Received as part of the Early Reviewer program. While the premise of the story was interesting, I found the book really hard to get through. Found my mind wandering every few pages as the writing did not really keep me interested. ( )

In The Committee, author Sterling Watson has taken a fascinating topic and done a great job turning it into a very readable historical novel. The period is the late 1950s, and the topic is to explore how the intrusion of the formalized witch hunt of the “Johns Committee” (Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, started by Governor Charley Johns) affected the sleepy academic world of the University of Florida. The Committee, having failed to make much headway in proving the NAACP a Communist front, had turned to the threat posed by homosexuals in the state schools. Ignoring, or ignorant of, constitutional rights, the Committee used bullying and blackmail to gather “evidence” about who needed to be purged from faculty, staff, and students.

Watson establishes his characters, then lets the interactions among them tell his story, avoiding the danger of long didactic passages sometimes found in historical fiction. The raw power and viciousness of the Committee put the college faculty and staff under pressure to make difficult decisions among bad options. There are enough twists and turns to keep the plot ticking along, although the ending seemed a little too neat. ( )

Bam! Akashic ends the year on a high note. I'm very familiar with the publisher's noir anthologies and love them, but hadn't read a novel put out by them before. So glad I got this introduction. While there were a number of big stretches that required a willing suspension of disbelief, Watson is a great writer. His pacing and character development was perfect to me and he gave just enough about each character to care without slowing down the story so much that you lost the thread of the narrative. ( )

While this book had a good plot, I felt it needed more editing. It was arduous to read, easy to put down and hard to pick up. I love the idea of a mid century Florida university having a committee to weed out the “considered unmentionables” of southern society at the time. Now living in central Florida, I thought more description would have made this more spell binding. ( )

4 stars for an enlightening book about a depressing time in American history. This is historical fiction, but based on a real life Florida state committee modeled on the US Senatorial McCarthy Committee. It was called the Johns Committee after its creator Charley Johns, who as President of the Florida Senate, became Governor when Governor Dan McCarty died of a heart attack. Its formal name was the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee. It was established in 1953 to root out homosexuals, communists, advocates for civil rights and people who were "passing"--code for African Americans or Native Americans "passing" as white.
The book takes place in 1958, 4 years after the McCarthy committee has been disbanded in disgrace.
The main character is Tom Stall, a professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. It opens with the suicide of Jack Leaf, a professor who Tom knows slightly. He rushes to the scene of Leaf's dead body after he jumped out a 3rd story window.
There are many twists and turns in a sordid story of blackmail of various gay professors on campus. Tom is reluctantly dragged into the middle of this blackmail. He is asked to spy on his fellow professors and threatened with revealing a secret from his past if he doesn't cooperate. He walks a fine line trying to keep his integrity intact.
Some quotes:
"Jack Leaf was a Red Indian, and he was passing. Passing was serious business in the South, and Gainesville, Florida, was definitely the South."
"Florida was America's Vacation Land, and her beautiful beaches, the ring of white sand that enclosed her like a necklace of pearls, were cosmopolitan places where North and South mingled and even the races came within shouting distance of each other. But, oh God, go inland a few miles and Florida was Alabama and Mississippi with a vengeance. She was a land of lynching, convict labor, peonage, and bare-knuckles politics that had not changed since Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest had served as the first grand wizard for the Ku Klux Klan."

One inaccuracy on p. 350: "HUAC had died when the lawyer Joseph Welch had asked Joe McCarthy, 'Have you no sense of decency?" Joe McCarthy was the US Senator from Wisconsin. He was not a member of HUAC.
HUAC was the House Unamerican Activities Committee and was still active when it came to Buffalo, NY, in the early 60s when I was in secondary school. I remember reading about it and the protesters, including actor Sterling Hayden.
Thank You Akashic Books, and Sterling Watson for sending me this book through LibraryThing. ( )