Mystery Monday: The White Ghost!

Our book today is The White Ghost, the latest historical mystery by James R. Benn starring Bostonian ex-detective and now WWII Lieutenant Billy Boyle. In this tenth Billy Boyle adventure (each one of which easily stands alone for new readers), Boyle and his friend Lieutenant Piotr Augustus Kazimierz, an expatriate Polish count who functions as a more polished thinker and sounding board for Boyle’s rough by tenacious insight into crimes like fraud and especially murder, are summoned in 1943 far, far from the European theater of the war. By a series of military transports, they’re hurried to Guadalcanal, their highly irregular travel sponsored and smoothed by the powerful Kennedy family (Joseph Kennedy, the dismissed but still powerful patriarch of the family, is pulling the strings all the way from the US).

The Kennedys have a vital interest in having their fellow Boston-Irish ward-boy Boyle look into an incident that recently happened in the Solomon Islands: a PT boat was destroyed in a surprise encounter with a Japanese ship, and the PT boat’s young captain, recuperating from his injuries at a naval hospital at Tulagi, has discovered on a nearby beach the body of local Coastwatcher Daniel Tamana. The mystery arises from the fact that the circumstances of the crime scene seem to implicate the young captain, and the Kennedy family’s urgency arises from the fact that the young PT boat captain is one of their own: John F. Kennedy, the former ambassador’s second son – and, we’re quickly told, the boyhood nemesis of young Billy Boyle.

Boyle and Kasimierz no sooner make their way to Jack Kennedy’s hospital room than Boyle is grippingly reminded of both the power and peril of the man even at a young age:

I saw Jack before he spotted me. He had always been skinny, but I wasn’t prepared for how frail and bone-thin he looked. But the smile was there, the same one I remembered. The kind of grin that took you in and swallowed you whole. There was no denying a smiling Jack.

Boyle and Kasimierz aren’t quite sure what they’re supposed to deny or affirm in the case; as more than one person hints to them, the Navy itself isn’t sure whether to court martial young Kennedy or give him a medal. And the murder of Daniel Tamana only complicates things, since his wounds could easily have been caused by the cane Jack Kennedy now needs while walking on his lacerated feet, and Kennedy himself seems both evasive and combative on the whole subject.

Benn has been steadily growing into this series as the books have come along, and The White Ghost is even stronger than 2014’s The Rest is Silence. His characters are wonderfully drawn, especially his star duo but also in this case also Jack Kennedy, not the easiest historical figure to capture convincingly. And his picture of the world of the Pacific Theater of the Second World War is terrifically evocative, both in its dangers from marauding Japanese and in its natural beauty, so foreign to a kid from South Boston:

As we cruised on, the dusky light at the horizon faded into black, and all that was left was the twinkling of more stars than I’d ever seen. This wasn’t like being offshore on Massachusetts Bay, where the lights of civilization glowed in the distance. This was pure darkness. No moon, no electric lights, nothing but inky-black velvet heavens draped around us, blending into the dark ocean, the play of starlight on the waves making it impossible to see where air and water joined, the horizon an invisible thread.

The narrative tangles up quickly with further murders and with plenty of sly inclusions of walk-ons from a number of historical figures (people familiar with Boston history will be particularly pleased), several of whom, from a charming Lieutenant Cotter to a less-than-charming Air Transport Officer Dick Nixon, would make excellent alternate suspects in the murders. And Benn does such a nicely textured job at the historical novel side of his task that it ends up being just as strong as the murder mystery side of his task. The combination makes The White Ghost a delicious summer hour’s read.