Christopher Buckley’s style of satire has a peculiar bite: It nibbles, nibbles, nibbles—gently, even delightfully—before chomping down and leaving teeth marks as distinctive as any known to forensic science. In such novels as Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, Florence of Arabia, and Boomsday, he gnawed at journalists, spies, lobbyists, and other assorted taffies. But he seems to have tired of the taste of present-day political culture. His last book, 2015’s The Relic Master, is a tale of historical fiction set in the 1500s; his new book, The Judge Hunter, is set in the 1600s; and he apparently aims to write subsequent books set in subsequent centuries through our own.
The Judge Hunter is a brisk adventure with protesting Quakers, dour Puritans, violent Indian tribes, and a Brazilian parrot. The great English diarist Samuel Pepys gets the story rolling in 1664. He wants to be rid of Balthasar de St. Michel, his wife’s nuisance of a brother, and so contrives to have him shipped off to New England on a royal assignment to hunt down two fugitive judges who had signed the death warrant for Charles I in 1649. What Pepys doesn’t know, however, is that his in-law’s mission has a secret secondary purpose: “Balty” is, simply by being his dunderheaded self, to raise a ruckus not only in New England but in New Netherland, antagonizing and confusing the Dutch leadership there to soften them up for an invasion by a small English fleet.
Many of the personages Pepys and Balty encounter were real: Lord Downing, who masterminded the covert plans to take over New Netherland and for whom Downing Street is named; John Winthrop (the Younger), governor of the colony of Connecticut; Rev. John Davenport, a cofounder of New Haven; and Peter Stuyvesant, the grouchy, bird-loving director-general of New Netherland whose name is still on many institutions around New York. The regicide judges were real fugitives, too, although Balty’s character is largely a creation of Buckley, and Balty’s mysterious bodyguard Huncks, as competent as Balty is incompetent, is entirely fictional.
Buckley’s signature wordplay transposes well to 17th-century England and America, and anyone familiar with the real Pepys will take special pleasure in Buckley’s pitch-perfect fictional diary entries for him. In The Judge Hunter, as in most of Buckley’s other books, the stakes somehow never quite seem real—his wit keeps us at a safe remove from the blood being shed—although there are some affecting moments. But the point of the thing is in the adventure and in the glimpses of a past that is distant but familiar, not only because of the names that still resonate three centuries on but because all the manners of stupidity and greed, intrigue and intrepidity he describes are still very much with us today.
