It was a matter of happy coincidence that I read The Grand Mirage during a recent journey through Islamic worlds Darrell Delamaide so vibrantly portrays. Though I traveled in relative luxury, Delamaide transported me back to a dustier, less comfortable age when the discovery and exploitation of oil had begun to transform the region and the world.
His narrative is so evocative, his characters so compelling and his descriptions so vivid that I at one point was certain I was inhaling the pungent aromas of Constantinople while sprinting alongside the his story's hero, Lord Leighton - an accomplished orientalist on a secret mission for the British Crown - as he evaded adversaries through the city's ancient alleyways. At another point, I found myself gripping the armrest of my Turkish Airways seat while Lord Leighton's caravan navigated the perils of the Mesopotamian desert.
Delamaide at his best is an updated Eric Ambler (think Coffin for Demetrius). What I mean is that the attention-challenged modern reader expects more rat-a-tat action from his thrillers than Ambler provided, and here Delamaide doesn't disappoint, as he also satisfies the cerebral requirements of history buffs.
Delamaide takes the reader back to a time when European powers were lurching toward war, and the German, British and Ottoman empires were jockeying for power. Leighton's seemingly hopeless task was to investigate and potentially undermine the German-Ottoman effort to construct a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway, which could endanger Britain's rule in India and provide Germany easy access to some of the world's richest petroleum resources, the font from which global power would be extracted.
Delamaide's supporting cast remains in the reader's mind long after reading: an Armenian seductress, an American rough-riding spy, a sadistic Prussian agent, and a Turkish pasha described as "having a yellow gleam in his eye that one rarely saw in a human but more often by some animals at dusk." As a skilled business writer and author of the financial thriller, Gold, Delamaide is particularly deft in portraying the German banker who is conscience-struck once he sees that Turkish and German leaders have turned his commercial venture into a vehicle for war and oppression.
This is a book both for lovers of thrillers and history. In a cameo appearance, the young British home secretary Winston Churchill explains to Leighton that petroleum was becoming the "paramount resource of our age" and that the Navy planned to replace its fleet's coal-powered engines with oil-powered ones to remain ahead of British rivals. Britain cannot maintain its empire without the oil it has found in Persia, but Churchill worries the Germans are gobbling up concessions along the new iron railway's path.
Delamaide doesn't spare the reader the brutality and violence of the period - floggings, mutilations and, in one case, the murder in the Syrian desert of an entire railroad crew. Leighton himself is only saved by a band of guardian angels, whose origins I won't reveal here as they form one of the book's many rich surprises.
There is a hint in the book's final pages that the adventures of Lord Leighton will continue - as Churchill dispatches our hero to Cairo, the burgeoning center of the Arab world. I hope the Armenian love interest will come with him. In any case, consider my pre-order placed.
