Epic adventure novel imagines life before 'The Great Gatsby'

"Gatsby’s Rival" by Richard Guimond is an epic adventure story that rivets the reader from page one, with a high-stakes plot and an ensemble cast of characters as iconic as the great Gatsby himself.

Set in the 1920s as a prequel to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal 1925 work "The Great Gatsby," Guimond’s novel juxtaposes socialite Jay Gatsby’s strategic efforts to amass a fortune from Rhode Island’s illicit liquor trade — so he can win over his true love Daisy Buchanan — with the scrappy determination of his salty rival Joe Bucolo, a fisherman-turned-rumrunner who considers that the “ten-mile waterway from Max’s Wharf to the Atlantic Ocean” and the liquor trade that fits so neatly within it belongs to him.

"Gatsby’s Rival" opens in early autumn 1922 in West Egg, Long Island, as Jay Gatsby sits at his desk in “a cheerful pink suit … with a forlorn expression and emptiness in his heart.” Daisy has not called as he’d hoped she would.

He recalls his dying grandfather’s prophetic words of six months earlier: “Your weakness for her will ruin you … she will never be yours … not in any real sense. She is no longer the girl of your youth.” Nonetheless, Daisy has remained Gatsby’s obsession. Within the pages of Gatsby’s Rival, readers are transported to Gatsby’s life before West Egg, before he was the great pretender known as The Great Gatsby.

Prohibition just became the law of the land in January 1920, and everyone believes it will last for a while. The rich still want to drink and the liquor needs to keep coming. Boats slip in from Canada, ready to meet the most enterprising of sailors, preferably in the middle of dirty weather and a dark night when, as hope would have it, those enforcing the law will stay home. So Gatsby parks his new rum boat — Diamond Daisy — in Oakland Beach...