Jacopo della Quercia’s debut novel The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy could have been little more than Internet fan service; after all, it involves steampunk mechanics, Nikola Tesla, and Theodore Roosevelt, which is like scoring a perfect blackout on your Internet bingo card. But della Quercia, a longtime columnist and editor at Cracked.com, is a student, educator, and most importantly, lover of history, and he approaches Pocket Watch Conspiracy not as someone writing mashup presidential fan fiction (like Herbert Hoover vs. the Space Werewolves or some shit), but as someone who thinks the men who have run this country are pretty awesome. The result is a remakably confident debut; the book is funny, exciting, and moves at the breathless pace of all great conspiracy thrillers.
TGALPWC doesn’t actually center on the titular president; rather, our hero is William Howard Taft, first introduced as a prizefighter in an underground London bareknuckle boxing ring. Della Quercia writes his fight scenes with verve and panache, and his choice of Taft as a protagonist is an inspired one; for Christ’s sake, the man was the only person to serve as President and Supreme Court Chief Justice, and today he’s best known for getting stuck in the White House bathtub (but in reality, as della Quercia writes, that was Taft’s Edison-designed automaton).
A deafening, bloodcurdling scream rang through the building as Taft unleashed an old favorite from his Yale days: the dreaded “Skull and Bones.” He gripped the Englishman’s face like a bowling ball, digging into his eye sockets with one hand while his other hand crushed the man’s genitals between his thick fingers.
And here’s where I run into a common quandary for reviewers: how much of the plot to give away. Since the word Conspiracy is right there in the book’s title, I’ll err on the side of caution, because giving away plot points is kind of a dick move. Suffice it to say that della Quercia weaves a deft, engaging mystery around Taft, Roosevelt, Lincoln (both Abraham and his son Robert), and a colorful cast of supporting characters (one of whom has the surname Butt, which admirably isn’t played for laughs).
The best thing I can say about The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy is that it’s so entertaining, so throughly researched, that I can easily overlook the few parts of the book I didn’t enjoy (i.e. Joseph Conrad getting name-dropped for no real reason, and an eleventh-hour twist that I wasn’t crazy about). Della Quercia’s love and knowledge of American history is infectious, and it will be hard to put down Pocket Watch Conspiracy and not want to pick up a history book.
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