Troubled Indeed

Dewey Lambdin's Alan Lewrie novels sail some well-traveled seas -- naval adventures during the Napoleonic wars. And although his series protagonist displays more than the requisite amount of derring-do, dash and martial heroism, Lambdin seems to have looked less to Forester, Pope and O'Brian for his inspiration than to Fraser. The results aren't always the best.

The series began in 1989 with Lewrie as a reluctant midshipman in The King's Coat. Over the course of 17 novels, he has risen in rank and reputation, both fair and foul. Brave in battle, he's a scoundrel in his personal life. In 2008's Troubled Waters, he finally manages to convince his wife that the anonymous letters accusing him of an affair with his ward might be untrue (they are). But his actual affairs remain and she more or less turns him out anyway. Lewrie also has to deal with the fallout of his previous actions in freeing slaves in Jamaica -- their former owners have accused him of theft and are seeking to have him convicted and hanged. So he is relieved when he is sent to join the blockade of France in command of the frigate Savage. There, Lewrie is less than content to cruise up and down the coast and hatches a plan to wreck a French fort under construction.

Like his creation, Lambdin is best in action. Himself a sailor, he has a good knowledge of the sea and also knows how to keep the battle and combat scenes humming. He's less good ashore, and one of the problems Troubled Waters has is the time spent there instead of on deck. Another of the problems is that Lambdin writes in a chatty, gossipy tone that somehow manages to make the entire book one long snigger -- Fraser's Harry Flashman was a coward (Lewrie isn't) and was even more lecherous but Fraser avoided the adolescent tenor that Lambdin apparently relishes. Although less obvious at first, it increases throughout the series and had put me off of it until I found Troubled Waters cheap at a used bookstore and thought I'd give them another chance. I'll probably be skipping them again.

Among the cover blurbs praising the Alan Lewrie series are one by James Nelson, himself an author of historical nautical fiction, and Bernard Cornwell, author of the Richard Sharpe novels that cover the life of a British Army soldier during the same years as the Lewrie books. I'm almost certain these praises were written earlier in the series when Lambdin had more of a focus on Lewrie the fighter rather than Lewrie the lecher and the books were simply better overall. Cornwell's cover blurb ends with this sentence, describing how he felt about the series: "I wish I had written them."

I wish you'd written them too, Mr. Cornwell.