Elsewhere

because the world has been waiting for that first chris bray novel

First, I have a short piece at The Federalist today examining a recent proposal from the political class to treat Trump and his voters the way the federal government treated “the vanquished Confederacy.” No, seriously.

Second, I should have mentioned a while ago that I’m experimentally dipping a single toe into Elon-era Twitter/X. You can find me here. I don’t guarantee that I’ll stay there forever, but we’ll see. If you’re there too, we can trade follows. I mostly tweet that Scott Wiener is disgusting, so you’ve got that to look forward to.

And finally, I’ve just released an ebook version of a novel I wrote a couple of years ago. It’s called Covenant: An Elihu Coffin Mystery, about which I’ll say more in a moment. It needs a few pieces of context, so:

First, the novel follows the work I did in the archives when I wrote my dissertation about the early national New England militia, and the characters are mostly based on people I read about in historical documents.

The prevailing narrative of the founding is that Americans feared the tyranny of a standing army and viewed the militia as the safe alternative for the defense of their nation, their states, and their communities. But what I found, spending a few years reading what militiamen wrote about the institution, is that the men who were the militia came to view the thing as a burden and a potential danger.

The implementation of a militia system left many men in the early republic viewing militia service with deep suspicion. (I’ve written about that here.) Enlisted men could be fined for training absences, having property confiscated to cover the fines, and they were sometimes subjected to physical discipline; officers could be tried by court-martial for extremely dubious offenses, like writing letters to the newspaper to criticize their governor. Militia service took the political speech of citizens and threatened to place it under the umbrella of military subordination.

As the decades went on, more and more men just stopped showing up. The militia defined by the federal Militia Act of 1792 just…gradually…vanished.

Part of that act of vanishing was a transition, during the First Industrial Revolution, from a nation of yeoman farmers toward the growing importance of wage labor. Attitudes changed. Sturdy republicanism, the embrace of shared burdens, declined.

I wanted to capture that moment, and the sometimes submerged debate that took place in the generations after the founding, in a form that wouldn’t read like a history lesson. And I thought of Tony Hillerman as a model, since he wrote about political and cultural issues on the Navajo reservation but did it in the form of the murder mystery, making it fun to read. So what we have here is a murder mystery about the decline of militia service and a culture of shared burdens in early national New England, if that floats your boat.

This dork wrote a book

It did not float a single boat in the publishing industry, which responded with such hostility that my agent refused to show me any of the responses. So be warned that I’m pitching a novel here that was uniformly despised by professional publishers, although much of the recent output of that industry makes me take it as a compliment.

Part of the reason the publishing industry hated it, if I understood the very careful way my agent broke the news, is that I loathe period literature that uses 21st-century California shopping mall language. There have been television shows, in recent years, about Emily Dickinson and Catherine the Great, and the dialogue has mostly been along the lines of, “Damn, bitch, your poetry be fine as hell!” and “Why you gotta front so hard, fool? You wanna throw down?” That kind of period-defying language makes me want to stab people, so I’ve tried to write dialogue that’s appropriate to the historical moment. Apparently this makes for a less-marketable fiction product. Call my agent for details.

With all of that in mind, the book is available at Barnes and Noble. I don’t buy from the pinch-faced scolds at Amazon, so I haven’t published there. I’ve only posted an ebook version, mostly to test the waters, but I’ll add a print edition if there’s interest. It would have to cost more as an actual book, is why.

The book is set in pre-statehood Maine. If you live in Maine, don’t make fun of me. (Unless you want to, in which case...) I was planning to use an advance to travel to Maine and spend some time nailing down the weather and the foliage, but there never was an advance. I suspect I’ve described mid-October in the language of early September or so. Send word. I live in Los Angeles, so my capacity for understanding weather is poor.

The plan when I started was to make it the first book in a series of murder mysteries set in the context of American military history, so maybe there will be more. “An Elihu Coffin Mystery.” It’s a strong maybe. You tell me.