Bøger af John Harmon McElroy

Benjamin Franklin & The Vanishing Messenger is the concluding novel in a trilogy of historical detective stories featuring Franklin, America's most versatile and consequential genius. He was a research scientist whose findings on the nature of electricity were compared to those of Isaac Newton on gravity. He was also the only American to sign all three instruments of America's independence from the British Empire: the Declaration of Independence, the American military treaty with France, and the peace treaty with Britain. As if that wasn't enough versatility, he was an ingenious inventor for whose Glass Harmonica both Mozart and Beethoven composed music. Because a detective uses a methodology similar to that of a scientist: gathering information on which to base an hypothesis in order to test it, it was natural to imagine Franklin in the role of a detective. As governor of Pennsylvania, Franklin hosted the Convention that wrote the U.S. Constitution and got it to agree that preventing "leaks" was imperative to the success of the Convention. The main feature of the security system he invented was that no delegate to it could put in writing any of its proceeding. But in this novel one delegate does write a letter that is full of sensitive information on the Convention's proceedings, and the messenger he pays to deliver his letter to another delegate vanishes. George Washington, the Convention's president, learns of this threatening development and confidentially consults those who've had the most to do with organizing the Convention--Franklin, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton--to see how the missing messenger and what he carried might be found. Franklin volunteers to try to repair this breech in the security system with the help of his trusted assistant in the two previous detective stories, Captain James Jamison. Benjamin Franklin & The Vanishing Messenger is the story of that investigation.

May, 1786. Two men fight a duel on a misty, isolated field west of Philadelphia. One of the duelists is shot through the forehead without firing his weapon, yet the surviving duelist claims he shot into the ground, not at his opponent. On his return to the city, he's arrested and jailed by the Sherriff on two charges. Murder and dueling. His wealthy father begs Revolutionary War veteran James Jamison to prove his son's innocence, because everybody in Philadelphia credits Jamison with having proven six months earlier that a Quaker accused of murder was not guilty when it seemed certain he was. What the public does not know is that Benjamin Franklin, America's most accomplished scientist and inventor, solved that mystery. Captain Jamison was only the legman in the investigation. Can Franklin-by looking into the case of a young man who was forced to fight a duel but didn't want to fire at his opponent-reveal the truth of how the dead duelist was killed and see justice done?

Why do so many different people with widely dissimilar ideas and customs get along as Americans? In American Beliefs , John McElroy identifies and explains those essential ideas that promote the unity of a vast nation and a diverse people-because they have been shared and acted upon by generations of Americans.