The Lamplighters

Stonex, Emma. The Lamplighters. New York: Viking 2021. Print

First Sentences:

When Jory opens the curtains, the day is light and gray, the radio playing a half-known song.

He listens to the news, about a girl who's gone missing from a bus stop up north, and drinks from a mug of brown tea.


Description:

Emma Stonex's The Lamplighters is based on an incredible, true mystery. According to the Author's Note section, in December, 1900, three lighthouse keepers disappeared from a remote rock lighthouse on the island of Eilean Mor in the Outer Hebrides." They were never found. 

The Lamplighters is a fictionalized view depicting a similar occurrence. Set in the 1970s, author Stonex creates the world of life on a lighthouse island, of three keepers and their lives, their routines, and their secrets, all building up to a similar disappearance of all three men just like the historic incident from the 1900s.

The book opens with the scheduled relief boat trying to land on the lighthouse island in high seas. The lighthouse door, the relief men discover, is locked from the inside. The interior of the tower is neatly in order, but Arthur, Bill, and Vincent, the lighthouse keepers, are eerily not seen or answering to the relief men's calls. 

There had been no recent communication from the light tower, so this was deemed a "rescue mission" rather than a "relief" mission. In reality, the relief men felt they would be looking for bodies. It was inconceivable that the three keepers could have escaped the island without a boat. The door locked from the inside seemed to confirm the three keepers (or their bodies) had to be inside the tower or on the island someplace.

But they weren't.

There was no indication of a getaway, no sign of flight, nothing to suggest the keepers have gone anywhere at all...The table is laid for a meal uneaten. Two places, not three -- a knife and fork each, a plate waiting for food...The clock on the wall has stopped at eight forty-five.

So what happened? That is the ticklish, locked-room question that, twenty years later, an adventure writer, Dan Sharp, wants to try to answer. Sharp tries to dig into the circumstances that led to the men's disappearance by examining letters, old news articles, and interviewing the surviving wives, girlfriends, family, and town acquaintances. No source provides more than a few meager clues. 

Alternating between Sharp's investigation in the present with the daily routines of the lighthouse keepers twenty years in the past, The Lamplighters quietly keeps you closely involved with this mystery, forcing readers to examine every detail to try to predict what happened to these three men, and why?

Intriguing? To be sure. Tense? Of course. And engrossing? Of the highest order. I strongly predict this will be a book for a quiet, compelling read that keeps you wondering about the circumstances and people, and whether author Stonex will possibly reach any ending that proves satisfactory..

Happy reading. 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Stedman, M.L. The Light Between Oceans.   

A lighthouse keeper and his young wife live on a small island off the isolated coast of Australia. Childless in their young marriage, they are surprised when a rowboat washes ashore carrying a dead man and a living three-month-old baby. The lighthouse keeper's young wife is adamant, after several miscarriages, that they keep the child themselves without revealing the source of the baby, but the morally principled husband feels they should seek out the infant's family.  (previously reviewed here)