Genre: GENRE
LGBTQ+ Category: IDENTITY
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
Lambda-Award winning author of the Boystown Mysteries,Marshall Thornton transports readers to early 20th-century Chicago, an era of developing queer subculture, a growing temperance movement and a legendary detective agency.
It’s 1913. Lewis Wait lives with his mother and hides behind scholarly texts, until his conservative middle-class life is thrust aside due to financial woes. Without his consent, Lewis’ widowed mother arranges an interview for him with his father’s last employer: the famous and unscrupulous Pinkerton Detective Agency. But his mother doesn’t stop there, she’s determined to find her son a wife among her fellow temperance ladies.
Intending to fail so he can return to his studies, Lewis instead discovers a natural talent for deduction. Will he embrace a life as a Pinkerton agent? Amid this, his mother’s latest romantic possibility has a few surprises of her own, offering a kind of life he has not considered, as he solves cases that begin to endanger his very life.
The Review
It’s 113 years ago in Chicago. In his first attempt at historical fiction, Marshall Thornton gets it right, and takes the reader on a time-travel adventure that is convincing and emotionally potent. It is a compelling, disquieting book, where details of the past come alive and draw us into the characters’ reality.
College graduate Lewis Wait has a game plan for his life, which is about to be upended by his meddling mother. Claiming financial troubles, Mrs. Wait has gotten Lewis a job interview with the Chicago office of the Pinkerton Detective Agency – the famous agents who both protected presidents (before the Secret Service) and helped break up pro-union strikes in Chicago. To Lewis’s dismay, he is hired right away. As he’s sent out on his first case – a possible insurance fraud – Lewis is determined to fail miserably, so he can go back to his previous plan.
The second bit of meddling is when Lewis’s mother targets a bold young woman, Edna Riggins, as a possible bride. Clearly, Lewis’s widowed mother suspects something about her son; something she can’t quite name. Getting a manly job like his long-dead father had and a girlfriend would help Mrs. Wait rest easier.
There is a slightly comic edge throughout the story, as Mrs. Wait’s attempts at controlling her son misfire in unexpected ways. At the same time, there’s a melancholy shadow present, as Lewis deals with his personal guilt over being the way he is, while also yearning for the freedom to live his own life. He’s a feckless young man, not entirely likeable; but we can see that this is because of a deeply-rooted unhappiness. In this way, Lewis reminds Thornton’s readers of Nick Nowak, the central figure in his long series of “Boys Town” books.
Mrs. Wait is a marvelous study in contrasts. Left alone with a toddler by the death of her husband and son from a flu epidemic, she embodies the idea of a woman seeking to empower herself in a world where she still can’t vote. But the woman fighting for suffrage is also a leader in the temperance movement (which, in just a few years, will result in Prohibition). Like so many characters in Thornton’s writing, she can’t be dismissed.
1913 Chicago is the star of the book, and its stark contrasts fill the reader’s imagination. From the massive, bloody stockyards that drive the city’s economy, to the sprawling Art Institute, where modern art is displayed; from the grim slums of Packingtown, to the new luxury high-rises of Lakeshore Drive, the story is wrapped in a dense, vivid reality.
All through this book I was captivated and fascinated – but also uncomfortable. Thornton surprised me at the end, which made me happy, but also made me hope that this is the start of a new series. By the end, Lewis has become someone I could admire and want to know better. I hate to think that this is all we’ll get.
Five stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
