Billingsgate Shoal
by Rick Boyer
Summary
Charles Adams, Doc to everyone, is a Boston area oral surgeon with a good practice, a good marriage, a sailboat, and the peculiar restlessness of a man whose comfortable life has stopped asking anything of him. From his Cape Cod cottage he watches, one morning, a fishing trawler aground on Billingsgate Shoal, riding the tide wrong, its crew behaving like men who want no help, and his idle curiosity hardens into something else when a young scuba diver he knows, sent to look at the wreck site, comes up dead.
Boyer's novel runs the amateur sleuth premise with unusual honesty about its costs. Doc's investigation, conducted between root canals, through boatyards, registries and harbourmasters' gossip, keeps arriving at the same lesson, that a hobbyist detective's mistakes are paid for by other people, and the guilt of the diver's death is the engine that keeps him going past every sensible exit. The trail leads through the working waterfront's grey markets to a repainted, renamed vessel and a smuggling operation dealing in illegal arms, run by men for whom a curious dentist is a small problem with an obvious solution, and the last act puts Doc alone on the water with them, seamanship against professionalism, the New England coast rendered with a sailor's exactness throughout.
Around two hundred and seventy pages, unhurried and salt soaked, with the pleasures of charts, tides and engine trouble given the loving attention other mysteries spend on ballistics.
Best for readers who want the amateur sleuth given real moral weight and real weather, the Cape Cod procedural conducted from a dental chair.
Historical Context & Significance
Billingsgate Shoal won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1983, a first mystery by a college English professor, and the choice drew the customary murmurs, Rick Boyer's quiet regional debut preferred over the year's famous names, which is precisely the Edgar habit this list keeps documenting: the committee's weakness for craft over campaign.
Boyer continued Doc Adams through eight further cases, the series a staple of the eighties regional mystery boom, New England's entry alongside the period's Montana, Navajo and New Orleans franchises, and his other bibliographic distinction endures in trivia: co author of the Places Rated Almanac, he is likely the only Edgar winner who also ranked America's metropolitan areas by liveability.
The novel itself became a small classic of the maritime mystery, passed hand to hand among sailing readers for the accuracy of its water; the arms trade plot dates, the seamanship does not.