Riverboat

Colorado resident Douglas Hirt has been an accomplished author of western fiction since 1991. Later, he threw his talent for historical fiction into a three-book series about a Mississippi riverboat during the 1800s and the ensemble cast of characters traveling on the steamship. The first novel in the series, Riverboat, was initially published in 1995 and remains available today from Wolfpack Publishing.

The Tempest Queen is the riverboat in question running up and down the Mississippi River filled with passengers and limited cargo in the years before the Civil War. Every passenger has a story, and Hirt leverages that reality into a Love Boat/Fantasy Island 300-page ensemble epic of criss-crossing and overlapping stories.

The captain is William Hamilton who has been on the river for 30 years and finally has a ship of his own. For this journey, he’ll be headed down the Mississippi for a week to The Tempest Queen’s home port of Baton Rouge. The boat is a football field long with multiple decks and 63 passengers plus crew. The ship is used for human transport but has many of the amenities of a Carnival Cruise lines and the passengers live in luxury on the journey.

My favorite passenger is the raffish professional gambler, Dexter McCay. There’s also an interesting subplot about a runaway slave who was captured in the woods and is now being transported in chains back to his cruel master’s estate by a loathsome and violent slave catcher. This sparks the novel’s action scenes and the author does a nice job using this as a vehicle to explore the variety of opinions regarding human enslavement in the run-up to the Civil War.

At 300-pages, the novel was a bit overlong and meandered at times, but this is a fine historical novel definitely worth reading. I’m thrilled that Wolfpack Press re-discovered it for modern audiences, and I’m looking forward to the next installment.

Get Riverboat HERE.