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Tag Archives: Allen Dulles

Cold War Hallucinations: Night Watch

10 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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"no--and furthmore", 1956, Allen Dulles, book review, CIA, criminal investigation, David C. Taylor, government corruption, historical fiction, LSD, narrative tension, New York City, thriller, tropes

Review: Night Watch, by David C. Taylor
Severn, 2018. 290 pp. $29

At first glance, or even second or third, the crimes seem to lack any connection; after all, this is Manhattan, 1956, and anything can happen. A couple walking through Central Park come face-to-face with a man who threatens them, kill him, and walk away. A man throws himself out the window of the Hotel Astor, and his colleagues, almost shrugging, say he was depressed.

But Detective Michael Cassidy, who knows his native city and what its residents can do to one another, latches on to the details that don’t add up. He refuses to accept the anodyne explanations dished out by unreliable witnesses or the police bureaucracy, overworked and under political pressure from every point of the compass. Before long, the federal government casts its shadow over the investigations, doors close, and odd things happen.

What’s more, a sophisticated, relentless stalker leaves messages promising that he’ll kill Michael at a time and place of his choosing. Michael can’t figure out which criminal he’s put away who would try to take revenge like that.

Like Night Life and Night Work, the two previous thrillers featuring Michael Cassidy (and which bracket the current installment by a few years), this one offers similar pleasures. From the first lines, you have New York City, portrayed as few authors can, capturing the grit, energy, and quirks of an infinitely surprising metropolis. The story begins with horses waiting to pull tourists through Central Park in hansom cabs:

The horses harnessed to carriages at the curb on Columbus Circle huffed smoke from their nostrils as they stood heads down, their backs covered with plaid blankets, and waited for the night-time romantics who wanted to ride through the park bundled under lap robes in private darkness. The shrill wail of a police car siren rose in the west. The horses watched the car pass on 59th Street headed east toward Fifth Avenue, lights flashing. They dropped their heads again to eat hay strewn in the gutter by their drivers. They had been raised on concrete and were used to sirens. In a city of eight million there was always an emergency — someone trapped in an elevator, a restaurant kitchen fire, a domestic dispute, a liquor store stick-up, a body leaking blood across the sidewalk.

The narrative, chronometer-intricate, conveys the fits and starts of criminal investigation, with all the dead ends and improbabilities that Cassidy and his partner sense are built on lies, but against which they can do nothing, for want of evidence. Since Taylor shows you the bad guys at work, the reader knows more than our heroes do. Consequently, the tension derives not just from the “no — and furthermore,” many instances of which involve close combat, but the desire to see justice done — and the fear that the scoundrels will escape because the government protects them.

Unlike the previous two novels, the scoundrels here aren’t J. Edgar Hoover or the Mafia, but Allen Dulles, CIA director. The plot turns on the covert program, much written about in recent years, to test LSD as a “truth serum,” often without the subjects’ knowledge, in the name of national security.

Undated government photo of Allen Dulles (courtesy Prologue Magazine, spring 2002 (NARA, 306-PS-59-17740; via Wikimedia Commons)

Practically no one in the New York of 1956 has heard of this drug or what it can do, which adds to Michael’s difficulties solving the mystery, but the reader will understand, based on the hallucinations several characters suffer. The outrage that the government could inflict this, and with such righteous, cold-blooded cruelty, turns up the narrative heat. Nor is that all. The scientists behind the experiments include Nazi death-camp doctors recruited for their special knowledge about what abuses the human body can stand.

Accordingly, it’s all the more satisfying when Dulles tries to recruit Michael, who bluntly refuses, then, when prodded to admit that he dislikes Dulles, and why, puts it plainly: Michael can’t stand people who tip the table so that everything on it flows toward them. I’m going to remember that phrase.

I don’t believe all of the physical confrontations, at which Michael excels — a trope of the genre, to be sure, yet still implausible. Michael also rescues his beautiful girlfriend (trope number two), a newspaper reporter, though, to be fair, she rescues herself too and is hardly helpless. (Her clothes, especially high heels, cause trouble in the action scenes, a nice touch that underlines the gender straitjacket she struggles to wear as a journalist consigned to “women’s interest” stories.) Michael has a few convenient resources, like a brother who’s a political TV commentator and an aunt who’s a Washington, DC, powerbroker. Finally, despite the ever-present “no — and furthermore,” loose ends get tied up rather neatly.

But I can’t resist these novels — I’ve reviewed all three — and if you read them, maybe you’ll feel the same way.

Disclaimer: I obtained by reading copy of this book from the public library.

Less Is More: The Wilson Deception

22 Thursday Oct 2015

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1919, Allen Dulles, David O. Stewart, diplomacy, Georges Clemenceau, historical fiction, implausible plot, Lawrence of Arabia, Paris Peace Conference, Robert Lansing, thriller, twentieth century, Woodrow Wilson

Review: The Wilson Deception, by David O. Stewart
Kensington, 2015. 266 pp. $25

As I mentioned in my review of Robert Goddard’s novel, The Ways of the World (August 30), I’ve always wanted to read a first-rate thriller about the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. So when The Wilson Deception crossed my path, I grabbed it.

That bad news is that this book isn’t what I’m looking for. Melodrama afflicts The Wilson Deception with a high fever, which, in its delirium, spawns a very far-fetched plot, full of talking heads of state repeating commonplace information, and whose French is sometimes less than grammatical. Even the novel’s protagonist, Major James Fraser, an army doctor, feels like a cardboard cutout who’ll topple in the slightest breeze off the Seine. Tending horribly wounded men has left its mark, but the narrative says so more than it shows him feeling it. He’s estranged from his wife and adult daughter, but that too feels handed out rather than enacted, and when the women arrive in Paris, the chance for reconciliation unfolds with little process. It’s not earned.

However, the good news is that the talking heads include the likes of Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, and David Lloyd George, with Lawrence of Arabia trying unsuccessfully to lobby them. As a historian of that era, I’m a sucker for Clemenceau in particular, and Stewart has a good time letting the French premier unleash his witticisms. For instance, when a would-be assassin wounds him, he tells American visitors to his sickroom:

Yes, it was a shameful episode. A Frenchman stands not ten feet from me and fires seven times. Yet he hits me only once. Who will respect French marksmanship? Our honor is forever stained. It will cause men in Berlin to think about invading France again. . . . Of course, men in Berlin need very little encouragement to think such thoughts.

Stewart also tries to turn Robert Lansing from a footnote into a person, and I like that too, or at least the attempt. Lansing became secretary of state in 1915 when William Jennings Bryan resigned, and he should have been the chief negotiator in Paris. But Wilson, who had never let Lansing do his job–the president even typed his own diplomatic notes–wasn’t about to unchain him now, given Wilson’s oversized ego and the chance to act on the world stage. The novel captures Lansing’s frustration at being pushed aside, which gives the supposedly dry-as-dust lawyer the chance to fire off his own bons mots: “Wilson’s had such a charmed political life that he’s afflicted with the optimism of the consistently fortunate.”

Robert Lansing, Wilson's second secretary of state (Courtesy Library of Congress).

Robert Lansing, Wilson’s second secretary of state (Courtesy Library of Congress).

However, the author hasn’t decided where the story lies. Lansing offers possibilities, but he’s there only because of his nephews, Allen and John Foster Dulles (whose relationship to Lansing was news to me, and piqued my historian’s interest). Since Allen would later direct the CIA, for which he seems to have been practicing, he serves Stewart’s purpose, in a way. But dragging him in requires a connection to the negotiations, which covers acres of ground, the promontory of which seems to be Lawrence’s attempts to create an Arab state in the Middle East. Linking these pieces would be a stretch in any narrative, but that’s only half the trouble.

Remember Fraser, the army-doctor protagonist? He, as an influenza expert, is called in to examine Wilson and winds up trying to clear a young African-American soldier from a trumped-up charge of desertion. So there’s yet another complication or three. The friendship between Fraser and the soldier’s father, who shows up in Paris for a conference on race, is never explained and seems unlikely, though it does lend a counterpoint to Wilson’s bigotry, on full display here.

Consequently, The Wilson Deception fights itself, with too many threads tugging the reader’s attention. I’ve always thought the conference provides plenty of drama, with even minor figures looming larger than life, as with Lawrence. If they’re the story, why shoehorn in a separate, unbelievable plot? Or, if Fraser really is the story, put the leaders in the background, just within the periphery, and devote full attention to the medical man and the young soldier he’s trying to protect.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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