FICTION

David Beasley's novels are fast-moving with well-defined characters. He has written
historical novels, novellas on love, detective stories and society novels as well as one
metaphysical novel. His historical novel, Sarah's Journey, about an escaped slave who
comes to Simcoe, Upper Canada, is extremely popular and praised widely by reviewers.

THE JENNY

When Rudyard Mack, head of security with the New York Public Library, is faced with the theft of a large portion of the library's Miller Stamp Collection, he has countless, conflicting clues, but no solid information. The theft includes a 1918 Inverted Jenny, the Postmaster Provisionals, and the 1869 U.S. Inverted Centres. Through an intriguing plot, which excels like the best of detective fiction, author Beasley leads the reader to suspect up to five or more individuals. . . . Mack doggedly pursues the frayed ends and puts together the puzzle to solve the crime. The Jenny will never win a prize as a work of philatelic research, but it gets Gold for the "whodunit" plot and the exciting, don't-put-me-down read that it is. David Beasley bases his fiction on an actual theft at the New York Public Library in 1977, but unlike the story in real life, the thief is exposed. - CANADIAN STAMP NEWS

THE GRAND CONSPIRACY

"An intelligent yet gritty gumshoe mystery set in the heart of the Big Apple (it) delves into the underworld of unions, city politics, pay offs and international conspiracy.... an enjoyable read and food for thought.” Writers’ Quarterly

OVERWORLD/UNDERWORLD

Rudyard Mack, New York Library detective, called out of retirement to solve a cold case—a woman murdered in the library stacks—finds it is connected to big banking, Israeli and other secret services, and operatives in the United Nations . . . which leads to men of wealth and power, who run shadow governments more influential than the real governments.

This book completes a tetralogy with the overall title, The Song of the Four Pilgrims, beginning with The House of Gods (1961) followed by The One True Man (1963) and the “satyr-play" The Big Stuffed Hand of Friendship (1969). They are related, formally and thematically, much as a cycle of poems would be.

Beginning in a trading ship near the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1789, Isaac Ford and his wife Rachel and their twenty-nine sailors are attacked by Haida. Isaac recovers consciousness lying bound on the floor of a canoe and surmises that he is the only survivor. Later as a slave on Queen Charlotte Islands he escapes with his friend Great Rock, a Tsimshian slave. “In thousands of miles there is only one European settlement, at Nootka. But Spain and England are on the verge of war, and there will be no British ships visiting this coast for a long time. If he goes to Nootka he might spend the rest of his life in a Mexican jail. Or he might be shot. Better to go to the territory of the Tsimshian: he will have at least one friend there. . .

“This work is fictional, but the events in which the protagonist becomes involved are historical in a general sense. There really was a Legaic ("Stone Cliff" or "Chief of Mountains”) dynasty among the Tsimshian. . . . sources have been the village and clan histories of the Tsimshian, Haida and Tlingit, which are part of the incredibly rich traditional oral literature of British Columbia and Southern Alaska. Norman Newton, 1929—2011, poet, playwright, novelist, librettist, worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation in Prince Rupert, a port city on Kalen Island at the mouth of the Skeena river near the Alaskan panhandle. The town’s history went back thousands of years to Tsimshian and Haida settlements. Through travel in the Queen Charlotte Islands to talk with peoples who absorbed their ancient culture Newton had an understanding that gives his novel depth and sensitivity. “Norman Newton, Polymath, Poet and Dramatizer of Myth” may be found in David Richard Beasley’s Canadian Authors You Should Know.

Japanese Armies invaded an almost defenseless Burma in 1942, sending tens of thousands fleeing over the mountains to India. They ruled the remaining Burmese, whom they boasted of liberating from British rule, with arrogance and brutality. Violet's Flight narrates the experiences of a young Anglo-Burmese girl and her relatives growing up happily under the British and their ordeal either escaping the Japanese or living under the occupation or fighting in the resistance.

The battles won by the allied armies coming out of India to retake Burma in 1944-45 are seen through the eyes of Japanese officers, who watch their armies suffer in their turn the agonies of defeat in war. The seeds of fascism sown by Aung San and his Burma Independence Army by joining the Japanese invasion, until disenchanted, grew like a weed, which poisoned Burmese society against Anglo-Burmese and other ethnic Burmans—strangling its bloom with an iron-fisted dictatorship.

Born a slave in 1790 in the Virginia Panhandle Sarah, a beautiful woman, marries a supposedly free Negro, Lewis, whom she hopes will earn her freedom. Her husband is taken back to Kentucky from where he escaped and Sarah is sold to a neighbour who mistreats her. She is forced to escape with her three youngest children through the Ohio wilderness and arrives in Simcoe, Upper Canada in 1822. She keeps house for a young Scotsman, Duncan Campbell, by whom she has a son. As Simcoe grows from a village to a prosperous town under Campbell's leadership, Sarah and her children flourish as does the growing black community of escaped slaves. Her son-in-law, George Smith or the Black Pimpernel, who helps her older black children escape to Canada, carries on his work for the Underground from Simcoe. Faced with many challenges, including American invasion and the reintroduction of slavery at the time of the Canadian rebellion, Sarah Lewis shows courage and resourcefulness.

Sarah's Journey is not just escape to freedom but an adventurous passage through life. Her son by Duncan Campbell, hides his background and becomes one of the richest men in New York City; his untimely death leads to the discovery of his mother's story.

Rape and wife and child abuse are common news today. Their distressing frequency makes us question the safeguards and the very nature of our society. Where have we gone wrong? Yet these crimes have always been present in civilized societies. Chocolate for the poor is a fictionalized account of an actual event from 1805. Ephraim Wheeler, an unemployed labourer, raped his 13 year old daughter in the Berkshire Mountain community of Massachusetts. His trial and the reactions of his family, friends, and the authorities to this rarely revealed violation bring out the political divisions and varying attitudes of different segments of the society. By looking back to a simpler community struggling with the issue of rape, we are able to see the crime in the round and judge the actions of the protagonists from the perspective of our experience.

"Beasley takes the reader on a search for justice, both for the victim and the offender. The journey is not pleasant and the paths it takes bear striking resemblances to the crossroads we face today when dealing with such crimes."  Brantford Expositor.

"The political intrigues are brought to life vividly.... Beasley allows us to see, and more importantly to feel, some of the forces that enmesh a man only too easily and drive him to acts otherwise incomprehensible." Hamilton Spectator

Three novellas explore the emotional and sexual relationships that can entrap, consume, frustrate and preserve the human spirit. "Helen" is an intensely erotic story of the love between a young man and an older woman. "Caravetti" deals with romantic love as against married love by contrasting love in Paris to love in a highly structured Spanish society, in which duty to family and the opportunism of purchased love reflect the ageless choice. "Adam" pursues the mental relationship between a homosexual and a heterosexual man in unrequited love, and the frustrations of both men in dealing with sexual attraction within the dictates of society.

When Canadian students are entrained from the East to work as caddies, bellhops, waitresses, drivers, cabin girls etc. in a resort in the Canadian Rocky Mountains for the summer, and the rich guests are looking for entertainment, there is bound to be sexual combustion. Bellhop D'Arcy Morgan, full-blooded Canadian boy, responds to the needs of his guests as does a host of others in this rambunctious and funny tale of life as it has been lived summer after summer for over a century in a North-American paradise.

Out of Print, see A New York Library Trilogy (above)

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