A March to Remember: A Hattie Davish Mystery
Anna Loan-Wilsey highlights a little-known episode in our country’s history, the first poor people’s march on Washington, D.C., in this, the fifth and most recent volume of her Hattie Davish mystery series.
The greatest crime recounted in this murder mystery set in the late 19th century is the suppression of the ideas of Jacob Coxey. Coxey was a real person, a visionary who marched from Ohio to Washington in 1894 with a colorful “army” of the unemployed and the idealistic. He sought to petition Congress to end the worst depression the country had known up to that time by building infrastructure. His ideas anticipated the New Deal by 40 years, yet he was thrown into jail for walking on the Capitol lawn. The robber barons and crooked politicians found that intimidation and imprisonment weren’t enough to silence Coxey; ridicule from the newspapers, however, turned Coxey’s crusade into a joke. To this day, the term, “Coxey’s army” is synonymous with “screw-up.”
Just as the vanguard of Coxey’s Army arrives in Washington, secretary/sleuth Hattie Davish witnesses an accident – or is it a murder? The bodies pile higher and Hattie’s investigations lead her to a plot that involves the highest levels of government.
With its themes of economic inequality and political corruption, A March to Remember is very timely. It’s also a fun read, though the narrative moves at a distinctly 19th-century pace; the first murder doesn’t take place until chapter 7. The dialog is in the purple prose of dime-store novels. A few colorful period expressions would have added spice to the narrative; a glut is cloying. Luckily, the storyline is engaging, and the heroine is plucky enough to offset the occasionally leaden pacing and dialog.
