FOREST FIRE by David James

About a block from the depot, a horse pulling an empty buggy flashed by him towards the center of town. The horse would die in the fire, O'Rourke thought as he turned the corner by the burned-out feed store. It could not be helped. He did not have time to chase it.

David Hagberg returns to the disaster scene under his David James pseudonym, this time with an ambitious period piece about the Cloquet Fire of 1918, which killed almost 500 people as it swept through the isolated communities of Northeastern Minnesota. Says the Minnesota Historical Society:

What is often called simply the Cloquet Fire was really a host of fires, fifty or more, that combined in a single event. It had two major theaters, one called the Cloquet–Duluth Fire and the other the Moose Lake Fire.

Conditions for both had been building for months. Lumbering, the region’s main industry, created giant depots of cut, dry lumber and left the countryside littered with wood waste. Farmers routinely burned fields and brush. Locomotives, contrary to law, spewed sparks and embers. The summer and fall of 1918 had been extremely dry.

Hagberg focuses heavily on the locomotive factor, and on locals' disbelieving mindsets: a fire would be too terrible, unthinkable even, so it can't possibly happen. One man who's all too ready to accept the awful truth is Chief O'Rourke. His life is currently falling apart, what with a pregnant mistress and political machinations against his office (we first meet him as he stops a white-on-white lynching, earning the ire of a local big shot), and even if he sounds the alarm it may be too little, too late. Those duplicitous trains, spewing hot embers, are nonetheless the lifeblood and lifelines of the north country, and O'Rourke will need to move fast to organize Cloquet's evacuation via rail. The few citizens who own automobiles can choose to ride off down the road, at the risk of driving right into the inferno.

Writing in that far off, futuristic year of 1975, with its satellites and phone lines and computerized whats-its, Hagberg makes it starkly clear for readers how limited the toolsets were in 1918: telegraph and couriers. A distance of 20 miles becomes an insurmountable hurdle, and the search for a missing child across town becomes a Herculean task. Poor form from Belmont Tower, by the way, spoiling the fate of O'Rourke's mistress on the back cover and letting us know that there's a "miracle of Cass Lake."

Besides Belmont Tower's spoilers, there's a certain stiffness to the narrative, maybe owing to its period setting. Whether or not we're experts on the Cloquet Fire of 1918, or had never heard of it before this book (raises hand), we know Hagberg is working with somebody else's script, as it were. Per usual, his writing is strong, but we're just missing that spark (ha!) that's present in his other 1975 disasterpieces Blizzard and Twister. We almost get there, with the firestorm proving a crucible for characters like reporter Sullivan, nursing shame from a cowardly episode on the Western Front, and poor, doomed mistress Mindy, but ... alas.

Forest Fire must have taken the most research out of the three 1975 titles, so it's disappointing that it's not quite as good. Not bad by any means, but still not as good as we know Hagberg can be.

Belmont Tower give us a nice spread of ads in the back pages, fiction and nonfiction, including the YA classic Walkabout and a story about the "confused, tortured world of the homosexual" title Boychick.

One final, humorous note: the anachronistic whirlybird almost hiding behind the title text on the cover art. Carelessness from Belmont Tower, or a deliberate attempt to hide the period setting from would-be buyers? When the smoke clears, Hagberg's Forest Fire earns a respectable 3/4 rating and sits comfortably enough alongside his other disaster work. Y'know, there's as much distance between now and 1975 as there was between Hagberg and his 1918 setting? Far out ...

Belmont Tower Books, 1975