Following Enquiry Agents

I had planned to do this yesterday, but things cropped up, and there wasn't time. So today then. I've finished a trio of books by author Will Thomas, focusing on a pair by the names Cyrus Barker and Thomas Llewelyn. Barker is a private detective, but prefers the term "enquiry agent". In fact, he insists on that title whenever anyone refers to him as a detective. Llewelyn is hired as his assistant early in the first title, Some Danger Involved, and follows Barker through the next two books, To Kingdom Come and The Limehouse Text. Each book is told from Llewelyn's perspective, allowing for period specific facts and locales to be explained under the auspice that Thomas doesn't know anything about them, and needs things frequently explained to him.

The three novels are set within a year of each other, in the late 1800s, and Thomas takes advantage of that in his choice of cases for Barker and Llewelyn to deal with. The first book starts with the crucifixtion of a young Jewish man, working off the anti-Semitism that was apparently prevalent in England as thousands of Jews fled Eastern Europe for the British Isles. To Kingdom Come revolves around radical Irish separatists planning to bomb important establishments in London, and The Limehouse Text is at least tangentially related to tensions between the Europe and China, both in terms of racism towards Chinese immigrants, ad in Chinese resentment of European (and American) imperialism. Those are usually just starting points, as the actual reasons behind the crimes are frequently more mundane.

Barker's an interesting fellow, a Scotsman who lived in China during his fromative years. This lends him a different style than most of the English he interacts with, one not given to overly dramatic displays of emotion. Rather, Barker is a lot like a large boulder in your path. He sits there, and changes little, but there's no doubting that he's a formidable obstacle. The insistence of describing him as an enquiry agent is probably an expression of that intractability. Llewelyn is another matter entirely. For someone who starts Some Danger Involved contemplating throwing himself into the Thames, he seems awfully impatient. You'd think he might be more accepting of things as they come, but there's an air of desperation around him, perhaps related to his beginnings as the child of a Welsh coal miner, a gifted child who actually went to Oxford, and has been under extreme pressure. The impatience could be a holdover from those days when he was constantly working or studying. It may also express itself in his tendency to fall for the first pretty face he sees, usually with less than stellar results.

What's important about the books, I think, is that Llewelyn actually shows improvement in his skills over the course of the books. It's incremental, but he's only had a year, and given the wide array of people and cultures an enquiry agent in the East End of London would encounter, and therefore must familiarize themselves with, it's fairly understandable. Still, Thomas shows an improvement in his fighting skills, as result of Barker's training, and in his ability to consider suspects, though he struggles with determining who is guilty. He also acts more autonomously through the books. Initially simply following Barker around, Thomas begins running errands and talking with witnesses on his own (in accordance with Barker's directives), and eventually begins to do some investigating of his own, without Barker's knowledge. This isn't always the best idea, as Thomas sometimes fails to really consider what he's doing, and his tendency to charge in can cause difficulties for his employer.

Each book is a mystery, nothing to severely difficult, and for the most part, the clues are there for the attentive reader, which is only partially me. When the killer is named, I'm usually recalling some seemingly throwaway line from earlier in the book and groaning as I realize that was a clue that I missed. However, there's also a bit of guesswork, and usually the guilty party has to be tricked into distinguishing themselves from the last few suspects. The books are quick and easy reads, and I was easily engaged by them. One thing I might suggest is to read the second book first, which I did because my father couldn't find the first one at that time. The advanatge is that it raises some questions about these characters, which you can then get the answers for in the first book. So it served as a little extra boost to my interest when I started Some Danger Involved.