About this item
Killer 'Cane takes place in the Florida Everglades, which was still a newly settled frontier in the 1920s. On the night of September 16, 1928, a hurricane swung up from Puerto Rico and collided, quite unexpectedly, with Palm Beach. The powerful winds from the storm burst a dike and sent a twenty-foot wall of water through three towns, killing over two thousand people, a third of the area's population. Robert Mykle shows how the residents of the Everglades had believed prematurely that they had tamed nature, how racial attitudes at the time compounded the disaster, and how in the aftermath the cleanup of rapidly decaying corpses was such a horrifying task that some workers went mad. Killer 'Cane is a vivid description of America's second-greatest natural disaster, coming between the financial disasters of the Florida real-estate bust and the onset of the Great Depression.
About the Author
BIO
I'm a Boston boy, born and bred in Beantown. As a child of the much maligned 60s, which I enjoyed very much thank-you, I played bass guitar and sang for a rock 'n' roll band while playing solo on the folk coffeehouse circuit.
After graduation from University of Massachusetts at Amherst, I headed for an extended tour of South America where I spelunked in Bolivia, fished in Patagonia, tromped through the jungles of the Amazon and Orinoco river basins and climbed the eighteen thousand foot Sierra Nevada de Cocuy in Colombia. During one of many jungle trips through the Amazon and Orinoco River basins, where I crossed paths with leftist guerillas who, fortunately, were too preoccupied to bother with a lost gringo.
I still travels extensively and each year, runs with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain as well as continuing my ecological interest in the Sierra de la Macarena. I am a former president of the Florida Writers Association and continue to lead the local Palm Beach County writing group.
I currently live in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.
Palm Beach Confidential, my new Palm Beach mystery, weaves an complex, twisted plot that plays out in a thrilling roller coaster climax.
"Mr Mykle has deftly slid Maxie Roberts as a hip and sightly subversive art dealer with a libido in overdrive into the Palm Beach sleuth niche vacated by Lawrence Sander's private detective, Archy McNally. Mr Mykle, is obvious no stranger to the ritzy and wealthy domain of Palm Beach as well as its guarded secrets and back allies."
Killer 'Cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928, my first non-fiction book, was the recipient of the Florida Historical Library Foundation, 2003 Carolynn Washbon Book Award and the Florida Writers' Association Royal Palm Literary Award for nonfiction, 2002.
