Taking Tennessee to Hart

In 1983, when the esteemed American playwright Tennessee Williams was close to death, he added a codicil to his will directing that his body be wrapped in a clean white sack and buried at sea at the same spot- in the Atlantic Ocean off the Jupiter Light north of West Palm Beach-where one of his idols, the poet Hart Crane, had jumped to his death from a ship returning to New York from Mexico.

Unfortunately, Tennessee's wishes weren't granted and he was interred in the family plot in St. Louis.

In this fanciful caper, a friend of Tennessee's, retired theater professor Walt Wordsworth, decides to right this wrong. With two young acolytes-soap opera actress Ann Laurel and former flower child and rock musician Billy Lamb-they concoct a plot to exhume Tennessee Williams' body and deliver him to the watery grave he'd desired.

They soon discover that taking Tennessee to Hart is easier said than done. With a $10,000 reward offered for the return of the body, these amateur grave robbers become the subject of a nationwide manhunt by both law enforcement and bounty hunters. Sparks fly, lives are threatened, and a romance flourishes, yet their resolve never wavers as they carry their revered and very dead playwright to his preferred resting place.

Taking Tennessee to Hart by Joe Stockdale is a delightful, graceful novel with literary overtones, and lessons in humanity to be learned. Tennessee Williams would certainly approve.