The Big Stick

by Lawrence Alexander and Lawrence Alexander

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385231318
• ISBN13: 9780385231312
• Release Date: January 1986
• Publisher: Doubleday Books
• Length: 348 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A "bully" detective

Teddy Roosevelt has always been my favorite of all Presidents: intelligent, funny, honest, tough, an unabashed individual who was never afraid to be himself, a devoted family man, a man who knew what he wanted and had the guts to go after it, and what my high-school history teacher defined as a "strong" Chief Executive, who was willing to do anything the Constitution didn't strictly forbid him from doing. He was also a man of many parts, and among the hats he wore in his lifetime was that of Police Commissioner of the City of New York--a tough job indeed in 1895, when bossism still ruled in every big city and the police were often both politically connected and corrupt. It's in this capacity that we find him, just 18 days into the job and already making it clear to all around him that there's a very different kind of boss on the beat. Then he receives an early-morning phone call from Henry Clay Frick, whose mansion has been burglarized to the tune of three Old Masters and two murders. A series of further crimes follows, and gradually Teddy begins to suspect that there may be a personal connection to his late, loved, envied, alcoholic brother Elliott (father of Anna Eleanor, the future Mrs. FDR). Valiantly assisted by reporter Jacob Riis and his trend-setting, demon-on-the-typewriter female secretary Minnie Kelly, Teddy sets out to uncover the truth, encountering by the way assorted luminaries and not-yet-luminaries of the day, such as Antonin Dvorak, Buffalo Bill Cody, Dr. Walter Reed (who will one day help Teddy's Panama Canal teams conquer yellow fever), a young Israel Baline (not yet Irving Berlin), and Thomas Alva Edison. As the case develops, Teddy begins to realize that it isn't the stolen items per se that someone is after, but something, perhaps, that is concealed within them. And the perpetrators turn out to be a band of young Germans, devotees of the master-race theories that are "all there in Wagner's music"--proto-Nazis of a sort, who, if they succeed, will advance the Air Age, and perhaps a world war, by almost a decade. Alexander clearly knows his man, his time, and the customs and attitudes of its people, and has constructed a suitably complex, yet ultimately completely plausible historical mystery with a charming hero; reading "The Big Stick," you find yourself thinking, "Well, but why *couldn't* Commissioner Teddy have had an adventure like this?" Spiced with humor and intimacies of the Roosevelt family--Teddy's own boisterous tribe and its connections--this is a fascinating and fun tale of detection which no admirer of TR should miss. (Those interested in the factual background might want to read Commissioner Roosevelt: The Story of Theodore Roosevelt and the New York City Police, 1895-1897.)

Bully!

A great romp through TR's hometown -- NYC