Book Review

The Prince Must Die
by Gower Leconfield (pen name for Dr. Richard Cummings)
Dandelion Books/Tempe, AZ
www.dandelionbooks.net

ISBN: 1-893302-72-5
Copyright 2003, 176 pages, Fiction
Reviewed by Mark Dankof for Mark Dankof’s America and Uncensored News and Views
Re-post permission granted worldwide with attribution



Richard Cummings’ new novel, The Prince Must Die, unveils a fictitious, but plausible assassination plot against Prince Charles. Dandelion Books categorizes its new release as a work of “riveting entertainment.” While The Prince Must Die lives up to this billing in every respect, it simultaneously delineates the actual fault lines of the sociological and political circumstances extant in the UK that give the mystery thriller its powerfully credible–and frightening--context. Cummings utilizes his personal and professional expertise in both British culture and the world of international covert intelligence intrigue as the foundation of a most readable and successful story line, complete with individual character development that is pivotal to the coherence and believability of the whole.

For the uninitiated, Dr. Richard Cummings’ resume underscores the thin line between excellent fiction and the insider’s view of the increasingly apocalyptic world scenario evolving in directions yet to be fully understood. A correspondent on Middle Eastern affairs for Pat Buchanan’s The American Conservative, a Cambridge-educated Attorney-Advisor with the Office of General Counsel of the United States Agency for International Development (including a stint as legal counsel for the USAID program in Israel, Jordan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan), a member of the Association of Retired Intelligence Officers, and a front line columnist and pundit for everything from The New York Times to the legendary Lew Rockwell’s pro-market, anti-war web site, the author employs his insight, wit, and Princeton/Cambridge academic pedigree in a way that will satisfy a diverse coalition of readers seeking a mystery thriller that combines the spellbinding with a subtle humor that occasionally peaks into visceral hilarity. An example of the latter occurs on page 45, where psychotherapist Montague Rogerson, one of the members of the anti-Charles cabal and the therapist of German bisexual/transsexual and professional contract killer, Christian von Oberman (the chosen Jackal for the assassination of the Prince), engages in some reflective academic and personal insight:

"After von Oberman’s departure, Rogerson, while waiting for his next patient, perused a paper given in 1932 by the psychoanalyst Karen Horney, entitled The Dread of Women. A boy’s fear of the father, Horney argued, was a smokescreen for 'the fear of the vagina,' which was the symbol of motherhood, life, and death. The fear of the vagina had two bases: It is the mysterious place from which life and death originate as well as the sexual goal he will want to pursue. But the boy believes his penis is inadequate to the task, and consequently his sexuality, from the beginning, is clouded with the terror of rejection, derision, and shame. Horney referred to the work of R. Boehm, who, in 1930, defined the 'femininity complex' in men as based on 'parturition envy,' which he described as the envy of the ability to bear and nourish babies and to create life. The complete reverse of Freud’s penis envy in women, this involved both 'womb envy' and 'breast envy.'

"Rogerson then found a passage in Sadomasochism by Susanne Schad-Sommers: 'In countless folklores and poems, the woman appears as the mysterious other who is both intensely desired, and at the same time, dreaded as the devourer and destroyer.'

"The struggle to be a man was constant and ongoing, Rogerson believed. In transsexuals, the battle is being lost as the man allows himself to drown his masculinity in a feminine identity. It was, in short, a form of surrender, which, he postulated, was a metaphor for the surrender of British masculinity to the effete. Politically correct British feminism was destroying the country, man by man, until nothing would be left but soft, semi-women like Tony Blair."

Cummings intertwines these tidbits of wry humor within the unfolding of the story itself, namely that a group of conspirators on the far right of British politics, have decided to murder Prince Charles in tandem with the installation of Prince William on the throne, a move designed to violently assert the traditionalist values of Middle Britain and the greatness of its former Empire-- expressed in The Prince Must Die in draconian opposition to the accommodation of both Prince and Prime Minister to the malignant influence of multi-culturalism, globalism, and a post-Christian Britain. The xenophobic motivations of the plotters, united against “Frogs, Wogs, Immigrants, Pakis, the West Indians, and the fags” (pp. 10-11), combines with the pivotal role played by the investigative powers of Chief Detective Stanley West of Cambridge against the plotters and their hired Jackal Christian von Oberman, to convey a world to the reader comprised of a blurring mosaic of history, fact, and fiction. And Richard Cummings manages to pull it off brilliantly in 176 pages of an intriguing synthesis of mystery thriller and sociopolitical commentary, weaving everything into the narrative from Frank Carlucci and the Carlyle Group, to Mossad, MI6, the Abwehr, Freud, Bach, and the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot of 1516 and Herzog Wilhelm IV.

Enjoy.

[Mark Dankof (Mark Dankof’s America at  http://www.MarkDankof.com) is a correspondent and staff writer with the Internet news service Uncensored News and Views, and an occasional contributor to the orthodox Lutheran weekly, Christian News. A graduate of Valparaiso University and Chicago's Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, he has pursued post-graduate theological study in recent years at Philadelphia's Westminster Theological Seminary. Formerly the 36th District Chairman of the Republican Party in King County/Seattle, and later an elected delegate to Texas State Republican Conventions in 1994 and 1996, he entered the United States Senate race in Delaware in 2000 as the nominated candidate of the Constitution Party against Democratic candidate Thomas Carper and incumbent William Roth. His writings are frequently re-posted in the Iranian Times; Sam Ghandchi's Iranscope; UK, San Francisco and Palestine Indy Media; the London Morning Paper; Nile Media; The Balochistan Post; and Table Talk, the official publication of the Lutheran Ministerium and Synod--USA. Upcoming articles on his web site include a tribute to the American Christian activist, Daniel New; a review of two volumes on the life and thought of Garet Garrett [courtesy of Bruce Ramsey of the Seattle Times], and a retrospective on his own iconoclastic run for the U. S. Senate in Delaware entitled Why I Ran and Won’t Again: Don Quixote Reflects On His Run for Delaware Gold in 2000.]