Read an Excerpt from Mystery Featured at Nov. 9 Book Fair
"Rogue Island" is the debut novel of Bruce DeSilva, a journalist for 40 years before retiring to write crime novels full time. At the Associated Press, he was the writing coach, responsible for training the wire service's reporters and editors worldwide. Previously, he directed an AP department devoted to investigative reporting and other special projects. Earlier in his career, he worked as an investigative reporter and an editor at The Hartford Courant and The Providence Journal.
Publishers Weekly included "Rogue Island" it in its "First Fiction" feature, naming it one of the best debut novels of 2010.
DeSilva and many other authors will be at the 33rd annual NPC Book Fair and Authors' Night from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 9.
More information about the fair is at http://press.org/bookfair.
Rogue Island
"Do you know how Rhode Island got its name, Veronica?"
"No, but I bet you're going to tell me."
"Actually, I'm not. Fact is, nobody knows for sure. Historians have poked into it for years, but all they've come up with are a few half-baked theories."
"So?"
"So one of them goes like this: Rhode Island is a bastardization of Rogue Island, a name the sturdy farmers of colonial Massachusetts bestowed upon the swarm of heretics, smugglers, and cutthroats who first settled the shores of Narragansett Bay."
Veronica snickered and tossed her hair. I liked it when she did that.
"They ought to change the name back," she said. "Rhode Island is boring. Rogue Island has pizzazz."
It's also apt. For more than a hundred years, pirates slipped from Narragansett Bay's hidden coves to prey on merchant shipping. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, Rhode Island shipmasters dominated the American slave trade. During the French and Indian War and again during the Revolution, heavily armed privateers skulked out of Providence and
Newport to seize prizes with little regard for the flags they flew.
After the Civil War, Boss Anthony, co-owner of The Providence Journal, kept his Republican machine in power for decades by buying votes at the going rate of two bucks apiece. Around the turn of the century, Nelson Aldrich, a former Providence grocery clerk immortalized in David Graham Phillips's "The Treason of the Senate," helped robber barons plunder the country. In the 1950s and 1960s, a Providence mobster named Raymond L. S. Patriarca was the most powerful man in New England, deciding everything from what records got played on the radio to who lived and who died. And Mayor Carroza's predecessor, the honorable Vincent A. "Buddy" Cianci Jr., recently did federal time for conspiring to run a
criminal enterprise, also known as the City of Providence.
"And this is why you like it here?" Veronica asked.
"I grew up here. I know the cops and the robbers, the barbers and the bartenders, the judges and the hit men, the whores and the priests. I know the state legislature and the Mafia inside out, and they're pretty much the same thing. When I write about a politician buying votes or a cop on the pad, the jaded citizenry just chuckles and shrugs its shoulders. That used to bother me. It doesn't anymore. Rogue Island is a theme park for investigative reporters. It never closes, and I can ride the roller coaster free all day."