Jane Smiley has form with mining classics for plots. Her 1991 Pulitzer winner A Thousand Acres was based on King Lear. Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn also inspired two of her previous 15 novels. In A Dangerous Business, which is set in a brothel in lawless 1850s California, she does something slightly different, using Edgar Allan Poe’s fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin to prompt her protagonist Eliza Cargill into action when women start disappearing from Monterrey.
No one cares enough about the missing women – who, like Eliza, are prostitutes – to investigate. Monterrey has no constables, only vigilantes, who are more interested in money and feuds. This lack of law enforcement had suited Eliza, who was 21 when her husband Peter died, shot in a bar fight after barely two years of marriage.
‘Eliza was more relieved than upset,’ Smiley writes at the outset, explaining how Eliza’s father had handed his daughter over to Peter, who was 38, back in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
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