Reviews for Jade Rooster

From December 2007 issue of United States Naval Institute Proceedings:

Jade Rooster
Captain Roger Lee Crossland, U.S. Navy Reserve (Retired). Lake Junalaska, NC: Broadsides Press, 2006. 263 pp. $17.95.

China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines of 1913 may be unfamiliar historic or geographical venues for a complex, nautical mystery, but Jade Rooster acclimates itself and showcases a solid, captivating flair for gripping, detailed, exhilarating fiction.

The author wields a unique literary sword, with minimal feints, within an intricate labyrinth of clues and barrels of fascinating data, naval and cultural. Descriptions by clothing, language, and character of heroes (clever, intuitive Quartermaster Hobson, his buddies Oyster Pirate, Tiger Cheng, buck dancer Jackson), simpatico mudangs (shamans), and various high- and low-lifes alike, are flawless. Action and script, occasionally horrific with everything from severed heads to sperm whale intestines "up or down current like scuttlebutt," is contextually appropriate.

Crossland's pirates/bandits/opportunists, in name or demeanor, are more Pirates of the Caribbean than the Mikado/ Penzance variety, but Wallace Beery, Popeye Doyle, Steve McQueen, and Orlando Bloom would blend-in with a theme song from Puccini by the Grateful Dead. After story-integrated brain teasing, tantalizing event and name dropping illusions, the author amiably serves up a summation of historical facts to help readers cull out the fictions.

Roosters—jade, barnyard, barques (funnels), tattoos, et al—symbolized victory during 19th and 20th centuries, teach courtesy per the Talmud, constitute the tenth sign of the Chinese Zodiac, and purportedly protect from yin energy, "the unseen world." Readers feast on plenty of that—in a challenging but eminently engaging and titillating spellbinder.

Reviewed by Alice A. Booher

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From the quarterly, The Connecticut Muse, Summer 2007, by the author of Last Refuge and Two Time, who is presently a finalist in the CT Book Awards:

If Patrick O'Brian Read More Noir..., September 18, 2007

Jade Rooster
By R.L. Crossland
Reviewed by Chris Knopf


There are worse things than being compared to Patrick O'Brian. And that's good news for R.L.Crossland, because comparisons between his historical naval thriller/crime story and the tales of O'Brian's Captain Aubrey are inevitable.

Both share an almost hypnotic evocation of the past, with rich descriptive detail and an encyclopedic command of nautical terminology and the vernacular of the times.

Where they begin to part company are the times themselves - for Crossland, it's early 20th century Asia, in particular Japanese-occupied Korea. A time that most readers, even lovers of exotic sea yarns, will find unfamiliar. Crossland's style, like O'Brian's, effectively captures the mood of this extremely alien environment, signaling from the first pages of the book that this ain't Kansas, Toto. So get ready for something completely different.

The other crucial distinction is that Jade Rooster is at heart an intricate murder mystery, complete with a self-possessed amateur sleuth in the form of Petty Officer Third Class Hobson of the U.S. Navy, a full complement of picaresque characters of questionable morality and several very nasty villains.

The triggering event is the disappearance of the merchant ship Jade Rooster, on a seemingly routine voyage from California by way of Hawaii. Not insignificantly, a tender from the freighter, a whaleboat, has been discovered aimless and abandoned with a cargo on board you could reasonably describe as gruesome (the behavior of some of our current jihadi terrorists come to mind, which should give you the drift).

Hobson's parents were missionaries who raised him in the Far East. Fluent in Japanese and Korean, as well as the hard ways of a seaman's life, he's the ideal choice of the Navy to assist the civilian investigation of this heinous crime on the high seas.

For better or worse, he's also a man of independent thought and resourcefulness, temperamentally incapable of towing the party line, be it military or civilian.

The story moves quickly across geographical and cultural boundaries, landing the reader in occupied Korea, a land chafing under Japanese domination. Hobson's own internal conflicts are ignited by his search for the missing vessel, and a brief encounter with a beautiful, and dangerously free thinking Korean beauty from his past.

Along the way, Hobson is swept up in the revolutionary intrigues of defiant Koreans, the magical mysteries of native shamans, the venality of merchants local and global and the underlying geo-political tensions between East and West that will ultimately erupt into global war.

Though clearly an aside, one of the most entertaining segments of the book is an honor race between a rowboat of Hobson's Pluto, a humble collier, and that of the grand warship Baltimore. Hobson has been given the task of recruiting and training the Pluto crew, and the ensuing contest is both an engaging interlude and an opportunity to see more deeply into Hobson's essential nature.

This is a book for careful readers accustomed to complex plots and non-linear narrative styles. And for lovers of military adventures and good old-fashioned detective stories. If you fit into any of those categories, Jade Rooster is a feast.

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From the “Bookshelf” of Columbia College Today, September/October 2007:

Jade Rooster by R. L. Crossland ’70. This nautical novel by a retired Navy officer, set in the “the hardboiled underworld of early 20th Century Japan” features an eccentric Columbia scholar named Stuyvesant Draper (Broadsides Press, $17.95)