Cracking thriller about a Royal visit
View(s):The Crossjack Club- by David Cooper
Reviewed by Rajiva Wijesinha
Well over a year ago, I read several books about Sri Lanka by David Cooper, two of them about street dogs and the third, a thriller entitled A Shot on the Beach. I had much enjoyed them so I was delighted when a few weeks ago I was sent yet another thriller by him, just before I went abroad.
I took it with me along with other books, including a book of travel descriptions by D.H. Lawrence which I had already started. This was a happy coincidence, for Cooper’s new book is based on the idea that Lawrence had written about meeting the Prince of Wales who had visited Sri Lanka while Lawrence was in Kandy. Coincidentally, Lawrence had stayed with an American called Earl Brewster who was his travelling companion in Italy to visit the Etruscan tombs that were the subject of the second travelogue in the book I had taken with me.
The Prince’s visit had prompted one of Lawrence’s best poems, ‘Elephant’, about the Kandy Perahera when,
Elephants after elephants curl their trunks, vast shadows, and some cry out
As they approach and salaam, under the dripping fire of the torches That pale fragment of a Prince up there, whose motto is _Ich dien_.
Pale, dispirited Prince, with his chin on his hands, his nerves tired out, Watching and hardly seeing the trunk-curl approach and clumsy, knee-lifting salaam
Of the hugest, oldest of beasts in the night and the fire-flare below.
He is royalty, pale and dejected fragment up aloft.
According to Cooper, the Prince was not so tired as all that, and went on to a party where a young lady had been arranged for him. Lawrence had been invited too, and wrote about it, which led to murder, perpetrated by members of a shadowy organisation called The Crossjack Club which provides the novel with its title. Their motives are a fascinating combination of allegiance to the reputation of the British Royal family and angst about social changes in Ceylon which they felt repudiated the imperial legacy.
Finding out what happened and its aftermath devolves upon Philip Drayton, a British writer who had come to Sri Lanka to research into famous writers who had written about their visits to the island, notably Leonard Woolf and Lawrence. A friend who hosted him to dinner on his first night in Kandy had told his fellow guests about this, and one of them spoke to Philip about the possible existence of the Lawrence manuscript. But he is secretive and tells Philip that he will tell him more if he comes to his home near Tangalle.
Action follows, fast and furious, after Philip meets Kingsley Pieris in Tangalle and is told the manuscript does indeed exist. Kingsley dies before he can reveal more, possibly murdered. Philip is then contacted by Kingsley’s niece Monica, and between them they solve the mystery, and escape the many dangers they face from a host of strange characters.
The book is a splendid mix of sex and politics with much suspense, the main plot complicated by Kingsley Pieris’s Danish wife who beds any male she comes across. As in Cooper’s previous book the police are remarkably efficient, though the principal guardian angel for Philip and Monica is a confidante of Kingsley who happens to have as a bodyguard a totally competent ‘ex-special forces soldier, specializing in jungle combat during the civil war: he knows more ways of killing a man than you can imagine’.
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