Book Review: Bruce DeSilva’s ‘Rogue Island’

Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Robert Corrente, Former US Attorney

Crime novels are a bit like soup recipes -- there are already a million of them, so who needs another one, especially since the ingredients are so familiar? Start with a couple of gruff cops, throw in an intrepid reporter, add a few bad guys who turn out to have hearts of gold, spice it up with a little sex and murder, and bon appetit! But, as we are happily reminded, there is always room for another really good one.

An impressive debut

And so it is with Rogue Island, the impressive debut from Bruce DeSilva, the erstwhile Providence Journal reporter. The book is a triumph on many levels. First, it is a top-notch piece of crime fiction. The fast-paced story centers on a horrifying series of deadly fires that are sweeping the Mount Hope section of Providence. Enter Liam Mulligan, the veteran crime beat reporter and Hope High graduate, who is consumed by the destruction of his old neighborhood, and by the arsonists’ brutal indifference to the growing pile of charred corpses. The characters of Mulligan and the rest of the cast are hot-forged in these infernos, amidst the drips of melting vinyl siding, and the dialogue crackles. Oddly, it is also laugh-out-loud funny at many spots along the way, as when Mulligan defends the honor of the newspaper profession as a “calling” -- it’s “like the priesthood but without the sex."

Capturing the "glitz and grit" that make this town what it is

Second, DeSilva has a reporter’s sharp eye for geographical detail, and his sketches of the Providence cityscape perfectly capture the strange blend of beauty and blight, glitz and grit that make this town what it is. As an added bonus, he ventures back in time to revive lost (and lamented) landmarks like Hope’s bar on Washington St., as a welcome complement to the more familiar tableaus around town. And, I don’t know about you, but I will never again be able to look at City Hall without calling to mind DeSilva’s impression of the edifice as “a Beaux-Arts atrocity at the southern end of Kennedy Plaza [that] looked as if a madman had sculpted it from a mound of seagull shit.”

The jumble of history and sort-of-history is immensely entertaining

These virtues alone would more than carry Rogue Island. But what makes the book so special to anyone who has spent the last twenty-five or thirty years here, and who has paid attention, is that it provides an almost encyclopedic account of the criminal and political histories of Rhode Island, which have more bad intersections than Atwells Avenue. From the thinly-disguised Buckles Melise, to Johnston mayoral candidates loading up on “aaaaa’s” before their names to get the top of the ballot, to the classic front-page ProJo picture (taken from outer space) of a certain Chief Justice exiting a motel and zipping up, it’s all here. The resulting jumble of history and sort-of-history is immensely entertaining. And DeSilva paints it all against a colorful backdrop of PC basketball, the menu at Camille’s, and the like.

But it is also abundantly clear that DeSilva gets the odd bits of Rhode Island history. Instead of the usual misty-eyed platitudes about Slater Mill, he offers a brief but dark counterstory about the theft of trade secrets and abuse of child laborers that made the place run. And, in a delicate subplot, he captures the strained relationship between the blue bloods that once owned this state, and its newspaper, and the immigrants -- once Irish and Italian, now Asian, Hispanic and so many more -- that have stepped to the forefront.

A rich and wonderful book

In sum, this is a rich and wonderful book that reeks of all that is good and bad about Rhode, or Rogue, Island. One finishes the book with the conviction that, hundreds of years after Roger Williams was exiled here, we would still be thrown out of civilized society as a bunch of rogues and scoundrels. Some things are not likely to change any time soon.

Rogue Island is available at major bookstores throughout Rhode Island. For more information, go here.

Robert Clark Corrente is a trial lawyer with the law firm of Burns & Levinson LLP in Providence and Boston. He served as the United States Attorney for the District of Rhode Island from 2004-2009. A Rhode Island native, he earned his bachelor's degree from Dartmouth College and his law degree from NYU.