Imagine America’s leading 19th-century historian, the prim and scholarly Henry Adams, embarking for France to do research for his masterpiece on medieval culture and architecture, suddenly plunged into a vortex of murder, kidnapping, sexual perversion and political corruption. Unlikely as it may seem, this is the daring premise of Eric Zencey’s brilliant first novel, Panama — the most exciting and best-written literary thriller I’ve read since The Name of the Rose.
Zencey, a history professor at Goddard College in Plainfield, wastes no time at all in getting us right to the heart of his story, which revolves around the failed attempt of the French Panama Canal Company to drive a waterway through that country. It’s 1892. Adams, a slight, relentlessly bookish, 55-year-old widower, has traveled to Panama to meet his close friend John Hay (soon to become U.S. Secretary of State). Huge dredges, abandoned by the unsuccessful French engineers, stand rusting in the jungle; rumors of bribery and scandal reaching all the way to the French Chamber of Deputies are about to break out on two continents. The mood of the novel is dark and tense from Zencey’s memorable opening paragraph:
“Nightfall comes suddenly in the tropics. The sun dives straight for the horizon, with none of the oblique angling of temperate climates. In the brief tropical twilight darkness seems to materialize out of the very air, as if it leaked from the transparent nothingness between things; as if, Henry Adams thought, it were a colorless, coagulant fluid, undetectable by any sense but sight, kept at bay somehow by the oppressive force of the sun.”
From this forbidding world of unending heat, murderous yellow fever and “dense, grasping, carnivorous jungle,” we follow Adams to France, where a chance encounter at Mont-Saint Michel with a beautiful young American painter named Miriam Talbott transforms his life. “Pay attention to the blue,” Miriam advises him the next day when they meet at Chartres to admire the stained glass windows. “It’s the first thing anyone who works with stained glass has to learn — how to manage blue.”
To his own astonishment, Henry Adams finds himself much more inclined to pay attention to Miriam, with her own “dark-sky” blue eyes; and managing his growing feelings for her soon becomes a far more difficult job than writing his book. When she turns up missing from her Paris apartment a few weeks later and the police inspector informs him that she’s committed suicide by jumping into the Seine, the aging American historian is devastated. But wait. When he views the drowned woman’s corpse, Adams can’t identify it! Whoever this is, it isn’t Miriam Talbott, who seems to have dropped right off the edge of the earth. The Chief Inspector wants no interference in his case. “I promise you I shall not write any history, if you will refrain from detecting,” he warns Adams. But for his part, the historian is determined to use his considerable skills as a researcher to find out — at the very least — what has happened to Miriam. And so the game is afoot.
What a game it turns out to be. Zencey, a fine historian in his own right, expertly guides us through late-19th-century Parisian bordellos (patronized by the country’s leading politicians), back alleys redolent with the stench of sewage, offal and coal smoke, the French Chamber of Deputies at the moment the Panama scandal breaks, and the newspaper archives of the National Library. When Adams visits the city morgue a second time, all hell breaks loose: The coroner has just been shot to death and someone has used a bolt-cutter to snip off the fingertips of the drowned corpse (“Not-Miriam,” as Adams has come to think of her). Soon afterward, as the intrigue deepens with further mistaken and false identities, Adams finds himself stalked by a killer, charged with two murders and absolutely at a loss to know “who in this morass is to be believed.”
Along the way, Zencey treats us to a score or more of delicious and often hilarious minor characters, some first-rate 19th-century police work involving the young science of fingerprinting, and any number of shrewd insights into French society and culture as seen from Adams’ point of view. “No matter how civilized they were otherwise, the French were never far from their animal nature,” the American historian reflects — non-judgmentally, now that he’s more in touch with his own. “This explained the egalitarian urge in French life, rather than the other way around.”
By degrees, Adams’ investigation leads him back to the Seine, long after dark, when the river’s “oily black bulk seemed to drain the city, pulling all its warmth and vitality out into the night.” Ultimately, an encoded note leads Adams to a violent confrontation in an underground labyrinth near the river, in a dramatic climax as horrifying as the hideous culmination of The Silence of the Lambs.
How under the sun does Zencey pull all this off? The key to his success — and Panama is a terrific success on every level — is that he stays very close to his characters, particularly Henry Adams. Traditionally the limitation of historical novels is that, sooner or later, the history gets in the way of the story and characters. Happily, this never happens in Panama. While the book revels in fascinating period detail — from the astonishing appearance of Paris’ first horseless, steam-driven fire engine to the minute inner workings of the city morgue — Zencey always gives his characters, historical or invented, free rein to act and think as they please. However carefully researched, the facts in Panama never get in the way of the truth.
In the end, Panama is not a work of history at all but a novel, and a damn fine one. Anyone who likes thoughtful suspense fiction, well-drawn and original characters and straightforward storytelling informed by contemporary sensibilities is sure to love this splendid novel.
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