In Pristine or Troubled Waters?

Steve Wattenmaker

Troubled Waters
A Sea Story
By Syd Stapleton
288 pages, $18.99 from Amazon

SAY YOU HAPPENED to sit down next to Frank Tomasini in a waterfront bar somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. You nod and exchange pleasantries. Three hours later you would be in deep, delightful, and consequential conversation with this new friend. Tomasini, the protagonist in Syd Stapleton’s new mystery novel Troubled Waters — a Sea Story, is a 47-year-old marine surveyor in Washington State’s San Juan Islands.

On a dreary evening, Tomasini receives an urgent radio distress call as he sits down to supper on his boat, the Molly B. That call launches a murder mystery wrapped up in a scheme to pillage the San Juan’s pristine environment.

Stapleton’s command of language, dialogue, and character suggests a wider experience leading up to this first novel. Stapleton grew up in Gilroy, California on farms and ranches, and fished with his father off Monterrey’s Cannery Row. He became a leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in 1964 and anti-Vietnam War activist. He ran for Congress as a socialist in 1970. During the 1980s he worked as a machinist and became a tool and die maker.

But Stapleton’s experience of working in and around the sea lends a particularly expansive and atmospheric underpinning to Troubled Waters. For years Stapleton lived in and sailed the San Juans. The islands are his backyard.

In the 1990s Stapleton, his wife and daughter sailed from Washington State to Cuba and back. He worked as a passenger ferry captain in the San Juans and wrote the first draft of Troubled Waters while working on an ocean-going tugboat in the Pacific.

Tomasini describes the effect of the sea and Pacific Northwest weather on his moods:

“It was a Thursday night in the middle of November. I didn’t expect to get many more chances to get out of the boatyard where I moor my boat. The weather gets nasty this time of year and it was a treat to be out on a quiet night, silence all around me. I could have been with Carol, my friend, companion, and lover, at her place on Decatur Island, but a heavy work day made the trip too much — and we both enjoyed (or needed) some time alone.

“It’s different when the wind blows, it jangles my nerves. Whistling wind makes me think about breaking rigging and overstressed planks, sailors choking on wind-driven spray as they cling to a life-ring in icy water. But a calm sea is an antidote to my usual anxieties, especially the most morbid ones.”

The Seafarer

Working-class protagonists are rare in the mystery and thriller genre. Police and private investigators, of course, predominate. Some exhibit a degree of class consciousness or have working-class roots. V.I. Warshawski, the P.I. in Sara Paretsky’s mysteries, for example.

Tomasini, by contrast, spends his life alternating as a working-class seafarer and a freelance marine surveyor. Murder investigation is not his business.

Carol Bogdanich, Tomasini’s lover, gets pulled into the mystery as well. She and Tomasini have deep respect for each other’s work and privacy. Stapleton portrays them as closely attuned and yet comfortable creating space for each other — sometimes for extended periods.

We also meet Harlan Brown and Alan Edmunds who become Tomasini’s comrades investigating the mystery. Brown and Edmunds are characters drawn as fully as Stapleton draws Bogdanich and Tomasini.

Pulled away from his supper by the radio call, Tomasini runs the Molly B to inspect a boat that had been found abandoned and taking on water. The derelict boat, Sound Avenger, belonged to a wealthy, “self-appointed eco-crusader,” Arthur Middleton.

Middleton, Tomasini tells us, had a reputation among locals as an irritating gadfly with a mission to single-handedly save the waters around the San Juans. Had Middleton fallen overboard, had he been targeted, or had his boat just broken its mooring lines and drifted out to sea?

Concern for Middleton drags Tomasini deeper into the mystery. Middelton’s current crusade had centered on a polluting salmon fish farm located on remote Baker Island, near to where the Sound Avenger is found adrift.

Step by step, Tomasini’s investigation nudges his interest toward the remote fish farm — and what deeper secret it may be hiding on Baker Island.

Tomasini discovers that whatever the secret is can be dangerous. Looking around Middleton’s house for clues, Tomasini is knocked out by an intruder and finds Middleton’s files missing when he comes to.

Middelton’s rich Seattle brother, Edgar, enters the picture with ties to whatever is happening on Baker Island and to the insurance company that gives Tomasini half of his work.

Through contact with Edmunds, Tomasini learns that Edgar Middleton and other big-money investors developed a furtive hazardous-waste disposal site on Baker Island. Middleton’s activist brother, first interested in whether the fish farm was polluting, had discovered hazardous waste leaking out of the site into the seawater surrounding Baker Island. Arthur Middleton was preparing to confront his rich brother and blow the whistle.

Stapleton’s conclusion — and the solution to Athur Middleton’s disappearance — reads a bit like a Tom Clancy thriller. The daring raid on Baker Island by Tomasini, Carole, Harlan, and Alan that concludes the mystery is heart-pounding. No spoiler alert but let’s just say that the San Juans remain pristine — at least for the moment.

November-December 2024, ATC 233