Duncan McCallum

“He now found a strange kind of peace when sitting alone with the dead. The dead were dependable. The dead had no pretence, no argument. If one only knew how to ask, the dead were always willing to share their dying secrets, their last link to the mortal world. They always told the truth”

This is Duncan McCallum, a Scottish physician who has settled in Massachusetts in the febrile years leading up to the American Revolution. I read and reviewed earlier books in this series, Savage Liberty (2018) The King’s Beast (2020) – to see what I thought, just click the links.The political situation against which the events of this novel is played out are complex. The British are determined to hold on to their American colonies despite resistance from a disparate alliance of groups, including the French, native American tribes and – most significantly – the fledgling revolutionary movement – The Sons of Liberty – whose leading lights are Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams.

King George’s grip on his American colonies is, however, tight and wide ranging. Not only do Redcoat platoons patrol the streets of Boston and the port of Marblehead – where this novel begins – but it is illegal to import sugar and other staples from anywhere but a British colony, and the import of industrial machinery – such as the Hargreaves Spinning Jenny – is strictly prohibited. McCallum, however, is no firebrand. He, unlike his lover Sarah Ramsey, seeks a bloodless and civilised transfer of power from Britain to America. His worst nightmare is a violent uprising resulting in a bloody conflict with the professional British army.

McCallum’s work is cut out when, within the space of a few days, two British army officers are murdered. One is found crucified in a shipping warehouse, his eyelids sewn open and his mouth sewn shut. Another soldier is hauled up in a fishing net and readily identifiable despite the work of crabs and other marine predators. McCallum realises that the British army – in the shape of the 29th Regiment of Foot – now believes it has more than enough reasons to turn Marblehead upside down their search for vengeance. His problems become worse when he discovers that Sarah is hiding group of escaped slaves from Barbados, and is hoping to smuggle them away to her property up on the Canadian border.

When the warehouse of a merchant called Bradford – a man fully in sympathy with The Sons of Liberty – is burnt to the ground, with him still inside it, tortured and tied to a stake, McCallum vows vengeance. But who are the culprits? British military, for sure, but acting on whose orders? Are they renegades? McCallum’s relationship with the occupying force is ambiguous; he is made welcome in the forts and barracks because of his medical skills, but can he be trusted? He is suspicious when Sarah receives an invitation to visit New York to meet none other than the Commander in Chief of all British forces in America, General Thomas Gage. Ostensibly, he wants to use Sarah’s rapport with the warlike Iroquois-speaking tribes on the border to foster better relations with the British, and McCallum senses something more sinister when Sarah goes missing.

When McCallum eventually arrives in New York, he finds Sarah safe and well, and he meets General Gage. finding that his medical reputation has gone before him, as the General asks him to do a thorough health and hygiene inspection of the main fort. This suits McCallum very well, as he is by now engaged in an audacious plan to switch a shipload of faulty gunpowder – the Americans are unable to manufacture ‘King George’s Powder’ due to a shortage of essential ingredients – with top grade British propellant.

Eliot Pattison has produced an intoxicating blend of real events – such as the killing of Crispus Attucks – with all the imagination demanded of a modern political thriller. Freedom’s Ghost will be published by Counterpoint on 24^th October

We are in pre-revolutionary America, Massachusetts to be precise, and it is 1768. Five years earlier, the Seven Years War between Great Britain and France had ended with The Treaty of Paris, and much of France’s former possessions in North America now lay in British hands. Despite the ending of formal hostilities, the French are still meddling in the affairs of the colony, and their mischief-making further stirs a political situation which is, day by day, becoming more unsettled. The citizens of Massachusetts are becoming more dissatisfied with rule from London and with King George’s redcoats are an ever-more ominous presence.

It is against this restless background that we meet Duncan McCallum, an exiled Scotsman with medical training who is bondsman to Sarah Ramsey, the widow of a nobleman. They are, as they say these days, ‘an item’ but, in terms of the narrative, very coyly so.

When the Arcturus, a ship from London, blows up in Boston harbour, McCallum is summoned to view the consequences, and they are stomach churning. Body parts of the crew are washed up on the beach, chomped by marauding sharks and pecked by gulls. Even men whose bodies remain more or less intact are denied dignity in death as their shrouds comprise drifts of seaweed and predatory crabs.

As McCallum investigates the tragedy, it becomes clear that the ship was sabotaged. But what was within its cargo that made someone think it imperative that it should never reach its destination? A party of British soldiers are on hand determined to guard the scene of the wreck from inquisitive eyes, but who is the man named Beck who is pretending to be an army officer, but is so obviously not a military man?

We learn that the whole sorry affair is connected to documents vital to the plans of a mysterious group known as The Sons of Liberty, a group of powerful men whose ultimate aim is to fight for the independence of the American colonies from Great Britain. We meet, fleetingly, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who went on to become prominent Patriots in The Revolutionary War which was to begin in earnest with “the shot heard ’round the world.” at Lexington in 1776.

Agent Beck makes it know that McCallum is responsible for the Boston deaths, and a warrant is issued for his arrest. McCallum has no option but to head north to evade the bounty hunters and soldiers who will not rest until he is swinging from a gibbet. As he moves through the wild countryside, accompanied by an electic collection of Native Americans, an evangelical priest, a traveling conjurer – and a monkey – McCallum knows he will never be safe until he finds the truth about the events in Boston until he finds the instigators of that fatal conspiracy.

If your knowledge of that period of American history is sketchy, than fret ye not. Pattison (right) provides a wealth of detail about real life events which were taking place during McCallum’s fictional quest to clear his name. I use the word ‘quest” advisedly, as the novel has a distinct Lord of The Rings feeling – “Roads go ever on”.

There is some genuine detective work – and some very graphic violence – wrapped up in the period detail, and Pattison is clearly a man who has charted the catastrophic decline and subjugation of the Native Americans, their culture, their awareness and their sensitivity to landscape. It may be of little consolation to us modern readers, but Pattison shows that the European assault on this vibrant and diverse society did not just happen on our watch.

Savage Liberty is the fifth installment of the Duncan McCallum series which began with Bone Rattler in 2009. It will be published by Counterpoint on 7^th June.You can read a review of an earlier Eliot Pattison novel Skeleton God, set in contemporary Tibet, by clicking the blue link.