Review The Aluminum Hatch

Review: The Aluminum Hatch

The Aluminum Hatch

A Mystery
by Ronald Weber
A Right Way Publishing Book, $19.95, hardback, 207 pages,
ISBN 1-885173-48-2

The Aluminum Hatch could as well be called The Au Sable Murder Mystery. In brief and without tipping the solution, the scene is a premier trout stream, the Borchard River, in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. The owner of the town of Ossning's canoe livery/fly shop, Link Pickett, is about his usual late winter task of illicit and illegal chainsaw removal of winter downed sweepers that would otherwise hamper the livery's trade. He is murdered, decapitated no less, by a thin wire strategically stretched, neck high across the stream. The prime suspect is Verlyn Kelso, "rabid" environmentalist, canoe hater and owner of a lodge, guide service and fly shop, Kelso's Kabin Kamp at Walther Bridge, the center of the legendary catch and release water on the Borchard. Who really did it? More would spoil the mystery.
It's a good mystery, but even more fun if you fish the Au Sable. Mr. Weber does fish there and from it drew his inspiration for locale. Grayling becomes Ossning, the Au Sable becomes the Borchard, Stephen's Bridge becomes Walther Bridge, The Fly Factory translates to Pickett's Canoe Livery and Gates morphs into Kelso's Kabin Kamp. The Bakery is there as is the South Down River Road, the South Branch, Chief Shopp's Hotel, and the road to Traverse City. The Keg O'Nails doesn't even get a name change but does get moved out on Route 72 and acquires a motel! The fictional owners of all of these familiar establishments are mercifully new people, not old friends.
If you enjoy mystery stories, fly fishing mysteries are a pleasant diversion when you cannot fish. Henry van Dyke, a sage fly fishing author of the last century, noted that "fiction, like wine tastes better in the place where it was grown" (Little Rivers, 1895). Fly fishing mysteries are like that and convey a special meaning to the fly fisher that the general public cannot appreciate. If it is a genre that you would like to try other titles include:
Siskiyou by Richard Hoyt at Steamboat on the North Umpqua. Death of a Dude by Rex Stout with Nero Wolfe in Montana. The three fly fishing mysteries by David Leitz (Dying to Fly Fish, Fly Fishing can be Fatal or Casting in Dead Water) all on fictional Down East water.
Sink or Swim by Gerald Hammond in the West of England. Death on a Cold Wild River by Bartholomew Gill, salmon in Ireland.
A Crooked Man by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in Virginia. Even keener tests for the fly fisher are Death is no Sportsman by Cyril Hare, Scales of Justice and Death and the Dancing Footman both by Ngaio Marsh and Immune to Murder by Rex Stout. In all of these the trout or the fly is the key to the solution of the mystery.
There must be more. I would like to know of them. They fill the time between the hatches. RWOL

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