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Book Review: 'Well-crafted story'
published: Sunday | June 29, 2008

Title: Rum Justice
Author: Jolien Harmsen
Publisher: Macmillan Caribbean
Reviewer: Barbara Nelson

"HE WAS a good boy, Smiley. He always know if he make a promise, he must keep it. So he not promising no girl nothing. Not until when he good and ready. Then he say he will marry. And he not spreading himself around neither, making baby here, baby there. He careful, Smiley. He looking for his blood family first." Smiley's granny, the old lady with the toothless mouth and the protruding stomach that provided a little shelf for her soft long breasts, is upset and distressed at hearing that her first grandchild, who "she herself had raised so his mother could go out to work", is dead - murdered!

"I hope they hang," she says. "They kill my boy. At least they deserve to hang for that."

Smiley's granny is just one of the many people on the little Caribbean island of St Cecilia who are very distressed at Smiley's death.

Hazel Cunningham, however, is not distressed. She is an American tourist who wore her silvery blonde hair Farah Fawcett-style and was considered to be an ordinary djanmet - a tart, by the women at the Bay Beach bar in LaPointe Sable. Hazel and her husband, Michael, lived on their yacht, called 'The Footloose', out in the harbour. But word was out that Hazel was spending time with Smiley, the young black water-taxi driver with the big smile who liked white women and who everybody liked.

The water-taxi

Then, Smiley's water-taxi is found floating on the rocks at Lovetree Point with two bullets in the bottom of the boat, as well as a cigarette butt and a red plastic lighter, half-full. Very strange, because Smiley does not smoke. But there is no sign of Smiley.

Some days later, two fishermen, Emmaus and Lennard, find Smiley's body floating in the sea with a bullet wound to his chest. All the signs of suspicion point to the American woman and her husband. They were known to have guns on board the yacht and Hazel had boasted about using them. There were even four bullets found in the bow of the Cunningham's dinghy.

From there, the story expands like a mushroom cloud. At first, it seemed that the evidence was against Michael Cunningham who, in a blind rage, could have shot Smiley in reaction to his wife's flirting with him. Then Hazel drops a word suggesting that Smiley was, perhaps, involved in drugs.

Reporters from newspapers in the United States fly down to the little island to cover the story, even as the US State Department is amazed that a Caribbean court dares to make American citizens stand trial for murder, on what they term is flimsy evidence.

"By the time the September assizes began, nobody in St Cecilia wanted anything more to do with foreign reporters, least of all me," the narrator, herself a white woman and also a journalist, writes. "In American public opinion, St Cecilia was now on par with fundamentalist Iran, terrorist Libya and Mafiosi Russia."

Meticulously crafted

Rum Justice is a meticulously crafted story. The author, Jolien Harmsen, was born in The Netherlands and holds a PhD in social history. She has worked as a newspaper editor and radio correspondent and has written several historical studies, including a general history of St Lucia. For more than a decade; she has been based in St Lucia. This is her first crime novel.

Her descriptions of the island are clearly drawn. For example, "An almost full moon stood high in the sky, throwing shadows under trees and bushes and illuminating the edges of the clouds. The breeze carried a heady smell of rotten fruit: love apples, mangoes, sugar apples and passion fruit that had fallen to the ground."

And she knows how the people live: "Emmaus took a wide plastic basin from a hook on the wall, stepped into his flip-flops, left the door ajar and crossed the road. At the concrete sink in the public laundry, he ran the basin three-quarters full and then carried it back. A little water slopped over the edge. On the deserted side of his house, in the early morning darkness, Emmaus stepped on an upturned soft drinks crate and scooped water over his naked body from a cracked cup. It ran down down his legs and into the earth without mucking up his feet. He ran a hard bar of soap over his body, scooped again, shivered and slapped at the mosquitoes that danced around his knees. He dried himself with a piece of T-shirt cloth his neighbour had given him."

Will truth and justice triumph? Will the American couple get a fair trial? After all, they were setting up a cha-rity fund for the "poor school children" in St Cecilia! "Some of them even have to share desks and books," Hazel remarks in an interview.

Will Smiley's granny, mother, brothers and friends get justice or will the outcome appear, as his brother Luke says, that "Sometimes, it seems as if God is asleep and He doesn't care anymore".

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