NRO Weekend, February 3-4, 2001
A Brit To Love
Nigel Haversham, a sort of Philip Marlowe meets James Bond meets British gray panther.

By Jonathan Wilcox, former speechwriter for California Gov. Pete Wilson

The Old Limey, by H. W. Crocker III (Regnery Books, 336 pages, $19.95)

f, the next time you visit Los Angeles's fashionable Westside, you should see a 60-ish Englishman, attired in heavy wool tweed and Panama hat, lunching at a posh eatery and chatting up two young and leggy locals, it is quite possible that a Nigel Haversham craze has taken hold throughout Southern California.

This could be the happy result of a splendid new novel that introduces us to an original and engaging character for the ages who journeys to America in search of his missing goddaughter, and along the way meets no end of domestic danger and imported intrigue.

H. W. Crocker III's The Old Limey (Regnery Books, 336 pages, $19.95) is set against the backdrop of sun swept Los Angeles, and tells the tale of the same Haversham, a retired British army general whose hilarious daydreams and whimsical musings conjure up grandeur both real and imagined about the glory of the crown and the glory of Nigel, usually in that order.

His travels bring him to L.A. in search of Alexandra, his attractive and well-bred goddaughter who has disappeared from her English flat suddenly and under less than benign circumstances. Nigel is then asked to take up the search and rescue by her mother, the aptly named Pandora (has she released both vice and virtue on an unsuspecting world?), the widow of his fallen military comrade.

Naturally, landing in the City of Angels and not knowing a soul, he seems hopelessly overmatched by his circumstances. But ever the military strategist, Nigel conceives "Plan A," and proceeds to gain the sympathies and assistance of April and Penelope, two young, bored, and beautiful locals, dreaming of setting up a business advising professional athletes about the mysteries of how to engage the public. "We'd be their image consultants," says the blonde and buxom Penelope. One gets the feeling that these are raw recruits.

But the two women turn out to be eager enlistees, and, Nigel seems to reason, his goddaughter's a young eye-catching lass, and here are two more. Surely they all know each other, or know where each other can be found?

Such is Nigel's repeated naiveté, which also results in repeated forays into hilarious political incorrectness (a personal favorite is Nigel's nocturnal alter ego — utilizing a Jamaican accent, adorning himself in blackface and calling himself "Bongo Topaz").

As if the twin challenges of being a stranger in a strange land and conducting a virtual needle-in-a-haystack search were not enough, Nigel's mission is also complicated by a potpourri of entanglements: Alexandra's ne'er-do-well English boyfriend who is bent on becoming a Hollywood screenwriter; British Rastafarians bent on recovering stolen cash; a Mexican drug gang bent on avenging a drive-by torching of their headquarters; a local troupe of Black Muslims, bent on stamping out the neighborhood narcotics trade and establishing its word through the publication of The Jihad Journal-Picayune. And did I leave out the Los Angeles Police Department, California Border Patrol, FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency, and some suburban Vietnam veterans?

An editor at right-leaning Eagle Publishing, Crocker smartly leads his charge through both death-defying thrills and humbling reality checks. And while Nigel may be eternally young at heart, he must pay deference to age as well. More than once, we find him, after spirited adventure or a nip from the old bottle (or several nips from several bottles) retiring to his hotel suite for a needed power nap.

All of this is why we can never take our imaginative eyes off the general, a sort of Philip Marlowe meets James Bond meets British gray panther. At a brisk and sometimes feverish clip, The Old Limey finds Nigel both repeatedly knocked down yet triumphant, and in the end, Crocker manages to bring the story's many complex loose ends together into a neatly tied package that should leave the reader's mouth agape with surprise and appreciation.

So we are left with Nigel, and there is something both tender and trying about him, with his unfailing British politeness and limitless sense of adventure that compel him to his rather risky quest. We don't doubt for a minute that he's undertaken it for familial and noble reasons, but it also seems obvious that the lifelong bachelor just isn't suited for quiet retirement and the life of afternoon chess matches at the local pub.

From his willingness to repeatedly risk life and limb, it seems that Nigel Haversham would prefer to go down tomorrow in a blaze of glory, rather than, like an old soldier, just fade away.