Counter-espionage and law enforcement during the Civil War. Sequel to Johnny Madigan.
After being coopted into the National Detective Service to go undercover in The Union Army soldier Johnny Madigan, the protagonist of The Ballad of Johnny Madigan, Johnny continues his undercover activities for the Service as he tries to infiltrate a counterfeiting ring in New york City with ties to the Confederate Espionage Service.
Excerpt
Johnny anticipated what would come next. A fist pounding on his door prompted him to answer it. Two men in top hats and long overcoats stood there, one taller and heavier than the other. In his mind, Johnny named the taller man Hawknose because of his prominent bird-shaped beak. The other Johnny dubbed Fatman in keeping with his round physique. Each one wore a neatly trimmed Van Dyke style moustache and goatee. They pushed their way inside.
“You Johnny Sullivan?” Fatman asked.
“Yeah,” he said, “that’s me.”
“Get your coat and come with us,” Hawknose ordered.
“Where exactly are we going?” he asked. “I have a train to catch.”
“You ain’t catchin’ no train, sonny.”
“Oh, why is that?” he asked, stalling for time.
“Never mind, just do what you’re told.”
The taller man with the bird beak nose made a menacing gesture toward the pocket of his overcoat. Johnny went to the bed where his coat lay draped over the rest of his belongings. He started to pick up the cloth bag.
“Leave that, you won’t need it where you’re going.”
Johnny shrugged into his shabby coat and Fatman snarled, “Hold it right there. Get your hands away from your pockets.”
Johnny held his hands out from his body, a gesture to show he held nothing in them. The hawk-nosed man reached in the right hand pocket of his coat and retrieved Johnny’s revolver. He slipped it into his waistband and gestured toward the door. “Down the hallway to the stairs and out through the lobby. Walk nice and slow and don’t try anything. We’re both armed and won’t hesitate to shoot.”
Johnny made his way through the empty hotel lobby with the two gunmen flanking him. When they reached the street, Hawknose said: “Turn left, keep goin’ that way.”
Johnny appeared hesitant.
“G’wan keep movin’” Hawknose said.
The warehouses and wharves of the lakefront loomed in the distance. They turned down a deserted street, the screech of gulls and the distinctive odor of a waterfront signaled their approach to Lake Ontario.
After a few blocks Johnny slowed his pace even further. “I don’t think this is the way to the railroad. I’m not taking a boat home, am I?”
“Y’all don’t worry ’bout a boat, sonny. Y’all might be goin’ for a little swim instead,” the hawk-nosed man sneered, his Southern drawl now becoming more pronounced.
The fat gunman to his right seemed engrossed in finding their destination, not looking at Johnny or paying attention to the cynical conversation. Johnny stopped and doubled over. “No, no, you can’t do this. I don’t wanna die.”
“Shut up and keep walkin’ or we’ll do ya right here. No more’n you deserve, damn Yankee spy,” Hawknose snarled.
Fatman had gone a few steps ahead before he turned to look. Johnny emitted a pitiful wail and dropped to one knee. “No, please, you can’t do this.”
Hawknose, the gunman nearest him, reached for the collar of Johnny’s coat to yank him upright. “Not so brave now are ya when you’re not sneakin’ around behind people’s backs. Get up and take it like a man, yeller-bellied Yankee.”
The Bowie knife from the scabbard on Johnny’s ankle concealed by his trouser leg, flashed in the cold sunlight more quickly than the gunman’s eyes could follow. Still kneeling, Johnny slashed at the wrist that grasped his coat collar and stabbed upward at the face bending over him. Blood spurted from the deep cut on the gunman’s arm. With the speed of Johnny’s second thrust the point of the knife caught the injured man on the edge of his chin. He screamed in pain and outrage. Fatman, startled by the sudden attack, fumbled at his coat pocket to bring his pistol into play. Johnny dropped the knife, stepped behind the injured man and spun him to face the other assailant, who now gun in hand, tried to get a clear shot at Johnny. Hawknose thrashed to free himself from the hand gripping his coat. Reaching into the waistband of the bleeding man’s trousers Johnny retrieved his pistol and pushed the injured would-be kidnapper toward his fat partner.
Both Johnny and Fatman fired at the same time. Fatman ducked away from Johnny’s first shot which went wide of the mark. With his aim disrupted, the bullet the fat gunman fired struck Hawknose in the shoulder. The wounded man screamed in agony and slumped to the ground. Johnny stepped to his left, crouched and fired again. The bullet hit the fat assassin in the upper thigh. Johnny sensed from the way he collapsed to the ground that the shot had shattered his femur. Howling in pain laced with virulent hatred the Fatman tried to pull himself up to a sitting position to get another shot at Johnny who leapt toward him and kicked the gun free. The hawk-nosed gunman writhed on the ground groaning, his blood pooling underneath him. Johnny returned to him, yanked the man’s pistol free from his overcoat pocket and let him pitch face forward again on the pavement. The kidnapper with the thigh wound once more tried to drag himself to where his weapon lay several feet away.
Johnny placed the barrel of his gun at the man’s temple. “Don’t make me kill you” he said.
The man looked up and tried to speak. Pain constricted his voice.
“You can thank me later,” Johnny whispered.
He slid his own weapon into his coat pocket, kicked the pistol that lay on the ground a few feet further away from Fatman. With the revolver he had wrested from Hawknose’s pocket Johnny fired one shot into the ground, then dropped the weapon several feet behind the bleeding Hawknose. The pain from the knife wounds and the bullet in his shoulder caused him to make feral noises from deep in his throat. Johnny picked up the blood-stained knife, wiped it on Hawknose’s overcoat, returned it to its scabbard and set out in haste to the railroad depot to catch up with Letitia.
Professional Reviews
Home Front
Being in the middle of tutoring my teenage niece on U.S. History and having just watched the new Steven Spielberg film, Lincoln, I was more eager than I usually would have been to read a Civil War spy thriller. Code Name: Caleb by John A. Bray is no political thriller, but a fairly plausible and remarkably historically accurate tale about a young Union soldier recruited to perform clandestine activities among the Southern sympathizing “Copperheads” of New York.
Although Code Name: Caleb is not billed as a young adult book, the story to which it seemed most similar was the classic revolutionary war story, Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremain. Unlike the youthful Johnny Tremain, Johnny Madigan, the hero of Code Name: Caleb is a young man, his age being indefinite, but probably in his late teens or early twenties and the adventures in which he participates are highly dangerous, requiring Johnny to become a killer himself, although always in self-defense. The activities of the Copperheads are true to history, consisting of counterfeiting, arson, and stealing and smuggling arms, sometimes in collusion with Southerners working in Canada.
The Union had an extensive espionage and counterespionage service during the Civil War, as did the Confederacy. Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus allowed those suspected of spying by the counterespionage service to be jailed indefinitely without a trial. In what appears to be the time-honored way of spy services throughout history and up to the present, the Union intelligence service played fast and loose with the laws in their pursuit of behind the lines spies and terrorists. In fact, opposition to Lincoln’s war, particularly following the Emancipation Proclamation, which made the abolition of slavery a prominent issue in the North’s prosecution of the war, was widespread and public in many areas of the north and especially among some groups, such as the Irish. Opposition to the draft in New York included not only riots and arson, but the lynching of blacks.
Author Bray manages to capture the flavor of the era in his depiction of the New York working class. Johnny Madigan’s identity as a Union spy must be kept much more secret than his supposed opposition to the draft and the war, which is common in his neighborhood and workplace. We are given a keen insight into the mindset of those who opposed the war, although living in the North.
Code Name: Caleb is also a love story and in fact, not a simple one. While Johnny cherishes his young, innocent courtship of his childhood love, Deidre, he is attracted to the seductive Letitia, the granddaughter of the mastermind of the Copperhead illicit activities in New York City. Letitia herself is a complicated woman, unsure where her loyalties lie, politically, and torn between obedience to her grandfather and her yearning for Johnny. The romantic subplot of Code Name: Caleb provides an entertaining sidelight to the story and contributes its own share of suspense.
I enjoyed Code Name: Caleb. It is a sequel to the earlier, Ballad of Johnny Madigan, but which I have not read. I have a strong suspicion that the real audience for Code Name: Caleb will be teens and young adults who are looking for a character in their own age range and a rollicking adventure story, which hast the added attraction of bringing the history they are probably having to study in school alive to them in an exciting way.
Being in the middle of tutoring my teenage niece on U.S. History and having just watched the new Steven Spielberg film, Lincoln, I was more eager than I usually would have been to read a Civil War spy thriller. Code Name: Caleb by John A. Bray is no political thriller, but a fairly plausible and remarkably historically accurate tale about a young Union soldier recruited to perform clandestine activities among the Southern sympathizing “Copperheads” of New York.
Although Code Name: Caleb is not billed as a young adult book, the story to which it seemed most similar was the classic revolutionary war story, Esther Forbes’ Johnny Tremain. Unlike the youthful Johnny Tremain, Johnny Madigan, the hero of Code Name: Caleb is a young man, his age being indefinite, but probably in his late teens or early twenties and the adventures in which he participates are highly dangerous, requiring Johnny to become a killer himself, although always in self-defense. The activities of the Copperheads are true to history, consisting of counterfeiting, arson, and stealing and smuggling arms, sometimes in collusion with Southerners working in Canada.
The Union had an extensive espionage and counterespionage service during the Civil War, as did the Confederacy. Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus allowed those suspected of spying by the counterespionage service to be jailed indefinitely without a trial. In what appears to be the time-honored way of spy services throughout history and up to the present, the Union intelligence service played fast and loose with the laws in their pursuit of behind the lines spies and terrorists. In fact, opposition to Lincoln’s war, particularly following the Emancipation Proclamation, which made the abolition of slavery a prominent issue in the North’s prosecution of the war, was widespread and public in many areas of the north and especially among some groups, such as the Irish. Opposition to the draft in New York included not only riots and arson, but the lynching of blacks.
Author Bray manages to capture the flavor of the era in his depiction of the New York working class. Johnny Madigan’s identity as a Union spy must be kept much more secret than his supposed opposition to the draft and the war, which is common in his neighborhood and workplace. We are given a keen insight into the mindset of those who opposed the war, although living in the North.
Code Name: Caleb is also a love story and in fact, not a simple one. While Johnny cherishes his young, innocent courtship of his childhood love, Deidre, he is attracted to the seductive Letitia, the granddaughter of the mastermind of the Copperhead illicit activities in New York City. Letitia herself is a complicated woman, unsure where her loyalties lie, politically, and torn between obedience to her grandfather and her yearning for Johnny. The romantic subplot of Code Name: Caleb provides an entertaining sidelight to the story and contributes its own share of suspense.
I enjoyed Code Name: Caleb. It is a sequel to the earlier, Ballad of Johnny Madigan, but which I have not read. I have a strong suspicion that the real audience for Code Name: Caleb will be teens and young adults who are looking for a character in their own age range and a rollicking adventure story, which hast the added attraction of bringing the history they are probably having to study in school alive to them in an exciting way.
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