Conundrum in a Coal Mine

Homer Hickam became famous in 1999 for his memoir Rocket Boys (later made into the movie October Sky), though in recent years he’s left both rockets and coal country behind to write four World War II-era novels. But you can’t keep the coal dust out of a Coalwood boy, and Hickam returns to his roots in his latest novel, The Red Helmet (Thomas Nelson, 342 pp., $24.99).

In the story, mine supervisor and all-around good guy Cable Jordan meets Song Hawkins, a wealthy and all-business Manhattanite, while visiting New York. Though Cable comes across as a hat-wearing, ah-shucks-ma’am dreamboat in the same vein as Rock Hudson pretending to be a visiting Texan in Pillow Talk, Song is no Doris Day. She’s more like Ivanka Trump—a princess with the business acumen to be a valued member of her tycoon father’s staff. “I crawl up inside a company for my father, see what makes it tick, then mentally take it apart,” she says of her job. Chief among the problems of this mismatched couple is an inability to agree on where they will live. A disastrous visit to Cable’s hometown in Highcoal, W.Va., confirms Song’s decision never to live there; meanwhile, Cable refuses to consider New York City.

The occasional clichéd expression aside—“The gray clouds matched her mood”—Hickam writes beautifully, especially when presenting the kind of hardworking, God-fearing, straight-talking, salt-of-the-earth types characteristic of his novels. At one point a man named Squirrel scratches his ear with the barrel of a shotgun and pronounces, “I’d like to oblige, I really would. But I think I need to shoot Bashful while I got the chance.”

The passages about coal and West Virginia are interesting and convincing, full of Hickam’s respect for its citizens, particularly the coal miners, but some of the New York scenes, not so much. After a shaky beginning, Red Helmet settles into an enjoyable tale. The character of Song in particular comes into her own once she decides to join a class of red cap, or trainee, miners. Her conversations with Cable finally exhibit the spunk and spirit we read so much about earlier.

By the final chapters of Red Helmet, there is enough intrigue, romance and action—much of which takes place deep within the mine, rendered in fascinating detail, even to this claustrophobic reviewer—to inspire paragraph- and even page-skipping, just to end the suspense.

Hickam appears at Davis-Kidd Booksellers 7 p.m. March 10.