“The Gold Standard in Historical Fiction”: A Review of Dead Beckoning by Mike Cobb

 

(MG Cobb Books LLC, 2022). ISBN: 978-0-578-33988-7

Every so often, a novel comes along that is so well researched, so well written, with such compelling characters and attention to detail that it deserves more than five stars.

Dead Beckoning by Mike Cobb is one of those novels.

This exquisite work of historical fiction, set in 1895 in Atlanta, Georgia, during the Cotton States and International Exhibition, easily holds its place on the bookshelf next to Caleb Carr’s Alienist books.

Yes. It is that good.

As my readers know, I am also a writer of historical fiction, as well as a historical education teaching-artist, performer/Chautauquan, and history-based immersive experience/Escape Room designer. Through those experiences, I have come to understand not only the countless hours of work that go into research for a novel with this level of authenticity and detail, but the challenges that come with integrating the gathered data into the story without resorting to “info dumps.”

Another challenge when writing historical fiction is delivering backstory as a way to provide depth of character and further immerse the reader in the world of the story without slowing down the pace or diminishing the narrative’s rising stakes. Cobb demonstrates considerable felicity with these challenges, helped in part by the fact that all chapter titles feature the name of their prevalent character.

I was recently watching the 2004 miniseries based on Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. The main character, a writer who returns to his hometown in a quest to resolve his childhood trauma, says, “Complex characters elevate genre.” This is certainly the truth of it here. Cobb’s cast of characters cover a wide range of types, backgrounds, and points of view. This is essential to good storytelling. Theatre director and theorist Harold Clurman taught that a gifted writer utilizes a broad spectrum of characters, which the analyst, director, or audience can form into a wagon wheel. The hub of the wheel is the story’s main theme (in this case, it is greed) and the spokes are each character’s relationship to that theme.

The key character in this spectrum (placed, appropriately, in the center) is the central character, with whom we take the journey. In Dead Beckoning, this is Captain William Manly of the Atlanta Police Department. Manly is just the type of everyman with whom it is easy to take a narrative journey. He is a devoted husband with a cultivated moral integrity, policing a growing city while surrounded by detectives (still a relatively new position in 1895) and commissioners who are motivated more by greed than by sense of duty (see how the wagon wheel works?). His boss, Chief of Police Arthur Connolly, has a refreshing multidimensionality, in opposition to police chiefs that too often comprise the clownish tropes of foul-mouthed, blustering, red-faced, beleaguered bullies in the genre of police procedurals.  

We are introduced to Manly when businessman, husband, and father Baker Bass is murdered on his way to his general store. Cobb skillfully navigates us through the experiences of the grieving family while unfolding the initial investigation (after managing to make us care about Bass after less than 40 pages), which means a set of interesting suspects and morally complicated witnesses. Cobb adds just the right amount of dialect for authenticity in his varied cast of characters without slowing the reader down.

Dead Beckoning has varied characters in abundance. From shady businessmen, to prostitutes and madams, to an ambitious journalist, to grieving and anxious spouses and children, to civil servants, to working-class minorities to whom the detectives put the screws, we get a clear sense of a growing city and state still suffering at the hands of the specters of the Civil War. References to Sherman’s March to the Sea and other seminal Civil War experiences in Georgia hang like summer storm clouds over the story.    

Cobb’s prose shines especially bright in the coroner and court scenes, as well as in the questioning of suspects and witnesses. This is particularly essential in police procedurals set in the late 1800s, as the case of Jack the Ripper and other sensational murders around the fin de siècle are pervasive in our culture through an abundance of films and documentaries.

The Cotton States and International Exhibition happening at the time of Bass’s murder adds a layer of richness and opportunity for detail that pulls the reader even further into the story, both technologically and socially. Cobb has printed a map of the exhibition layout in the book, which he brings to three-dimensional life over the course of the story. From Grover Cleveland’s lighting of the electric fountain remotely from Washington, DC, to the presence of the Liberty Bell, to other technological innovations at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution that seemed to some as though they were supernatural, we experience the sense of awe right along with the characters. Cobb also uses the exhibition as an opportunity to explore international perceptions of America in the late 1800s and to broaden instances of prejudice beyond the treatment of African Americans. In general, the little details of brands and products, firearms, and rail travel in 1895 Georgia demonstrate Mike Cobb’s considerable hours of research and passion for the history of his city and state.

As Christmas approaches, Manly feels the increasing pressure of bringing justice to Bass’s devastated family (whose lives are up-ended in myriad ways) while fighting corruption at the highest levels of the fractured police department. As lies, secrets, and subterfuges are exposed and the conspiracies and complexities deepen, Manly faces a mounting level of self-doubt and moral stress.

In other words, he is a suitably complex hero with whom we not only willingly take the journey but who evokes in the reader a desire for him to emerge victorious.

In this day and age of book banning, algorithmic censorship, and a sharp focus on targeting hate speech and derogatory language, Cobb has added a Word of Caution to the front of the book explaining his rationale for using period- and culture-specific language that, taken out of context (a considerable danger these days), might be misconstrued. As a creative writing teacher, developmental editor, and story analyst, I tell my students and clients that if language choices are authentic to the characters and story, then they most certainly should employ them.

In truth, for their stories to be authentic, it is a must.

Mike Cobb certainly meets this standard in Dead Beckoning, and the novel is all the more educational and illuminating because of his bravery.

For those who wish to delve deeper into the true story on which the novel is based, Cobb provides lists of real people and actual locations (indicating for the latter if they still exist, have been converted to other uses, and so on).

If you enjoy this book, Cobb is the author of another historical fiction crime novel, based in 1963 and 1980, called The Devil You Knew. He is also working on a new book.