Benjamin Franklin & The Vanishing Messenger

John Harmon McElroy was born and raised in a small Pennsylvania town, and by working in its glass factory helped put himself through Princeton University (which makes an appearance in the first book of his Benjamin Franklin Detective series). Two of McElroy's German-born immigrant ancestors fought for American independence. He has a doctorate in American Literature from Duke University. In 1990-1992 McElroy and his wife planned and, with the help of the U.S. and Spanish governments, planted a grove of 500 redwood trees on the rainy northwest coast of Spain (Galicia) to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America. In 2010 he walked the entire Camino de Santiago across northern Spain. John is a Professor Emeritus, University of Arizona, where, among other things, he created and taught the course Literature of the Early Republic for twenty years, which included Benjamin Franklin's autobiography. He also taught at Clemson University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and, as a Fulbright Professor of American Studies, universities in Spain (Salamanca) and Brazil (Santa Cataraina). In the summer of 1981 he taught in the English Seminar in Poznan, Poland. He and his wife, Onyria Herrera McElroy, author of best-selling medical dictionaries, were married in Havana, Cuba.

Benjamin Franklin & The Vanishing Messenger is the concluding novel in a trilogy of historical detective stories featuring Franklin, America's most versatile and consequential genius. He was a research scientist whose findings on the nature of electricity were compared to those of Isaac Newton on gravity. He was also the only American to sign all three instruments of America's independence from the British Empire: the Declaration of Independence, the American military treaty with France, and the peace treaty with Britain. As if that wasn't enough versatility, he was an ingenious inventor for whose Glass Harmonica both Mozart and Beethoven composed music. Because a detective uses a methodology similar to that of a scientist: gathering information on which to base an hypothesis in order to test it, it was natural to imagine Franklin in the role of a detective. As governor of Pennsylvania, Franklin hosted the Convention that wrote the U.S. Constitution and got it to agree that preventing "leaks" was imperative to the success of the Convention. The main feature of the security system he invented was that no delegate to it could put in writing any of its proceeding. But in this novel one delegate does write a letter that is full of sensitive information on the Convention's proceedings, and the messenger he pays to deliver his letter to another delegate vanishes. George Washington, the Convention's president, learns of this threatening development and confidentially consults those who've had the most to do with organizing the Convention--Franklin, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton--to see how the missing messenger and what he carried might be found. Franklin volunteers to try to repair this breech in the security system with the help of his trusted assistant in the two previous detective stories, Captain James Jamison. Benjamin Franklin & The Vanishing Messenger is the story of that investigation.