LIONEL DAVIDSON: A Long Way to Shiloh

A couple of years ago I re-read Lionel Davidson’s Kolymsky Heights from the 1999os and confirmed my first impression of it as one of the greatest thrillers I’ve ever read. I decided to try A Long Way to Shiloh, first published in 1966 and widely acclaimed as another of his best books, which I somehow missed out on. It is very good indeed, but Kolymsky still gets my gong!

A young British professor academic is invited to Israel to follow the clues from a newly discovered Scroll to the location of an historical artefact of inestimable value to world Jewry. Initially reluctant, he goes to Israel and is soon fighting Israeli bureaucracy as well as the obstacles provided by military security in this most paranoid of states (with some justification). Rather a naughty boy, Caspar relentlessly pursues a young female interpreter on the team even though she already has a fiancé.

The writer who kept coming to my mind was Hammond Innes, whose adventure stories I read avidly in the 1950s and 60s. Writing about an Arctic landscape, Innes could make you shiver on a midsummer Mediterranean beach. Lionel Davidson has a similar gift for evoking a location so vividly that he takes your senses there. The Judean wilderness is “a place of jackals and prophets, very old, very dry, very dead.” The chapter in which Caspar hunts for a hidden cave in the hills above the Dead Sea has all the nail-biting tension of an Indiana Jones movie.

Lionel Davidson died in 2009 but his thrillers are still in print. You’ve got a major treat in store if you’ve not read him before. I intend to catch up on some more of his books.