A Tale Of Two Jamies

The event of the season…

Thanks to Monk for scouting up a palaver between two titans of frontier Highlander storytelling: The Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona will present on Thursday, March 2

John Sayles in conversation with Diana Gabaldon

Sayles’ novel, Jamie MacGillveray: The Renegade’s Journey, drops on February 28. I may not have it entirely read by March 2…

This is so cool. Gabaldon is, of course, the creator of the Outlander saga, featuring another renegade Jamie — as in James Alexander Malcom Fraser. I think it’s wonderful that she’s game for a Tale of Two Jamies. Access the virtual event on Facebook Live or on YouTube through this page:

https://calendar.time.ly/9plshfqx/posterboard;event=75701972;instance=20230302170000

I will post a reminder closer to the event.

To say I am looking forward to Sayles’ novel release is a bit of an understatement. Here’s the caper:

It begins in the highlands of Scotland in 1746, at the Battle of Culloden, the last desperate stand of the Stuart ‘pretender’ to the throne of the Three Kingdoms, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and his rabidly loyal supporters.  Vanquished with his comrades by the forces of the Hanoverian (and Protestant) British crown, the novel’s eponymous hero, Jamie MacGillivray, narrowly escapes a roadside execution only to be recaptured by the victors and shipped to Marshalsea Prison (central to Charles Dickens’s Hard Times) where he cheats the hangman a second time before being sentenced to transportation and indentured servitude in colonial America “for the term of his natural life.”  His travels are paralleled by those of Jenny Ferguson, a poor, village girl swept up on false charges by the English and also sent in chains to the New World.

“Eyes on the Horizon — The Delaware Shingas..” Art by John Buxton.

The novel follows Jamie and Jenny through servitude, revolt, escape, and romantic entanglements — pawns in a deadly game.  The two continue to cross paths with each other and with some of the leading figures of the era- the devious Lord Lovat, future novelist Henry Fielding, the artist William Hogarth, a young and ambitious George Washington, the doomed General James Wolfe, and the Lenape chief feared throughout the Ohio Valley as Shingas the Terrible.

I will also carve out some time beforehand to get up a post on Shingas, who has to have the most epic handle in Frontier Partisan history.