Blending Fantasy with Fact

By Michael Demarest

Tracking Lincoln's murderer, Edward's jewels and other prey

Historical thrillers are the meatiest of all mysteries. They are connected to reality like funny bone to shoulder bone, insidiously subverting the official versions of history. Gore Vidal's Burr, for instance, and--more inventively--Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Per-Cent Solution plausibly :combine wit, suspense, speculation and scholarship. Novels like these not only induce insomnia but are also hallucinogenic, tingeing with fantasy the reader's remembrance of known fact.

For example: since Lincoln's assassination 115 years ago, scores of books have been written about the conspiracy and the characters surrounding it. None has dispelled the legend that the man who was tried and hanged for the crime, Actor John Wilkes Booth, was not the real murderer. The Cosgrove Report by G.J.A. O'Toole (Rawson, Wade; 424 pages; $12.95), though fictional, makes the strongest case yet that Booth escaped. This is not an easy task: the actor had one of the most familiar faces of his day. And yet...

The novel purports to be "the Private Inquiry of a Pinkerton Detective into the Death of President Lincoln," as edited and verified in recent years by another private investigator, Michael Croft, Colonel, U.S. Army (ret.). The Pinkerton man, a Jules Vernian character named Nicholas Cosgrove, has been retained by

Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to investigate rumors of Booth's survival, three years after the murder. The Pink soon finds that the coffin in which J.W. Booth has been interred is empty. He also finds that Washington City, as it was then called, is a nest of intrigue and calumny. Even the greatest names are not free of suspicion. Cosgrove, posing as a salesman of a potent potion called Hostetter Bitters, works out of a safe house on K Street.

President Andrew Johnson, who had been Lincoln's Veep, is scurrilously rumored to have been privy to the conspiracy--and is facing impeachment over his "soft" policy toward the defeated South. Secretary Stanton is widely believed to have been implicated in the murder. So is General Ulysses S. Grant, by now a leading contender for the Republican nomination for the presidency. Politics aside, there are strong inducements for those involved to claim that the real Booth had been run to ground: not least, the $50,000 War Department reward for his capture. It is up to Cosgrove, largely on his own, to trace the actual circumstances of Lincoln's assassination, Booth's escape and supposed death after a twelve-day hunt, and the mysterious burial. The Pinkerton man, a former Union spy, leaves no headstone unturned tracking the actor, a onetime Confederate agent. It is a harrowing assignment, leading him to prod such sacred cows as Robber Baron Jay Gould and General Lafayette C. Baker, Lincoln's spymaster. By carriage, train, boat and balloon, Cosgrove stumbles on one denouement after another --though the last and most dramatic is supplied by Colonel Croft.

Novelist George O'Toole, a former CIA official and author of An Agent on the Other Side, follows sleuth and Booth with verve, humor and impressive scholarship. As he points out, "In the century that has passed since one of the most important single events in American history, not a single book written about it, traditionalist or revisionist, can be relied upon to be accurate, even as to details that should not be controversial, and which don't seem to have any sinister meaning." For lovers of the Learned Footnote, this may be one of the most edifying thrillers in years.

Even closer to history, and almost as footnoteworthy, is Robert Perrin's Jewels (Stein & Day; 269 pages; $9.95), a recreation of one of the century's greatest unsolved heists. To the vast displeasure of King Edward VII, to whom they belonged, the so-called Irish Crown Jewels vanished in 1907 from a safe in Dublin Castle, never to be recovered. The crowning insult was that the investigation threatened to embrangle Edward's brother-in-law, the playboy Duke of Argyll, in a homosexual scandal. As a result, the friends of Edward VII "perpetrated a cover-up that makes the Watergate Affair appear the work of backward children."

The plot, as Scotland Yard quickly discovered, was devised by a pair of dashing rascals who had first met during the Boer War. Captain Richard Howard Gorges, a raffish cavalry hero, was drummed out of his regiment for consorting with a Malay boy, and later joined the Royal Irish Regiment. His partner was Frank Shackleton, younger brother of Sir Ernest, the South Pole explorer; Frank tried desperately to float a get-rich scheme in Mexico. Shackleton also held an honorary post in Dublin Castle, where he became a protege of Sir Arthur Vicars, fuss-budget guardian of the Hibernian sparklers. Between all-male orgies in the castle and AC-DC frolics at the maison of one Daisy Newman, the cash-strapped Englishmen cooked up a seemingly impossible scheme to spirit the gems to the Continent. There they were disassembled and recut. Another footnote: some of the stones could have been unwittingly reacquired by the royal family. Queen Elizabeth often wears a magnificent brooch containing at least a dozen white Brazilian diamonds that might once have belonged to her great-grandpa.

According to Author Perrin, a BBC journalist, only two minor characters in the book are fictional. His narrative, covering a 21-year span, captures the period with irony, authority and zest. Save for the delicious Daisy Newman, who used her loot to settle into suburban domesticity, virtually everyone who was directly or indirectly involved in the Edwardian caper came to a sad end, despite a noble battle by Sir Arthur Vicars to clear his name. Indeed, his cause became so famous that a relative of Vicars, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, offered at one point to join the fray. Alas, his offer was refused, and Sherlock Holmes moved on to lesser crimes.

In time and geography, Cope, Idaho, is about as far as you can get from Lincolnian Washington or Edwardian Ireland. But The Noble Enemy (Doubleday; 384 pages; $12.50), set in that no-horse town, is also about death, deceit, love and survival. Charles Fox's novel adds a haunting, imaginative denouement to a news story from the Rockies in the 1960s.

Cope is an ironic name for the town in which almost no one can. Certainly Rick Coulter, the callow, phenomenally endowed local lothario, cannot. Nor can the enraged husbands and parents of his inamoratas. Nor can the bumbling posse that sets out to find a feuding quartet --Coulter, his buddy Mike Arizo, a cuckolded husband and his companion --trapped in the snowbound Rockies. Friend and foe are united, bind each other's wounds, curse as would-be rescuers pass over and around, unaware of their piteous fires and cries. After 41 days in the mountains, only Coulter survives. He becomes an instant hero, on 60 Minutes, in LIFE and in the town. Gradually, the ole mountain boys begin to suspect what the reader already knows: the angry husband and his companion have been shot by Coulter. The engaging Mike Arizo has been left to die by the lecher. And the vigilantes begin to form. Wounded after a cruel snowmobile chase, Coulter has to face betrayal by the loving woman whose husband he killed. He manages to escape in a truck bound for California, where his talents may be more appreciated.

Fox, 39, an English-educated Californian, writes in a fashion reminiscent of Van Tilburg Clark. His passages about the Mountain West and its mores, unforgiving nature, the meanness of small-town men, the sagacity of an oldtime sheriff, the vulnerability of neglected women, are powerful and occasionally lyrical. Describing the half-dead survivors, he writes: "After a while, the thin sound of two men singing poorly came from a shadow thrown by the moon on a canted field of snow, a thin sound rising up into the mountains that jostled imperceptibly around them. They sang to obscure this awful scale of time; they sang to obscure their fear; they sang in defiance; they sang to be worthy of love; they sang until they could sing no more." The town's sole motel is called the Ho-Hum. It is a term that will never be applied to this memorable first novel.

--Michael Demarest

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.