A Conspiracy of Paper

Rating:
Summary: Detective Story in Uncommon Setting
Review: Having recently digested the excellent Coffee Trader by Mr. Liss, I was anxious to sink my teeth into another one of his, and did so with this one. It is a fine, entertaining novel, but the plot--a detective story basically--is a bit too conventional.

It takes place in early eighteenth-century London and like the Coffee Trader, the historical detail is excellent. You get London in all its muddy, dungy glory, as well as a bellyful of the obsolete, inhumane practices of the day. Jails were filthy and vicious and men and women were not separated. People were put in the stocks and tormented by passersby. Justice was doled out in a completely arbitrary way: those with the gelt were most likely to obtain it. Interestingly, there was no police force, per se, so law and order was doled out indiscriminately and often by criminal gangs. Pickpockets roamed during the day and thugs controlled the night. Tough stuff.

The hero of this tale is Benjamin Weaver, a former pugilist, who now makes his living as a detective, although he is never really referred to by that term. It is narrated by him in first person, and he is a very engaging fellow. A tough guy, he makes his living by finding debtors and other such undesirables for clients who want them found. The plot here begins with a task he is given to retrieve stolen papers for a wealthy client. At the same time, another client asks him to look into the deaths of both his father's and the client's father's deaths. The client has reason to believe that they were murdered, not killed accidentally, and also that these murders were related. As you might suspect, it gets pretty intricate, as our friend becomes enmeshed in a web of lies, truths, half-truths, disappearing witnesses and threats against his person. Some unseen force is desperately trying to stop him and some benevolent force seems to be helping him, and wouldn't you know, as he goes along, the highest forces in England seem to be involved. Yes, it's very engrossing, but if you've ever read a good detective novel, you'll recognize the pattern.

Nevertheless, it's a cut above the typical fare, in that the characters are lively and believable; the setting, as mentioned, is superb; and the prose style is filled with wit and quite elegant. Very enjoyable.


Rating:
Summary: Very Impressed With This First Effort.
Review: This is a very good book, and it's very well-written by an author who is making his first attempt. In the book we learn of Benjamin Weaver (a Jew who lives in 1719 England). Weaver was a fighter (or pugilist) before he became a private enquiry agent, and the skills that he learned in the ring, as well as what he picked up during his previous career as a house breaker, help him solve some difficult cases. In this book Weaver sets out to try to solve the crime of who killed his own father, and while doing so he is thrown into the arena with high financiers, robber barons and various other common thugs and whores. This book delves into the very early beginnings of stock brokering as well, and it's interesting to see how that whole business started. While covering all of this very handily, Mr. Liss also crafts an historical mystery that is both intelligent and suspenseful. There are a number of twists and turns in the plot that keep the reader guessing. I cannot wait to read more in this series because Weaver is a truly captivating protagonist written by an author with a very skillful hand indeed.

Rating:
Summary: dry writing but good story line
Review: This book has an extremely interesting plotline, albiet a bit dry in writing style. A good read if you like historical fiction.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating
Review: In a day when men still wore wigs and short breeches, Benjamin Weaver is a Jew and former boxer living in London who makes his living via outing thieves and garnering profit for himself. 28 years old, Weaver broke his leg in a boxing accident a few years previously and walks with a limp. A seemingly unimportant detail, but one which plays prominently in this tale of corruption and evil in early-18th-century England.

This intriguing story opens with a plea from a wealthy stock trader who is convinced that his father's death and the death of Weaver's father were no accidents, and who wants Weaver to investigate the case. It sounds pretty far-fetched to Weaver, but he reluctantly takes the case, promising to do his best.

Seemingly unrelated is a case in which a wealthy lord comes to Weaver asking him to recover a valuable pocketbook belonging to him. Descending among the dark underworld of prostitution and poverty, Weaver recovers the pocketbook from a whore named Kate Cole, murdering her pimp in the process. Weaver tells her to be quiet, and Kate goes to Newgate prison.

The book is written from the viewpoint of Weaver as an older man; he often goes into flashbacks into his past as a boxer and the beginning of his current career.

In all this is an excellent historical book which should not be overlooked.

Rating:
Summary: Fascinating and engaging
Review: I'm in the middle of A Conspiracy of Paper right now, having started with Liss' other historical novel The Coffee Trader. I love both of them! They're interesting in several ways:

+ Their depiction of the status of Jews in 17th century England (Conspiracy of Paper) and in Amsterdam after their expulsiopn from Spain, the insider/outsider identity and the politics within the marginalized Jewish community.

+ Their depiction of the beginnings of economic institutions that today we take for granted -- the commodities markets, or the stock exchange.

+ They're plain good mystery/thrillers! They have kept me guessing about what was going on, and the main characters are depicted with subtlety and believable detail.

Highly recommended!

Rating:
Summary: An impressive first novel
Review: A Conspiracy of Paper is set in the early 1700s in the developing world of finance capitalism in London. It's protagonist is a lapsed Jew, pugilist-turned-detective Benjamin Weaver, whose murdered father was a powerful figure among "stock-jobbers," the early stockbrokers. Stock finance was considered a necessary evil, not to be handled by gentlemen, so fell largely to the Jewish minority who brought knowledge of the nascent field from Amsterdam and other European finance centers. The "conspiracy of paper" is the South Sea Company stock bubble of 1720, considered the first stock market collapse.

Weaver's struggle to solve his father's murder leads him from London high society to the underworld to the then-mysterious realm of stocks, "promised" money that few truly understood, but many flocked to for its lure of unearned wealth. The mystery is serviceable but not exciting, and the novel's best qualities are in its portrayal of the Exchange (the burgeoning financial district of London), the Jewish district, and the discordant life of Weaver, a proud man who no longer follows his people's religion, but cannot (and is not allowed to) think of himself as anything but Jewish. The stock schemes of the 1700s are easily recognizable to modern readers inured to stock scandals and get-rich-quick promises; the book reveals how little has changed in stock speculation since its early days.

Liss brings a wealth of knowledge of early capitalism to the book, and a lively writing style that manages to be antiquated without being daunting. For a wilder ride through the same period, the "Baroque Cycle" by Neal Stephenson provides an entertaining romp through Isaac Newton's world in the style of the early picaresque novel - Candide meets alchemy, calculus, and mayhem in high finance.

Rating:
Summary: Charming, but only up to a point
Review: "A Conspiracy of Paper" is both a historical novel and a murder mystery. As such it is charming, on its own terms. Benjamin Weaver, formerly Benjamin Lienzo, is a professional "thief taker" and the 1719 equivalent of a private investigatior. Before that he was a highwayman and thief, and therefore has acquired a certain amount of useful experience. Before that he was a professional boxer, and before that he was a Jew, who ran away from his stockjobber father. Now he is asked to investigate the suicide of an investor, only to learn that the accidental death of his father was actually a murder. In the course of his investigations he stumbles upon the South Sea Company, just months before its collapse in one of the greatest scandals in English history. He must re-encounter his father's family, including his wily merchant uncle and his late cousin's lovely widow. He must worry about Jonathan Wild, another professional thief taker, who is actually the leading criminal in all of London. He must worry about the South Sea's great rival, the Bank of England, a baronet who lost crucial letters to a thieving prostitute, and several associates of his uncle's whose allegiance is unknown but sinister. Twice he ends up facing a judge on (unfair) charges of murder, hoping he can find a way to bribe him, while worrying about the justifiable homicide he did commit. So far, so interesting. And in all of this Weaver, who narrates the novel, speaks in the literary style of the 18th century. He is not quite as lugubrious as Gibbon. He's a bit more readable, like Fielding, though references to London's unsanitary conditions also remind one of Smollett. Like both he has a certain wit. Liss was completing a dissertation in English literature and students of period can guess from which monographs he got his details. (I recognized a passage about tobacco workers from Peter Linebaugh's "The London Hanged," while there is a minor theme in the novel about Jacobitism, a fashionable subject in 18th century studies, which will be more developed in this book's sequel.)

But if this is interesting, is it enough? The classic mystery novel, by say, Agatha Christie, combines extreme ingenuity about the nature of the crime, with a complete absence of interest of psychology or depth. This is partly because nearly all mystery writers are hacks, and partly because if we could see the participants in all their psychological complexity we would soon find out who did it. Well, Weaver certainly seems more ambiguous and complex than Hercule Poirot, and the coda to the book does sort of give it a "Chinatown" ambience. But a closer look reveals that Weaver is not intrinsically more interesting than Christie's fastidious, pompous, unsympathetic Poirot. On the other side of the equation, this is certainly not an elegant or cleverly conceived mystery. There are in fact several complicated conspiracies invovled. And while it appears more realistic for Weaver to stumble upon clues, to spend much time diligently looking for evidence with little result, to bluff his way to getting real answers, not unlike a real detective, it is dispiriting the way he actually finds out involves so little ingenuity on his part. Moreover, the problem with conspiracies is that they are too complicated. There are several gambits by Weaver's clients and Wild that are overly complicated. And why does the actual murderer go to such elaborate lengths to get rid of Weaver, when there are much simpler ways of going about it? There is certainly nothing of Christie's simplicity at her best. So without character, and without ingenuity, one cannot have great literature.

And there is also a problem with the historical novel. There is such a gap between the present and the past that is hard for the novel not to call attention to it in an artificial way, in what James Wood calls "a certain desperate quality ot the detail." The problem is that Weaver, who is supposedly writing his memoirs several decades after the event, is not and would not have been writing a bestselling murder mystery. So instead of discussing whether or not his father was actually murdered or not, he would first say this is the story of how I found my father's killer. On first encountering the killer a real Weaver would point this out, not wait for hundreds of pages to reveal that fact. In reading Liss' account we get a discussion of the 18th century English pub, check, the narrowness and dangerousness of 18th century English streets, check, a fashionable masque at a fashionable new house, check, a medical doctor who mentions the infallibly wrong-headed technique of bleeding, which Weaver wisely rejects, check. In bringing the past alive, Liss forgets that Weaver would not tell people what they already know. Meanwhile the subplot of Weaver's Jewish identity, while not clearly inaccurate, also shows no real insight. There is a certain hollowness about the whole enterprise.

Rating:
Summary: London Confidential
Review: "Conspiracy of Paper," a period detective novel (the setting is early Hanoverian London) relates in the first person the adventures of what today we would call a private investigator. It's far from a bad read. The narrator is Benjamin Weaver, an ex-boxer who once fought as "The Lion of Judah." He's engaged in two cases, one of which is an investigation of the murder of his own father, from whom he was estranged.

Everyone, including his uncle who welcomes him back to the family fold as well as the people who've hired him, seems to know more about the cases than he does (they involve "stock jobbing," which was then new on the London scene and within a year would lead to a financial collapse), but Weaver hot-headedly stumbles and bumbles along and finally the murderer is revealed.

There's much to admire here. Mr. Liss, an academic, has done his research about the period and the first-person narrative is, as the author explains in his postscript, an attempt to re-create 18th-century cadences. His portrayal of the London of the time fascinates, with its highlife and lowlife (the gentlemen's clubs, the coffeehouses where the traders did their business, the theatres, and the lowlife pubs that sold cheap gin to their louche patrons). Of interest as well is the description of the living conditions of the Jews. They were mostly of Iberian origin and constituted a nation within a nation.

Unfortunately (and in all fairness this was the author's first novel; a sequel has recently seen the light of day) Mr. Liss is far from expert at plotting. He simply has Weaver visiting and revisiting the same people time and again, each time prying out a little bit more of the truth. And maybe the wrapping things up explanation at the end, written in all seriousness, will remind you far too much of Hitchcock's tongue-in-cheek, tacked on "psychiatrist" scene in "Psycho," and that's unfortunate.

In the acknowledgments the authors tips his hat to various academic departments who have given him support, including financial support. And the book comes equipped with the full "serious lit" attachments--a historical note; an interview with the author; the usual unintentionally barmy reader's guide questions. But at the end of the day, "Conspiracy of Paper" is just another hardboiled detective novel. That's hardly a dishonorable achievement, but there are many authors, experienced in the genre, who do this sort of thing far better, and they do it without academic funding and without the "A New York Times Notable Book" banner on the front cover.

3.5 stars, really.

Rating:
Summary: Can't Put Down!
Review: In this age of corporate scandal and political posturing over what to do with the problem, people may be inclined to think that this sort of crime is a relatively new phenomenon. To cure this misconception, one can simply turn to David Liss' epic and brilliant novel, A Conspiracy of Paper. In its rich pages, we discover that the pursuit of vast amounts of money and the use of financial institutions to engineer this chase is hardly a recent development. While some might shy away from a purely financial thriller, A Conspiracy of Paper is simple enough to understand without sacrificing the innate fascination that one should have with the financial world that, in many senses, still exists today. Machinations both petty and mortal make this book a delightfully engaging read, with a protagonist that absorbs ones eyes with his own contradictions and determination to set things right in a world where truth rarely wins out.

In 18th century England, there wasn't really police, as we are familiar with the term. Justice was hopefully corrupt and tilted toward the rich and powerful. Enter Benjamin Weaver, a former boxing champion who happens to be a Jew. "The Lion of Judah" is a jack of all justice trades, making paid arrests, retrieving stolen goods, and providing protection against the street criminals that controlled whole swathes of London at night. Weaver is torn away from this life of rough regularity with news of his estranged father's death by carriage accident. For years, Weaver has separated himself from his Jewish family, but the hint of conspiracy that surrounds the death of his father brings him back. There, he has to deal with the complex world of money and family, falling in love with a widow while not fully trusting his merchant uncle. The boxer turned detective begins his investigation into his father's death, but soon finds that the going is far murkier than he could imagine.

For the world of Weaver is one hidden by secrets and grand intrigue. Standing in his way at times are men such as Jonathan Wilde, the crime lord of 18th century London. Tied up in a murder charge involving Wilde's associates, Weaver struggles to untangle himself from the man?s nefarious designs. Weaver soon finds that the massive corporate entities, such as the South Sea Company, may have an interest in the case. Developing in the financial world at the time was the use of stocks, and Weaver's deceased father was heavily into the practice of buying and selling them. This sort of practice was leading to the accumulation of vast quantities of wealth, and those who sought to derail such financial windfalls were treading on dangerous ground. With the help of his hilariously ribald Scottish doctor friend, Weaver ignores every warning and attempt on his mission, turning the world of shadowy London finance on its head.

A Conspiracy of Paper is a truly transportive novel, taking the reader to a place both disturbing and intriguing. Liss is so brilliantly descriptive, that is just is hard to put this book away. His is also very adept at juggling the numerous and sometimes opaque antique storylines into a thriller almost anyone can follow. It is an amazing effort by a first time writer and an exciting example of what enlightened thrillers can be. A must read.