A Tour de Force of the American Revolution
The South Spy is S.W. O’Connell’s latest entry in his Yankee Doodle Spies series and is by far his best work to date. His protagonist, Lieutenant Jeremiah Creed, is sent to South Carolina by George Washington in 1780 to gather intelligence on British operations in the South and to frustrate their endeavors as best he can. He assumes the identity of Joseph Miles, a Loyalist businessman who, like many others of that persuasion, is trying to profit from the war by playing both ends against the middle.
O’Connell artfully uses this backdrop to give us a detailed chronicle of the war in the South, involving an expansive cast of characters both historical and fictional. No event is too large or too small to escape the author’s deft eye, from the siege of Charleston by the British to many smaller skirmishes in the backcountry.
More importantly, though, in this book O’Connell really brings home what it is like to be embroiled in a war in one’s own homeland. He correctly points out that the American Revolution was a much a civil war as the one fought eighty years later, and its effects on the psyches of those involved, combatant or no, were just as devastating. O’Connell renders all of his characters, real or imagined, with such depth that we come to know them as people, and experience the consequences of the war through their eyes, as if we were there beside them. This ability to inspire empathy in a reader is a rare gift, and it makes The South Spy both a thrilling military novel and a masterwork of literary fiction, one that deepens our appreciation of the human condition as revealed by war.
