden with fragments, as though Hall abhorred compound sentences. The novel is spiced with etymological digressions from a killer with a photographic memory for words and peppered with slang, salty profanities, and a few apt similes. Characters are sketched rather than fully drawn but given depth through their internal observations and spoken insights. What most matters, however, is the plot. With all its entanglements juxtaposed against a barely plausible master plan devised by a semi-sympathetic madman, Buzz Cut delivers an entertaining read that, like popcorn, satisfies immediate hunger without ruining the appetite.

Body Language

The nonseries thriller Body Language explores the delayed effects of past bad deeds while examining the illogic of evil. The novel concerns Alexandra “Alex” Collins Rafferty, who at the age of eleven shot and killed seventeen-year-old Darnel Flint, the neighbor who raped her—a crime her father, Lawton, then a police officer, covered up. Nearly twenty years later, Alex is in a loveless marriage to Stan Rafferty, an armored-car driver who keeps a mistress and plans the perfect robbery so that he can run away with his lover. Alex cares for her aging father, who is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and maintains a platonic relationship with Jason Patterson, a stockbroker and black-belt karate instructor who has taught her martial arts and is infatuated with her. Alex works as a forensic photographer with the Miami Police Department in league with Homicide Lieutenant Dan Romano, a crusty, overweight, middle-aged officer. Together, they investigate the depredations of a serial killer called “the Bloody Rapist,” who rapes women, slashes their throats, and repositions the bodies in contorted shapes before leaving a trail of his own blood away from the scenes of the crimes.

A well-conceived, mature, and extremely suspenseful work that keeps the reader guessing, Body Language presents a number of separate threads that converge at the end. Alex’s relationship with her father is especially poignant, and Lawton’s struggles to remember past events, though sometimes played for humor, are particularly moving.

Blackwater Sound

What would happen if all electronic devices—computers, cell phones, automobiles, boats, and airplanes—suddenly stopped working? That is the main premise of Hall’s Shamus Award-winning novel. Blackwater Sound brings back Thorn and Sugarman, and as a bonus also reintroduces Alex Collins and her father, Lawton. Together, they collectively battle the evil Braswell family—father A. J., who is obsessed with tracking the gigantic marlin that pulled his favorite, genius son Andy into the ocean’s depths; ruthless, murderous daughter Morgan, who runs MicroDyne, a computer chip-coating company branching out into high energy radio frequency (HERF) technology that has the capacity to fuse electronic circuits; and son Johnny, who has a thing for knives. A tense, exciting page-turner littered with bodies, the novel offers something for every fan of Hall’s work: lush descriptions of tropical nights, suspenseful fishing scenes, sudden violence, crisp dialogue, and a full cast of quirky, psychologically bent characters.

Principal Series Characters:

• Thorn is a solidly built middle-aged man with sun-bleached hair, blue eyes, and the bronzed skin of someone who spends most of his time outdoors. A fisherman who composes poetry in his head and lives with a succession of casual lovers in a stilt house in Key Largo, Florida, Thorn supports himself, barely, by selling hand-tied bonefish flies and carved lures. A cantankerous, isolated hermit far behind the times, he has a tendency to become involved, as a reluctant amateur sleuth or loyal sidekick, in doggedly, often violently, thwarting various nefarious schemes.
• “Sugar” Sugarman is a former police officer who spent twenty years with the Monroe County Police Department and is a lifelong friend of Thorn. The product of a Scandinavian mother and a Jamaican father, the middle-aged but tall, handsome, and extremely fit Sugarman runs a private investigation firm that takes on a variety of cases and security-related jobs and frequently calls on Thorn to assist him. Divorced because of the instability of his freelance employment, he is the father of young twin girls, Janey and Jackie.

Bibliography

Adams, Michael. “Audio Reviews.” Review of Body Language, by James Wilson Hall. Library Journal 124, no. 1 (January, 1999): 184.

Hall, James Wilson. The Official Website of Bestselling Author James W. Hall. www.jameswhall.com.

Hall, James Wilson. “PW Interview: James W. Hall: Serious South Florida Thrillers.” Interview by Brewster Milton Robertson. Publishers Weekly 243, no. 28 (July 8, 1996): 62-63.

Ott, Bill. Review of Buzz Cut, by James Wilson Hall. Booklist 92, no. 16 (April 15, 1996): 1394.

Ott, Bill. Review of Rough Draft, by James Wilson Hall. Booklist 96, no. 6 (November 15, 1999): 579-580.

Publishers Weekly. Review of Red Sky at Night, by James Wilson Hall. 244, no. 21 (May 26, 1997): 63.