Still Warm Corpse Serves as Plot Device

Patrick Anderson has a Monday column reviewing thrillers for WaPo I've somehow missed before now, and this week he probes John Weisman's Jack in the Box, which peddles the "Bush let 9/11 happen" theory as its McGuffin.

This mother of all conspiracy theories is advanced by Edward Lee Howard, the real-life former CIA agent who defected to Moscow in 1985 but in the novel returns to Washington in 2002 to make amends. He tells his bombshell to an ambitious Republican senator who hopes to use it to replace Bush as president. First, however, the senator consults our hero, Sam Waterman, a CIA agent who was forced into retirement because he pushed too hard looking for Russian moles at the agency's headquarters. Waterman loathes Howard and doesn't believe his charge against Bush, but to disprove it he must journey to Moscow, because Howard has fled back there.

I happen to be rather wary about using contemporary real-life figures as crucial hinges in fictional narratives, particularly thrillers. Howard died in Moscow in July 2002; it's unclear from the review and a cursory search for info on the novel whether Weisman places his supposed trip to the U.S. before or after that date--I'm guessing before, since he "has fled back there," and presumably winds up dead. At its most extreme, I think this technique verges on the irresponsible, and I freely concde I don't have any idea whether that's the case here. But on a more general basis I agree with Julian Rathbone's contention concerning "the mistake of presenting real historic personalities, leaders or otherwise" in such stories, as "it is at street level that the impact of historical forces are experienced and therefore understood." He was talking, by the way, about what makes Eric Ambler's work so good.