When I reviewed Lou Aguilar's “The Washington Trail” two years ago, I ended with a line from its hero, Mark Tristan, contemplating a poster of the John Wayne classic “El Dorado” hanging in his apartment.
“They don't make 'em any more,” he lamented. “Too triggering.”
Women are beautiful, men notice, and nobody apologizes. Masculinity is generally treated as a virtue rather than a medical condition.
He had a point about Hollywood. But Aguilar's novel suggested that the old-fashioned hero was alive and well.
The wisecracking former Army Ranger and his considerably more civilized partner, Neil Cork, belonged to an older tradition of detective fiction — tough men, beautiful women, actual villains, plenty of sex appeal, and little apparent concern about whether any of this had been approved by a sensitivity reader.
Now Tristan and Cork are back in “The Camelot Trail,” out November 17, and Aguilar has found an appropriately old-fashioned cause for them to defend.
Knights wanted
The trouble begins with Ian Ousby, an expatriate British literature professor teaching at Georgetown University. Ousby is also the author of a best-selling book called “Excalibur” and the leader of a rapidly growing youth movement of the same name.
His pitch is unlikely to endear him to the average HR department. Young men should become strong, Christian protectors and providers. Young women should embrace beauty, femininity, marriage, and motherhood. Western civilization is worth defending, and Arthurian chivalry might have something to teach a generation raised on TikTok.
Naturally, Ousby has enemies. He fled Britain after receiving death threats from Islamists, feminists, and assorted political radicals. His estranged wife works at the British embassy. And with an enormous Excalibur rally scheduled for the National Mall, somebody appears determined to kill him.
Or drive him insane. Ousby has begun seeing Laura Darwell, the great lost love of his youth, a woman he hasn't encountered in nearly 30 years. He spots her on a Metro platform and nearly gets himself killed trying to save her from an oncoming train. She appears again on Georgetown's famous Exorcist Steps, with similarly dangerous results.
The problem is that nobody else can see her.
Ousby hires Cork and Tristan to protect him and find out what's going on. Before long, they're up against something considerably more sinister than a lovesick professor's hallucinations.
Boys' own adventure
As in “The Washington Trail,” much of the pleasure comes from watching two very different men work the same case.
Cork is thoughtful, learned, happily married, and still somewhat sheepish about carrying a gun. Tristan is an Afghanistan veteran more comfortable throwing a punch than cracking a book.
When Cork introduces Ousby as an English literature professor, Tristan responds with an apparently involuntary utterance: “Pip.”
Cork explains that he helped Tristan with a Dickens term paper and that his partner still suffers flashbacks.
“Pip,” Tristan repeats.
Aguilar wisely hasn't tampered with this dynamic. Cork does the Sherlock Holmes work; Tristan handles the more physical end of the business. But both are capable of surprising us — and each other.
Raquel Valdez, the beautiful Venezuelan former cop introduced in the first novel, also gets considerably more to do this time around. She's a crack shot but embarrassed by how little she knows about books, art, and poetry. Ousby begins introducing her to that world, while Tristan — to his own slight surprise — encourages her.
“The world just seems bigger, more mysterious and exciting,” she tells him.
Aguilar seems to share her enthusiasm.
Beltway bailiwick
The author has also retained one of the first book's best qualities: He knows Washington.
Georgetown row houses, the Metro, the National Mall, the Exorcist Steps — these aren't generic thriller backdrops with famous names pasted on them. Aguilar worked as a young reporter in Washington, and his familiarity with the city gives the increasingly fantastic plot a useful physical reality.
And fantastic it gets. What begins as a bodyguard assignment and a possible case of induced hallucination expands into international intrigue, experimental technology, kidnapping, and a conspiracy with consequences far beyond Ousby's personal safety.
The mixture recalls the old Tom Clancy technothrillers, complete with elaborate schemes, exotic hardware, and geopolitical villains. The machinery can get rather complicated, and the science occasionally demands a generous suspension of disbelief. But Aguilar keeps things moving, helped enormously by the fact that his detectives are enjoyable company even when they're simply trading insults.
RELATED: My publisher thought my new thriller was too political. So I found another.
Politically incorrect
Aguilar also continues his one-man campaign to restore sex appeal to popular fiction. Women are beautiful, men notice, and nobody apologizes. Masculinity is generally treated as a virtue rather than a medical condition.
Aguilar's politics are decidedly conservative, but he doesn't treat disagreement as an inexcusable moral flaw. Liberals, take note.
One of the refreshing things about “The Washington Trail” was that its left-leaning characters weren't necessarily stupid or evil. “The Camelot Trail” continues that tradition, particularly with Tristan's great love, television journalist Nina Holt. She's liberal enough for Tristan to call her network “Commie News Network,” yet remains smart, funny, sexy, and entirely worthy of his devotion.
Their political arguments sound like arguments between two people who know and love each other. Aguilar has a decided preference for one side, but he doesn't let it spoil a good romance.
Nor does he spare his own hero a little ridicule. Tristan's enthusiasm for Ousby's movement cools momentarily when he discovers that its prescription for “tough guys and hot chicks” includes holy matrimony.
“Oh,” says Tristan.
A new Camelot
Ousby also informs Tristan that he shares a name with Sir Tristan, one of the knights of the Round Table, famous for his doomed romance.
“The story of my life,” he replies.
For all his womanizing and wisecracks, Tristan has always been a fundamentally chivalric character. Put somebody helpless in danger, and he'll go toward the danger. Cork will too, although preferably after figuring out what's happening.
Aguilar has built an entertaining thriller around the unfashionable proposition that courage, loyalty, romantic love, and duty might still be worth cultivating. He makes the case without sacrificing the wisecracks, fistfights, pretty women, or increasingly outlandish perils that make this sort of fiction such a pleasure.
“They don't make 'em any more”?
Readers of "The Camelot Trail" may beg to differ.
“The Camelot Trail” will be published November 17 by World Castle Publishing and is available for preorder here. In the original publishing run of “The Washington Trail,” “Mark Tristan” was named “Mark Slade.” In the republished version and in books going forward, his name is “Mark Tristan.”
Continue reading...
[H/T Blaze Media]
