The Last Frontier

When I was up in the Boundary Waters on the old logging roads on a motorcycle following the grey sandy roads through fallen trees and second growth forests I had the feeling that I was on the edge of the last frontier. It was summer and I had been away from the "Lower forty eight" for three weeks and one definitely felt there was this life and there was the modern life below.

You do not have to look for the reason people went West. They went West to find themselves. The frontier was declared closed in 1880 by Frederick Jackson Turner and this left people with the notion the Great Adventure was over. It was not. The million acres Teddy Roosevelt set aside on the top of the country that became the Boundary Waters was and is largely untouched.

When I was researching Jack Pine I was amazed to learn all the trees had been logged out and that all I was seeing was the Jack Pine. One can only imagine what the country looked like with the towering white pines all well over three hundred years. I haven't been back to The Boundary Waters since those years of research. But I will go back one day...if for nothing else than to see the Last Frontier one more time.

Jack Pine

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Fantastic Publishers Weekly Review of JACK PINE A Thriller of the North Woods

Hazelgrove (The Pitcher) delivers a searing look at a disintegrating company town and the desperate lengths people will go to in order to preserve their way of life. In Ely, Minn., near the Canadian border, Johnson Timber is the cornerstone business, with tourism a distant second. When loggers start getting killed, militant environmentalist Tom Jorde becomes a suspect; and when a 16-year-old girl cries rape, Sheriff Riechardt blames Tommy Tobin, a local Indian. Deputy Sheriff Reuger London tries to just do his job, but his ability to perform it with emotional detachment becomes increasingly difficult, as Johnson Timber owner Ben Johnson, Riechardt, and Jorde constantly pressure him to serve their respective interests. Distinctive supporting characters help keep the pages turning, including Ben’s bullying grown son, Cliff; an environmental lawyer, Patricia Helpner; and a morally bankrupt newsman, John Mcfee. Rough country and people as tenacious as the jack pines, the softwood trees that have replaced the old clear-cut timber, make Hazelgrove’s novel memorable.

Jack Pine A Thriller of the North Woods

Writing the Historical Thriller

I have written two books that might be termed historical thrillers, Tobacco Sticks and Jack Pine. Both books required a lot of research and both required me to go to the actual location. Lets take the first one Tobacco Sticks. This book began with stories my father used to tell me about his family in Virginia and his father who was a lawyer and who ran a Senators campaign in 1946. I began by recording my dad and gathering all the scrapbooks and pictures he had. Then I went to Virginia.

In Virginia I lugged around a video camera and interviewed people who knew my grandfather in 1946. Then I went and videotaped where he lived and where he worked and then finally where he was buried. I then returned to Chicago and went to the library to do some legal research on court cases. Then I made outlines and arranged the pictures I had of my fathers family on the table. This was how I got into that world every day and five years later I published Tobacco Sticks which was my break out book and hit the National Bestseller List.

Now we come to Jack Pine. This began by going to the Boundary Waters on a family vacation and becoming interested in the way of life in this remote wilderness that struck me as the way the country used to be. Then I found out about the logging issues associated with the area and again talked to a lot of people. Finally I rode around with a Deputy Sherriff and asked a lot of inane questions about police procedures. Then I returned to Chicago and got out lots of books on logging and did my outlines again.

Ten years later I published Jack Pine which is due out (the paperback) this month. The story of a way of life that is vanishing and the struggle between the enviromentalists and loggers with a psychopath thrown in to get things going. I would love to write another set in the early twentieth century but I need to settle down and go into that world. Something that his harder and harder to do these days.

Jack Pine...a thriller of the North Woods

www.williamhazegrove.com


 

Outstanding Booklist Review of JACK PINE Comparisons to FARGO and William Kent Kreuger

In northern Minnesota, a logger is found dead. At about the same time, a teenage girl claims that she was molested by a Native American, but then changes her story. Some concerned citizens wonder if the same man is responsible for both incidents, but Deputy Sheriff Reuger London isn’t inclined to jump to conclusions, as he’s convinced neither that the logger’s death was murder nor that the girl was really molested. Under pressure to close the cases, London soon finds himself stuck in the middle of a potentially violent conflict between loggers and environmentalists. Hazelgrove tells great stories (his last book was the wonderful Real Santa, 2014), and he creates believable, captivating characters. The people in Jack Pine feel like just that: people, not fictional characters. Hazelgrove gives these characters a tactile environment, the Minnesota Boundary Waters region near the Canadian border, and real voices (that distinctive upper-midwestern drawl we know from Fargo). Another fine effort from a very interesting writer. This one will appeal especially to William Kent Krueger fans.

JACK PINE...A thriller of the North Woods
www.williamhazelgrove.com

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Top Amazon Reviewer Harriet Klausner Gives thriller Jack Pine Five Stars

ByHarriet Klausner#1 HALL OF FAMEon April 5, 2015

Format: Paperback

Jack Pine
William Hazelgrove
Koehler Books, Apr 1 2015, $18.95
ISBN: 9781940192680

On the Northern Minnesota side of the Boundary Waters that separates America from Canada, Deputy Sheriff Reuger London finds sexagenarian logger Foster Jones with a bullet in his head and his slasher vehicle burned. Soon after that Sheriff Riechardt tells Reuger that a teenage girl Dana Reynolds staying with her parents at the Lodge claims a big Indian raped her. Riechardt wants London to bring in the latter’s friend Tommy “Tobin” Toboken, a recent guest of Stateville Correctional Center, before the man flees to Canada.

Johnson Timber CEO Ben Johnson accuses the tree huggers for killing Foster and other loggers as a means to speed up the end of the industry in the area; the environmentalists insist not them but likely the loggers eliminating competition for the dwindling jobs. Owners of the best Jack Pine forest, the Ojibwa Indians distrust both groups whose respective agendas fail to consider tribal needs. In that environ, London seeks a killer and a rapist.

Armchair readers will feel transported to the Northern Minnesota forests in William Hazelgrove’s engrossing atmospheric police procedural; as even local vernacular adds to the sense of being there. The official investigations are top rate, but it is the rustic outdoor lifestyles that hook the audience throughout.

Harriet Klausner

 

www.williamhazelgrove.com

Jack Pine...no one can hear you scream in the woods

Writing an Envriomental Thriller JACK PINE by William Hazelgrove

Writing Jack Pine came about from my vacationing in the Boundary Waters in Minnesota just below Canada. I was lucky enough to find a group of people who accepted me through my wife into their logging camp style vacations and I came to know the people of the North woods. I also came to know the issues associated with that way of life. Logging and the land and the environmentalists are all intertwined into a complicated mosaic.

Jack Pine at the core is a story about a strand of three hundred year old pines the loggers missed when the country was logged out in the late nineteenth century. These trees are priceless but they are up in the Boundary Waters a million acres protected when Teddy Roosevelt created the Boundary Waters Canoe Area by turning it all into protected land. From there the stage is set between the people who make a living off the land and the people who want it for the people.

And you can see both sides. In my book a Deputy Sheriff is torn between the three groups who are fighting for their rights. The Indians. The loggers. And the environmentalists. Everyone has a legitimate claim to the land but there is just not enough room and time is running out. I even rode around with a sheriff who patrolled this lonely land and got his take on what life is like for someone trying to enforce the laws over this vast frontier.

Throw in some dead loggers who are logging in the Boundary Waters illegally and the fuse is lit. I tried to give a picture of this land that is very similar to the West in that its beauty and sweep take your breath away and the people who have lived there. The rest is up to the reader.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Jack Pine

Writing for Television

It happens. You think you won't and then you do. Someone says you know you can get three hundred grand for a pilot...really? Really. And then you get interested in the form. Interesting. A mini teleplay. Like a mini play. And how long does it have to be? Twenty two minutes playing time. In other words a page a minute and now you have to really knock it down to twenty two pages but you can go up to thirty some pages for cues and such. But you really shouldn't go beyond that.

And so you dissect the American fascination with the sitcom. What it comes do is this: situational comedies are based on misdirection or rather misconceptions. Character A misconstrues what Character B is doing which impinges Character C which impinges Character D. So every one starts acting on these misconceptions and amping up the plot by adding fuel to the fire or the misconceptions of the misconceptions. By the twelve minute mark everyone is really pissed off about perceived slights and insults.

So then the the misconceptions lead to slapstick situations. The whole thing blows up and the misconceptions begin to be revealed for not being anything anybody thought they were. Fences are mended and a moral imperative snakes through the grass toward the end as faith is restored and characters are shown to be basically very good people.

That then is writing for television. Throw in a lot of situational jokes and you can bowl for that three hundred grand.  Here's looking at you kid.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
JACK PINE IS OUT TODAY!
Thriller Set in the Northwoods.
Kindle 3.99
Jack Pine...No one can hear you scream in the woods

Doing the American Library Assocation Conference without a Table

You want to do something hard. Go to a conference of librarians without a table, a base of operations. So now you have to walk around and tell librarians about your new book. My new book is Jack Pine.  I have a rollaway suitcase full of books and brochures the publisher gave me. How to give them away then. Because that is all you do at the ALA conference; give away books.

You can do it outside the conference the guard tells me but not inside the conference hall. Fair enough. I open my suitcase of books and full color catalogs and go to work. Librarians are very nice people and are interested in a man in a suit coat with a book. So it works well for the first few hours and I have handed out one hundred brochures. I now go to my cards with CR scans of the book. These work well because the librarians are already loaded down with books.

Oh this is a good idea they say taking he cards. I blow through two hundred in another hour and give out a few books to those who seem like they would do something with them. I determined the librarians have enough books and literally cant carry anymore so the cards work well. A woman appears. Sir you cant do this. She is with another man. You have to have a table. The Man has just shut me down.

Oh sorry I say realizing I just have fifty cards left anyway. So I pack up my suitcase that is now mostly empty. On the way out to my car I give away my fifty remaining cards. So in total I gave away three hundred and fifty promotion pieces for the new book, Jack Pine. That is how you do the ALA Mid winter show without a table.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher
Jack Pine