FADED COAT OF BLUE
By Owen Parry
Avon, 338 pages, $23
ANGEL TRUMPET
By Ann McMillan
Viking, 205 pages, $22.95
As we plummet toward the millennium, the Civil War still eats at our public and private hearts–a national obsession that has produced such fine novels as “The Killer Angels” and “The Black Flower.” Mysteries set in that era have also been impressive: Miriam Grace Monfredo’s bracing books about an upstate New York librarian (“Must the Maiden Die” was reviewed here recently); “The Lucifer Contract,” part of the wonderful early New York City “Dutchman” series by Maan Meyers; Donald Honig’s two robust and thoughtful books (“The Sword of General Englund” and “The Ghost of Major Pryor”) set in the Montana territories just after the war; a vivid five-part series by James D. Brewer (“No Bottom,” “No Escape,” “No Justice,” “No Remorse” and “No Virtue”) about an ex-Confederate cavalryman, an ex-Union gunboat captain and a prostitute that should be immediately reissued in paperback; and Kirk Mitchell’s memorable “Shadow on the Valley,” about a one-armed Union Army doctor asked by Gen. Philip Sheridan to investigate the killing of an Amish farmer during the Shenandoah campaign are all prime examples.
Now come two more impeccably researched and energetically written Civil War mysteries to add to that list–the start of one promising new series and the continuation of another. Both are set in autumn 1861, when hope on both sides still burned brightly, and both are as much about the shattering of that hope as they are about the murders they contain.
At 33, Capt. Abel Jones, the somewhat dour, pragmatic and thoroughly believable hero of “Faded Coat of Blue,” Owen Parry’s exciting, heartbreaking debut novel, has apparently already fought all his battles–first for the British Army in India and then at Bull Run, after he left his childhood Welsh sweetheart, Mary Myfanwy, and their baby son in their Pennsylvania coal-mining hometown of Pottsville and took command of some raw volunteers because he knew they’d be slaughtered without expert instruction. Badly wounded in the leg, he works for the War Department in Washington, trying to keep the Union Army supplied with trousers and arms while hordes of corrupt businessmen conspire otherwise. When Capt. Anthony Fowler, a highborn Union officer of great beauty and liberal promise, is discovered shot to death in a camp near Rebel lines, Jones–through a series of tenuous and eventually suspect connections–is called upon by the new Union Army head, Gen. George McClellan, to quietly investigate.
Jones eliminates Rebel snipers from the picture when a cynical doctor informs him that Fowler was killed with a pistol and his body moved from somewhere else, and then quickly zeroes in on Philadelphia industrialist Matthew Cawber. This richly detailed villain had reasons for wanting Fowler dead: a romantic link with Cawber’s beautiful wife, and an investigation by Fowler into some exploding cannons supplied by Cawber. Also on the list of suspects are some of Fowler’s fellow officers from the same Philadelphia social circle, not all of whom shared the murdered man’s strong abolitionist stand.
The scope of Jones’ investigation lets Parry bring to life Washington (“Now I am an old bayonet and a veteran of John Company’s fusses, and my nose has not been stuffed with violets from the cradle up. But I tell you I have never smelled a great stink like that of Washington in the summer.”), Philadelphia (“There was a prosperity in the city, and I marked one building of eight stories, but the greatest surprise to me came from the number of Negroes shuffling about the streets with an aimlessness that said, `No work.’ It was an odd business, for this was the North and a free place for all, yet here the African seemed a superfluous man. In Washington, he was a busy fellow, though hardly free.”), and no less than a dozen memorable characters. His McClellan looks and sounds especially right, based (as Parry notes in an epilogue) on the general’s own papers, “with their misapprehensions and stunning vanity.” A brief but pivotal appearance by detective Allan Pinkerton didn’t seem accurate in terms of dress or demeanor to my in-house Pinkerton expert, and others might find his Lincoln a tad too prosaic. But Jones, his shrewdly supportive wife and his motley crew of colleagues (that dyspeptic but dedicated doctor, another former soldier turned con man, a radical landlady, a long-winded telegrapher) are like remembered figures from old family photographs, brilliantly reanimated to help us understand the worst hurt of our own history.
Perhaps because of “Gone With the Wind” and its images of swirling ball gowns and fainting females, Ann McMillan’s two books (“Dead March” and now “Angel Trumpet”) about Narcissa Powers, a young widow of Richmond, Va., at first seem more romantic and less realistic than “Faded Coat of Blue.” But don’t be deceived: There’s plenty of true grit here, as Powers and her friend Judah Daniel–a free black woman working as a herbalist–look into what appears to be a slave uprising on a Virginia plantation.
The “angel trumpet” of the title is both another name for the jimson weed used to drug a group of servants before the massacre of the white family who owned them and the heavenly call expected to be heard summoning slaves to a final battle for freedom. Although her late husband was an ardent foe of slavery and probably would have fought for the North if he had lived, Powers–who spends her days nursing the terrible wounds of Confederate soldiers–can’t bring herself to speak out against it. “Slavery may be immoral, as you believe,” she tells her sister-in-law, “but we are fighting now for our country. If we are not for our own country, we are traitors. If we lose this war, crowded hospitals will give place to crowded prisons–and scaffolds!”
Daniel is equally conflicted: She conspires with Powers, a white doctor and a British journalist to help solve the murders, but she also finds herself being drawn into the circle of a powerful and charismatic rebel slave called King. Although only a few hundred miles of actual geography separate Parry’s Washington and McMillan’s Richmond, they are worlds apart in terms of ideas and aspirations. Taken together, these two excellent mysteries show us why the Civil War was inevitable–and why we’ll still be thinking about it in 2099.
