Word: thomasã
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...answer might be obvious (of course he wouldn’t) and the question might be wildly fantastic and unhelpfully simplistic, but such is the nature of Will Thomas??s mildly entertaining detective novel “To Kingdom Come...
...Kingdom” is Thomas?? second novel, and, as in his debut, “Some Danger Involved,” it features the crime-fighting duo of Victorian “private enquiry agent” Cyrus Barker and his young assistant, Thomas Llewelyn. Barker is a sort of Sherlock Holmes on steroids: in addition to possessing a strange omniscience, he is in peak physical condition and can defeat even the most formidable of adversaries in hand-to-hand combat (or, as is inexplicably the case here, stick fighting). He is also a botanist with an Edenic...
...addition to pumping up the detective figure, Thomas?? main innovation is combining the classical detective fiction of Conan Doyle with the hardboiled works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. The two subgenres meet in Llewelyn, the only character with any sort of depth, who narrates his boss’s exploits à la Watson while participating in them with the laconic wit of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade...
Even the president’s conservative Protestant religiosity finds its way into the novel—Barker freely quotes Scripture, complete with chapter and verse citations—and, indeed, an emphatic and annoying self-righteousness underlies Thomas?? political posturing...
Ultimately, that is the backbone of Thomas?? book, which feels more like an action novel than a calculated mystery and fittingly ends with a fight and a chase: a self-assured reinforcement of the most extreme beliefs of our President and a willful ignorance of any nuance or complexity in what is probably the most important issue facing our nation...