In this chilling
mystery, David Thomas constructs for his subject a secret
life. What is marvelous about David N. Thomas is that he manages to reframe Dylan Thomas, transforming him from a
poet and caricature drunk into a gifted man of mystery. The plot of the
book revolves around the suggestion that Thomas could have been a British Intelligence agent: Dlyan Thomas becomes James Bond! This playing with the imagination of the reader brings Dylan Thomas to life once again, giving David Thomas’s book a powerful kind of truth, albeit of a fictional kind. Instead of Dylan Thomas, poet and Welsh
writer, we are invited to think, what if Dylan Thomas had been in the British Intelligence, so giving the writer, who the author of this book clearly admires, a whole
new imaginative life. At the same time David Thomas skillfully weaves historical fact in between the fictional lines. This mixture of fact and fiction is fun, and it adds a whole other dimension to this book.
As the book progresses, Dylan Thomas''s closest friends are confronted with the legacies that haunt their past. The characters are plunged into dangerous relationships, caught up in the events of the
novel which force them to reconsider their own lives and the lives of their forerunners. This book is a haunting tale. The ease of the prose makes one think that this is not a first novel, but almost a book written by an experienced author on casual afternoons, shipped to the publishers just by pure chance.
Who was Dylan Thomas? Even today, no one really knows. From his early years of growing up in Swansea in Wales, to his family life; from his beginnings as a writer to his tours of America; from his early days of alcohol abuse to his death in New York in 1953: Dylan Thomas has become an icon for lovers, literature fans and poets. Dylan Thomas has become a cult figure for Welsh travellers of today an inspiration for every young lad heading from Swansea to London, into the new life. But it is Dylan Thomas’s debauched lifestyle that perhaps draws people towards him. In the book The Dylan Thomas Murders , by David N. Thomas, we begin to get an idea of who Dylan Thomas might have been, reimagining the poet without attempting to stick to the known facts. Reading this book, D. Thomas still remains a mystery, but David Thomas’ writing is so convincing that at times it seems less fiction and more the product of well-documented research.