Drummer in the Dark by T. Davis Bunn

First published: New York: Doubleday, 2001

Genre(s): Novel

Subgenre(s): Mystery and detective fiction; thriller/suspense

Core issue(s): Awakening; conversion; ethics; good vs. evil; sacrifice; self-abandonment

Principal characters

• Wynn Bryant, the protagonist, an interim congressman replacing the disabled Graham Hutchings
• Sybel Wells, Wynn Bryant’s sister and Grant Wells’s wife, a Coptic Christian born in Egypt
• Grant Wells, Sybel’s husband and the governor of Florida
• Graham Hutchings, a U.S. congressman disabled by a stroke, leader of a legislative movement to reform the finance and banking industry
• Esther Hutchings, Graham’s wife and caregiver
• Kay Trilling, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, an ally of Graham Hutchings
• Jackie Havilland, a former finance graduate student now employed by a private investigation firm
• Pavel Hayek, the antagonist, owner of Hayek Funds Group
• Colin Ready, a former computer hacker and electronics genius, now employed by Hayek Funds Group

Overview

Drummer in the Dark intermingles the bizarre and the mundane in both characters and story line to produce a tale of murder, politics, faith, and courage. Written in 2001, the novel portrays events that could very well be played out today. Grant Wells, the opportunistic governor of Florida, seeks to use the recent, disabling stroke of Congressman Graham Hutchings to advance his interests in Washington by nominating his brother-in-law, Wynn Bryant, as the replacement for Hutchings. Grant’s wife, Sybel, Bryant’s sister, also encourages her brother to run for the interim congressional seat, albeit for her own reasons. As a staunch enemy of Hutchings’s efforts to curb the out-of-control banking and financial industry, Grant instructs his brother-in-law to do only one thing while he is in Washington: to see to it that the Jubilee bill is killed. The bill was Hutchings’s attempt to restrict the banking industry’s ability to manipulate world currencies and thereby significantly reduce the debt of developing nations. In the meantime, Hutchings’s wife, Esther, hires a second-rate private investigator, Jackie Havilland, a former graduate student in finance who has an ax to grind with the hedge-fund industry leader, Hayek Funds Group. Esther wants Jackie to research the opposition to the Jubilee bill.

As events begin to control of the lives of the characters, Wynn takes his seat as a hapless puppet congressman of the Florida governor and quickly becomes the laughingstock of the staffers in his Washington office. It seems obvious to all the staff of the disabled congressman Hutchings, as well as to Esther, that Bryant is at best a “speed bump” in their plan to pass the Jubilee bill and at worst an inimical plant by the opposition.

The action, which centers on the ongoing development of the Jubilee bill, takes Wynn, Sybel, Jackie, and Kay Trilling not only up and down the U.S. coast between Washington and Florida but to Egypt as well. Sybel and Wynn were born in Egypt and lived there with their scholar-parents, who died under unusual circumstances when Wynn was a young child. For Sybel, however, Egypt was a place of roots: Both her culture and her Coptic Christian faith are grounded there. After their parents’ death, Sybel became the surrogate parent to Wynn. During the trips to Egypt to work on the Jubilee bill, Wynn experiences several cathartic events that change both his personal life and his political agenda.

At the same time, Jackie is continuing her search for “dirt” on the Hayek Funds Group from the inside out. She has unwittingly found an ally in a phantom figure who apparently has access to insider information about the group. She cannot bring herself to trust this source, however, because of the “cloak and dagger” tactics he (presumably) continually uses to communicate with her.

The information-technology security guru for Hayek, Colin Ready, like so many intelligent employees with limited access to strategic information, begins to be suspicious about how his boss is manipulating the company’s employees against one another. With access to information from both sides, Ready begins to realize that owner and president Pavel Hayek is not only double-crossing the world currency markets but also double-crossing his own people at the same time. The Hayek Funds Group is plotting a currency manipulation of global proportions. Code-named Tsunami, the planned currency scam will place the dollar at risk and throw world currency markets into a near panic, thus enabling Hayek to reap huge profits. This is just the type of currency manipulation that the Jubilee bill backed by congressman Hutchings seeks to curb. The suspenseful conclusion of the plot dramatizes, because of the author’s personal knowledge of the banking and financial marketplace, just how devastating such a conspiracy could be for the global economy.

Christian Themes

Drummer in the Dark brings the reader into a world seen, by most, only on the surface—the incestuous world of politics and currency market regulation. Since the Great Depression of the 1930’s, the banking industry has successfully eroded the effective regulatory system that had been established to maintain monetary stability on national and international levels. Florida governor Grant Wells, heavily supported politically and financially by the banking industry, decides to exploit his position by running his apolitical but beholden brother-in-law for a recently vacated congressional seat. The story immerses the brother-in-law, the protagonist, a self-satisfied individual, into circumstances that demand choices—the most basic of all moral choices, between good and evil. Wynn Bryant has lived his life as a “kept” man by his sister and brother-in-law. When his brother-in-law attempts to use Wynn for his purposes, Wynn quickly finds himself a tool in the hands of the banking lobby to ensure its ability to control banking regulation.

Wynn’s awakening from his moral lethargy is facilitated by his sister, Sybel. As he tries to orient himself to his newly acquired moral compass, he wrestles with his sense of obligation to his brother-in-law and his loyalty to his sister. As he becomes more intimately involved with the players on both sides of the moral fence in his “playground,” Wynn becomes aware of qualities within himself that he has never known. His newfound sense of moral awareness also leads Wynn on a spiritual quest and ultimately to the point of choosing which set of principles he will support. He has been thrust into the role of a congressman; what sort of congressman will he be? Wynn’s choice is reminiscent of the choice Thomas à Becket must make in T. S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral (pr., pb. 1935).

Drummer in the Dark also illustrates another, albeit subtler, Christian theme: lifestyle evangelism. The story is set firmly on the character of Sybel Wells, who is not only an older sister to Wynn but also his spiritual mentor. A Coptic Christian by heritage, Sybel’s solid faith is obvious to all who know her, from her unbelieving husband, Grant, to the Washington insiders who surround the disabled congressman, Graham Hutchings, his wife Esther, and Hutchings’s replacement, Wynn. Sybel’s living witness is unstated but present throughout the story, and the almost offhand conversion of several of the novel’s principal characters is clearly the result of Sybel’s influence on their lives. The existence of this theme in this understated, almost unstated, guise is one of the more masterful strokes in the novel.

Sources for Further Study

Eichengreen, Barry, and Donald Mathieson. Hedge Funds: What Do We Really Know? Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 1999. One in a series of books developed by the IMF to help laypersons and bureaucrats alike have a better understanding of the murky world of international financial markets. Because of the way hedge funds appear to operate like mutual funds, but with less restriction and oversight, they have been linked to several financial and currency crises around the world.

Faithfulreader.com. Interview with T. Davis Bunn. http://www.faithfulreader.com. Provides a biographical sketch of Bunn and an interview that surveys several of his novels, including his Heirs of Acadia series.

Mort, John. Review of Drummer in the Dark. Booklist 97, no. 21 (July, 2001): 1948. A lukewarm response to the novel, concluding that Bunn is “writing hurriedly in a style that strikes a high tone and then descends into stale slang and shallow characterizations.”

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Implication of the Growth of Hedge Funds: A Staff Report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Washington, D.C.: Author, 2003. This report, by the staff of the SEC, provides a comprehensive overview of the nature of hedge funds, their exponential growth, and recommendations regarding the management and regulation of such funds. An excellent primer for understanding the backdrop of Drummer in the Dark.

Zaleski, Jeff. Review of Drummer in the Dark. Publishers Weekly 248, no. 27 (July 2, 2001): 50. Notes that the novel succeeds in expanding Bunn’s traditionally Christian audience to a mainstream one.