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Scorpion Reef
Aboard a ghost ship, sailors discover a tale of treasure, lust, and murder.
When the tanker finds the yacht, she is far from land, adrift in the middle of the Caribbean. No one is onboard, but the hold is stuffed with cash, the coffeepot is still warm, and a hint of perfume hangs in the air. The passengers have vanished, but the ship's log tells a chilling story of the madness peculiar to the search for sunken riches.
The journal was written by salvage diver Bill Manning, who was out of money and out of luck when he met a statuesque Swede named Shannon. She and her husband hire him to sail them to the Yucatan coast, to find a plane that went down carrying untold wealth. But a pair of gangsters is pursuing them, hoping for a crack at the treasure as well. For the sake of Shannon's beauty Manning will chase this fortune, knowing it will take him to the height of riches, or to the bottom of the Caribbean Sea.
When the tanker finds the yacht, she is far from land, adrift in the middle of the Caribbean. No one is onboard, but the hold is stuffed with cash, the coffeepot is still warm, and a hint of perfume hangs in the air. The passengers have vanished, but the ship's log tells a chilling story of the madness peculiar to the search for sunken riches.
The journal was written by salvage diver Bill Manning, who was out of money and out of luck when he met a statuesque Swede named Shannon. She and her husband hire him to sail them to the Yucatan coast, to find a plane that went down carrying untold wealth. But a pair of gangsters is pursuing them, hoping for a crack at the treasure as well. For the sake of Shannon's beauty Manning will chase this fortune, knowing it will take him to the height of riches, or to the bottom of the Caribbean Sea.
190 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1955
7 people are currently reading
156 people want to read
About the author
Charles Williams
33 books100 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Please see: Charles Williams
Charles Williams was one of the preeminent authors of American crime fiction. Born in Texas, he dropped out of high school to enlist in the US Merchant Marine, serving for ten years (1929-1939) before leaving to work in the electronics industry. He was a radio inspector during the war years at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Washington state. At the end of World War II, Williams began writing fiction while living in San Francisco. The success of his backwoods noir Hill Girl (1951) allowed him to quit his job and write fulltime.
Williams’s clean and somewhat casual narrative style distinguishes his novels—which range from hard-boiled, small-town noir to suspense thrillers set at sea and in the Deep South. Although originally published by pulp fiction houses, his work won great critical acclaim, with Hell Hath No Fury (1953) becoming the first paperback original to be reviewed by legendary New York Times critic Anthony Boucher. Many of his novels were adapted for the screen, such as Dead Calm (published in 1963) and Don’t Just Stand There! (published in 1966), for which Williams wrote the screenplay.
After the death of his wife Lasca (m. 1939) from cancer in 1972, Williams purchased property on the California-Oregon border where he lived alone for a time in a trailer. After relocating to Los Angeles, Williams committed suicide in his apartment in the Van Nuys neighborhood in early April 1975. Williams had been depressed since the death of his wife, and his emotional state worsened as sales of his books declined when stand alone thrillers began to lose popularity in the early 70s. He was survived by a daughter, Alison.
Please see: Charles Williams
Charles Williams was one of the preeminent authors of American crime fiction. Born in Texas, he dropped out of high school to enlist in the US Merchant Marine, serving for ten years (1929-1939) before leaving to work in the electronics industry. He was a radio inspector during the war years at the Puget Sound Navy Yard in Washington state. At the end of World War II, Williams began writing fiction while living in San Francisco. The success of his backwoods noir Hill Girl (1951) allowed him to quit his job and write fulltime.
Williams’s clean and somewhat casual narrative style distinguishes his novels—which range from hard-boiled, small-town noir to suspense thrillers set at sea and in the Deep South. Although originally published by pulp fiction houses, his work won great critical acclaim, with Hell Hath No Fury (1953) becoming the first paperback original to be reviewed by legendary New York Times critic Anthony Boucher. Many of his novels were adapted for the screen, such as Dead Calm (published in 1963) and Don’t Just Stand There! (published in 1966), for which Williams wrote the screenplay.
After the death of his wife Lasca (m. 1939) from cancer in 1972, Williams purchased property on the California-Oregon border where he lived alone for a time in a trailer. After relocating to Los Angeles, Williams committed suicide in his apartment in the Van Nuys neighborhood in early April 1975. Williams had been depressed since the death of his wife, and his emotional state worsened as sales of his books declined when stand alone thrillers began to lose popularity in the early 70s. He was survived by a daughter, Alison.
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July 22, 2019
My last appointment of the summer with hard-boiled fiction maestro Charles Williams is Scorpion Reef. Published in 1955, the novel appeared in condensed form as Flight To Nowhere in the September 1955 issue of Manhunt and was reprinted five years later under the tawdry title Gulf Coast Girl. None of these titles adequately convey the strong love story that reveals itself as the novel progresses, or the wonderfully inventive way that the author frames his story, which I'll do my best to keep secret. Williams alternated between tales of backwoods double crosses and high seas suspense and brings both genres together with nearly flawless precision here.
The story begins ominously, with the American tanker Joseph H. Hallock encountering a small craft adrift in the Yucatan Strait. The mate and two ABs board the thirty-six foot sloop Freya and discover its dinghy fastened and even a warm pot of coffee, but no souls. More mysterious is a voluminous journal whose last entry concludes with, " ... the blue, and that last, haunting flash of silver, gesturing as it died. It was beckoning. Toward the rapture. The rapture ...". A long strand of ash-blond hair is found between the pages. The party also finds a satchel containing a hundred thousand dollars in cash. The tanker captain receives and begins to read the journal.
The journal is the tale of thirty-three-year-old Bill Manning, who attended M.I.T. for three years before the war. Learning diving and salvage in the U.S. Navy, he sold a few adventure stories upon his discharge, but sifting through the wreckage of a divorce has drifted into salvage work, hopping from one job to the next in warmer and warmer waters. Finding himself in the (fictional) Florida town of Sanport in June, Manning is living on his boss's barge when he's visited by a smooth Scandinavian driving a '54 Cadillac convertible. Introducing herself as Mrs. Shannon Wayne, she offers Manning a job salvaging a shotgun she claims her husband dropped in a lake while duckhunting.
I looked at her for a moment, not saying anything. There was something odd about it. What kind of fool would be silly enough to take a $700 trap gun into a duckblind? And even if he had money enough to buy them by the dozen, a single-barreled gun was a poor thing to hunt ducks with.
"How deep is the water?" I asked.
"Ten or twelve feet, I think."
"Well, look. I'll tell you how to get your gun back. Any neighborhood kid can do it, for five dollars. Get a pair of goggles, or a diving mask. You can buy them at any dime store. Go out and anchor your skiff where the gun went overboard and send the kid down to look for it. Take a piece of fishline to haul it up when he locates it."
"Don't you want the job?" she asked. "Why?"
I wondered myself. I wasn't doing anything, and I hated sitting around. It would be easy, and she didn't mind paying for it, so why the reluctance?
I shrugged. "Well, it just seems silly to pay a professional diver all that travel time for something a kid could do in half an hour."
"It's not quite that simple," she said. "You see, it's about three hundred yards from the houseboat to where the duckblind is, and we're not sure where it fell out."
"Why?" I asked.
"It was early in the morning, and still dark."
"Didn't he hear it?"
"No. I think he said there was quite a wind blowing."
It made a little more sense that way, but not much. I still hesitated. Maybe I only imagined it, but I could feel a tension inside her that she was trying to hide and it had to be caused by something more than a lost shotgun. And I was too damned aware of her. I could feel her, even when I wasn't looking at her. I realized this was stupid, but it didn't change the fact. Maybe I'd been living too long alone.
Manning notices that Mrs. Wayne is preoccupied with being followed. Reaching the lake, he dons an aqualung and offering to help, she changes into a swimsuit and guides him from a skiff. Manning recovers the shotgun quickly. Assuming his client must have some other job in mind, Manning investigates no further when two hoodlums burst into the houseboat. The professional of the two men, Joey Barclay, refers to her as "Mrs. Macaulay" and is in search of her husband. When the pugnacious of the men smacks Shannon around, Manning knocks the man on his ass. After taking a look around, the men leave.
Admitting that her real name is Mrs. Shannon Macaulay, she hires Manning to purchase a seaworthy boat for three and take her and her husband to Yucatan. There, Manning will salvage something from a private plane sixty feet down. He'll then transport the couple to Central America. In return, he gets the boat plus five-thousand dollars. With visions of his own boat to skipper, Manning is intrigued. Given the story that Mr. Macaulay is a marine underwriter hiding from gangsters, he agrees to what sounds like an easy job offering him a month to spend in Mrs. Macaulay's company.
The first complication arrives when the pug shows up at the marina for a rematch with Manning. In the fight, the hoodlum falls off the pier and caves his skull in before sinking to the bottom of the marina. Dubious of a police investigation that would derail his plans, Manning retrieves the hood's car keys and abandons his vehicle miles away. He arranges a meeting with Shannon and deducing that her husband is still inside the house, works out a plan to get him out without the gangsters catching on. Barclay and his men issue a professional beating to Manning and instruct him to get out of town, but through great subterfuge, he purchases the Ballerina, a thirty-six foot sloop.
Barclay proves one step ahead of Manning at every turn, finding and shooting Mr. Macaulay before Manning can get to him. Under threat of Shannon being harmed, Manning is forced to charter Barclay and his right-hand man George Barfield to the Yucatan. Barclay reveals that he's after a cache of smuggled diamonds that went down in the Gulf. The diamonds were salvaged by Mr. Macaulay, who crashed a plane west of Scorpion Reef trying to steal them. Barclay is convinced that Macaulay told his wife the plane's location as an insurance policy to keep her alive. Manning realizes his life expectancy and Shannon's is short whether they can locate the diamonds or not.
I cursed them all for a bunch of fools. It was a game. It was "button, button." The rules were simple. You dropped a cuff link in two hundred thousand square miles of empty ocean and then went back and found it. If you didn't find it, you killed somebody. You didn't know much about the odds on finding cuff links dropped in oceans, but you were hell on wheels at killing people.
What chance did we have of getting away from them? And if we got away, where did we go? With not only the police after us but the rest of the "button, button" crowd as well. The two we had on our backs now were only part of them. The game never really ended. It just took them a while to find you, and then it started all over again. Macaulay had never been able to shake them, had he?
I was measuring coffee into the percolator when the idea began to take form. I stopped dead still, so abruptly I spilled the coffee from the spoon, enthralled with the beauty of it. Half our problem didn't even exist. Go back?
Who wanted to go back?
Here was the Ballerina, the answer to any blue-water sailor's dream. There she was, beyond that curtain, the girl I'd never had out of my mind since the moment I met her. And behind me, in a black satchel, was eighty thousand dollars. I stood there holding the coffee can in my hand, feeling the deck heel down and hearing the sound of water along the hull while I rolled the names around my tongue: Grand Cayman, Martinique, Barbados, Guadeloupe, Granada--Not the big places, not San Juan or Port-au-Prince or Havana, where we'd be caught, but the little ones, the small tropical islands with long golden beaches and native villages in sheltered bays where the water was blue and still.
Scorpion Reef contains the familiar trappings of noir fiction. There's a lusty bum. There's a smooth dame with secrets who hires him for a job he can't say no to. There's gangsters and a Whats-It. There's first-person narration. There's Florida. Whereas a lot of noir seems written on a Monday so the author can pay his light bill Saturday, Charles Williams winds his fiction as tight as a Swiss watch. His expert level knowledge of seafaring offers a bounty of detail. His stories are immensely suspenseful, stacking the deck against his protagonists. His knack for psychological insight is profound. His writing is precise. His chapter breaks left me wanting to read more.
It was a good, cold-blooded professional job. Nobody said anything. Nobody became excited. I never did even know for sure how many there were besides Barclay. I swung at the first dark shape I saw, because I had to do something; the blackjack sliced down across the muscles of my upper arm and it became a dangling, inert sausage stuffed with pain. They pulled both arms behind me and bent me back and slugged me in the stomach. At first I tightened the abdominal muscles in time to the cadenced beat of it, slug, swing, slug, but after a while I lost even the power to do that. Somewhere far off I could hear her crying out and opening the car door, but then somebody pushed her and she fell.
When they turned me loose at last and went away my knees folded and I fell forward on my face. Wind roared out of my throat, and my mouth was full of sand.
Of the Charles Williams novels I've read--Hell Hath No Fury, Scorpion Reef, Aground, Dead Calm and And The Deep Blue Sea--this is my favorite. In addition to the familiar neon signage of noir fiction, we have a bum anti-hero who's also a writer, or at least was a writer, and Williams brilliantly introduces the possibility that Manning might be taking some artistic license with his own story. Rather than just reading a plot, my imagination was turned on, trying to figure how the couple were going to get back on land, or whether the story being told was the real story. The author knows his terrain, switches into a whole other gear and enthralled me from beginning to end.
Reprint cover illustrated by Robert McGinnis.
The story begins ominously, with the American tanker Joseph H. Hallock encountering a small craft adrift in the Yucatan Strait. The mate and two ABs board the thirty-six foot sloop Freya and discover its dinghy fastened and even a warm pot of coffee, but no souls. More mysterious is a voluminous journal whose last entry concludes with, " ... the blue, and that last, haunting flash of silver, gesturing as it died. It was beckoning. Toward the rapture. The rapture ...". A long strand of ash-blond hair is found between the pages. The party also finds a satchel containing a hundred thousand dollars in cash. The tanker captain receives and begins to read the journal.
The journal is the tale of thirty-three-year-old Bill Manning, who attended M.I.T. for three years before the war. Learning diving and salvage in the U.S. Navy, he sold a few adventure stories upon his discharge, but sifting through the wreckage of a divorce has drifted into salvage work, hopping from one job to the next in warmer and warmer waters. Finding himself in the (fictional) Florida town of Sanport in June, Manning is living on his boss's barge when he's visited by a smooth Scandinavian driving a '54 Cadillac convertible. Introducing herself as Mrs. Shannon Wayne, she offers Manning a job salvaging a shotgun she claims her husband dropped in a lake while duckhunting.
I looked at her for a moment, not saying anything. There was something odd about it. What kind of fool would be silly enough to take a $700 trap gun into a duckblind? And even if he had money enough to buy them by the dozen, a single-barreled gun was a poor thing to hunt ducks with.
"How deep is the water?" I asked.
"Ten or twelve feet, I think."
"Well, look. I'll tell you how to get your gun back. Any neighborhood kid can do it, for five dollars. Get a pair of goggles, or a diving mask. You can buy them at any dime store. Go out and anchor your skiff where the gun went overboard and send the kid down to look for it. Take a piece of fishline to haul it up when he locates it."
"Don't you want the job?" she asked. "Why?"
I wondered myself. I wasn't doing anything, and I hated sitting around. It would be easy, and she didn't mind paying for it, so why the reluctance?
I shrugged. "Well, it just seems silly to pay a professional diver all that travel time for something a kid could do in half an hour."
"It's not quite that simple," she said. "You see, it's about three hundred yards from the houseboat to where the duckblind is, and we're not sure where it fell out."
"Why?" I asked.
"It was early in the morning, and still dark."
"Didn't he hear it?"
"No. I think he said there was quite a wind blowing."
It made a little more sense that way, but not much. I still hesitated. Maybe I only imagined it, but I could feel a tension inside her that she was trying to hide and it had to be caused by something more than a lost shotgun. And I was too damned aware of her. I could feel her, even when I wasn't looking at her. I realized this was stupid, but it didn't change the fact. Maybe I'd been living too long alone.
Manning notices that Mrs. Wayne is preoccupied with being followed. Reaching the lake, he dons an aqualung and offering to help, she changes into a swimsuit and guides him from a skiff. Manning recovers the shotgun quickly. Assuming his client must have some other job in mind, Manning investigates no further when two hoodlums burst into the houseboat. The professional of the two men, Joey Barclay, refers to her as "Mrs. Macaulay" and is in search of her husband. When the pugnacious of the men smacks Shannon around, Manning knocks the man on his ass. After taking a look around, the men leave.
Admitting that her real name is Mrs. Shannon Macaulay, she hires Manning to purchase a seaworthy boat for three and take her and her husband to Yucatan. There, Manning will salvage something from a private plane sixty feet down. He'll then transport the couple to Central America. In return, he gets the boat plus five-thousand dollars. With visions of his own boat to skipper, Manning is intrigued. Given the story that Mr. Macaulay is a marine underwriter hiding from gangsters, he agrees to what sounds like an easy job offering him a month to spend in Mrs. Macaulay's company.
The first complication arrives when the pug shows up at the marina for a rematch with Manning. In the fight, the hoodlum falls off the pier and caves his skull in before sinking to the bottom of the marina. Dubious of a police investigation that would derail his plans, Manning retrieves the hood's car keys and abandons his vehicle miles away. He arranges a meeting with Shannon and deducing that her husband is still inside the house, works out a plan to get him out without the gangsters catching on. Barclay and his men issue a professional beating to Manning and instruct him to get out of town, but through great subterfuge, he purchases the Ballerina, a thirty-six foot sloop.
Barclay proves one step ahead of Manning at every turn, finding and shooting Mr. Macaulay before Manning can get to him. Under threat of Shannon being harmed, Manning is forced to charter Barclay and his right-hand man George Barfield to the Yucatan. Barclay reveals that he's after a cache of smuggled diamonds that went down in the Gulf. The diamonds were salvaged by Mr. Macaulay, who crashed a plane west of Scorpion Reef trying to steal them. Barclay is convinced that Macaulay told his wife the plane's location as an insurance policy to keep her alive. Manning realizes his life expectancy and Shannon's is short whether they can locate the diamonds or not.
I cursed them all for a bunch of fools. It was a game. It was "button, button." The rules were simple. You dropped a cuff link in two hundred thousand square miles of empty ocean and then went back and found it. If you didn't find it, you killed somebody. You didn't know much about the odds on finding cuff links dropped in oceans, but you were hell on wheels at killing people.
What chance did we have of getting away from them? And if we got away, where did we go? With not only the police after us but the rest of the "button, button" crowd as well. The two we had on our backs now were only part of them. The game never really ended. It just took them a while to find you, and then it started all over again. Macaulay had never been able to shake them, had he?
I was measuring coffee into the percolator when the idea began to take form. I stopped dead still, so abruptly I spilled the coffee from the spoon, enthralled with the beauty of it. Half our problem didn't even exist. Go back?
Who wanted to go back?
Here was the Ballerina, the answer to any blue-water sailor's dream. There she was, beyond that curtain, the girl I'd never had out of my mind since the moment I met her. And behind me, in a black satchel, was eighty thousand dollars. I stood there holding the coffee can in my hand, feeling the deck heel down and hearing the sound of water along the hull while I rolled the names around my tongue: Grand Cayman, Martinique, Barbados, Guadeloupe, Granada--Not the big places, not San Juan or Port-au-Prince or Havana, where we'd be caught, but the little ones, the small tropical islands with long golden beaches and native villages in sheltered bays where the water was blue and still.
Scorpion Reef contains the familiar trappings of noir fiction. There's a lusty bum. There's a smooth dame with secrets who hires him for a job he can't say no to. There's gangsters and a Whats-It. There's first-person narration. There's Florida. Whereas a lot of noir seems written on a Monday so the author can pay his light bill Saturday, Charles Williams winds his fiction as tight as a Swiss watch. His expert level knowledge of seafaring offers a bounty of detail. His stories are immensely suspenseful, stacking the deck against his protagonists. His knack for psychological insight is profound. His writing is precise. His chapter breaks left me wanting to read more.
It was a good, cold-blooded professional job. Nobody said anything. Nobody became excited. I never did even know for sure how many there were besides Barclay. I swung at the first dark shape I saw, because I had to do something; the blackjack sliced down across the muscles of my upper arm and it became a dangling, inert sausage stuffed with pain. They pulled both arms behind me and bent me back and slugged me in the stomach. At first I tightened the abdominal muscles in time to the cadenced beat of it, slug, swing, slug, but after a while I lost even the power to do that. Somewhere far off I could hear her crying out and opening the car door, but then somebody pushed her and she fell.
When they turned me loose at last and went away my knees folded and I fell forward on my face. Wind roared out of my throat, and my mouth was full of sand.
Of the Charles Williams novels I've read--Hell Hath No Fury, Scorpion Reef, Aground, Dead Calm and And The Deep Blue Sea--this is my favorite. In addition to the familiar neon signage of noir fiction, we have a bum anti-hero who's also a writer, or at least was a writer, and Williams brilliantly introduces the possibility that Manning might be taking some artistic license with his own story. Rather than just reading a plot, my imagination was turned on, trying to figure how the couple were going to get back on land, or whether the story being told was the real story. The author knows his terrain, switches into a whole other gear and enthralled me from beginning to end.
Reprint cover illustrated by Robert McGinnis.
July 11, 2019
Extraordinaria novela. Los personajes, los ambientes, el mar, ... Todo está muy bien narrado. Es original. Podría enumerar sus virtudes hasta la extenuación.
Conocía este autor solo por el nombre y es imperdonable ya que es un clásico. Y los clásicos no fallan.
Conocía este autor solo por el nombre y es imperdonable ya que es un clásico. Y los clásicos no fallan.
June 28, 2020
"There was something ghostly about it. The mate and the two ABs of the boarding party looked at each other, unable to believe what they saw."
Gulf Coast Girl is one of Charles William's best novels. Certainly among the top three novels he has written mainly due to the twist at the end (I never saw that coming), the wonderful descriptions of life out on the sea that fills you with longing and the novel's ingenious crime procedural aspect. It is a terrific nautical action thriller and also a love story. It is similar to Aground. Both novels had the tough but sexually vulnerable sailor getting hired by attractive women to embark on some seemingly mendacious mission with hidden motives. In Aground, John Ingram was tasked with recovering a schooner. Gulf Coast Girl has Bill Manning being forced to recover diamonds that were lost in a shoal near Scorpion Reef after a plane crash. Both books have abandoned vessels at the center.
Gulf Coast Girl is a great crime procedural (as against police procedural) where the first person narrator (whose story is told through a journal) comes up with ingenious ideas to outwit not just the cops but also the gangsters. Like in Sailcloth Shroud, there are long passages filled with detailed accounts of how to outwit people who are watching or following you. This is why I called it a crime procedural.
There is a lot of hands on action. I am surprised Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson never made a novel based on William's nautical thrillers. These novels would have been perfect as starring vehicles for one of them.
It is also a great romance. The longing with which Bill Manning the sailor dotes on Shannon Wayne is well described - "She got out and closed the door and walked over to the edge of the pier with the unhurried smoothness of poured honey."
This is another solid novel from the underrated and sadly forgotten Charles Williams. I wish there were films based on every one of his novels. They are all really good and have so much cinematic potential. There are not enough nautical thrillers and Williams (who served in the US Merchant Marine) wrote some great novels about sailors and their adventures.
Gulf Coast Girl is one of Charles William's best novels. Certainly among the top three novels he has written mainly due to the twist at the end (I never saw that coming), the wonderful descriptions of life out on the sea that fills you with longing and the novel's ingenious crime procedural aspect. It is a terrific nautical action thriller and also a love story. It is similar to Aground. Both novels had the tough but sexually vulnerable sailor getting hired by attractive women to embark on some seemingly mendacious mission with hidden motives. In Aground, John Ingram was tasked with recovering a schooner. Gulf Coast Girl has Bill Manning being forced to recover diamonds that were lost in a shoal near Scorpion Reef after a plane crash. Both books have abandoned vessels at the center.
Gulf Coast Girl is a great crime procedural (as against police procedural) where the first person narrator (whose story is told through a journal) comes up with ingenious ideas to outwit not just the cops but also the gangsters. Like in Sailcloth Shroud, there are long passages filled with detailed accounts of how to outwit people who are watching or following you. This is why I called it a crime procedural.
There is a lot of hands on action. I am surprised Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson never made a novel based on William's nautical thrillers. These novels would have been perfect as starring vehicles for one of them.
It is also a great romance. The longing with which Bill Manning the sailor dotes on Shannon Wayne is well described - "She got out and closed the door and walked over to the edge of the pier with the unhurried smoothness of poured honey."
This is another solid novel from the underrated and sadly forgotten Charles Williams. I wish there were films based on every one of his novels. They are all really good and have so much cinematic potential. There are not enough nautical thrillers and Williams (who served in the US Merchant Marine) wrote some great novels about sailors and their adventures.
August 26, 2018
When a tall sexy Nordic blonde asks you to help her and her husband escape the clutches of a team of professionals mobbed-up guys, what should you do? Not everyone is competent enough to help this couple find the missing plane lost somewhere near a reef in the Gulf. You can't just leave her to her own devices, can you? Does it change things for you when you find she didn't quite tell you the whole story? Or are you too bewitched to think straight?
Gulf Coast Girl, first Published in 1955, is yet another testament to the excellence of Charles Williams' writing. This book, like other Charles Williams novels, is so damn good, it's in a class by itself.
The story begins with the finding of an abandoned boat in the Gulf, well provisioned, the dinghy aboard her, the coffee pot still warm, and a satchel filled with $80,000 on the deck. There's a log and a strand of ash-blonde hair and the tale the log tells is something else entirely.
It's a tale of a couple on the run from mobsters and filled with car chases and brawls and bodies strewn about. It's also a deep sea tale about a search for buried treasure on a sunken plane and the desperate search to find it. It's a tale of trust and betrayal. And it may just be the best book you read all year.
The femme fatale here, Shannon Wayne, walked down the pier in spiked heels with " the unhurried smoothness of poured honey." "She was a cathedral of a girl." Over six feet in heels and with the complexion of a Norse goddess. "She could make your breath catch in your throat." But she waved "that wedding ring in your face while she beat you over the head with the advertising matter that stuck out of her bathing suit in every direction, but it was still nothing to blow your top about, was it?"
Yes, Bill Manning falls for her, hook, line, and sinker. Manning is 33, divorced, bitter, with nothing to look forward to. As Manning explains, he "was practically panting to believe anything she said."
Williams is a master at building tension and he does it throughout this book. The tension in this story - which is really not that complicated plot wise - is pulled tight. Whether you read this for the Pulpish aspects of the seductive blonde who the poor sucker can't say no to, the developing relationship between these two characters, the fight scenes, the desperate attempts to get away from the hoods, the deep sea excitement, this is just a terrific book.
Gulf Coast Girl, first Published in 1955, is yet another testament to the excellence of Charles Williams' writing. This book, like other Charles Williams novels, is so damn good, it's in a class by itself.
The story begins with the finding of an abandoned boat in the Gulf, well provisioned, the dinghy aboard her, the coffee pot still warm, and a satchel filled with $80,000 on the deck. There's a log and a strand of ash-blonde hair and the tale the log tells is something else entirely.
It's a tale of a couple on the run from mobsters and filled with car chases and brawls and bodies strewn about. It's also a deep sea tale about a search for buried treasure on a sunken plane and the desperate search to find it. It's a tale of trust and betrayal. And it may just be the best book you read all year.
The femme fatale here, Shannon Wayne, walked down the pier in spiked heels with " the unhurried smoothness of poured honey." "She was a cathedral of a girl." Over six feet in heels and with the complexion of a Norse goddess. "She could make your breath catch in your throat." But she waved "that wedding ring in your face while she beat you over the head with the advertising matter that stuck out of her bathing suit in every direction, but it was still nothing to blow your top about, was it?"
Yes, Bill Manning falls for her, hook, line, and sinker. Manning is 33, divorced, bitter, with nothing to look forward to. As Manning explains, he "was practically panting to believe anything she said."
Williams is a master at building tension and he does it throughout this book. The tension in this story - which is really not that complicated plot wise - is pulled tight. Whether you read this for the Pulpish aspects of the seductive blonde who the poor sucker can't say no to, the developing relationship between these two characters, the fight scenes, the desperate attempts to get away from the hoods, the deep sea excitement, this is just a terrific book.
May 15, 2023
06/2021
From 1955
An interesting framing device of the boat being later found abandoned. Classic themes of Charles Williams, boats of course and plans clearly laid out. Starts with a twisting crime tale but eventually devolves into something like surrealism or sea madness.
From 1955
An interesting framing device of the boat being later found abandoned. Classic themes of Charles Williams, boats of course and plans clearly laid out. Starts with a twisting crime tale but eventually devolves into something like surrealism or sea madness.
September 10, 2024
When a tall sexy Nordic blonde asks you to help her and her husband escape the clutches of a team of professionals mobbed-up guys, what should you do? Not everyone is competent enough to help this couple find the missing plane lost somewhere near a reef in the Gulf. You can't just leave her to her own devices, can you? Does it change things for you when you find she didn't quite tell you the whole story? Or are you too bewitched to think straight?
Scorpion Reef has also been released as Gulf Coast Girl. Published in 1955, it is yet another testament to the excellence of Charles Williams' writing. This book, like other Charles Williams novels, is so damn good, it's in a class by itself.
The story begins with the finding of an abandoned boat in the Gulf, well provisioned, the dinghy aboard her, the coffee pot still warm, and a satchel filled with $80,000 on the deck. There's a log and a strand of ash-blonde hair and the tale the log tells is something else entirely. It's a tale of a couple on the run from mobsters and filled with car chases and brawls and bodies strewn about. It's also a deep sea tale about a search for buried treasure on a sunken plane and the desperate search to find it. It's a tale of trust and betrayal. And it may just be the best book you read all year.
The femme fatale here, Shannon Wayne, walked down the pier in spiked heels with " the unhurried smoothness of poured honey." "She was a cathedral of a girl." Over six feet in heels and with the
complexion of a Norse goddess. "She could make your breath catch in your throat." But she waved "that wedding ring in your face while she beat you over the head with the advertising matter that stuck out of her bathing suit in every direction, but it was still nothing to blow your top about, was it?"
Yes, Bill Manning falls for her, hook, line, and sinker. Manning is 33, divorced, bitter, with nothing to look forward to. As Manning explains, he "was practically panting to believe anything she said."
Williams is a master at building tension and he does it throughout this book. The tension in this story - which is really not that complicated plot wise - is pulled tight. Whether you read this for the Pulpish aspects of the seductive blonde who the poor sucker can't say no to, the developing relationship between these two characters, the fight scenes, the desperate attempts to get away from the hoods, the deep sea excitement, this is just a terrific book.
Scorpion Reef has also been released as Gulf Coast Girl. Published in 1955, it is yet another testament to the excellence of Charles Williams' writing. This book, like other Charles Williams novels, is so damn good, it's in a class by itself.
The story begins with the finding of an abandoned boat in the Gulf, well provisioned, the dinghy aboard her, the coffee pot still warm, and a satchel filled with $80,000 on the deck. There's a log and a strand of ash-blonde hair and the tale the log tells is something else entirely. It's a tale of a couple on the run from mobsters and filled with car chases and brawls and bodies strewn about. It's also a deep sea tale about a search for buried treasure on a sunken plane and the desperate search to find it. It's a tale of trust and betrayal. And it may just be the best book you read all year.
The femme fatale here, Shannon Wayne, walked down the pier in spiked heels with " the unhurried smoothness of poured honey." "She was a cathedral of a girl." Over six feet in heels and with the
complexion of a Norse goddess. "She could make your breath catch in your throat." But she waved "that wedding ring in your face while she beat you over the head with the advertising matter that stuck out of her bathing suit in every direction, but it was still nothing to blow your top about, was it?"
Yes, Bill Manning falls for her, hook, line, and sinker. Manning is 33, divorced, bitter, with nothing to look forward to. As Manning explains, he "was practically panting to believe anything she said."
Williams is a master at building tension and he does it throughout this book. The tension in this story - which is really not that complicated plot wise - is pulled tight. Whether you read this for the Pulpish aspects of the seductive blonde who the poor sucker can't say no to, the developing relationship between these two characters, the fight scenes, the desperate attempts to get away from the hoods, the deep sea excitement, this is just a terrific book.
April 12, 2010
As part of my ongoing project of dividing noir into as many subcategories as possible, I am proclaiming Scorpion Reef to be an example noir gonade, that special brand of noir in which a woman seizes control of a male protagonist's brain via his testicles and thereby leads him to believe things and to do things that no sane man would otherwise believe or do. Scorpion Reef is a frame narrative: The Joseph H. Hallock, an American tanker, finds a small, abandoned boat drifting in the Gulf of Mexico. On the boat, a coffee pot is still warm. Clearly, the boat has not been abandoned for long. But what has happened to its occupants? The answer lies in a log book in which our protagonist, Bill Manning, has written his story. Reading over the shoulder of the Hallock's master, we learn how Bill had his gonades seized by a tall blonde he calls "Swede" . . . and we learn how they ended up on that small boat with some bad guys . . . but enough about the plot. Bill Manning's story is somewhat interesting, and the novel's frame makes it even more so. The danger of spoilage prevents me from saying more than that.
July 15, 2016
Un clásico de la novela negra escrito y ambientado en los años 50. Parece que el autor es muy prestigioso en US.A. pero aquí apenas se le conoce. Me ha gustado mucho por no ser la típica novela negra. El protagonista es un submarinista profesional y tiene le contratan para encontrar algo bajo el mar. A todo esto le siguen una banda de matones. http://contandoteunlibro.blogspot.com...
April 18, 2018
“The rapture…the rapture…” 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.
“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.
August 21, 2020
La trama está bien estructurada con algunos giros de guión, incluido el final y contiene asesinatos, sexo, mentiras, peleas violentas, quizás demasiadas, …en diferentes ambientaciones : la ciudad portuaria, los muelles, y, sobre todo, el asfixiante escenario de un balandro en el Golfo de México pero no me ha gustado ,me ha resultado lento y sobre todo muy repetitivo y no he logrado conectar ni con la historia ni con los personajes por lo que solo he conseguido terminarle pasando muy por encima bastantes páginas.
January 7, 2024
Aquesta és la quarta novel·la de Charles Williams que em llegeixo i segurament la més rodona fins al moment. Hardboiled clàssic americà amb protagonista bussejador de passat incert, la femme fatale de torn, pinxos de la vella escola i intensa caça del tresor al Golf de Mèxic. Certes situacions són inversemblants, però la novel·la és molt entretinguda i plena de girs interessants. Els grans coneixements marítims de l'autor fan que l'ambientació sigui impecable.
August 28, 2017
Pedazo de novela negra, pedazo de novela de aventuras y amor, y pedazo de rubia protagonista. Y además se desarrolla en el mar. Alguien debería sacar del olvido a este clásico, autor de "Calma total".
November 8, 2015
Una pareja escapando en yate.Lenta y aburrida.
July 4, 2016
El arrecife del escorpión —Scorpion Reef o Gulf Coast Girl—, de Charles Williams, es una novela escrita enWilliams, Gulf Coast Girl, Dell 1955 y recuperada ahora por Medianoche Editorial, para su colección de clásicos. El prólogo corre a cargo de Hernán Migoya —guionista de cómics y de cine, y escritor—, y donde confesará ser un gran entusiasta de Charles Williams. Migoya hará un breve recorrido por la bibliografía del autor, las ediciones de El arrecife del escorpión en España, y nos hablará también del homenaje que se realizó a Charles Williams en una Semana Negra de Gijón del año 1998 con la hija del propio Williams, Alison, como invitada. En el ameno prólogo, Hernán Migoya apunta un deseo y este es que «ojalá esta edición llegue sobre todo a nuevas manos que no conocían la obra de Williams». Pues por lo que a mí se refiere, deseo cumplido ya que nunca había leído a Charles Williams y la verdad es que mis impresiones después de conocer El arrecife del escorpión no pueden ser mejores... http://www.abrirunlibro.com/2016/07/e...
November 12, 2012
Grab this book! I kid you not, when you grab it, it will grab you and when you come up for air, you will give copies to your friends, relatives, and lover.
Action, Adventure, and love – who could ask for anything more? I haven’t read anything before by Charles Williams, but Scorpion Reef has turned me on to this guy – think James Patterson – and then think ‘better writer.’
If you read no other book this week or month or year, make it Scorpion Reef.
Action, Adventure, and love – who could ask for anything more? I haven’t read anything before by Charles Williams, but Scorpion Reef has turned me on to this guy – think James Patterson – and then think ‘better writer.’
If you read no other book this week or month or year, make it Scorpion Reef.
September 14, 2016
Estupenda novela negra de un autor hoy un tanto olvidado. Dotada de un ambiente marinero muy logrado, con una atmósfera melancólica que impregna todo el relato, y con un final espectacular, es sin duda una lectura muy recomendable.
October 9, 2016
Excepcional, una historia interesante con unos personajes bien definidos. Original aunque sea un clásico dentro del género. Recomendable.
September 2, 2019
Una novela bien contada, buenos giros en la historia, excelente ambientación y un gran final.
Bastante recomendable.
Bastante recomendable.
July 26, 2020
The ending makes you reassess what you think you thought was going on.
October 19, 2024
Reminds me a lot of Rogue Male by Jeffrey Household in its focus of a person trapped in an inescapable situation that is explained ever-so-thoroughly. The difference between that taut thriller and this are the additions of a crazed infatuation of a romance and a framing device that feels like when a studio makes a movie reshoot the ending to make it happy. I just looked it up and it was based on a novella, so it makes sense the ending was expanded. But well-written noir to the max.
June 6, 2025
Williams wrote a whole bunch of pulp novels and this one is an excellent representation of them. Beautiful femme fatale, money, mystery, intrigue, shady characters and a sympathetic hero all combine to create an enjoyable romp in the Gulf Coast playground. The books hold up well and don't even seem especially dated. Good clean fun if you like noir or pulp. Recommended.
August 30, 2020
This was an entertaining nautical fiction set on a sail boat in the Gulf of Mexico. The story is told by the sailor who dives for salvage recovery and gets selected and involved with the femme.
July 21, 2023
Brilliant like everything Williams wrote.
Crooks, boats lots of water, mystery, love and lots of suspense.
Can't say anything about the actual plot because everything would be a spoiler.
Crooks, boats lots of water, mystery, love and lots of suspense.
Can't say anything about the actual plot because everything would be a spoiler.
May 12, 2020
Relectura feliz, 3. Aunque quede en criterio de cada uno optar por la que fuese su obra maestra, es claro que dos novelas de Charles Williams fueron claramente más destacadas que las demás. Marcada por la sospecha (una de las pocas que se alejan del ambiente marino que le era tan grato) y la que hoy nos toca en suerte son las dos novelas que más ayudaron a la popularidad del autor tejano (podríamos sumar Mar Calmo, que yo nunca leí, pero propició adaptación cinematográfica con Sam Neill, Nicole Kidman y Billy Zane). En El arrecife del Escorpión todo lo que amaba Williams está volcado en un relato de estructura clásica -el hallazgo del diario de bordo en un yate abandonado propicia la lectura y reconstrucción de toda la situación- pero que guarda no pocos giros o sorpresas. El diario en cuestión está escrito por Bill Manning, un buzo profesional, quien recibe un encargo rutinario -buscar una escopeta de caza perdida en una laguna- de manos de una hermosa mujer que a las claras guarda un secreto. Pronto aparecen matones, hay un marido escondido y un thriller de tenso desarrollo (con búsqueda de tesoro incluída) en el que Manning termina metido de cabeza, cómo tantos otros personajes creados por Williams, incapaces al parecer de esquivar los líos. Además de su tremenda estructura, la prosa de Williams -sobre todo cuando la situación ponga a los personajes en ese yate que mencionaba antes- se dispara a tremendos niveles y si no fuera porque uno ha leído muchos relatos semejantes (lo que permite adivinar más o menos para dónde van los tiros) la sorpresa estaría servida página a página. Para leer en doblete con Una mortaja, la que reseñamos hace un par de entregas, la demostración de que el subgénero “policial negro marino” existe y tiene a su mejor exponente en Charles Williams.
January 4, 2019
Point Blank Podcast Review (pointblankpodcast.com)
This maritime noir novel starts well.
I enjoy the tension early on and am eager to get into the water, to get on the boat and head into the Gulf. But it takes forever to get to this point. Half way through the book we are still on land, still working toward heading off shore.
Once we finally do, the protagonist’s corny obsession with the Swede dominates the narrative.
And while the surprise ending salvaged the book from being structurally pointless, it was a bit hammy; for noir, aren't things supposed to end end poorly?
The unreliable narrator trope can be a good one, and this one works to some extent, but it leaves me wondering whether or not this was Williams initial plan or it it was a matter of Williams not knowing where to go with his story.
The narrator is unreliable. He is a story writer. He is writing a story in the boat log. How much of it is true. I find myself thinking of The Usual Suspects. I don’t want to spoil the film, which I think is great, but there are definite parallels between US and SR.
The frame of this book saves the narrative, but I also feel that the frame is a bit gimmicky.
Justin’s rating: 3 1/2 kill shots out of 5
This maritime noir novel starts well.
I enjoy the tension early on and am eager to get into the water, to get on the boat and head into the Gulf. But it takes forever to get to this point. Half way through the book we are still on land, still working toward heading off shore.
Once we finally do, the protagonist’s corny obsession with the Swede dominates the narrative.
And while the surprise ending salvaged the book from being structurally pointless, it was a bit hammy; for noir, aren't things supposed to end end poorly?
The unreliable narrator trope can be a good one, and this one works to some extent, but it leaves me wondering whether or not this was Williams initial plan or it it was a matter of Williams not knowing where to go with his story.
The narrator is unreliable. He is a story writer. He is writing a story in the boat log. How much of it is true. I find myself thinking of The Usual Suspects. I don’t want to spoil the film, which I think is great, but there are definite parallels between US and SR.
The frame of this book saves the narrative, but I also feel that the frame is a bit gimmicky.
Justin’s rating: 3 1/2 kill shots out of 5
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 15, 2017
But as much as the middle part is a letdown after the promising opening, the worst is yet to come. I would dare guess that Mr. Williams wanted to wrap up the novel with a surprising twist so the next several chapters we need to endure some ultra corny romance that in the end serves as a basis for that surprising ending. But too little too late for my liking. After 190 pages, I was just happy to finally get over the line.
More here (review includes spoilers!):
http://a60books.blogspot.ie/2017/02/s...
More here (review includes spoilers!):
http://a60books.blogspot.ie/2017/02/s...
January 22, 2018
Можно ли написанному верить? Чарльз Вильямс представил вниманию читателя историю, в которой всё может быть вымыслом. Доверчивый человек поверит рассказанному, склонный анализировать – усомнится. На руках есть лишь дневник, его содержание будто объясняет, почему в море оказалась яхта без экипажа. Для убедительности оставлен чемодан с почти сотней тысяч долларов. Но стоит ли согласиться с предложенной на страницах версией? Каждый читатель сам определится с ответом на данный вопрос.
(c) Trounin
(c) Trounin
January 15, 2025
Absolutely Fantastic! If I could give it 10 stars I would. If you like John D. MacDonald, then this is a book for you. One of the best books I've ever read! You just have to be a fan of noir fiction to enjoy it. Dark and delicious.
Read
October 16, 2023Fabulous read
Williams' maritime background creates a vividly appointed tale of what people will do for love. Lots of unexpected twists that always pass the smell test. An exquisite blend of rough, rich, and poignant. My favorite williams' story so far.
Williams' maritime background creates a vividly appointed tale of what people will do for love. Lots of unexpected twists that always pass the smell test. An exquisite blend of rough, rich, and poignant. My favorite williams' story so far.
February 7, 2013
Scuba diver crime novel, good stuff.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews