The villain may be unfit for more mischief, but the reader is raring to go. Rumor has it that Liss, a 33-year-old grad student at Columbia University, received a spectacular $725,000 for “Conspiracy.” Historical fiction is a growth industry this spring, and Liss’s publisher, Random House, is clearly banking on a best seller along the lines of “The Alienist.” Far crazier bets have been made. “Conspiracy” is a tremendously smart, assured and entertaining novel: an intricate mystery, a colorful rogues’ gallery and, improbably, a history lesson on the birth of the stock market. Weaver investigates two suspicious deaths. One of the dead men is his own estranged father, a Jewish broker run down by a coachman. Before long, Weaver’s tangling with not only the lords of London’s underworld but with the Bank of England and its rival, the South Sea Company. “Conspiracy” could be deeper and more emotionally engaged. Still, it’s a nuanced evocation of the 1700s???the courtly language, the caste systems that divided genders, classes and religions???and it’s enormous fun. “David had the intellectual self-confidence to write about the period with a sense of humor,” says his editor, Jonathan Karp. “The problem with most historical fiction is that the writers are so worried they’re going to get caught faking it that they never loosen up.”
In person, Liss seems as unlike the explosive Weaver as one could imagine. The author grew up in Florida, and now lives with his wife in Queens, N.Y. Liss is an unusually calm, precise young man driven by a scholarly fascination with the 18th century. (He offers a visitor a “caffeinated beverage,” and then, when pointing the way to the bathroom, says, “You have to hold the handle down until a full vortex is formed.”) Liss stole time away from his dissertation on finance and the 18th-century novel to write “Conspiracy.” He was inspired by the memoirs of Daniel Mendoza???a Jewish boxer born in 1764???and by the first stock-market crash in the English-speaking world, the South Sea Bubble of 1720. Liss told virtually no one what he was up to: “If you tell people you’re writing a novel, and nothing happens with it, it’s embarrassing. Hey, how’s that novel coming, Dave? So to protect myself emotionally, I kept it kind of quiet.”
He needn’t have. Liss landed a first-rate literary agency???Darhansoff & Verrill, which also brokered “Cold Mountain” and “Memoirs of a Geisha.” He sold his book after a four-day auction his editor calls “ulcer-inducing.” Random House is printing more than 100,000 copies of “Conspiracy,” a giant declaration of intent. Literary best sellers are never sure things, but Benjamin Weaver won’t go down without a fight.
