Copper in the Hills

THE BLUE CHIP (307 pp.)--Ysabel Rennie--Harper ($3.50).

Jim Packer was a good mining engineer with a speculator's itch. He had an unshakable belief in America, in progress, and in his own good luck. Like most people in Arizona of the '80s, he dreamed of striking it rich. His son Tommy heard him say that he would "rather not live at all than live a failure." But he never really expected to fail, and his dream came real when a crusty old prospector partner led him to one of the richest copper strikes in Arizona. With the Blue Chip mine making him richer every day, Packer began talking to his wife about New York dressmakers and Tiffany jewels. What he could not foresee, as he watched the town of Jericho mushroom, was the kind of overpowering disaster that can turn even blue chips into crushing liabilities.

The Blue Chip is not so much a novel as a fictional memoir warmly evocative of another time. Author Rennie's granddad was a great plunger in Colorado silver; his bankruptcy in the panic of 1893 was "fabulous." Her dad, like Jim Packer, was a speculator in Arizona copper. Young Tommy Packer, who tells the story of his father's faith and failure, does it with a mixture of sympathy, skepticism and faith as authentic as it is engaging.

Author Rennie gets her Arizona landscape down effectively with a commendable minimum of adjectives; even that tired old setting for fiction, the boom town, is done with simple freshness. The Blue Chip ends neither happily nor unhappily, but inevitably. When a financial depression and uncontrollable underground water combine to ruin the mine, Jim Packer has to take a job in another town. But with the family packed and waiting to go, he saddles a horse and packs another for a trip into the hills to follow a hunch about an old, deserted gold mine. His parting words: "Goodbye, boys. Take care of your mother."

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