The Big Both Ways

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Rattled by the gruesome accidental death of a coworker, Slip Wilson quits his job at a logging camp, and decides to make a clean start in Seattle. But along the way, he rescues a woman and her young niece from their car in the ditch, and his life takes a hard turn. The woman, Ellie Hobbes, is an archist with big dreams. But first, she has to take care of that pesky dead body in the trunk of her car...From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. In this gripping tale of survival, betrayal and murder set in the Pacific Northwest in 1935 from Straley (Cold Water Burning), Slip Wilson is just trying to find work, food and a little justice when he hooks up with a bottle-blonde, Ellie Hobbes, who drags him into her edgy, ragtag life. At the last minute, Ellie, a notorious red union organizer who faces mounting problems with antiunion forces, and her young niece hop aboard the same rickety boat Slip is escaping on that's traveling from Seattle to Juneau. The odd trio barely catches a breath as weather, hunger, a Seattle homicide detective and a revenge-seeking gang of thugs hound them all the way up the Inside Passage. Ellie isn't big on explanations, so Slip isn't sure until nearly the end of their journey if she's a heroine or a scoundrel. Straley's beautifully understated narrative, vivid sense of place and unapologetic, unadorned characters make this a riveting, unpredictable ride. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistStarred Review Straley, author of the Cecil Younger series, starring a contemporary Alaskan private investigator, turns here to Pacific Northwest history, with a rich tale of labor strife in the 1930s. After quitting his logging job, Slip Wilson sets off for Seattle, hitching a ride with a bleached blond in a big car. Trouble? Of course, especially given the body in the car’s trunk. Soon enough, there’s another body, and Slip, Ellie (the blond), her niece, and a yellow bird are on the lam, sailing a dory up Puget Sound’s Inside Passage, from Seattle to Alaska. What follows is part mystery and part action-adventure tale, as the neophyte sailors battle weather, tides, and unfriendly locals, all the while pursued by a determined Seattle cop on his own kind of lam from a troubled life. Straley hits all the right notes here: vividly detailed scenes evoking the clash between emerging trade unions and more radical advocates of revolution, as well as almost Dickensian vignettes of the working conditions in the canneries and on the waterfronts of the Northwest, meld perfectly with a Jack London–like, man-versus-nature story in which two adults, one child, and one bird, huddled together in a very small boat, attempt to stay afloat and move ever northward. Labor fiction only works if the characters don’t come across as stick figures, singing the union-label song on cue, and Straley nails that, too. Ellie spouts the party line, but she’d rather be Amelia Earhart, and Slip is uncertain about almost everything. If you want to read one novel about the Northwest in the grip of labor unrest, read this one. --Bill Ott