Book review - McDougal's Honolulu Mysteries

I was a bit confused reading McDougal's Honolulu Mysteries, an anthology, edited by Glen Grant.  According to the notes, the stories are oral histories from Arthur McDougal, a detective in 1920's-1930's Honolulu.  Hawai'i is U.S. territory, not a state.  People still remember, and are bitter about the end of, the monarchy.  The book is more detective noir fiction, rather than a whodunit.  More answers by fist, instead of the little, gray cells.

At the end of each story, Grant inserts a note discussing the validity of the events in McDougal's adventures, which in very few of them, can he.  Therefore, my question is: Was McDougal a real person?  I can't tell and I can't find out, either.  It took away from the enjoyment of the book (a little) because it read as McDougal is a fictional character.

Still, the book was a fun read.  I most enjoyed the first and last stories, which had elements of the paranormal.  And some were true whodunits.

The glimpse into Honolulu's past was one of the pluses of the book.  The stories, not in chronological order, occur from just after WWI to 1934.  Places, events, and events of the era give the stories an authentic feel.

McDougal's Honolulu Mysteries: Case Studies from the Life of a Honolulu Detective is a good read. It's more along the lines of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet than Agatha Christie.

That's how we set sail!

Aloha Tower

We had received a notification that our cruise was leaving 3 hours earlier to get ahead of Hurricane Lester.  However, he moved to the north so we left at our original scheduled time.

Hot hula dancer.

The atrium of NCL's Pride of America has a replica of the Washington Monument.

 

Honolulu at night.

Downtown Honolulu

Iolani Palace

With a few hours to kill before we were to board the cruise ship, we drove around downtown Honolulu.  Norwegian Cruise Lines had contacted us saying they were moving our departure time from 7pm to 4pm to get ahead of Hurricane Lester.  Lester moved north so we departed at our original time.  Oh, well.

A huge monkey pod tree.

Huge banyan trees.

Statue of King Kamehameha I in front of the Hawai'i Supreme Court building.

Kawaiaha'o Church - the Westminster Abbey of Hawai'i

Unique buildings

Hotel Halekulani

The view from our room at the Hotel Halekulani!

The pool area.

We had an ocean front room.

A lone surfer catching early waves.

Arriving in Oahu

Waikiki Beach

After rising in the middle of the night, flying from Baltimore to Houston and then a grueling eight hour flight from Houston to Honolulu, we arrived in Oahu!  We had three days to kills before boarding our cruise around the islands.

The coolest dog on Kalakaua Avenue in downtown Honolulu.

We checked into our hotel and then went for a sight-seeing walk along Kalakaua Avenue and got a bite of supper at Moose's Bar and Grill.

Wipeout by Chip Hughes

SPOILER ALERT!

I recently reviewed Needled to Death, a knitting mystery by Maggie Sefton, where I mentioned that it may have a limited appeal to only those interested in the craft. Chip Hughes’ novel Wipeout is to surfing what Sefton is to knitting. Sometimes it seems that Hughes is more interested in spewing out facts about surf boards, surfers and the history of the sport rather than building suspense.

Kai Cooke is a private detective/surfer in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is approached by a very pregnant young woman who wants Kai to prove her husband is dead. He wiped out on Christmas Eve, over a month ago, and was never seen again. His widow is due any minute and the insurance company refuses to pay out his two-hundred thousand dollar life insurance policy until they have proof of his death. No body, no money.

At first, Kai’s task seems impossible since everyone on the island remembers Corky McDahl’s deadly wipeout vividly but no one knows anything beyond that. However unlikely, Kai starts finding clues that may lead to the missing man. In one seemingly implausible scene, Kai travels to Maui looking for a red-headed woman named Maya. Somehow with only those two clues to go on, he manages to find her. Is Maui that small and close-knit?

There was plenty more amiss with the novel. Readers like their sleuths to have the same flaws and human characteristics that we all have but Kai Cooke is a jerk. When his girlfriend Leimomi fears she may be pregnant, he avoids her, using the case of the missing surfer as an excuse. He tells himself he’s not ready to be a father. How did this happen, he asks. Really dumb question for a thirty-four year old. Shortly after, he is seduced by the beautiful Maya, fully cognizant of his girlfriend’s predicament and that Maya’s husband may just have been killed a few hours before.

During his conversation with colleagues, clients and girlfriends, Kai speaks proper English, but when speaking with his surfing buddies, he slips into a dialect that may be Hawaiian but reads like Cajun. There was no explanation why the abrupt change in his manner of speaking. I was reminded of Vanilla Ice or Barbara Billingsley’s role as a jive translator in “Airplane”.

When Kai finally tracks down the errant surfer, alive and well and surfing the same beach he disappeared from, there is no explanation how he faced his death in front of witnesses. Hughes also doesn’t give any reason why nobody on the beach recognizes Corky McDahl when they all recognized him immediately in the photographs Kai showed them just days before. And Corky’s a jerk, too.

The ending is wrapped up a little too quickly and convenient. The drug lord is captured and put away (scene not in the book) and Kai’s girlfriend isn’t pregnant. Not only that, but she’s leaving to spend time with her parents. Kai is freed from any parental responsibility or obligations and can resume his life of surfing.

There is also a lack of real suspense since the run-ins with the kingpin’s goons are limited to one and it wasn’t very exciting. The kingpin must be the benevolent and lenient criminal mastermind there is.

Wipeout, although well-written, is much more a cozy mystery than hard-boiled detective story. If you have an interest in surfing, you may enjoy the multiple references to surfers, techniques and waves. If you want an edge-of-your-seat action-packed whodunit, look elsewhere.

Third day (cont.) - USS Missouri

More pictures from the USS Missouri.

The guns of the USS Missouri looking over the USS Arizona Memorial and downtown Honolulu.

The Captain's Quarters.

The movies "Tora, Tora, Tora," and "Pearl Harbor" would have you think this is a control tower but it is actually a dive tank for practicing scuba dives.

These two buildings survied the attack on December 7, 1941 and still stand to this day.

Second Day - Pearl Harbor

On Sunday, August 16, we visited Pearl Harbor. The area where you board the shuttle boat to the USS Arizona Memorial is the USS Bowfin Museum and Park.

The USS Bowfin is held in place by enormous anchors and chains.

Here you can walk among many items taken from ships or submarines to see what equipment or weaponry was used during WWII.

Frazier looks through a periscope that was part of a conning tower for the USS Parche (SS-384), a sister ship to the Bowfin.

The conning tower is an eight feet diameter cylinder located above the control room of a submarine’s pressure hull. The conning tower contained equipment for steering the submarine and firing torpedoes. It was the command center of a WWII submarine and the battle station for the commanding officer.

A submarine rocket or subroc. An underwater-to-air-to-underwater anti-submarine missile was in use from 1965 to 1990. It was designed to be fired from a submierged nuclear fast attack submarine.

A 40-mm quad gun assembly, used on destroyer escorts and all classes of larger ships, consisted of four recoil-operated, heavy machine guns, designed primarily for anti-aircraft fire. Each gun had a firing rate of 120 rounds/minute and fired a 2 lb projectile at a maximum horizontal range of approximately 33,000 feet and maximum ceiling range of 22,800 feet.

The inside of a kaiten or suicide submarine.

‘Kaiten’ means to make a radical reverse in the course of events. It was an enlarged torpedo with a small cockpit, a periscope and manual controls for steering, speed and depth. It had a pure oxygen-fed kerosene-burning 550 horsepower engine and a huge 3,000 lb explosive warhead which could be detonated on impact or by an electrical switch controlled by the pilot.
Kaiten were transported by submarine to ‘firing position’ which was 3.5 – 4.5 miles from the target. The only kaiten known to have sunk a U.S. Navy ship hit the fleet oiler USS Mississinewa at Uluthi on Nov. 20, 1944.

The propellor of the kaiten.

Submarine Rescue Chamber

These chambers were used by the U.S. Navy for over 50 years to rescue crews of submarines stranded on the ocean floor. It had two chambers inside; the upper held two operators and eight passengers; the lower helped survivors to pass from the submarine’s escape hatch into the rescue chamber.

The first and only operation use of the submarine rescue chamber was in 1939 when the USS Squalus accidentally flooded her aft compartment during a test dive. Divers from the rescue vessel USS Falcon attached a downhaul cable from the chamber and make several trips to the surface until 33 survivors were brought to safety.