Los Alamos (1997) By Joseph Kanon

The literary formula of writing a fictional story on top of a historical event while risky is not uncommon, though seldom does it work as well as it does in Joseph Kanon’s book Los Alamos.

In his book, the plot centers on solving a murder, your standard detective story. Yet, the victim wasn’t just any victim, he was a security operative at Los Alamos, New Mexico -- the top secret location of the Manhattan Project, one of if not the most significant historical events of the 20th Century. The first successful detonation of an atomic bomb takes places at its Trinity test site in the final chapters of the book.

At Los Alamos, many of the biggest names in science worked under Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, often called the “father of the atomic bomb” to develop a weapon that could bring World War II to an end.  Many of the scientists were immigrants and refugees, many of them were also Jewish, working collectively against time to end the holocaust in Europe that many/most Americans were still blind to at the time. Determined as they were, all of the scientists were also aware that they were creating one evil, to address another. In the end, the war in Europe came to an end before the bomb was complete.  It's first and second military deployment would be on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hastening the end of the war in the Pacific theater, not on Germany.

                                                                                                             

To-date, there hasn’t been a third combat drop of an atomic weapon, which makes the moral debate in the nonfiction part of this story still relevant today, with nuclear aspirations in Iran and North Korea, and an anti-immigrant, anti-refugee, anti-science, and bellicose administration temporarily in command in the United States.

Returning to fiction, in Chapter 1 of the book the Project's military command limited the feared concern about the crime being viewed as espionage by internally dismissing it as a “homosexual murder,” an obsession of 1940’s and 1950’s America, when “pinko, commie, fag” was a favorite catchall condemnation, and telling everyone else that it was a botched robbery. They don't dismiss the investigation however, bringing in a non-military investigator from Washington to quietly discover what really happened. The gay stereotypes deployed throughout are infuriating, but an accurate reflection of the times.  Significant to the story is that because the murder is categorized as “homosexual” everyone is more than willing to sweep it under the rug, no one wants to talk about it, no one wants to risk coming forward.  That the initial categorization turns out wrong gets acknowledged towards the end of the book, but never corrected by any of the official record – such is history, infuriating or not.

This is the second novel by Joseph Kanon that I’ve read.  A few years ago, I reviewed his book Istanbul Passage, about the transition taking place in espionage after the Cold War.  While I liked the book, I had a geography problem. I believe Kanon failed to capture the essence of Istanbul (which in my mind has the romanticism personified by Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk), and faulted him for even trying.  Having never been to Los Alamos, I had no concerns about this title; except it ends up that I should have.  I’ve been to many of the surrounding communities in New Mexico where action in the book takes place, including nearby Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and the very remote Chaco Canyon, which is captured perfectly in the book, all-the-way down to the rattle snake’s rattle.

Recommendation:  You bet, completely engrossing.