CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. – Put Tim Wendel's "Rebel Falls" on the shelf next to "The Falls," by Joyce Carol Oates, and "The Day the Falls Stood Still," by Cathy Marie Buchanan. They are great Niagara novels by great Niagara-born writers.
Wendel and Oates are natives of Lockport and Buchanan of Niagara Falls, Ont. That makes the Niagara River their birthright – and they write of its raging waters with prose so good you can almost feel the mist rising off the page.
"The Falls" was published in 2004 and "Stood Still" in 2009. "Rebel Falls" is just out, and Tim is coming home next week to tell us about it. Tonight, at 6 and again at 7, he'll be at Author's Note Bookstore, on Main Street in Medina. On Thursday night, at 7, he'll be at The Place, on Elmwood Avenue.
"Rebel Falls" ($28.95, Cornell University Press) is a historical novel based on a lesser-known fact of the Civil War: Confederate spies on the Canadian side of the Falls hoped to turn the tide in the late stages of the Civil War. They plotted to seize a Union gunboat on Lake Erie and use it to bombard Buffalo, Cleveland, and other Great Lakes cities. If they could force the Union Army to face a Northern front, it might well demoralize Northerners and turn them against the war. Had their scheme succeeded, Tim believes Abraham Lincoln would have lost re-election in 1864.
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Many of the novel's characters, Lincoln included, are drawn from real life, and much of the page-turning action is grounded in historical fact. The story is sometimes told in the third person and at other times in the voice of Rory Chase, the fictional character at the center of the novel.
"Wendel's narrative is strong, emotional and driven by one of his best characters yet, a heroine with more than her fair share of grit and bravery," writes Ken Burns, the documentarian who knows more than a little about what he calls "our most complicated of wars."
![Rebel Falls](https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/9/51/9517d4dc-1b8b-11ef-894e-1f15d4e3deeb/66537bbb675ba.image.jpg?resize=150%2C225 150w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/9/51/9517d4dc-1b8b-11ef-894e-1f15d4e3deeb/66537bbb675ba.image.jpg?resize=200%2C300 200w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/9/51/9517d4dc-1b8b-11ef-894e-1f15d4e3deeb/66537bbb675ba.image.jpg?resize=225%2C338 225w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/9/51/9517d4dc-1b8b-11ef-894e-1f15d4e3deeb/66537bbb675ba.image.jpg?resize=300%2C450 300w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/9/51/9517d4dc-1b8b-11ef-894e-1f15d4e3deeb/66537bbb675ba.image.jpg?resize=400%2C600 400w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/9/51/9517d4dc-1b8b-11ef-894e-1f15d4e3deeb/66537bbb675ba.image.jpg?resize=540%2C810 540w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/9/51/9517d4dc-1b8b-11ef-894e-1f15d4e3deeb/66537bbb675ba.image.jpg?resize=640%2C960 640w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/9/51/9517d4dc-1b8b-11ef-894e-1f15d4e3deeb/66537bbb675ba.image.jpg?resize=750%2C1125 750w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/9/51/9517d4dc-1b8b-11ef-894e-1f15d4e3deeb/66537bbb675ba.image.jpg?resize=990%2C1485 990w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/9/51/9517d4dc-1b8b-11ef-894e-1f15d4e3deeb/66537bbb675ba.image.jpg?resize=1035%2C1553 1035w, https://bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com/buffalonews.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/9/51/9517d4dc-1b8b-11ef-894e-1f15d4e3deeb/66537bbb675ba.image.jpg?resize=1175%2C1763 1200w)
Tim and his wife, Jacqueline Salmon, a fellow writer, live in Charlottesville, Va., where the Civil War still haunts. Tim was writing "Rebel Falls" when the so-called Unite the Right rally brought white supremacists to the city, in 2017. "We're still, in many ways, fighting the Civil War today," Tim says. "If I had written this book somewhere else it would be a different book."
The first stop on his book tour came in Charlottesville, at the University of Virginia's Miller Center for Public Policy, where a bust of Thomas Jefferson stands sentry in the lobby. Jefferson would have appreciated the Niagara setting for Tim's novel: He had two engravings of Niagara Falls in his dining room at Monticello, where they remain on display to this day.
Tim told the crowd at UVA that the idea for his novel came while reading the end notes to Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team Of Rivals." That's where he came upon a mention of the Confederate spies John Yates Beall and Bennet Burley, and their desperate plans for piracy on Lake Erie. "Footnotes drive me crazy," Tim says. "But I'm a big reader of end notes."
He grew up in a house on the Erie Canal, in Niagara County, and had never heard about a network of Confederate spies on our borderlands. Intrigued, he set out to learn more about Beall (pronounced Bell) and Burley. Now he thinks of them as the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the Civil War – "seemingly destined to make headlines," Tim says, "but soon ushered into the shadows."
Tim sought out Beall's papers and the testimony from his trial for treason – and found them at Cornell, of all places. He read Burley's file at the British Library in London. (Burley was a Scotsman who later became a noted war correspondent for the London Telegraph.) Tim's deep research – into them and into the Civil War era – undergirds the story but never slows it down. His novel moves swiftly, like the river that animates it.
Cataract House, a long-gone Niagara Falls luxury hotel that was a last stop on the Underground Railroad, plays a key role in the story, as does the long-gone Suspension Bridge that once connected the U.S. and Canada near where the Whirlpool Bridge stands today. The following passage offers a feel for the flavor of "Rebel Falls":
"From the bridge's upper tier, the enormity of the Niagara Gorge revealed itself beneath the structure, and when crossing over the abyss the mist from the Falls often hung like a veil. When those clouds did part, the distant smoke from the factories closer to Buffalo could be seen. Off to the other side, the Niagara River flowed north past sheer cliffs until it emptied into Lake Ontario. In the early morning, mist could hug those shale-green walls like ghosts from some forgotten cemetery."
Joyce Carol Oates writes operatically of the Falls: "The air roars, shakes ... as if time has ceased. Time has exploded. As if you've come too near to the radiant, thrumming, mad heart of all being." Cathy Marie Buchanan is quieter; she calls the Falls "that thin line that separates eternity from time."
Their books are haunted by Niagara-style suicide. Rory Chase, too, is briefly seduced by the hypnotic pull of the Falls: "Here the Niagara River itself accelerated, seemingly devouring everything in its path as it raced, faster and faster, for the precipice. ... The sight from the overlook was almost too much to behold. Well below me, the green-blue waters roiled and waked, and I felt as if I was stranded on a trestle and a train was bearing down on me. For an instant, I realized how easy it would be to simply step off and be done with it."
Rory is a composite of several real-life women of the time. She insinuates herself inside the Confederate spy network – and Rory is there when the rebels try to take the U.S.S. Michigan off Sandusky, Ohio.
"If you want to know how close they came, read the book," Tim said the other day in a reading at Politics and Prose Bookstore, in Washington. There he was in conversation with poet E. Ethelbert Miller, who says in a blurb for the book, "Wendel weaves a story that captures the maritime conflict as well as one in which women play a prominent role in saving our nation from itself."
In Medina, Tim will be in conversation with author Julie Berry, who owns Author's Note Bookstore. In Buffalo, he will be in conversation with author Matt Higgins, cofounder of Buffalo, Books & Beer, the barroom reading series. (The Place is a perfect place for Tim, as it was John Hummer's favorite hangout when he played for the Buffalo Braves – and Tim and brother Chris Wendel wrote the definitive history of that doomed franchise, "Buffalo: Home of the Braves.")
At the first stop on Tim's book tour, in Charlottesville, Tim was in conversation with Carol Stevens, a former managing editor for news at USA Today and metro columnist for the Courier-Express. Oh, and also my wife of almost 42 years.
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Author Tim Wendel and Carol Stevens, formerly of the Courier-Express and USA Today.
Carol and Tim have been friends since they met at Syracuse University in the mid-1970s. Tim and I met when he interned at the Courier in the summer before his senior year. That makes Tim the only person on the planet who knew Carol and me before we knew each other.
"As Mother once told me," Rory Chase says in the book, "life comes down to the company you keep."