Mystic Island a novel by Jan Evan Whitford

NK STANDARD-Times Page 4 • Thursday, August 4 - Friday, August 5, 2005 • TIMEOUT

THE BOOKSHELF

Mystic Island reveals debauchery and murder at 'fictional' island campground

JAMESTOWN -- Sitting as a gatehouse keeper of a popular summer campground, the keeper often bears witness to every sort of human created. There’s the lobster poachers, drunks, and those who like to mingle with fellow campers’ husbands and wives. All these characters sprinkled in between the respectable families and individuals, naturally.

For one gatehouse guy, Jan Evan Whitford, sitting at the entrance to the Ft.Getty campground in Jamestown has been a source of inspiration. Whitford has just released his first novel, Mystic Island, based on the island seaside retreat with characters he confesses are each a compilation of dozens of people he’s known with a generous dose of his imagination as well.

“You get a lot of characters at the campground every year,” said Whitford. “We’ve seen them all.”

And with all that knowledge, of both the World War II fort and his entertaining imagination, he created the Seabreeze RV Resort, the place in which some truly unsavory (and very funny) characters mix with a politician, a lonely-yet-loveable gatehouse worker and an admirable “clam cop” to form several mysteries that can only be solved by a massive, category-five hurricane named Dora.

The main character, a spunky woman named Nikki O’Connor, takes on the job of patrolling the seaside area for fishing violations for the Department of Environmental Management. She, in turn, has a murky background and a grandfather with a secret letter addressed to Hitler that sets the old fort-turned-campground on its axis, even before Dora blows into town.

“People keep asking why I went with a woman,” said Whitford, known locally for his saucy humor columns in a local paper known as That Gatehouse Guy. “The truth is, there’s not much rolling around in a guy’s head except sex and beer. I wanted a main character with more of an emotional background to work with.”

Lobstermen steeped in booze, dysfunctional families and individuals so truly foul and pathetic you can’t help but laugh at their absurdity color the story with a great level of entertainment that the pages keep turning as the book gets more involved.

Though Whitford, with his short, graying sea captain beard and easy smile looks the part of a laidback native New Englander, he was born in New Mexico and spent much of his time in St. Louis as a cartographer. In St. Louis, he and his wife, Barbara, who is an artist, raised their five sons before moving to Jamestown in 1989. He’s been on the job at the gatehouse at Ft. Getty every summer since 1990. The pair winter in Florida.

Upon getting the job at the old war fort, he became interested in its history during World War II.

“A lot of people don’t realize the fort was once a prisoner of war camp,” said Whitford.

With that knowledge and his time spent in the Marine Corps Reserve, he began mapping out a plot that involved a WW II captain stashing several important letters from President Roosevelt to Adolph Hitler in a watertight map tube before spending the next fifty years in a coma as a result of an accident.

When Nikki O’Connor, the captain’s faithful granddaughter, comes to visit and finds him lucent, telling the story of the documents that are of enormous historical value, the hunt is on for the now buried fort and the letters. Into the mix comes a United States Senator and his father who need to destroy the letters or face the destruction of the senator’s presidential campaign. Throw in a murder, a love affair, drugs, lobster poaching, and the hurricane that rocks the island and the book will keep anyone’s interest.

The character of Nikki O’Connor is a mix of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum written with a slightly more “testosteroned” point of view. This mix makes for a great female lead that has the potential to keep readers interested in her odd life, much like the Stephanie Plum series, far beyond the island of Mystic. Look for her in Whitford’s upcoming novel, The Purple Pearl.

Mystic Island, published by Hilliard & Harris, is available at local bookstores, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. Copies are also available by visiting Whitford’s website at www.janwhitford.com. The books are available in both soft and hard cover.

Most native Rhode Islanders would be hard-pressed to define the pejorative term “Swamp Yankee”, but Jan Evan Whitford, a Jamestown resident by way of Albuquerque, New Mexico and St. Louis, Missouri, portrays three of the sort with stunning accuracy in his debut novel Mystic Island (Hillard and Harris, 2005, 229pgs, $16.95 in paperback).

Whitford, locally known as the “Gatehouse Guy”, sets his fictional novel at a campground that bears striking resemblance to Fort Getty and in a community called (perhaps symbolically) “Benedict’s Landing” -- unsurprisingly reminiscent of Jamestown Village. An unearthed, unsent letter from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Adolph Hitler drives a plot that involves a presidential candidate, Beanie Babies, stuffed calico cats, a cat named “Moses Malone”, drug dealing, lobster poaching, a Category 5 hurricane, sex, and violence. The novel’s protagonists are Nikki O’Connor, an environmental law enforcement officer and Steve Marshall, who is, un-coincidently, a gatehouse guard at the Seabreeze RV Resort and Campground, but it is the unholy triumvirate of Manny Faria, Otis Wonie, and Hobart Murphy who make the story most compelling. Faria, a gun-toting, irascible, and unscrupulous lobsterman, is a victim of poaching and hell-bent on revenge. Perhaps his singularly definitive declaration is when he spouts, “Here in Rhode Island, there’s three things you never do: don’t trust the politicians, don’t (urinate) into a Nor’ easter, and don’t (pick trouble) with a Lobsterman”.

Wonie and Murphy are campers. The former has a wife, a young boy and a golden retriever, but his marriage is threatened by a romantic indifference exacerbated by impotency and a traitorous (thus Benedict’s Landing?) friend. The latter owns a prized Cadillac, and all three purportedly best buddies are beer-guzzling miscreants who pride themselves on witty repartee, crude language, and vulgar behavior. In fact, the author’s most salient strength is his ability to capture the nuances of New England dialect while creating intriguing yet thoroughly realistic characters through dialogue. This skill is particularly evident in a passage where the cold-stricken, stuffy-nosed and recently cuckolded Otis is bonding with his two pals. Whitford writes:

“Tell you what, Hobdie,” said Otis with a snuffle. “For a Caddilag mad, you’re a preddy dab good mechanig.” Shortly later, when Manny joins the other two, he writes:

“Cub odd, guys,” said Otis. He shifted from foot to foot. “I god a dew bubber sticker,” he announced. “I thig you’ll like id.” Of course, the bumper sticker’s message is not appropriate reading for a family newspaper, and that’s just the way Otis would like it. The moment would also prove to be one of the last warm ones among the three pals.

Whitford is also adept at conveying the beauty of uniquely coastal scenery, the type of which he was not treated to in the landlocked environs of his former homes, New Mexico and Missouri. An example of this is when Whitford writes: “The sea was a rich cobalt blue and magical sparkles from the sun skipped across the wavelets, a scattering of solar diamonds. Another passage describes a scene that familiar readers would undoubtedly associate with Mackerel Cove: On the way they cruised past the town beach, a sandy strip on Wheezer’s Neck. A happy place in daylight, it loomed preternaturally spooky in the dark. Forbidding, inky water slapped at the sand and moonlight reflected off the lonely lifeguard towers. The towers cast long, sinister shadows across the beach. A buoy clanged.

Whitford takes the unconventional approach of alternating between the first and third person points of view, and the result is that the first-person narrative voice of Nikki O’Connor is often indistinguishable from the third person narrator’s voice, but this literary anomaly does not detract from the plot. O’Connor’s grandfather was a World War II officer in charge of acclimating German prisoners to the post-war world of democracy and reigning American values that are an inevitability. One of his charges, who happens to be a former Hitler crony, is delegated to deliver the aforementioned, clandestine letter from Roosevelt to Hitler, but fate precludes that from happening, so the letter or, more importantly, the mysterious contents thereof, is the catalyst for deeds and shady misdeeds.

O’Connor is the noble “clam cop” who overcomes being raised in a convent after being orphaned at age five by a promiscuous mother and a sexually abusive fisherman father, who is eventually lost at sea. A heroic aunt rescues her and places her in a public school, where she would eventually become a prom queen before enduring a series of ill-fated relationships. That is until she meets Marshall, the down-to-earth gatehouse guy with Paul Newman blue eyes, his own boat, and a large streak of benevolence. Together, the two work to unravel mysteries while falling in love.

Trudie Upton is a nosy, voyeuristic, eavesdropping, gossip-mongering, and trouble-making type that is probably a staple of communities large and small across the globe, and readers will recognize the insipid pomposity that is Roger Starkweather’s character. Whitford weaves all these characters into a plot that renews its focus when a Category 5 hurricane arrives to wreak havoc on Mystic Island, and more specifically, the Seabreeze Resort. In the aftermath, crimes are solved, lives are lost; some reputations are ruined, while others are heroically made. Local readers will especially enjoy reading Mystic Island while associating its places and characters to those that are familiar to Jamestown. Whitford undoubtedly found Jamestown’s inhabitants and cultural flavor to be fecund material for a tragicomic story that is steeped in local, as well as historical, intrigue. Summer reading lists undoubtedly would be enhanced with the addition of Mystic Island.

The Midwest Book Review

Established in 1976, the Midwest Book Review publishes several monthly publications for community and academic library systems in California, Wisconsin, and the upper Midwest:

Small Press Bookwatch

Mystic Island
Jan Evan Whitford
Hilliard Harris
PO Box 3358, Frederick, MD 21705-3358
1591331269 $16.95

Mystic Island is the debut novel of Jan Evan Whitford, is a thrilling and suspenseful novel about a mysterious 1945 letter that President Roosevelt secretly penned to Adolph Hitler. Only one man knows where the secret letter is; he has suffered severe brain trauma for over fifty years, yet at last his hidden knowledge comes to light. His granddaughter becomes obsessed with finding the letter, but at what price? Buried within an old German POW camp lies the missive that could destroy the campaign of a senator with presidential aspirations, turn history upside down, and send shockwaves across the American political landscape. A tautly exciting thriller about the lengths some travel to keep the past under wraps.

James A. Cox
Editor-in-Chief
Midwest Book Review
278 Orchard Drive
Oregon, WI 53575-1129
phone: 1-608-835-7937
e-mail: mbr@execpc.com
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