Black Rose: A Midsummer Night's Chutzpah (Larkin's Barkin Book 1) by Pete Adams

 (Next Chapter 2021). ASIN: B08VH2Z8GK

This is the third book I have reviewed from architect and author Pete Adams. The first two were Dead No More (Rhubarb Papers Book 1) in 2021 and Rite Judgement (DaDa Detective Agency Book 2) in 2022. Although all three books are situated in different series, they are united in a single, whimsical world (the 14-book Hegemon Chronicles, of which 11 are written) where multinational corporations, British police and intelligence agencies, and religious organizations come to brilliant life in Adams’s surrealist, socially conscious, quick-witted world.

If you are interested in comparisons, Robert Anton Wilson, James Joyce, William S. Burroughs, and Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum and Baudolino immediately come to mind. 

Like the authors mentioned above, Adams’s intelligence and facility with history, society, culture, politics, and economics are readily apparent, as is the transdisciplinary nature of his themes. For instance, Rite Judgement has all of the elements mentioned in the opening, while drawing heavily on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. 

Subversion through parody and puns is the order of the day, which, as a creative writing teacher and storyteller, I have found to be a potent way to illuminate themes for an audience. When hard truths are coated in silliness (sugar), they help the medicine go down—and more importantly, to be digested. Silliness is apparent in the situational exaggerations, the characters’ desire to do a bit of shagging every chance they get, and the rapidly delivered witticisms that are a hallmark of Adams’s works.

Although the police and shadowy multinationals are essential players in the current series, Black Rose: A Midsummer Night's Chutzpah introduces a new cast of characters, ala Peaky Blinders: two working-class families in the East End, the Saints and Larkins, who run the East India Dock, gambling and whore houses, and just about everything else in their proximity. As above, so below as the spiritualists and philosophers say (apparently, they aren’t wrong). The appellation East India refers to the original mega-corporation, the East India Company, which was the power behind the throne in England for centuries, being as it was at the center of the maritime and slave trade and Opium Wars. Essentially, thugs in powdered wigs. 

The Saints and Larkins run competing pubs, side by side, where they plot and plan, shouting orders above the din of clinking glasses and drunken patrons. Although they are seemingly rivals, the nature of their overlapping enterprises requires a tense cooperation (think America and China). Both families are matriarchal. Being raised Sicilian, this did not surprise me at all. Both of my grandfathers had plenty of bark, but, on the rare occasion there was someone in need of “correcting” (always admittedly warranted) my grandmothers were the ones with the bite.

Black Rose: A Midsummer Night's Chutzpah begins with a burned commemorative crumpet, in honor of a Saint(ed) son who was reported missing in action during World War I. According to the Preface, the element of the burned crumpet began as a writing exercise, with a myth committed to paper by a painter. One of the painter’s paintings also gave inspiration to some of the central characters. Writers take note: Who knows where an intriguing prompt might lead?

As to the Larkins, the Barkin’ Larkin’ of the series title is Chas, a teen with a bum leg, terrible sight, and a massive problem with bullies—inside his family as well at school and because of the Saints. Everyone has their limit, and when this beleaguered laddie reaches his, the narrative appreciably intensifies. 

The working-class vernacular and rough talk/manners of the Saints and Larkins up the levity throughout. Whereas Peaky Blinders had the single verbal joy of goons instead of guns, especially when the Big Bads were the Irish Republican Army (IRA), Black Rose gives us page after page of rapid-fire colloquialisms, accents, and jargon. Some of the time, even the characters in close proximity have no clue what another is saying. 

My mention of the IRA was not only to make a contextualizing comparison—the Irish threat to England and the internal strife on the Emerald Isle itself loom like a spectre over the narrative. There are shadowy, almost mythic families; several Irish pretend to be otherwise to navigate their careers in London; the organized crime families cannot resist participating in arms dealing; and the Black Rose of the title (Roisin Dubh, pronounced “Rosheen Dove”) figures mightily throughout. The sequences involving the early years of renewed violence in Ireland and England provide the moments of greatest levity, and rightfully so, as the characters share their stories of dead relatives and broken relationships. 

Once Adams delivers the backstory, the body count between the families begins to rise through a series of beatings, bombings, and other malevolence, causing a seismic shift in family leaders, alliances, and reveals about interfamilial connections, amorous and otherwise. Again, the IRA, and the Irish in general, complicate the plot with several Gordian knots.  

The year is 1966, and the growing strength of the IRA and their counterbalance, the Ulster Defence Association, is just beginning to catch the attention of the Metropolitan police, Scotland Yard (the inner workings of which, physically and operationally, Adams treats us to a prolonged and no doubt delightfully distorted tour), MI5, and the Flying Squad (aka The Sweeney Todds).     

Although the first bombing in London (historically) is still four years away, people are aware of mounting tensions that will soon become The Troubles, three decades of strife between Catholics (separatists) and Protestants (loyalists) in Northern Ireland. 

Enter Casey, the story’s nontraditional hero, and his newly assigned partner, a caustic lesbian detective named Wade (the first having nothing to do with the second). Add in a Palestinian doctor named Nadia (whose experiences with the Israelis create a reinforcing parallel) as Casey’s love interest and Chas’s protector, and Wade’s girlfriend, Wendy, and the story begins to bubble on multiple levels. 

The banter between individuals and branches of law enforcement and intelligence is a highlight of the book. Truly funny stuff amidst the mounting carnage and historical gravity.

By the start of the third act, all of the factions—including a powerful multinational in the City of London (introduced in other Hegemon series) that is playing, ala the Illuminati and Global Elite, both sides of the conflict, crash together in the kind of unbridled chaos that calls to mind Monty Python, Animal House, and Blazing Saddles.

The ensuing secrets that Adams reveals and who emerges in positions of power I will leave for you to discover.  As for me, I plan to read the next in the series, A Deadly Queen, which takes place three years later, over the winter.