The Authentic William James
1913. Sebastian Becker, Special Investigator for the Chancery in Lunacy, is usually charged with investigating madmen of the British aristocracy (a group whose penchant for close marriages guarantees Becker’s job security). He’s puzzled when his latest assignment is William James—a decidedly un-aristocratic traveling Wild West showman accused of setting fire to a crowded Sussex theatre, resulting in dozens of deaths. Becker suspects he isn’t getting the whole story from his superiors or James, and the resulting investigation leads him on a transatlantic chase with stops in Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and even the burgeoning film industry of Los Angeles.
This is an interesting perspective on the Wild West sideshow and the mythos that inspired it. James and his coterie model themselves after Buffalo Bill Cody, but these “Wild West” cowboys are anything but—the James troupe is manifestly English. Gallagher uses the late Edwardian setting to ratchet up tension: he captures the uneasiness caused by technological flux and the social stratification of the period, with its vivid lines of demarcation. This mystery has at its core some fairly complicated interpersonal relationships: Becker and his sister-in-law, James and his daughter, that daughter and a morphine-addicted “authentic” American cowboy. Character development is as important as the plot, which is complex enough and resolved in a manner that will satisfy fans of well-written period mysteries.