Billy and the Big Stick

Richard Harding Davis serves up a razor-sharp satire of American imperialism in this rollicking novella about an engineer who gets caught in the gears of Haitian bureaucracy and decides to fight back. Billy Barlow came to Hayti to install electric lights, but after his company is run out of the country, he finds himself employed by the eccentric President Hamilear Poussevain - and chronically underpaid. When his wages fall months behind, Billy hatches a scheme worthy of a confidence man: he convinces the president that a visiting American warship has arrived to intervene, using the threat of military action as leverage to demand his money. The result is a deliciously absurd comedy of errors that commentary on the absurdity of colonial "diplomomacy" and the audacity required to survive it. Davis, writing with the wit he honed as a war correspondent, delivers sharp social critique disguised as light entertainment - a young American manipulating superpower politics to collect a paycheck and win the girl. It's a period piece, yes, but one that exposes the theatrical nature of international relations with gleeful irreverence.