The Music Behind the Music
by Dabí Sánchez, publisher and playwright
October 21, 2015
I should start by disclosing that I was an advance reader of this book, and an early sympathizer. In the crush of things it's easy to lose mental track of something you haven't seen for about a year--even if books are not as perishable as movies. In a good read, you are re-creating the book as you go, while movies more often than not are done to you. This novel by Tim Jollymore is the essence of liberty. It opens wide the door to a place you haven't seen. While giving you just the amount of guidance you need, it invites you to roam in its vast and interesting spaces. As I was reminded when I checked off the questions supplied by Amazon, Observation Hill manages to be quite racy without ever crossing the line into those dispiriting regions of graphic sex and violence that the conventions of modern storytelling have mandated. This is elegant storytelling that packs a punch. At its best, it reaches what the Finnish poet Lassi Nummi has called «the music behind the music». And when the story is done, it's the musical essence which stays in the memory, as intimate as a quartet or as big as a symphony. This is great writing which allows for great reading, and will live in you for a good long time after your encounter with it.
OBSERVATION HILL: A novel of class and murder, Tim Jollymore, Finnsway Books, 5/30/2015,
Police detective Paul Tuomi is caught between East and West in Duluth, Minnesota, where drugs, arson, and greed figure in a series of mysterious deaths. Here the drug culture of the 1960s stands in relief against the backdrop of a glowering steel industry where workers from the West side risk mutilation and death at a mill controlled by wealthy industrialists on the East side - men “whose souls had been scorched barren not at the two-thousand-degree open hearth . . . but by the mammonish glow of money and mounds of wealth.”*
Despite marital ties with East side aristocracy, Paul’s heart is in the West, with the mother of his child, and with his private detective father, PS Tuomi, whose reputation is tarnished by link with an earlier murder in a bootlegging enterprise. Although his West-side connections put his job in the East in jeopardy, Paul follows his instincts, as he pursues the trail of the spoiled teenaged son of a privileged East side family.
As the second novel of award-winning author Tim Jollymore, “Observation Hill” is as tightly constructed as a rubik’s cube, every scene leading into the next with unrelenting suspense. On a level with best-selling authors such as Robert Crais and Joseph Wambaugh, “Observation Hill” is a gripping thriller, a must-read for any lover of mystery fiction.
*page 186
Kitty Fassett
Oakland, California
Duluth native Tim Jollymore, author of "Listener in the Snow," signs copies of "Observation Hill," his new, fast-paced thriller that explores class differences in the city by the lake.
With an exquisite sense of place (beginning writers should read this book to understand that term), Jollymore tells the story of Detective Paul Tuomi, caught between the West Side where in the 1960s workers risked death in steel mills controlled by wealthy industrialists on the East Side. Tuomi's heart is in the West, where his connections put his job in the East in jeopardy as he follows his instincts and pursues the trail of a spoiled teen son of a privileged East Side family.
The murder at the center of the story was influenced by the Elizabeth Congdon murder at Glensheen.
Jollymore holds English degrees from the University of Minnesota-Duluth, and has taught writing in California, where he relocated in midlife.
Posted: 08/22/2015 10:26:44 AM CDT