The Professor

An abandoned boat, eighty-three thousand dollars and a long story in ship’s log. Bill Manning meets leggy blonde Shannon Wayne but to steal a phrase “This is not going to go the way you think”.

“Gulf Coast Girl” (aka “Scorpion Reef”) begins with that delicious Marie Celeste mystery prologue, then rewinds through the ships log to a job offer from the aforementioned Shannon (“She was a cathedral of a girl”/”She’d stick out like a Chartres cathedral in a housing development”), a nasty encounter with some heavies and then, ta-daa!, the real job offer. We’re in the land of boats and suntans and beautiful women and dreams of escapes to island paradises and as such, just as a piece of lifestyle porn, “Gulf Coast Girl” makes for good reading. It all pootles along quite inoffensively until, after one injudicious punch up, a wild hit sends Manning tumbling into a very well painted nightmare hellscape of sunken corpses, vengeful mobsters and justice seeking officials. One thing the great pulp/hard-boiled/noir writers of the fifties knew all too well and which has made it wholly intact into the Godforsaken twenty-first century is how life can go straight down the can in the blink of an eye.

Shannon Wayne’s real reason for hiring Bill Manning (her initial gun retrieval gig does smack a little of plot gears grinding) is all crashed planes, stolen diamonds and sociopathic gangsters. That’s the A-plot, but bubbling underneath is a rather affecting grown-up love story. Williams has a poet’s soul. His characters take time out to luxuriate in a swim or enjoy the evening air or landscape and reading this soon after Dan J Marlowe’s “The Name Of The Game Is Death” one is struck by the wistful yearning and tenderness rather than, say, toxic masculinity out to burn the world. Williams, however, does do existential dread very well (“There was a lot of dark water between here and the shore”/”It was drifting in the same trackless void”) and he gets cosmic when the stars come out and Shannon and Manning are adrift in the sea. The ending may seem anti-climatic until…well, Williams has very lightly suggested there’s more going on here than meets the eye. No spoilers, but Manning’s tiny character detail of wanting to start to write again sets up a very nice twist of the ribbon at the end. Sharper minds might spot this a mile off but I was enjoying the ride too much to extrapolate.

In a nutshell this is far better written than the (delicously) trashy covers might lead snobbier types to believe. There’s lots of procedural description in the making ready of the boat for the trip to the sunken plane and then the gunpoint voyage to Scorpion Reef itself which really places you out there on the sea with Manning and Shannon and their two dangerous captors. Interestingly, I detected faint Bondian tropes: diving and the sea in general, Scorpion Reef versus Crab Key and Shannon has a fit of the heebie-jeebies towards the end faintly reminiscent of Vesper Lynd’s at the end of “Casino Royale”. These writers do like their tough but tragic heroines

Charles Williams was clearly a craftsman of good, solid prose, shot through with melancholy and yearning and a teller of rattling good yarns that make twenty-first century commutes fly by. It also helped that early on I head-cast Tom Hiddlestone and Elizabeth Debicki from the BBC’s “The Night Manager” as Manning and Shannon. If either fancy a trip to Scorpion Reef I’d be up for it but without Williams’ prose it’d just be shots of beautiful scenary.