Some of the best Gulf Coast fiction comes from people who know the water. W.J. Speed — Woody Speed to everyone at O’Zone Pizza Pub in Pensacola’s East Hill, where he has tended bar for two decades — has spent his career enforcing coastal environmental rules for the City of Orange Beach. His first novel, The Lost Republic, pours that experience into a coastal crime story about what happens when development and greed collide with a stretch of coastline worth protecting.
A Bartender With a Manuscript
Speed’s path to fiction ran through some of the most storied water on the Gulf Coast. He grew up in Columbia, Tennessee, about 40 miles south of Nashville, and left at 19 for a community college program in Key West in 2000 — officially marine biology, practically an excuse to reach the Keys. Writing classes during that first year hooked him. “School was an excuse to move to the Keys,” he says. He worked as a lifeguard and bartender while studying, then moved to Northern California to study conservation at Humboldt State before transferring back to Florida.
He graduated from the University of West Florida in 2006 with a degree in environmental studies, then worked as a biological scientist in Blackwater River State Forest and later at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. “I really cut my teeth on environmental regulation there,” he says. Six years as Orange Beach’s coastal regulatory manager — responsible for compliance with local, state and federal development regulations — put him at the center of the development-versus-coastline fights that animate his fiction. He also represents the city on the board of the Pensacola and Perdido Bays Estuary Program, the RESTORE-funded body covering Escambia, Santa Rosa and Okaloosa counties and Orange Beach in Baldwin County.
The Plot on Lost Key
The Lost Republic follows Ace Gonzales, a fictional local environmental advocate who runs into nefarious characters plotting a high-rise condominium development that would destroy a beautiful stretch of coastline on Lost Key. When Ace’s life is threatened, the sinister plot deepens, pulling him into criminal territory that readers of coastal crime fiction will find familiar. Speed wrote the book as a tribute to James Lee Burke’s Dave Robicheaux series and John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee — the two towering influences on Gulf Coast crime fiction.
The comparison to John Grisham’s early novels — legal and environmental thrillers set in real Gulf Coast towns where the criminal activity reads like the local news — is the natural one. Like those books, The Lost Republic gains its power from geography: readers who grew up on this coast will recognize the places and haunts scattered through the pages, names changed to protect the innocent. Speed also trains with an organization that rescues people from human trafficking and forced servitude, and he says the novel’s darker corners — crimes that operate in the shadows along the coast — will teach readers things happening that they likely don’t know about.
Fiction With a Family Legacy
Speed edited and self-published the book himself, and says it carries on his father’s legacy; his father ran a restaurant and bar in Tennessee, where Speed grew up around the hospitality business. When the first box of printed books arrived at his home, he describes it as an emotional moment. His wife Emily, a forensic scientist who spent more than a decade with the local Medical Examiner’s office and now hosts a true-crime podcast, supplied an authentic read on the procedural details. They live at Innerarity Point with two young sons.
Readers who enjoyed John Grisham’s Gulf Coast settings or Burke’s Louisiana novels will find familiar pleasures here: strong sense of place, an environmental conscience, and a protagonist who takes the threats personally. Speed plans at least two more Ace Gonzales novels.
The Lost Republic is available on Amazon and is headed to local independent bookstores. For a fun — if occasionally dark — beach read with real Gulf Coast teeth, it’s hard to put down.