Author: John Galligan
Published By: Bleak House Books
Cover Artist: 2Faced Designs
Binding: Hardback
Publication Date: September 2008
A mystery involving trout fishing, a man nicknamed Dog who has been traveling around in a Cruise Master camper for four years fishing, and skinheads protecting the property of an action film star and who seem bent on preventing anyone from fishing the fenced-in Roam River. What’s not to like?
It may not be a sport that appeals to all people; but I, for one, like fishing, and I like reading mysteries – so, I thought this book would combine the best of both of them, with perhaps something of the action in the TV series “Dog, the Bounty Hunter” (though this was silly – I knew that the “Dog,” in The Clinch Knot would likely not be like the “Dog,” of the TV series in most ways, if not every way); still, I thought I’d check this novel out and see if I liked it and if the combination worked for me.
While I’d say, in my opinion, that the novel starts slowly, maybe like a slow-moving, meandering stream on a warm summer day when the fish aren’t biting, the pace picks up around eighty pages into it. I began liking it more and more, and though some time and pages are spent earlier on getting to know the characters like Dog (the nickname of Ned Oglivie, the main protaganist of this book and the Fly Fishing series, of which this is the third novel), his fishing companions D’Ontario Sneed (called D’Ontay by his mother and Sneed or Sneedy by most other people), and Jesse Ringer (his white girlfriend, whose father, Galen, is in prison for murder), and a cast of very eccentric extras – the time and pages spent doing this pays off later on.
The novel is told in the first person, from the POV of Dog. It’s mostly linear, but he backtracks occasionally to provide information on who and when he first met Sneed and Jesse and started to feel paternally about them, for instance, and also when he thinks back to how his four-year-old son Eamon drowned in the bathtub as he and his wife argued and how it was one of the many causes of his divorce from her. Eamon’s death was very traumatic for him, leaving him with a sense of guilt that will stay with him the rest of his life.
It’s set in Livingston, Montana, Big Sky Country, a beautiful state with numerous excellent trout fishing streams and rivers in it. It makes anyone who loves to fish almost salivate thinking of it, and reading the descriptions of catching and landing trout. But, while I don’t mind and often like to read about fishing, it isn’t usually considered to be the most active sport around, or one brimming with dangers of the kind that people read in mysteries, like blackmail, rape, greed, jealousy, betrayal, and murder.
However, author John Galligan skillfully makes it all work, weaving together a wonderfully colorful tapestry of a novel. The action of the rest of the book more than compensates for the unhurried beginning of it, sort of like a big brown trout that’s been hiding in the depths of a pool biding its time coming to the surface with a rush like lightning to snag a mayfly on the surface.
The Clinch Knot opens with the Dog thinking back to when he was drinking with his new fishing buddy, Sneed, in “the Stockman tavern, Livingston, Montana, in the hot shank of August,” when Sneed sets eyes on Jesse for the first time. She is a drunk, local, white girl, who overhears Sneed telling the Dog: “My mama went to prison.” She immediately is attracted to him, sensing a type of kinship with him, because, as she says:
“This is wild. You’re not going to believe it. My daddy’s in prison!”
And so, over the next three weeks, a sort of love develops between them. The Dog, initially also somewhat attracted to Jesse (she has that effect on most of the men in this novel), fishes with both of them, sees their growing love, and lets them live in tent pitched near his Cruise Master. He is their friend, their benefactor.
That is why, when two skinheads come into his camp, burn the couple’s tent, and leave a warning written on an orange-black sign behind that says on one side “NO TRESPASSING” and on the other “Turn back now!” the Dog takes it very personally. His Glock and two hundred bucks has also been stolen from his Cruise Master RV, and Jesse’s clothes are strewn across the Dog’s “gritty floor and down the portable steps,” and they’re “wet and smell funny.” The Dog realizes that the skinheads have peed on her clothes.
The sheriff shows up at the scene after the Dog hails down a passing motorist and borrows his cell phone to call the police. Sheriff Roy Chubbock, an emphysema suffering man whom is described as looking like: “a turkey buzzard on life support,” is no help at all. He wears an oxygen pack on his back, and “Tubes, thin and clear, lead into his nostrils.”
Prejudice and racism is dying out (well, we can hope so, anyway), but there still are some last bastions of it. In Galligan’s novel, Livingston, Montana is one of them. There are people like the snoose-chewing (tobacco shewing) Uncle Tick Judith (a friend of her father’s, he promised him to be Jesse’s guardian), who doesn’t see anything wrong in her relationship with Sneed; but, there are many who do.
The Dog is the one who eventually discovers Jesse’s gold Oldsmobile, and Jesse’s dead body lying on the ground, shot in the head. The car’s windows are sealed from the inside with duct tape, the doors are locked, and Sneed is inside, passed out. The car is filled with smoke from the coals of a hibachi grill, on the floor between his legs. The Dog can’t rouse him, so he breaks the car’s window and drags Sneed out.
Though the Dog is sure Sneed would never have killed Jesse, whoever did and put Sneed in the car made it appear as if he shot her, saw he had no bullets left in his gun, and decided to commit suicide by sealing himself up in the car with the smoking hibachi. That’s how the sheriff sees it; there seems to be no other explanation. How else to explain a car locked with its windows taped from the inside?
The Dog believes Sneed’s been framed, and doesn’t want Sneed to be punished for something he didn’t do. Sneed has suffered brain damage from breathing in the toxic fumes, and is hovering between life and death in the hospital. He can’t come to his own defense and say what really happened, so the Dog feels it’s up to him to figure out who killed Jesse and tried to kill Sneed.
He is aided in this by Deputy Russell Crowe (who likes to inform people he’s “no relation” to the actor Russell Crowe), Uncle Tick Judith, and a character who almost steals the novel with her intensity and love for her son, Aretha Sneed, D’Ontario’s mother. Sneed had told the Dog his mother had been addicted to drugs and he’d been placed in a foster home in Arkansas (where, coincidently, I live with my family). He hadn’t seen her for years and had thought she was dead, but she got off the drugs and had become a fireman.
She’s the one who shows up around page 80 and, for me, kicked the book into a higher gear. She and the Dog decide to go to the people they believe might be the likeliest suspects and ask them to demonstrate how they would tie a clinch knot. As an added incentive to gain their cooperation, Aretha has a Colt .45 with her to persuade them.
Why a clinch knot? Not to give away too many secrets about the book, Deputy Crowe notices and brings to the Dog’s attention a fly hooked to the back of the Oldmobile’s rear seat. They figure the killer must have crawled out of the car by folding down the back seats and exiting via the trunk. Then, the murderer must have hooked the seat with a fly rod, pulled it closed, and snapped the line, leaving the lure behind rather than taking the time to cut it free.
When you add to the race issues a mixed couple might face in a rural town like Livingson Jesse’s flings with influential men like the lawyer Hendricks (“Hendy”) Gray, and her knowledge of and involvement in drugs being sold in town by the ex-rodeo clown, current fly fishing outfitter Hilarious Sorgenson, the list of people wouldn’t mind her turning up dead seems to grow longer and longer.
I really liked the use of pronghorn antelopes as a metaphor for Sneed, the Dog, Aretha; and, by extension, all of us. They’re mentioned frequently in the novel: Sneed helps his foster family raise them; they’re a native animal of the region that can’t jump; and a grade-B action movie star, Dane Tucker (who is also a Nativist, meaning that he’s actually a white supremacist, wanting to guard the borders and keep out Mexicans), has fenced in his land, blocking the traditional migratory route of the pronghorns.
The Dog, Sneed (who has escaped police custody), and Aretha – who are traveling in an inflatible boat on the Roam River to a place Sneed and Jesse have circle on a map – have Tucker’s land on both sides of them. The skinheads work for him, both to keep nosey fishermen and Mexicans off of Tucker’s property, and they track the trio’s progress on the river in some of the most exciting chapters of the novel.
They see pronghorns milling around a section of the barbed-wire fence, an unexpected roadblock in their paths and lives. It’s hard for them to cope with the obstacle; they’re confused, like Sneed trying to cope with the brain damage he’s suffered. It’s like the Dog and Aretha trying to put their past feelings of sin and guilt behind them and move on with their lives. As the Dog puts it:
“They stall and stress,” I explained to Aretha. They waste time and energy. They don’t want to take a different route that’s not as good. They’re conflicted.”
This is kind of a lengthy review, but the book warrants it, IMHO. If you like to read mysteries set in the Great Outdoors with lots of action and adventure, you’re sure to love The Clinch Knot by John Galligan. You don’t have to have read the first two novels in the Fly Fishing Mysteries series, The Nail Knot and The Blood Knot, to get into this novel, which is a plus. However, I have no doubt as you read The Clinch Knot you’ll get “hooked” (terrible pun, I know) and want to read the entire series.
