2 - The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. (1910/63)

Summary

Jack London’s The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. could have been the novel that continues what James began to foster—namely, a fledgling genre—yet its peculiar publication history prevented it from playing such a role. I mainly include it here to show that James’s novel was not a solitary exception in the literary imagination of assassination in America at its time, and that the genre’s concerns and its modes of representation were not simply put on hold between The Princess Casamassima and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Instead, London’s abortive novel indicates that there is at least enough of a tacit continuity to challenge the notion that it took the context of the Cold War to genuinely establish the genre of assassination fiction and its parameters. Yet The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. should also not be understood as a robust intermediate step between James and Warren, since London “abandoned the novel in late June of 1910, claiming he did not know how logically to conclude it.” The novel was only published in 1963 when Robert L. Fish, who had just written his first novel as he embarked on a career as an author of crime fiction, completed London’s text, considering (but not always following) his notes. That, of course, was the year of the JFK assassination, yet this historical coincidence should not suggest that London’s novel can be read more productively in the context of 1963 rather than that of 1910. The bulk of the novel is thoroughly embedded in its cultural environment of the early twentieth century, and the ending aims to be consistent with it. If the conclusion, written by Fish, does hint at its own historical moment of production at all, then it betrays mostly its postwar context, but even such suggestions are very scarce. If the novel is responding to a presidential assassination at all, it is actually McKinley’s in 1901, as Donald Pease suggests in his 1994 introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel, but even this is only relevant as the reactions to the event provided “the socio-political backdrop” for what is happening in the narrative (Pease xxiii).