Stuart Woods

• Born: January 9, 1938
• Birthplace: Manchester, Georgia
• Died: July 22, 2022
• Place of death: Washington, Connecticut

Types of Plot: Police procedural; private investigator; hard-boiled

Principal Series: Will Lee, 1982-; Stone Barrington, 1991-; Holly Barker, 1998-; Rick Barron, 2004-

Contribution

Stuart Woods began his career in mystery and detective fiction with the critically acclaimed novel Chiefs in 1981. Woods used stories from his hometown and family history to create a critically acclaimed thriller lauded for its realistic portrayal of a small town’s political dynamics and its critical dissection of a seemingly peaceful American community, themes that Woods has revisited occasionally throughout his career. Chiefs won the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America and gave rise to the possibility that Woods could become one of the premier mystery writers of his day. Woods’s novel Palindrome (1991) was nominated for the Edgar Award, and his Imperfect Strangers (1995) was awarded France’s Prix de Littérature Policière. He has written more than thirty-five novels, most of which have become best sellers because he has gained a strong American and international readership.

With a few exceptions, rather than offering a deep analysis of his characters, Woods focuses on the systems in which the characters function. These are typically the bureaucracies of politics, criminal justice, and law. His protagonists are those who willingly accept the consequences of breaking normal protocol to solve a problem for the greater good of the system, community, or nation in which they live and work. His protagonists’ ability to overcome bureaucratic obstacles makes them modern-day heroes and makes their experiences relevant to contemporary American civilization.

Biography

Stuart Woods was born Stuart Lee in Manchester, Georgia, in 1938. A pivotal event in his adolescence was finding a chief-of-police badge in his grandmother’s closet. According to Woods, it was dented by buckshot and spattered with dried blood. It belonged to his grandfather, who was wearing it when he was shot to death on duty ten years before Woods was born. The story of his grandfather influenced the premise of the novel Chiefs and provided the framework for the character William Henry Lee, Sr. Georgia, his home state, has been the setting for many of his novels and is mentioned in most of them. His hometown provided the setting of the fictional town Delano.

Woods majored in sociology at the University of Georgia and served in the Air National Guard in the early 1960’s. He spent ten months of his year of service in Mannheim, Germany, during the Berlin Wall Crisis. During the rest of the 1960’s, he worked as an advertising agent in New York, and at the end of that decade, he moved to London, where he worked quite successfully in advertising and copy writing. Despite his career choices up to that point, he had not forgotten about the chief-of-police badge and the novel that had been brewing inside him, so in 1973 he decided to move to Ireland to write his novel. It is not clear why he chose to move to Ireland, but he found a peaceful place to begin writing while working part-time at an ad agency.

Although he was in a position to write, he was distracted for a time by sailing. It became such a passion that he had a boat built in Cork and raced it in the 1976 Observer Singlehanded Transatlantic Race (OSTAR) from Plymouth, England, to Newport, Rhode Island. He returned to Georgia and wrote two nonfictional books: a travel book about England and Ireland and a memoir about his time in Ireland and the OSTAR race. The British publisher of the latter, Blue Water, Green Skipper (1977), sold the rights to W. W. Norton. Based on an outline and two hundred completed pages, W. W. Norton gave Woods a contract for the novel he had begun in 1973 and advanced him seventy-five hundred dollars, which gave him the incentive to finish Chiefs, the first Will Lee series novel, and diligently to pursue his fiction-writing career. He has continued to write in the Will Lee series and written novels in the Stone Barrington, Ed Eagle, Holly Barker, and Rick Barron series as well as nonseries novels.

Woods has established homes on the Treasure Coast of Florida, on an island off the coast of Maine, and in New York City. In addition to being an accomplished sailor, he is also an experienced small-aircraft pilot, both of which factor heavily into his novels.

Analysis

Stuart Woods, like many writers, is influenced and inspired by his childhood and personal experiences. His writing shows an antipathy to bureaucracy, military protocol, authority, and blind obedience to orders that may partially be the result of his time in the Air National Guard during the Berlin Wall Crisis. Though he was certainly not on a combat mission, he has hinted that he still does not thoroughly understand why the government sent him to Mannheim. His attitude may also stem from being a young American in the 1960’s and early 1970’s. In addition, he may have moved to London in the late 1960’s as an act of protest against the political situation in the United States. All of Woods’s protagonists are people who will listen to and carefully consider orders from superiors and advisers, but they ultimately will make their own decisions. Though it is important for his protagonists to work with the system to improve it, their competence and courage in the face of mortal danger often supersede the guidelines set forth by those sitting behind desks. Some of the government officials in his novels—such as Will Lee, Katherine Rule Lee, and Lance Cabot in Dark Harbor (2006) and Iron Orchid (2005) and Robert Kinney in Capital Crimes (2003)—are talented people, but Woods does not let readers forget the fact that officials’ incompetence can endanger ordinary people. In creating intuitive, talented, versatile, and ethical heroes, he appeals to the ideals of American independence and individuality and the frustrations of those who are not satisfied with the political status quo.

Woods’s childhood in Manchester, Georgia, clearly influenced his fiction. He has often experimented with the ways deep-rooted, small-town problems can have universal consequences. For example, the plots of Chiefs and Under the Lake (1987) are based on the premise that a few divulged secrets, pertaining to perversion, racism, fraud, and other sins, can shake the foundations of a small town. In these and the Holly Barker novels, if no one is interested in the truth, or if the root problems of the community are micromanaged, then the conflicts can and will reach beyond the township limits, affecting a state or even a nation. This is also how Woods’s background in sociology comes into play in the world of his fiction.

Woods’s experience in navigation and travel have helped him create dynamic characters and plots. In preparation for his novel White Cargo (1988), for example, he spent a lot of time flying over Columbia. His geographic knowledge of Florida helped to fuel the plots of Orchid Beach (1998), Orchid Blues (2001), and Blood Orchid (2002). His time in Maine helped him conceive of places for fugitives to hide and small airstrips suitable for dramatic landings and pursuits in novels such as Capital Crimes and Dark Harbor. Furthermore, his knowledge of London gave him an intriguing setting for the Stone Barrington novel The Short Forever (2002). His knowledge of boats, sailing, and aviation allows him to place extra barriers in the protagonists’ way, thereby generating more suspense, and to create chases in which protagonists pursue wealthy criminals escaping by water or air.

In creating a suspenseful novel, Woods immediately sets up a murder mystery for the protagonist to solve, then he methodically creates several red herrings, disincentives, and obstacles for that character to overcome. These obstacles are often caused by or manifested in the following character types: derelict leaders trying to serve a large bureaucracy instead of the general public, egotistical leaders who micromanage because of fear or lack of faith in others, irresponsible journalists (as in the novel Dirt, 1996), organized criminals who are eternally flawed because they take sex and money more seriously than their own collective success, and technologically savvy criminals who strive for some semblance of control in a postmodern world (Teddy Fay in Capital Crimes and Shoot Him if He Runs, 2007). To complement the fast pace and suspense, Woods uses a clear and concise style of dialogue that very rarely strays from standard English. He seldom uses jargon, slang, idioms, or clichés that would detract from the credibility of the characters or, more important, the reader’s understanding of what has transpired.

Capital Crimes

Little attention has been paid to Woods’s understanding of the positive and negative dynamics of social groups. Although one person often takes the leadership role in solving the murder in Woods’s novels, many of the solutions occur through the work of several individuals, often working as a team toward one common goal, as in Dark Harbor and Capital Crimes.

In Capital Crimes, Will Lee has settled into his first term as president of the United States, and he has enough experience in Washington, D.C., to know what to expect from those around him. He knows his enemies and allies, and he and his wife, Katherine Rule Lee , director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), can safely delegate some of their problems to the expertise of others, in this case, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) deputy director Robert Kinney. The problem is that someone as intelligent and skilled as any FBI agent is killing conservative leaders: First, Republican senator Frederick Wallace was killed, then a right-wing radio personality. Next, a powerful figure in the religious right was nearly killed. It takes Katherine’s finesse, Kinney’s leadership and diligence, and a tip from a traitor and former CIA agent, Ed Rawls, to locate the man responsible. In addition, several people have to put their differences aside to stop these murders.

Woods wrote this book shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City, which makes the themes of political dichotomy, postmodern isolation, and blame-seeking more relevant to his readers.

Dark Harbor

As in Capital Crimes, the solution to the murders in Dark Harbor, an island village in Maine, requires the work of a group whose members trust one another. The primary murders, those of Stone Barrington’s cousin Dick Stone, his wife, and their daughter, occur shortly before Barrington reads a will sent to him by Dick. The will grants Barrington the Dick Stone estate, which is peculiar considering the timing and the fact that Dick’s brother Caleb would be the most likely beneficiary. After learning that Dick, also a lawyer, had been working covertly as a CIA operative, Barrington gains an ally in CIA agent Lance Cabot, who informs him that there are other retired agents living on Islesboro Island, including Ed Rawls. As the case becomes life-threatening, Barrington calls in his friend and former New York Police Department colleague Dino Bacchetti, along with Holly Barker and her father, Ham. Barrington’s group, which includes Sergeant Young of the Maine State Police, bonds to pursue a solution when one of the CIA retirees and his granddaughter are murdered.

Because the reader initially suspects that Caleb is the murderer, Dark Harbor seems to be about the consequences of greed; however, it is about the hubris of individuals who have an exaggerated vision of their power in a small community and no knowledge of the truth of their own existence in the broad spectrum of society. This relates to most of Woods’s novels in that the truth is exposed by a group of people who will put their professional reputations and lives on the line to solve a problem. While others are pointing fingers and hacking at the branches of the problem, Woods’s heroes are busy digging for the roots.

Principal Series Characters:

• Will Lee is Stuart Woods’s most developed character. Readers come to understand his family’s political background and witness him grow into a man. After serving as a lawyer, a chief aide to a U.S. senator, and a U.S. senator, Lee becomes the president of the United States. Weathered by everyday problems, Lee becomes a leader who does not allow lies and manipulation to encroach on his obligations, mostly because of his keen instinct about the strengths and weaknesses of those around him.
• Stone Barrington begins as a New York City homicide detective and leaves the department to begin a law practice. However, his curiosity, personal connections, and lifelong commitment to solving crime constantly place him in the role of private investigator. Barrington is familiar with the dark side of humanity but has not let that destroy him. Instead, he remains gallant and loyal to his lifelong calling, as if he were a modern-day knight.
• Holly Barker , a friend of Barrington and a former army major and military police officer, is the police chief in the fictional town of Orchid Beach, Florida. In battling drug traffickers, organized crime, and crooked real estate developers, Barker uses her knowledge of human greed, lust, and hubris to succeed. She later is depicted working for the government. Her beauty, wit, and sense of humor make her successful as a fictional character. The most fun-loving, courageous, and independent of Woods’s characters, she is often obligated to put her life on the line with little or no help from others.

Bibliography

Abbot, Jillian. “Three Writers on Plot.” The Writer 117, no. 5 (May, 2004): 16. A question-and-answer interview with three consistently best-selling authors: Dennis Lehane, Gayle Lynds, and Stuart Woods. Includes Woods’s typical concise and unambiguous comments about plot, setting, and literary background. Also provides a short biography.

Huntley, Kristine. Review of Capital Crimes. The Booklist 100, no. 1 (September 1, 2003): 9. This favorable review summarizes the plot of this Will Lee series novel and recommends it to Woods’s fans.

Huntley, Kristine. Review of Dark Harbor. The Booklist 102, no. 12 (February 15, 2006): 7. This favorable review provides a plot summary and praises the pairing of Barrington and Barker.

St. Martin, Tiffany. “Stuart Woods Coming to Sarasota: Novelist Brings Back Popular Protagonist.” Knight Ridder Tribune Business News, October 15, 2006, p. 1. This short profile written on the author’s appearance in Sarasota to promote Short Straw looks at Woods’s motivations to write, the difference in his pace and dedication now versus when he started, and the return of a series character, lawyer Ed Eagle.

Woods, Stuart. Stuart Woods Official Website. http://www.stuartwoods.com. Includes the most insightful and thoroughly compiled information on Woods’s life and philosophy toward writing, plus a bibliography and plot summaries.