Fast-paced political thrills in 'Lost'

The Lost Constitution, By William Martin, Forge, 512 pp., $24.95

This past March, a federal appeals court struck down the District of Columbia's gun control law, ruling it to be an unconstitutional abridgment of the Second Amendment's right of the people "to keep and bear arms" clause.

The ruling is likely to bring this politically and emotionally charged constitutional issue before the Supreme Court, but already it makes William Martin a most prescient novelist. And his novel should stand as a provocative entry in the post-Virginia Tech gun control argument.

On its own merits, "The Lost Constitution" is a fast-paced political thriller woven around parallel searches a century and more apart for a "lost" draft of the Constitution on whose margins several of its framers are believed to have noted their reservations about the Second Amendment.

The present-day search involves Back Bay rare book dealer Peter Fallon, who in previous novels by Martin was on the trails of a Paul Revere tea service and a Shakespeare manuscript.

Here the stakes are higher. "This is about more than another lost document, isn't it? It's about ideas that matter today," says Evangeline Carrington, Fallon's girlfriend and accomplice.

The constitutional conflict is inherent in the one-sentence wording of the Amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." As Fallon puts it, "Those two clauses have been fighting with each other since they were written."

As that conflict plays out in Martin's novel, it raises the question of whether repeal of the Second Amendment could lead to stronger gun control laws. For the players on both sides, the "lost" draft of the Constitution could be the key to the repeal campaign -- either to advance it, or to kill it.

Martin employs Shays's Rebellion, the populist uprising in Western Massachusetts in 1786-87, to set the stage for the political debate at the core of the book, for the losing of the draft Constitution, and for the searches for it.

The initial search involves Will Pike, a minor participant in the rebellion, who is entrusted with the draft by a historical figure, Rufus King, a Massachusetts delegate to the Constitutional Convention whom Martin casts as one of the skeptical annotators. It is stolen from Pike, setting off the initial search for it, one that traverses 19th-century New England.

Present-day rumors of its existence prompt Harriet Holden, a Massachusetts congresswoman who is a leader in the repeal movement, to hire Fallon to find it. And Fallon's search is shadowed by a counter-search involving backcountry militia groups and their well-heeled backers.

To offset the murders and such-like that litter Fallon's search, Martin takes his hero to the library of the Massachusetts Historical Society as well as to a rare book dealers' convention at Bretton Woods. The denouement occurs at Fenway Park during the opening game of the World Series.

While that wraps up Martin's tale in satisfactory fashion, there remains a tantalizing question of whether there could indeed have been a lost Constitution allowing for a different interpretation of the Second Amendment.

In his 2006 study, "A Well-Regulated Militia," historian Saul Cornell notes that James Madison's "original formulation" of the amendment placed the "right to bear arms" clause before the "well-regulated militia" clause -- echoing the formulation proposed by several states as they ratified the Constitution during 1788.

"The Lost Constitution" may not rate a footnote in a Supreme Court brief, but it brings to life the looming constitutional debate.

Michael Kenney is a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge.