THE SAILCLOTH SHROUD BY CHARLES WILLIAMS

Reviewed by Ed Lynskey

This shorter offering from the Charles Williams' noir sea sagas which include Dead Calm (1963) and Scorpion Reef (1955) was made into a forgettable film, The Man Who Would Not Die directed by Robert Arkless. The flick starred Dorothy Malone, Keenan Wynn, Aldo Ray, and Alex Scheafe.  Ironically enough, it was released in 1975, the year of Williams' death, an alleged drowning suicide in the Pacific Northwest.

Why is a 186-page novel still of reading interest and value over forty years after its original publication date (1960)? Beats me.  I only know one thing: upon starting it, I was sucked into a lean, tight narrative.  Something else, too.  The author's unique voice and style intrigued me.  This is more difficult to define.

Today, when I typically read a thick suspense thriller off the paperback rack, I wade into a flat, generic prose.  My brain goes into lock mode, my eyes blur out of focus.  Williams (and other hardboiled novelists from his era) propel a straightforward plot with suspense points built in without seams. 

How they pulled it off, and perhaps not in every title, but consistently enough is worthy of our attention and admiration today.  Charles Williams, along with other Gold Medal published authors, has started to receive some critical notice.  I also see his works have been translated into French, German, and Dutch.

Williams logged in ten years as a merchant marine radio officer, what must've served as a life experience from which to write a book like The Sailcloth Shroud.  The action kicks off with Stuart Rogers, a 32-year-old charter yacht captain, fixing up a forty-foot ketch called Topaz in the muggy harbor town of Southport, Texas.  Two local detectives drop by to see Rogers. Trouble has ensued.  A man's dead body has turned up, his face smashed in.  Rogers knows it has to be Keefer.

Keefer is the second dead man.  Rogers employed two deck hands to assist him sailing the Topaz up from the Panama Canal where he bought it for a song.  His hopes to sell it quick and turn a nifty profit fade.  The first man, Baxter by name, died en route of an apparent heart attack.  Then the winds died and their gas ran out.  Stuck with a corpse decomposing in the blistering heat, Rogers decided on the most expedient course: Baxter's burial at sea.
It has been suggested that the sea drowning imagery in Williams' work presaged his own self-death.  In The Sailcloth Shroud comes this illustrative passage:
"Then suddenly it was back again, that strange feeling of uneasiness that always came over me when I remembered the moment of his burial, that exact instant in which I'd stood at the rail and watched his body slide into the depths."

The thugs responsible for killing Keefer and Baxter are, of course, now gunning for Rogers.  They pursue Rogers who travels to Florida to try and determine why Baxter and Keefer, both broke and beat, were carrying a slug of money.  The fight sequences and overall sense of urgency are restrained but effectively paced.  Williams doesn't stoke his plot to go over the top. 

On the other hand, Williams does deploy an interesting plot device.  The thugs join Rogers to a lie detector machine.  Much of the novel's back story about the Topaz's tragic sea voyage is revealed while Rogers' emotional responses are validated by the lie detector's recordings.  Rogers described the experience:
"I was sitting here hooked up to a shiny electronic gadget like a cow to a milking machine while an acidulous gnome with popeyes extracted the truth from me -- truth that I apparently no longer even knew myself."

Charles Williams wrote more ambitious sea mysteries like Dead Calm, later made into a 1989 film.  Sadly, he died just as his works were breaking into the hardback commercial book market, most notably his last, Man On A String (1973). The Sailcloth Shroud is tight and terse, perhaps more akin in scope and voice to his 1950s Gold Medal paperbacks.  The novel provides a good entryway into the body of work by a hard-boiled author deserving an audience today.

Copyright© 2003 Ed Lynskey

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ED LYNSKEY's crime short fiction has appeared in such online venues as HandHeldCrime, Plots With Guns, Judas, The 3rd Degree, Hardluck Stories, The Murder Hole and others.
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