Foggy Noir

Genre is a curious thing.

Fundamentally it's a contradiction, because readers of genre writing want the same thing but different. When it comes right down to it, genre is about variation within limit. The mystery reader wants to read something new but expects certain things; the science fiction reader - other things. The reader of romance or technothriller or western or domestic fiction - other things still. And then there are subgenres: the police procedural; the serial killer novel; cyberpunk; splatterpunk, and so on ... And then there's genre crossing and blending.

A Conspiracy of Paper is a hard-boiled detective story set in 18th Century London.

The book jacket wants to lead you to believe that "author David Liss has created an irresistibly appealing protagonist, one who parlays his knowledge of the emerging stock market into a new kind of detective work" but Liss is clearly working in Hammett or Chandler terrain. Weaver is an ex-boxer who takes work finding information, clearing up problems, etc ... and contrary to the marketing text on the book jacket, uses his fists as often as his wits in uncovering some questionable financial doings.

The novel is appealing in a number of ways. Liss is a doctoral candidate working on 18th Century fiction. Well versed in the era, he does a nice job capturing the atmosphere and characters of period London and he does it in a movie-set kind of way: it feels authentic without being overly Historical; it's full of detail and research but not in that slow, cataloged kind of way in which facts are there to testify to their own of true-ness, story be damned. The same is true of his use of historical figures like Jonathan Wild - the historical basis for Mack the Knife - and events like the South Seas Bubble.

Liss also creates some interesting characters. Based on the historical figure Daniel Mendoza, Weaver is not only an ex-boxer but also a Jew. It never gets in the way of Weaver's central story, but his depiction of the ethnic (and class) conflict Weaver must deal with help flesh out what might have been a more typical historical mystery. Weaver is a Jew but is basically estranged from the Jewish community; his boxing career was an intentional rejection of class aspirations, while at the same time it has made him is a celebrity.

Weaver is hired on a couple cases that wind up being much more intertwined than he expects. One of them involves an investigation into the accidental death of his father ... which of course turns out to be maybe not so accidental ... and ...

The solution to the mystery is not so surprising but the twists and turns that get you there are diverting enough. I wouldn't want to spoil it, so to reveal too much would defy genre convention, but I will complain briefly.

One of the current conventions of this genre (for now let's call it simply The Mystery Novel) is that of The Series. Although it is Liss' first novel, A Conspiracy of Paper is clearly the first entry in a series: it concludes with a chapter that sets up future novels in which Weaver and Elias - his physician/playwright sidekick - continue their exploits, wrangling with Jonathan Wild and other 18th Century baddies. Although I liked the book, enough to read another "Benjamin Weaver Mystery," which is how I'm sure these books will be touted, I was disappointed by Liss' apparent focus on what was coming up. I wish he had left me captivated, hoping for more instead of just defaulting to the convention of "The End?"

--Brad Katz