Patrick Gallagher #1
This book has a ticking clock hanging over it even without any of the machinations of the plot – it’s set aboard the Lusitania on its final voyage. As each chapter is set to a day, you can watch, as a reader, the time ticking down to May 7, 1915, the day of the disaster. While there’s a mystery to be solved, the almost larger one is which of the characters encountered in the story will be alive by the end of the book. And this is a very well conceived mystery.
Many, many books are set during WWII, far fewer are set during WWI. This one takes place at a point when the U.S. has not yet entered the war (the sinking of the Lusitania, of course, will prompt this), but the characters in the novel are still possessed by the war and it hangs over everything. Shipboard mysteries are traditionally a time away from the happenings of the outside world, but in this book many of the characters are connected to the war in some form or fashion.
It is traditional in that the mystery concerns the characters in first class, but to be fair, the Lusitania had third class blocked off for cargo. The central character, Patrick Gallagher, is with British intelligence in some way (never fully revealed). The initial scene, at the fist dinner on ship, finds a group of ill matched and uncomfortable characters who seem wary and suspicious of one another.
When one of their number is found murdered the next day, the captain asks Gallagher to look into it, and his investigation begins to reveal the back stories of the characters at the dinner table. In truly classic fashion, they are the suspect pool. The Lusitania carried over a thousand passengers on its final voyage, but our concern is the eight or so at the first dinner, and that’s really plenty for a writer to take on.
There’s a retired chorus girl; there’s an arms manufacturer slash efficiency expert; there’s a Spanish couple emigrating back from Mexico to their native Spain; there’s the drunk charlatan that Gallagher is escorting back into the arms of British intelligence; there are other mysterious folks who may or may not have German connections. Everyone could be a spy. This is a pretty classic set up, told in a classic manner, and the murder itself is an actual locked room mystery.
Imposing this classic format onto an oncoming disaster gives it a tension and suspense that I think the book would have lacked otherwise. I wasn’t, to be frank, as interested in the mystery as I was in the actual ship, how it operated, what it was carrying, and the ultimate details of the sinking of the ship. Was the Lusitania a sacrificial lamb offered up to get the U.S. into the war? It’s pretty clear what the author’s opinion is, and it’s certainly supported by history.
This is a traditional mystery told in a classic fashion with a banger of a disaster at the end. Like the best of all armchair travel, the reader learns something as they read. — Robin Agnew