The Devil's Company

I borrowed two books from my dad on my last visit. One was Cry Havoc, the other was David Liss' The Devil's Company.

The Devil's Company is (I believe) Liss' third book starring one Benjamin Weaver, a noted London "thieftaker", which seems to roughly mean bounty hunter. Weaver is more than simply someone who pursues wanted criminals, he reminds me of Burn Notice's Michael Westin: You have a problem, you hire him, he takes care of it. In this case, Weaver finds himself set-up, given a job which is designed for him to fail and wind up in debt to one Jerome Cobb. As Cobb has also bought up the debts of Weaver's friends and family, he now effectively owns Weaver, and sets him on a task, stealing documents from the office of the East India Company. Which Weaver then returns to the Company almost immediately.

Things progress into a tightly woven set of deception and intrigue. Weaver is trying to extricate himself from Cobb's grasp, but in a quiet enough fashion to keep his friends from prison, while also trying to determine what the myriad secretive factions within the Company are up to. And what does it all have to do with the death of a man named Abaslom Pepper?

The book is set in 1722, so Liss does his best to use historically accurate phrasing and language, but in a way the reader can still follow wot the bleedin' 'ell the characters are saying (Note: I don't think anyone in the book actually says "Bleeding hell"). I didn't have much trouble following things, and on the occasions I wasn't familiar with a phrase (such as "molly house") Weaver (who is apparently telling this story to an audience several decades later) usually explains it.

There's an interview in the back of the book where Liss mentions that in his research, he was surprised how many modern corporate practices were already in play by the 1700s. The East India Company truly doesn't balk at much of anything to try and protect its trade. Whether the threat is Parliament, new inventions, rival business interests, they try and deal with all of them, mostly by methods of questionable legality. So what we see today is nothing new under the sun, really. The relationship between the Company and the government is one of those where both parties smile and shake hands, while they each conceal a dagger behind their backs. They'll work together as long as their interests coincide, and once they don't, Katie bar the door.

The other historical bit that was interesting is that Weaver himself is Hebrew, which means he has to deal with a lot of dirty looks and condescending talk. Actual violence based on his faith is rare. For better or worse, England was the best place in Europe for Jews in the 18th Century. There's a bit in there about what Weaver calls Tudescos, which from looking online, refers to Jews whose ancestors hail from Germanic regions (whereas Weaver's folks are from Portugal and Sephardi). I think the more common term is Askenazi, and Tudesco is more a specific term used in Portugal to refer to non-Portugese Jewish people. At the time, there wasn't much love between the two, and the Sephardi were dominant economically, so that made life difficult for the Tudescos in London.

This another one of those pieces of history I'd never heard of that intrigued me. The story doesn't detail what issues the Sephardi have with the Tudescos, only that they don't have anymore love for these Germanic folk than the Christians in England do. I don't know if it's a cultural rivalry issue, or that Sephardim are/were a tightly knit community, and so where the Askenazi/Tudescos, but the two don't really intermingle, and that produces hostility and awkwardness. It adds to the overall feel of the book, fleshing out the world Weaver inhabits. Plus, I'm not sure Weaver even knows why his family would look unfavorably upon the Tudescos, so it's another conflict where the sides may not even know why they're fighting, or who they're fighting.