William Wister Haines (1908–1989)

High Tension is a surprisingly readable yarn for a book about late 1930s linesmen working for a railroad company. It’s told from the point of view of a head linesman named Jig, who along with his buddy Beckett ends up boarding in a rich lady’s home while laying poles and wire for newer electrical trains. The rich woman has an attractive but off-limits adult daughter who befriends the two workers. Eventually a couple more workers board at the house, one of them a mysterious but talented rogue, and Haines works up to a fuzzy love triangle against the backdrop of missing copper wiring, a bank job, plenty of overtime, and a climactic train wreck rescue scene.

One of the pleasures of the book is simply reading about how these linesmen used to put up all the wiring needed for the railroad companies. Taking place in the window between the Great Depression and WWII, the blue-collar characters appreciate and take pride in their work. Like Melville, Haines uses as much ink describing in detail the work his characters do as he does with the strict plot of the book; however, he manages to keep it interesting, and the pace at which the work must be done often affects Jig’s attempts to help his friends, keeping the story fairly integrated.

While the plot isn’t anything revolutionary, and almost all the characters are completely wholesome by today’s standards, Haines does a good job of maintaining reader interest. There are a few lost colloquialisms in the language that give the book character (people “arc” at one another) and the narrator has a fun way with language (ex: “A blind woman could have seen with a cane that pair was going to be worth two bucks to some preacher, and old lady Bower wasn’t blind.”)

I’m the last person who thought he needed to read a 75-year-old book about men hanging tension wire, but I enjoyed the fast, pleasurable read.… (meer)