Journalist Catherine “Cat” Marsala is torn when Hal Briskman, editor of Chicago Today, approaches her about doing a story for the publication. As a freelancer and, the reader gathers, as someone who prides herself on being professional, she welcomes a paying assignment. As a non-swimmer who nearly drowned in childhood, the assignment worries her.

The assignment consists of boarding the yacht of a wealthy businessman and his wife on Fourth of July weekend and sailing around Lake Michigan with them and a group of their wealthy friends. “Get a lot on how you sail a boat,” Hal tells her. “How the very rich live. Are they really different from other people? Do they have class? What is class? What do they eat? Do they wear diamonds at the wheel? Brush their teeth in champagne?”

If Cat didn’t accept the assignment, there would be neither a book nor this review. (Saw that coming, didn’t you?)

Her hosts, the owners of the yacht Easy Girl, are Will Honeywell, president of the manufacturing company Honeywell Furniture, and his wife Belinda. Their guests include their son Bill and his friend Mary Shaughnessy, a second-year student at Yale Law School; Dr. Daniel Silverman, sports medicine specialist; Belinda’s brother Dr. Greg Mandel, a well-known Chicago surgeon, and his wife Twinkie, who owns a successful jewelry boutique; Takuro Tsunami, an engineer; Bret Falcon, a young Broadway star who hopes to make it in films, too;  and Chuck Kroop, another furniture manufacturer who, along with the Honeywells, financed Bret’s successful Broadway musical Off and On. Also aboard is a young man named Emery Langmar, who is the yacht’s sole crewman and who waits on the guests as often as he deals with nautical matters.

Cat’s fears that she might be regarded as an unwanted outsider are quickly disposed of; the Honeywells and most of their guests treat her cordially. The Honeywells and some of the others teach her the fine points of sailing, and she takes to it enthusiastically. But, as a reader might expect, tensions develop among the guests as their voyage goes on. Twinkie Mandel, for instance, is quite flirtatious, which doesn’t sit well with her husband. Chuck Kroop, in particular, is coarse, overbearing, and fond of inappropriately touching the women aboard–especially Twinkie.

Greg eventually confronts Chuck, and a violent fight erupts. Chuck turns murderous, and is only subdued when Daniel Silverman forcibly administers a shot of Valium. He’s then carried to the master stateroom and locked in. The Easy Girl encounters a dangerous night of stormy weather during which nobody gets any sleep save for the narcotized Chuck. Those who needn’t be on deck congregate below, most in the area of the galley. This gives them a good view of the door to the master stateroom.

So when Chuck is discovered with his throat cut, it seems at first reasonable to assume he committed suicide. The nature of his death and the nature of his wounds suggest otherwise. Suicides don‘t usually cut their own throats–even when they’re not loopy from a shot of Valium. They find quicker and less painful methods of killing themselves. But how could it be murder when nobody saw anyone enter or leave the stateroom? The impossible aspect of the situation makes it all the more chilling to Cat, not least because the yacht is becalmed after the storm and its motor will not start because of water in the fuel line. Its communications equipment has been sabotaged. She and the others are thus trapped on a boat with an unknown murderer.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, impossible crime stories–which category subsumes locked-room puzzles–are my favorite types of mysteries, whether sedate or hardboiled. I’m a sucker for them, though unfortunately some of them suck. Hard Tack is not one of those. I found it quite entertaining, even if the locked-room murder method, when finally revealed, strained credulity as many such methods are wont to do. Cat Marsala’s first-person narration is lively, leavened with humor that’s sometimes sassy but seldom snarky, and maintains a good pace. (I knew I liked her when, in the first chapter, she said she had packed two novels to take along on the trip: John Dickson Carr’s The Three Coffins and The Judas Window.) In keeping with the tradition of many Golden Age mysteries, Barbara D’Amato provides the reader with a sketch of the Easy Girl and its below-deck layout.

The caveats? The murder doesn’t occur until a little more than halfway through, the lead-up time being devoted to character interaction and development, and a lot of discussions about the fine points of sailing and what kinds of conditions sailors encounter and how they contend with them. (D’Amato provides a glossary of nautical terms at the back of the book.) Some readers may grow impatient, especially if they’re landlubbers. I’m one of those, but I was neither impatient nor bored. Besides which, some of the information is crucial to the murder’s solution.

All things considered, Hard Tack is a pretty good mystery.

© 2010 Barry Ergang

Barry Ergang’s locked-room mystery novelette, “The Play of Light and Shadow,” is available at Smashwords and Amazon.

Having spent seven years in San Quentin after a con game went bad, and determined to walk a straight-and-narrow path to avoid a return to prison, John Hayden now lives a deliberately spartan life in a small, cheap room and works as the assistant manager at a bowling alley in Boulder, Colorado, earning eighty-five dollars a week. He’s taking a correspondence course in hotel management, hoping one day to buy a roadhouse outside the city that has rooms upstairs and cabins out back. “The current owner doesn’t know what to do with the place,” he tells Doug Rance. “He’s a lush and he just knows how to sell drinks and how to build himself a case of cirrhosis. With the right kind of operation the place would be a gold mine.”

Rance, nine years younger than Hayden’s forty-two, is someone Hayden met years earlier but never worked with, and who has come looking for him, hoping to persuade him to go back on the grift. Rance was recently in Las Vegas where he met a woman named Evelyn Stone, the titular character. She complained to him about her boss, a man named Wallace J. Gunderman, the intended target of Rance’s depredations–the “mooch,” as marks are referred to in this novel–whom for personal reasons she’d love to see get taken for a great deal of money. Gunderman made his money buying and selling land, and had already once been the victim of a con game involving property in Canada. Rance wants to work yet another Canadian land grift on Gunderman, and thinks Hayden would be the ideal partner. Evelyn Stone would also get a cut for her role in the game.

As much as he fears the prospect of going back to prison should something go wrong, Hayden realizes that his portion of the money they stand to take Gunderman for would enable him to fulfill his roadhouse dream almost immediately instead of requiring him to

work for chump change and save perhaps twenty-five hundred dollars annually for the next nine or ten years while living a desolate excuse for a life. And so he declares himself in, and he and Rance go to elaborate lengths to stage the operation and psych out the mooch. Gunderman is neither stupid nor a fool; he needs to be carefully suckered into buying what Hayden and Rance pretend to sell. They execute their scheme thoroughly and meticulously, taking into account every contingency. They have everything covered, right? Nothing could possibly go wrong, could it?

If I told you, you’d want to kill me for spoiling the fun and excitement. As it is, I’ve given you the barest outline of the novel’s beginning without revealing necessary and intriguing details, minutiae, and subsequent plot developments.

Narrated in the first person by John Hayden, in an unadorned, often staccato prose style, The Girl with the Long Green Heart is one of Lawrence Block’s earliest efforts. It amply demonstrates the storytelling skill, sense of character and pace, that would ultimately win him the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award, and many other literary honors. As has usually been my experience with a Block novel, this one was very hard to put down, and is highly recommended to fans of criminous fiction.

A Derringer Award-winner, Barry Ergang’s fiction, poetry and non-fiction has appeared in numerous publications, print and electronic. Some of his work is available at Smashwords and Amazon. His website is http://www.writetrack.yolasite.com/.