Jake Tapper’s ‘Hellfire Club’
We review the debut novelist’s D.C. thriller.
CNN’s Jake Tapper proves he has the page-turning knack in his entertaining debut novel, The Hellfire Club (Little, Brown, 327 pp., ★★★☆).
Channeling his inner Brad Meltzer, Tapper pulls out a dossier’s worth of thriller tricks — conspiracy theories, secret societies, blackmailers, duplicitous cronies, whizzing bullets, dead bodies (lots of them) — in this smart if sometimes overheated potboiler set during the height of McCarthyism.
Tapper, CNN’s chief Washington correspondent, steers clear of the Trump era in The Hellfire Club, even if its more pointed passages evoke today’s White House and Congress, and not in a flattering way.
Set in a nation’s capital made paranoid by the “Commie” menace, Hellfire Club revolves around a newbie con- gressman, Charlie Marder, an innocent who, it appears, may be headed like a lamb to slaughter.
The book opens at dawn on March 5, 1954, with a Chappaquiddick-like scene as a still-drunk Charlie, after a wild party at the Mayflower Hotel, awakens in Rock Creek Park with a mouthful of mud next to a Studebaker he doesn’t recognize. No alarm bells go off when a wellconnected lobbyist, Davis LaMontagne, just happens to drive up. Charlie, who remembers nothing after a last slug of absinthe, is horrified to see a dead girl lying next to the half-submerged Studebaker. LaMontagne’s solution? Put the girl in the car and torch it.
How has the freshman congressman gotten himself into this mess?
Tapper backtracks a few months to when Charlie, a Columbia University professor with a well-connected New York Republican lawyer for a father, is tapped to fill a seat left vacant by the mysterious death of Congressman Martin Van Waganan.
Now Charlie and his wife, Margaret, a zoologist, are suddenly in D.C.
Talk about a swamp.
The Hellfire Club is at heart the story of whether a good — if naïve — man can do the right thing when surrounded by corruption.
Charlie, a World War II vet, is quickly on the wrong side of congressional power brokers when he dares to question an appropriation for Goodstone (think Goodyear), a huge corporation that manufactured defective gas masks that failed to protect soldiers during the war.
That’s the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and when Charlie crosses the nefarious “Hellfire Club” (populated by politicians and businessmen), his life and that of his pregnant wife are in real danger. Tapper can get carried away with his lethal pyrotechnics: A gunfight scene in which toppling statues of George Armstrong Custer and Charles Lindbergh became deadly weapons gave me the giggles.
Tapper has a flair for Mad Men- esque ’50s flourishes, though he writes through a modern prism that can be jarring. Margaret Marder, who studies wild ponies on a Virginia island (locals will recognize Chincoteague), is a feminist paragon about two decades too early. And Charlie’s friendship with a fictional black congressman also has that toogood-to-be-true quality.
What’s really fun about The Hellfire Club are the real-life characters who pop up and whom Tapper sketches with aplomb. A creepily charming Joe McCarthy, a vile Roy Cohn, an unctuous Lyndon Johnson and a hobbling, womanizing Jack Kennedy (and his sweet young wife, Jackie) make memorable cameos.
It’s only April, but Tapper’s thriller has beach-read written all over it. And I think the author has a good feeling about Charlie Marder’s future (as he should), because this Club ends with an invitation to a sequel.