I was listening to an NPR program a couple weeks ago, a panel discussing the merits and hazards of genetically altered plants and animals—food sources. Two of the experts were clearly for genetically altered materials and one against.
The fourth, New York Times public health reporter Gardiner Harris, was neutral. He was, as he said, a reporter who simply had been covering the story for a number of years. He could see both sides.
At the end of the program, the host thanked the panelists . . . and then congratulated Harris on his book—a mystery.
A mystery?
I looked it up.
New York Times reporter plants a mystery in a Kentucky coal mine
I wondered why Gardiner Harris titled his 2010 mystery Hazard?
I guessed the story had something to do with the hazards, the dangers, inherent in playing with the genes of plants and animals . . . altering their genes to make them more productive, like genetically altered corn and soybeans that tolerate herbicides intended to kill all plant life in a field—weeds, particularly—except them.
But the book's cover doesn't show cornfields or dairy barns. It shows a lone coal miner.
I get it now . . . Hazard—Hazard, Kentucky.
Big coal-mining country.
Harris's book open with a wall in the Blue Gem mine blowing out, killing nine men as water floods the mine.
MSHA—the Mine Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency that oversees mines—has to investigate. Will Murphy gets the assignment with instructions to wrap up his work fast so the Blue Gem can reopen. Delays cost miners in lost wages and the mine's owner in lost profits.
Murphy's brother owns the mine—uh-oo—so Murphy has a family incentive to do a quick investigation, but something about the Blue Gem's operations just aren't right.
As Murphy probes, mine bosses order witnesses to lie. Several who won't wind up dead—likely murdered.
The reviewer for Publishers Weekly gave Hazard a starred review, saying "the reader comes to care about a wide cast of characters, mostly hardscrabble Appalachian men and women, as Harris carefully unspools the many plot threads. Pitch-perfect dialogue and an authentic view of the nuts and bolts of mining help make this an engrossing mystery thriller."
Hey, this is a book I want to read. I lived and worked as a newspaper reporter in West Virginia coal mining country down around Beckley, in Wyoming County and up in the Kanawha River Valley.
Mine blowouts happen and most should not, would not had the mine's owners and managers not cut corners by either ignoring or defying safety regulations and practices.
So Hazard resonates with me.
I wondered how Harris came to get his characters, the setting, and the details of mining operations right. I assumed, since he worked for the Times, he was a city guy.
He isn't.
He grew up in his early years on a tobacco farm in Todd County, Kentucky, the better part of 200 miles away from the coalfields, to the west. As a teen, though, he attended tony high schools in Princeton, New Jersey, and Manhattan, New York.
Harris went on to Yale and, after graduating in the spring of 1995, he returned to Kentucky, to work as a reporter for the Louisville Courier-Journal. The editors made him their Eastern Kentucky bureau chief and assigned him to work out of Hazard.
The pieces are starting to fit together.
Harris's reporting on coal mining operations over the next four years resulted in state and federal changes in mine safety laws and black-lung compensation. That's quite an achievement.
For Harris personally, his reporting won a George Polk Award and the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative journalism . . . and a job with the Wall Street Journal where he covered the drug industry, not the illegal stuff, but the pharmaceutical end.
He jumped to the Times in 2003, covering the same beat.
To date, Harris's written only one book.
© Jerry Peterson.
