The Adventure of the Irish Terrorists

Would Osama bin Laden still be on the loose if Sherlock Holmes were on the case?

The answer might be obvious (of course he wouldn’t) and the question might be wildly fantastic and unhelpfully simplistic, but such is the nature of Will Thomas’s mildly entertaining detective novel “To Kingdom Come.”

“Kingdom” is Thomas’ second novel, and, as in his debut, “Some Danger Involved,” it features the crime-fighting duo of Victorian “private enquiry agent” Cyrus Barker and his young assistant, Thomas Llewelyn. Barker is a sort of Sherlock Holmes on steroids: in addition to possessing a strange omniscience, he is in peak physical condition and can defeat even the most formidable of adversaries in hand-to-hand combat (or, as is inexplicably the case here, stick fighting). He is also a botanist with an Edenic garden, a man with connections of every sort in several nations, and the inventor of a bulletproof lead coat—in 1884. He is never required to outrun a speeding bullet or stop the passage of time, but it wouldn’t exactly come as a surprise if he could. (At least Holmes had a drug problem to humanize him).

In addition to pumping up the detective figure, Thomas’ main innovation is combining the classical detective fiction of Conan Doyle with the hardboiled works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The two subgenres meet in Llewelyn, the only character with any sort of depth, who narrates his boss’s exploits à la Watson while participating in them with the laconic wit of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade.

In “Kingdom,” Thomas unleashes this team on the urgent subject of terrorism. It is May 30, 1884, and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), a terrorist organization working to liberate the Emerald Isle from British rule, has just detonated a bomb at Scotland Yard. Barker and Llewelyn immediately offer their services to the government and infiltrate a secretive IRB faction, posing as a German bomb maker and his assistant. They must work to earn the group’s trust while preparing to stop its ultimate plan to bring London to its knees—without concern for innocent life and perhaps more for personal than national gain, of course. Llewelyn, for his part, must also fight against his desire for Maire O’Casey, the femme fatale sister of one radical.

At the most basic level, “Kingdom” is only a partial success. The writing is at times clumsy, and almost every character seems cut out of cardboard (something especially evident when a burly Scotland Yard cop hilariously bullies Barker with the prospect of preventing him from teaching his “precious physical training classes” and when the criminal mastermind maniacally blathers like the worst sort of Bond villain). Still, Thomas maintains a brisk pace, and the read is quick and often fun.

Beyond that, however, the novel falls completely flat. Any contemporary work that features terrorism is bound to have political implications, but those in “Kingdom” are so thinly veiled as to be laughable.

“Patriotism aside, I fail to see what you hope to gain,” the British Spymaster tells Barker of his mission.

“As far as I am concerned,” Barker later says, doing his best Rambo impression, “it became my affair when they injured innocent London citizens and damaged public buildings.”

In case any reader flirts with becoming a terrorist sympathizer, Thomas is sure to reduce a complex political situation to a black-and-white equation any child can understand: terrorists are bad, others are good.

One Irishman “could have played Mephistopheles” while another has “a devilish appearance.”

“They would ally themselves to Satan if it meant they could have their own country,” Llewelyn observes.

Whether or not the Oklahoma-based Thomas voted for President George W. Bush, he has effectively written the wet dream of all those who did. The adolescent fantasy of a lone ranger detective single-handedly thwarting the plot of terrorists has alarming implications for unilateral American militarism (though one must wonder if Thomas sees the humor in having his duo defend an imperialist monarchy).

Even the president’s conservative Protestant religiosity finds its way into the novel—Barker freely quotes Scripture, complete with chapter and verse citations—and, indeed, an emphatic and annoying self-righteousness underlies Thomas’ political posturing.

“While many pastors across London were no doubt calling for peace after the recent bombing, Barker’s pastor warned us of false peace-makers and assured us that there would be no peace in the world until the Lord’s return,” Llewelyn says.

Ultimately, that is the backbone of Thomas’ book, which feels more like an action novel than a calculated mystery and fittingly ends with a fight and a chase: a self-assured reinforcement of the most extreme beliefs of our President and a willful ignorance of any nuance or complexity in what is probably the most important issue facing our nation.

Unfortunately, this is far too simplistic: Osama bin Laden is still on the loose, and there is no omnipotent detective to bring him in. Though “Kingdom” can entertain at times, it completely misses the mark.

—Reviewer Patrick R. Chesnut can be reached at pchesnut@fas.harvard.edu.

To Kingdom Come
By Will Thomas
Touchstone
Out Now