The poem narrates the life of a white Jamaican, Adam Cole, born sometime in the 1930s and so growing up during World War II, during which his uncle Johann, of German extraction, is interned in the same camp as future national leader Alexander Bustamante.
From this history a series of vignettes emerge, of profits turned, of a needless death on the operating table caused by a substandard generator, of extrajudicial killing by a special police squad, and of events in the life of a principal cocaine baron—Adam's sometime friend, Nathan.
Adam also hears the dying confession of a white middleman, Tony 'the Frog' Blake, who knows of Nathan's involvement, and so becomes an unacceptable threat to the cocaine trader—and as Blaka observes, "Blood / cheaper than drugs" (946-7).
Blaka is found murdered on Mount Diablo (a central Jamaican height), "stuffed in a handcart, head severed, torso turned / to the mountain, blank eyes staring down the valley [...] the word Judas, warning intaglio, / carved with a switchblade into the transom" (955-9); another body is floating in the harbour; and Adam himself is confronted at home, and after a brief struggle shot dead, by Nathan.
Formally, View from Mount Diablo uses a tragic (i.e. failed, abortive) Bildungsroman structure to support a state-of-the-nation novel; additional topoi and tropes concerning the drug trades and policing are drawn both from real Jamaican life and from popular cinematic and print fictions of crime.
In keeping, while Adam's childhood and racial identity are similar to Thompson's, his Oxford degree, profession of journalism, experience of familial tragedy, and murder in early middle-age progressively distance him from his creator.