You don’t know you’ve been caught up in this oddly compelling historical novel until you realize that you’ve just passed your subway stop. Shooting the Sun starts slowly, has characters that are sometimes difficult to differentiate from one another, and does not contain much in the way of what traditional mystery readers will consider an actual mystery, but its intellectual heft and historical verisimilitude cannot help but hold the reader’s interest. Max Byrd, well-known for his historical novels about presidents (Jefferson, Jackson, Grant) tackles new territory, literally, with this account of an 1840 expedition to photograph a full eclipse of the sun. He deserves a new audience among those who read mysteries, those who read westerns, and those who read, simply, good books.

The protagonist of Byrd’s novel is Selena Cott, a young American woman raised in France who is a mathematician and a scientist in an age when women did not take up such careers. Miss Cott is particularly adept at calculating longitude and latitude with the aid of a clock, a sextant, the stars, and, most astonishingly, a small version of Charles Babbage’s great invention, the Difference Engine, precursor to the modern computer. Her skills are necessary to carry an expedition into the desert of the great American southwest, miles off the Santa Fe Trail, where Babbage’s Difference Engine has calculated that a total eclipse will take place on September 5, 1840. There Miss Cott’s other talent, that for taking daguerreotypes – and especially her chemical accelerator formula, which shortens the exposure time necessary to acquire an image – will be indispensable to capturing, for the first time, a visual record of the sun’s corona.

The road to totality is a hard one for Miss Cott, undertaken by wagon train in the company of four rather disagreeable men of her station. The artist is threatened by her newfangled science of photography; the Harvard professor of mathematics is threatened by the Infant Engine; the explorer is threatened by her gender; and the capitalist is simply a nasty fellow who seems to have plans he is not sharing with the others. The expedition is rounded out by a genial vegetarian wagon train master, a large number of unnamed Mexicans to perform the manual labor, and a considerable quantity of mules.

The expedition is arduous and beautiful, full of unexpected adversity and natural beauty, and Byrd captures the boredom and pleasure of the months spent on the Santa Fe Trail brilliantly. It would seem, however, that such a trip would change, develop, even grow one’s character, but no one on this expedition seems to experience more than a softening toward Miss Cott, or a strengthening of resolve when adversity strikes. Byrd is more interested in his history than he is in his characters. But the history is so gripping a tale that one gladly follows Byrd to the ends of the earth, where civilization is not to be found and where the sun disappears.

Originally published in The Drood Review of Mystery, Volume 24, No. 11 (Jan/Feb 2004) at pages 5-6. ( )