JAMES DALTON – City of Shadows.

Forge; paperback reprint, May 2002. Hardcover 1st edition: Forge, 2000.

   Historical mysteries are all the rage, and this qualifies as such, I think, in both of the possible ways, but only just barely. The late 1960s and early 70s were not that long ago. The era is certainly within my lifetime, if not my children’s (in any sense that they knew what was going on). And the crime, or at least the major one, was the one called a “third-rate burglary,” at least by some at the time.

   Watergate, that is, and all of the incidentals surrounding that particularly tumultuous moment in the country’s history. Beginning before then, and continuing on, woven solidly into the background of this hefty novel, was Viet Nam and the anti-war protests; Kent State; the assassination of Martin Luther King; Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters; Richard Nixon; Henry Kissinger; Howard Hughes; JFK’s failed attempt to take out Fidel Castro; Spiro Agnew; the Saturday night massacre; Patty Hearst; and … I’ll leave some surprises.

   That’s the setting. Three main characters take up the rest of the space: DC police office John Quinn, and a bit of a loose cannon on the job; National Security Council aide and former Marine officer Nathan Holloway, whose loyalty is tested as never before; and Senate assistant Vaughn Conner, whose stint on the Watergate committee starts to open doors that certain other parties desperately need to keep closed.

   Their paths, painstakingly drawn, slowly converge. Quinn’s lover, a one-time call girl, and another young dead girl in the same line of work seem to be the key, the reason why these “certain other parties” have their interest aroused.

   The opening chapters are told in an onrushing, cinematic, hard-boiled style that’s very effective, but it seems to dissipate as the need to work with the facts on record, the events of the time, starts to take over. The plot is set into place in a long interconnected process that takes a while to develop, yet the story itself is accompanied with a sense of urgency that prevails for a while only to lose (surprisingly) a large chunk of its coherency and focus at the end.

   When it comes down to it, those were terribly dangerous days. No matter how the events of Watergate are embellished, with new theories or other fictional fabrications, these enhancements are still overpowered by the facts on record, as they’re known so far. Dalton (not his real name) gives it his best shot, and even though he may have hit on something here, I think he tries too hard, loses control, and comes up a notch or two short.

[UPDATE.] 10-04-08. I didn’t know this when I wrote the review, and I don’t believe it was common knowledge at the time, or I’d have mentioned in the review. But “James Dalton” turns out to have been James Grady, whose career began in spectacular fashion with Six Days of the Condor in 1974 and Shadow of the Condor in 1975.

   This seems to be the only book he wrote under this pen name. I’ve found nothing that would suggest otherwise.