A Long Way to Shiloh
Harper & Row (US) | |
Publication date | 1966 |
|---|---|
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 239 |
A Long Way to Shiloh is a thriller by Lionel Davidson, published in 1966 by Victor Gollancz Ltd and in the US (under the title The Menorah Men) by Harper & Row .[1] It was a Book Society Choice and won both the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger Award and the Crime Critics' Award for Best Thriller of the Year.[2]
Plot summary
30-year-old womaniser and drunkard Caspar Laing has just been made Professor of
The Jordanians have already sent scouting parties into the
Another clue alerts Caspar to the fact that not only have directions been reversed but the distances mentioned in the parchment must be halved. This narrows his search to the wilderness area behind the Dead Sea, where the border between Jordan and Israel is imprecisely defined and his search takes him into the rugged terrain on the Jordanian side. No sooner has he located the crucial third parchment than he is spotted by a border patrol and taken for a narcotics smuggler. Escaping with difficulty over the Dead Sea, he reaches the kibbutz where his friends are camped.
What the searchers eventually learn is that the hiding place for the Menorah is beneath the foundations of a new hotel. The question of locating it is debated at a special
Background
The novel was written following a visit by Davidson to Israel, to which he returned for a ten-year stay in 1968.[3] It has been particularly commended for its descriptive treatment of the country.[4] However, the geographical and political situation described there was considerably changed by the Six-Day War of 1967. An ironical but later change was the creation of a factual University of Bedfordshire in 1993, initially based in Luton rather than Bedford.