Back to previous page Terrorism kept his wife in fancy hats By LAWRENCE COSENTINO Rush Limbaugh complains that academics try too hard to "understand" terrorists. Ann Larabee isn’t that kind of professor. She pins them, squirming, into a dry-mounted collection. The MSU prof’s new book, "The Dynamite Fiend," tells the unsavory story of Alexander Keith, an obscure war profiteer from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Keith blew up a docked German steamship in 1874, killing 80 people – not out of religious or ideological zeal, but as part of an insurance scam. It was the first terrorist act of the portable-bomb age. During the American Civil War, Keith cast his lot with Confederate war profiteers and crooks in Halifax, slipping into the United States when things got too hot up north. Many readers may be surprised by Larabee’s portrait of Civil War-era Halifax as a hotbed of Confederate sympathizers and spies – "a town almost Southern in its hatred and ill will toward the Union." "It’s causing a little bit of a scandal," Larabee said after returning from a small media blitz in Canada, where the book has become a bestseller. It seems the terrorist’s uncle, a brewer also named Alexander Keith, is still a respected figure in Halifax. "Everybody up there knows his beer," Larabee says. "Labatt’s, which bought Keith’s years ago, asked my publisher not to mention Keith in the publicity material." Halifax and other Canadian cities floated on what Larabee calls the "dream-like fringe of the war," where "outlaw cavaliers" hatched shockingly violent schemes. One enterprising Canadian saboteur invented the "coal bomb," an explosive device disguised as a large lump of coal that would detonate when shoveled into the boiler of a steamship. "Saboteurs out of Toronto may have been responsible for bombing 60 Mississippi steamboats," writes Larabee. Even worse, Larabee tells of a Confederate ne’er-do-well named Luke Blackburn who schemed to wipe out Northern cities with yellow fever by distributing what he believed to be contaminated sheets, underwear and blankets. (Fortunately for New York and Boston, the disease can’t be transmitted that way.) Blackburn, by the way, later became governor of Kentucky. Meanwhile, Keith’s towering scams brought him great wealth. For example, he sold a brand-new locomotive to three different buyers – Russia (the country) among them – then found a way not to deliver the goods and collect from all three. After all, had a taste for good cigars and, later in life, a family to support. (His wife liked expensive hats.) Larabee’s book is full of deluded people, beginning with the terrorists, whom she calls "adventurers and profiteers who imagined themselves much finer and nobler beings." Even merchants of ladies’ clothes aren’t what they seem: "Nearly all the milliners in the country pretended they had fashionable French origins," Larabee writes. The entire town of Highland, Ill., where Keith settled for a time, is full of Swiss emigrants who put on Old World airs and imagine the not-even-hills surrounding them are Alps. And as for Europe – forget it. "It was an age of poseurs, imposters and impersonators, fake dukes and dauphins, false claimants and bogus heirs." "The Dynamite Fiend" is a crackling, crisp narrative full of coldly dissected deceit and delusion. Larabee opens the book with a literal bang – one of Keith’s early explosive exercises – and keeps the picture vivid and engrossing all the way to the bizarre ending, in which Keith’s head meets its own special fate decades after it had been separated from his body. Along the way, she liberally sprinkles acid-penned descriptions of bit players like Georgina Walker, wife of a Confederate major, who "hated the war mostly because it curtailed her shopping." Larabee says writing this sordid tale has been less depressing than one might expect. After learning how commonplace the technology for terrorism has been for the past century, she’s surprised it hasn’t been used more often. "It puts my mind at ease that people don’t go around blowing each other up more," she said with typical dryness. "It’s a very rare exception."   Copyright 2005 Lansing City Pulse Back to previous page

©2006 Ted Weinstein Literary Management