Of the period between 1710 and 1730, Tobias Smollett, the 18th-century novelist, remarked: "This was the age of interested projects inspired by the venal spirit of adventure; the natural consequence of that avarice [was] fraud and profligacy, which the moneyed corporations had introduced. This, of all others, is the most unfavorable era for a historian." It is, however, a very favorable era for fiction. Lately, David Liss has revived the era, first with the Edgar Award—winning novel A Conspiracy of Paper (2000) and its successor, this spring's A Spectacle of Corruption. Both novels revolve around a proto-private eye, Benjamin Weaver. Weaver, whose real name is Lienzo, is an ex-boxer, famed in his day as the "Lion of Judah." He is a Jew in an England that has just accepted the legal immigration of Jews—although anti-Semitic talk is rampant, and Jews are subject to such special legal restrictions as not being able to own property in London.

In the first novel, Weaver is pulled into an intrigue involving one of the first great stock market collapses: the South Sea Bubble. This occurred when a company that touted some vague assets in the South Seas issued shares of stock that caught the public fancy. The shares went up, the price rising in relation not to the real assets of the company but to the increasing price of the shares themselves. Finally, just as in all bubbles, shareholders realized that the company couldn't deliver a return. The shares suddenly collapsed and spread a depression throughout English society. Sound familiar? Liss's book came out in 2000, and it presciently commented on our own time—including a good bit about the fraudulence displayed by the management of the South Sea company, something that the American public became aware of in regard to our own bubble after the collapse of Enron, a year later. Liss, however, disclaims any insider knowledge about the '90s boom and bust. "I was a graduate student in English literature in New York in the '90s. I didn't even know there was a boom going on until it had gone on for about two years. Graduate students aren't normally obsessed with Nasdaq."

The "venal spirit of adventure" again animates the plot of Weaver's latest mystery, A Spectacle of Corruption, out this month. Set in the period after the South Sea Bubble collapse, Liss portrays an election struggle between two ambitious factions, the Whigs and the Tories. The Whigs are the party of the new business men—the Tories are the party of tradition. A secret group within the Tories, the Jacobins, even hankers for the return of the deposed Stuarts. The whole notion of the election campaign was relatively new back then. Voters were bought wholesale; politicians made promises they had no intention of keeping; the press was spun shamelessly; and slander was a mainstay of electioneering rhetoric. Once again, Liss has shown how Benjamin Weaver's world reflects our own. "The 18th century is a bizarre fun-house mirror of our times. That age's perception of reality is something we can relate to, up to a point. Go up a hundred years, and the people are pretty much like us; go back a hundred years, and the people are just too weird."

Given Liss's familiarity with the London of 1720, one wouldn't be surprised if he lived in a thatched cottage in Hampshire. Instead, he lives in a subdivision in San Antonio, Tex. When his wife, Claudia Stokes, was offered a job in the literature department at San Antonio's Trinity University two and a half years ago, Liss, his wife and their then six-month-old daughter moved from New York City to the heart of Texas—a transition Liss is still negotiating. The day PW visits, Liss is removing the traces of the previous night's primary election party. The returns from New Hampshire showed Liss's candidate coming in second. After a quick tour of the spacious house (including Liss's study, in which his Edgar—a sad-eyed bust of Edgar Allan Poe—has found a use as a bookend), we go out to lunch at Liberty Bar, an artsy restaurant locally famed for two things: its breads and being sited in a large clapboard house that is visibly threatening to fall over on its side. Everything is delightfully out of plumb in the restaurant, which always fascinates the out-of-town guest. Liss regrets a few things about having moved from New York City, among them, that he has a narrower choice of restaurants. Liss is a vegetarian, and Texas is heavily into animal fats. Luckily, the Liberty Bar is vegan-friendly.

Liss, younger-looking than his author photos, continues a remark he'd begun about the state of American politics as we sit. Objecting passionately to our current president, he has a theory about what he sees as the unfair media treatment of Howard Dean. "Look at how the media portrayed the relationship between Dean and his wife as 'creepy.' Actually, it is admirable that she isn't a cheerleader wife. She has her job to do, which is very normal. I think that the media overreacts to these things because Dean represents real, radical change for this country. I have an Althusserian read of the resistance, the overt prejudice against him by the media that feeds off controversies that it makes up for itself—it is a case of ideology reproducing itself."

It is hard to imagine Patricia Cornwall or even Scott Turow so casually dropping a reference to Louis Althusser, the French philosopher. In fact, Liss is one of those writers of historical thrillers—along with Charles Palliser, Ian Pears and Caleb Carr—who cut his teeth in academia. While pulp writers cull their acronyms from popular high-tech media or employ the scientific-sounding psycho-babble of FBI "profilers," the writers of historical thrillers mine their material from the obscure sections of research libraries and are competing, in an odd way, with the very works of their period. They tend, then, to write on a more literary level. Liss does not go so far as to make pastiches of 18th-century prose—as Neal Stephenson did in Quicksilver—beyond appending the odd "Sir" or "Madame" to his lines of dialogue. His novels also purposely avoid the picaresque or the moralizing, and move along with a vigorous, clear sense of the unity of action and development of character that is basic to contemporary storytelling.

Liss was raised in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and did his undergraduate work at Syracuse University. Upon getting out, "I didn't know what I was doing. So I went into advertising. I didn't like advertising at all. So I went back to school—to Columbia—in 1993. I was going for a Ph.D. in English lit. All along, though, I wanted to be a novelist. When you are young, you think that writing is a natural talent. You either have it or you don't. But what I discovered is that, simply by reading, and analyzing what I was reading, I was developing the tools for writing. I was asking questions like, how does this book work? Those are exactly the questions a novelist has to ask."

He came to the subject of his first novel through his work for his Ph.D. "I was specializing in the 18th century. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about my choice—I like the wigs, the clothing; I find it pleasing on an aesthetic level—and there is the rise of the press and urban life becoming something that we can recognize some commonality with. So there I was, reading novels of the period for my orals, thinking about what I wanted to do for a dissertation. I had been noticing how the novelists were all obsessed with money and debt. I also read about a real-life Jewish boxer later in the century, Daniel Mendoza. So I stole aspects of his life and took it back to the South Sea Bubble. I was at a point where I was finding it hard to go forward on my Ph.D.

"Although I'm not going to make claims about the quality of my fiction," he says, "I will claim that I wrote an absolutely great query letter. I used the success of The Alienist to show that readers really like to read about the origins of things we take for granted—for instance, in The Alienist, psychology. So, in my novel, I would show how probability theory and the stock market started." Despite the brilliance of his query letter, Liss acquired his agent, Liz Darhansoff, through a personal contact. Random House, his publisher, has been obliging, with his only real disputes with them turning on titles and covers. However, Liss is reflective about the perils of genre writing. "I didn't want my second book to be P for Periwig. I am ambivalent about the demands of writing a series. Although I am not turning up my nose at genre—not at all. Anyway, that's partly why I did something different with my second novel."

That novel, The Coffee Trader, is coming out in paperback, in tandem with his new novel. The Coffee Trader temporarily abandons both England and the 18th century, going back to one of the fictional Weaver's ancestors, Miguel Lienzo, who becomes involved in speculation in coffee futures on the Amsterdam market in 1659. Again, finances motivate the enigmas posed by the plot; and again, the issue of the status of the Jews in early modern Europe pervades the novel. "The Dutch used the international trading network of the Jews. So they allowed them freedoms undreamt of elsewhere in Europe," Liss explains. He finds that using Jewish history as the perspective from which to look at this period presents both a thematic interest ("this is the first moment in modern Jewish history in which assimilation is possible") and a technical novelistic advantage. "Putting an outsider in the story makes it easier for contemporary audiences to understand what is happening. Everything has to be explained to Benjamin Weaver. Because, for instance, he does not have a vote, he doesn't know or care about English politics. So as he learns about it, the reader learns, too." Liss is contemplating deepening the Jewish theme in future novels in which Weaver will figure.

Although Liss is having fun with the 18th century, it has its perils for today's novelists. This is especially true when Liss contrives roles for women in his novels. "It's a problem, because it is hard to create plausible action for women outside the domestic sphere—at least of the wealthy class. Lower-class women had a lot more visibility and present a lot more dramatic possibilities for the novelist. It is the inverse of now. Now, if you want to show a contemporary middle-class woman going from New York to Los Angeles, she just does it—she buys a ticket on a plane. Our affluence has bred that freedom, and it is available regardless of sex." Writing about the 18th century, he continues, "You have to work to find a way to make your respectable female characters move about and do things. You have to use what freedoms they do have, which consist of their moments of invisibility: balls and masques and visitings. I do try to measure whatever I invent against whatever the reality was. Of course, on the other end of the social spectrum, there were even female boxers back then. I refer to one in the novel—Elizabeth Stokes —who'd strip down and box against men. I had to include the reference to her, since she shares the same last name as my wife. My wife doesn't find this as amusing as I do."

In 18th-century fiction, the entertainments produced by the novelist or the poet were commonly justified by some reference to the lesson one could acquire from them. Perhaps in his latest novel, the passions aroused in Liss by what is happening in the country now has seeped unconsciously into his subject matter, presenting us not so much with an uplifting moral as a moral warning. "I was interested in how the two-party system functioned back then. The Whiggish dominance after the accession of George I, who wasn't comfortable with the two-party system, reminds me uncomfortably of the Republican hegemony of our time. The contest between the Whigs and the Tories comes down to voting either for somebody to perpetuate the power system, or somebody who will be powerless not to perpetuate the power system." The possible applications of that dark and elegant paradox hangs in the air between us.