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WORK TITLE: The Devil’s Throat
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BIRTHDATE:
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COUNTRY: United States
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LC control no.: n 83044812
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n83044812
HEADING: Theroux, Joseph
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PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
WRITINGS
Contributor to magazines and periodicals, including Hawaiian Journal of History, Pacific Islands Monthly, Historic Nantucket, New Pacific, Hawaii, Spirit of Aloha, and the Journal of Pacific History.
SIDELIGHTS
Joseph Theroux is a writer and novelist. He is the brother of writers Paul and Alexander Theroux. He has lived in Hawaii, Samoa, and currently on Cape Cod, with all of these locations influencing his writing of both fiction and historical nonfiction. He has published work in periodicals such as Pacific Islands Monthly, Historic Nantucket, Hawaii, Honolulu, and the Journal of Pacific History.
Black Coconuts, Brown Magic
Black Coconuts, Brown Magic, Theroux’s first novel, centers on main character Silas Wicklowe, a thirty-five-year-old physician and Vietnam veteran. As the story opens, Wicklowe has come to Samoa from Hawaii. He has connections to the island that go well beyond his medical assignment: years ago, when he was two, his sailor father allegedly killed his mother there by throwing coconuts at her. In Samoa, he will serve for three months at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Tropical Medical Center. He quickly realizes that his stint as a physician there will be filled with challenges. His boss, for example, is a Mormon Samoan who doesn’t believe bacteria exist because he hasn’t seen any. He is more pleased with his patients, who seem to genuinely appreciate the efforts he expends on their behalf.
He is pursued by Betty, an estranged wife, but he is interested in or able to respond to her romantic overtures. As Wicklowe spends more time in Samoa, he develops an interest in the traditional medicine and local sorcery. He is also interested in finding out more about his childhood on the island and what really happened between his mother and father. A writer on the website Goodreads called the novel a “uneven yet stylish, modestly impressive debut.”
The Devil's Throat
In The Devil’s Throat: or, Robert Louis Stevenson, Detective, Theroux “couples a plausible fictional depiction of Robert Louis Stevenson with an intriguing whodunit plot” with its origins in a genuine unsolved mystery, noted a writer in Publishers Weekly. In 1889, Stevenson is living in Hawaii. During this period, the body of Jules Tavernier, a well-known painter, is found in his studio in Honolulu. The local physician determines that, essentially, Tavernier drank himself to death, and there is no inquest or further investigation into the painter’s demise. Even if there had been interest in additional exploration, the death scene had been quickly overrun by police, friends, and locals, which would have destroyed any evidence.
However, Tavernier’s stepdaughter later claims that her father was shot in the heart and that the claims of an alcohol-related death are false. There is no murder weapon to be found, and she believes that the death is being covered up. She does not know who might have wanted her stepfather dead.
Among the visitors to Tavernier’s studio are Stevenson and Stevenson’s stepson, Lloyd Osbourne. They are able to make some early observations that help them search more deeply into the man’s death. A large selection of suspects is identified, from jealous and spiteful fellow artists, to local Chinese gangsters, to Lloyd Osborne’s own brother-in-Law. Stevenson and Osbourne pursue the case thoroughly, with Osborne frequently narrating.
Richard Wiley, writing on the Peace Corps Worldwide website, remarked: “This is an easy novel to like. Its pace is lively, its chapters are short—the endings of which always seem to entice the reader to get going on the next one—and its only apparent literary ambitions, other than to mark the narrative as a product of its time, is to tell a good tale.”
Wiley concluded, “During these days when many good writers are seeing their work languish on various reefs and shoals, it is my hope that The Devil’s Throat will find the wide readership that it and its author (both Osbourne and Theroux) clearly deserve.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, February 26, 2018, review of The Devil’s Throat: Or, Robert Louis Stevenson, Detective, p. 70.
ONLINE
Cape Cod website, http://www.capecod.com/ (June 26, 2018), “Author Talk: Joseph Theroux.”
Goodreads, http://www.goodreads.com/ (June 26, 2018), review of Black Coconuts, Brown Magic.
Pace Corps Worldwide website, http://www.peacecorpsworldwide.org/ (November 24, 2017), review of The Devil’s Throat.
Local author Joseph Theroux will be at Dennis Public Library for a book signing and to talk about his book, “The Devil’s Throat.” This new book is set in 1889 in the Kingdom of Hawaii. Robert Louis Stevenson investigates the murder of volcano painter Jules Tavernier. Stevenson gets caught up in the intrigue of secret societies and Chinese tongs. His investigations ultimately lead him to the treasure of Kamehameha the Great’s tomb.
Local author Joseph Theroux has published one novel, “Black Coconuts, Brown Magic.” He has written fiction and historical articles for the Pacific Islands Monthly, New Pacific, Hawaii, Honolulu, Spirit of Aloha, Historic Nantucket, and The Journal of Pacific History. He lived in Samoa, Hawaii, and now resides on Cape Cod.
The Devil's Throat: Or, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Detective
Publishers Weekly.
265.9 (Feb. 26, 2018): p70+.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Devil's Throat: Or, Robert
Louis Stevenson, Detective Joseph Theroux. Kilauea, $8.99 trade paper (173p) ISBN 978-0-9992665-0-2
Theroux (Black Coconuts, Black Magic) couples a plausible fictional depiction of Robert Louis Stevenson with an intriguing whodunit plot based
on a real-life unsolved mystery. In 1889, while Stevenson is living in Hawaii, the corpse of Jules Tavernier, a "celebrated painter of Plains Indians
and Hawaiian volcanoes," is found in his Honolulu studio. Since the doctor who examines the body attributes his death to "excessive use of
alcoholic drinks," there's no inquest. In Theroux's telling, which is based on a claim that Stevenson's stepdaughter would later make in her
memoir, Tavernier was shot through the heart, and someone is covering up the truth. Aided by his stepson, Samuel Lloyd Osbourne, Stevenson
searches for clues and motives, as well as links between the painter's death and other murders. In Theroux's hands, Stevenson is an effective
sleuth, and Sherlockians will be amused at his echoing Holmes's cynical view of doctors ("When a medical man turns to crime, he is the worst of
offenders"). Readers will hope to see more of the famous author as detective. (BookLife)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Devil's Throat: Or, Robert Louis Stevenson, Detective." Publishers Weekly, 26 Feb. 2018, p. 70+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A530637441/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8eb2bca4. Accessed 2 June 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A530637441
Review–The Devil’s Throat by Joseph Theroux (Samoa)
Nov 24 2017
1
The Devil’s Throat
by
Joseph Theroux (Samoa 1975-78)
Kilauea Publications
190 pages
September 2017
Kindle ($3.99) Paperback $8.99
Reviewed by Richard Wiley (Korea 1967-69)
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of reading Joseph Theroux’s The Devil’s Throat or Robert Louis Stevenson, Detective, a novel set in Hawaii in the late nineteenth century, starring, if you will, the great Scottish novelist himself, and narrated by his stepson Lloyd Osbourne.
The conceit of the novel is that its author found a partially completed manuscript, written by the above named Osbourne, hidden in the false bottom of an antique chest he bought at auction “several years ago” in Hilo. And maybe it’s true. My abilities to detect artifacts from fact have waned over the years, so I can’t be sure. But either way, it provides a great start to the mystery that the manuscript brings to light; namely that a locally famous artist, a “volcano painter” named Jules Tavernier, is found shot dead in his studio. The murder weapon is missing, and no one knows where to begin in figuring out what happened. The year is 1889, so the forensic sciences are in their infancy, and anyway, the crime scene is soon diluted by local onlookers, visits from the police, and friends of the deceased. Among the first to arrive, before things go too far awry, are Robert Louis Stevenson, a few years away from his death in Samoa, along with a stepson, Lloyd, both of whom feel they owe it to the dead man (and the reader) to solve the crime.
That’s the setup, some external to the action, some internal to it, and both intriguing. There are a lot of culprit candidates; jealous fellow artists, the feared and busy Chinese Tong gang, Lloyd Osbourne’s own brother-in-law, whose pistol is suddenly missing, even the dead man’s wife. What’s more, the newspaper accounts of Tavernier’s death say that it was the result of natural causes. What? Eh?
Early on in the novel Robert Louis Stevenson has to leave the action to fulfill a promise he’s made to visit the famous Father Damien on Molokai at Kalaupapa, Hawaii’s notorious leper colony, so he is taken out of the action, leaving the job of interviewing most of the suspects to his stepson, Lloyd. To tell the truth, I was disappointed to see Stevenson go. His job was to act like Sherlock Holmes, keenly observing slights of hand and slightly-off alibis that no one else has the skill to notice. With so many suspects dancing around the edges of the murder, we need him to help Lloyd eliminate some and bring others to the forefront of their investigation. If I were to pitch the story to Hollywood, in fact, the hook would be “Sherlock Holmes meets Murder on the Orient Express,” so RLS is rather important.
But never mind my disappointment, Lloyd Osbourne does a credible job of winnowing things down on his own, so that when Stevenson does return, some fifty pages later (it’s only a 168-page novel), we don’t feel we have lost as much as I, at least, anticipated. The action of the story continues to heighten until – not to give anything away – in one of the its best scenes, both RLS and Lloyd barely escape the fate of the volcano artist themselves, by leaping into the basket of a hot air balloon and sailing above their would-be assailant in the able hands of an on-the-spot secondary character with the hyper-literary name of Melville… Alas, when RLS asks the obvious question, Melville has to say alas, too, as in ‘alas, no relation.’ Melville appears again in the novel’s penultimate scene and to equally heroic avail.
This is an easy novel to like. Its pace is lively, its chapters are short – the endings of which always seem to entice the reader to get going on the next one – and its only apparent literary ambitions, other than to mark the narrative as a product of its time, is to tell a good tale. Lloyd, as narrator, does a good job of making us suspect whomever he wants us to suspect and like or dislike whoever he wants us to like or dislike – most especially, in the latter category, the diabolical Dr. Edward Cook Webb, whom I, at least, came to hate. But I won’t tell you why. Nor will I tell you what the Devil’s Throat of the title means. For that, you have to read this charming book, about which, what’s most impressive to me, is how it wears its research so lightly. I published a novel last year (it’s why I was asked to write this review) entitled Bob Stevenson, concerning a New York psychiatrist and her patient who believes himself to be Robert Louis Stevenson. So, of course, I had to do some Stevenson research, too. Mine, however – the reading and re-reading of Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jykll and Mr. Hyde – cast a very thin shadow compared to the discipline and depth of Mr. Theroux’s. He lists thirteen texts in an afterword, not including the basic Stevenson oeuvre. What’s more, all of the characters in The Devil’s Throat truly lived and worked in Hawaii at the time of the story’s unfolding, and are woven together here in an ingenious and continually interesting webbing.
I do have three quibbles with the book, but only one with the text itself. Robert Louis Stevenson’s wife and Lloyd Osbourne’s mother, Fanny, was a decade older than RLS and outlived him by some two more. She does play a role in The Devil’s Throat, but it is a disappointingly minor one. I was curious about her, wanted her voice on the page, wanted a personality behind the presence and, most importantly, a sense of why Stevenson married her. I didn’t get one.
Otherwise, the novel seemed to suffer from inadequate copy-editing. There were times when phrases or words were repeated unintentionally, and there were mistakes in syntax and spelling.
Lastly, we get as front matter a description of Hawaii at the time, a note on Tavernier, a preface concerning the discovered manuscript, and an introduction. I would have preferred most of them as back matter since I wanted to get on with the story.
But I am a fan of this novel, no question. During these days when many good writers are seeing their work languish on various reefs and shoals, it is my hope that The Devil’s Throat will find the wide readership that it and its author (both Osbourne and Theroux) clearly deserve.
Richard Wiley is the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of nine novels, most recently Bob Stevenson, from Bellevue Literary Press. His short story collection, Tacoma Stories, will be out in the fall of 2018.