Soldiers of Fortune — Book Summary & Review

On the opening pages of Soldiers of Fortune, Davis frames the whole story around the 1903-’04 Columbia Theatre setup—Luckett & Dwyer as lessees and managers—so the book’s “stage” reality is part of the plot’s engine, not mere decoration. Edwin Arden moves through the central power play with the zeal of a man who treats risk like currency, and the mining-scheme backdrop keeps tightening the screws: fortunes are made, lost, and remade through control of resources rather than through heroic battlefield luck. What Davis does especially well is braid interpersonal triangles with the mechanics of coups d’état; every flirtation or alliance feels like it could become a contract, and every contract feels like it could become a betrayal. Davis also leans into South America as a pressure chamber: revolutions aren’t romantic scenery, they’re messy systems where logistics, cash, and reputations decide who gets to speak first. A concrete example is how Arden’s “associate players” circle around the same small set of leverage points—money, access, and credibility—until the relationships read like a board of moving pieces. Davis’s writing makes you feel the era’s confidence in engineering and enterprise, then turns that confidence into a liability when local politics refuses to behave like a solvable problem. Still, Soldiers of Fortune is not a deep political analysis, and it won’t satisfy readers who want sustained realism about mining operations or revolutionary governance; it’s closer to late-19th-century adventure theater than to a documentary of any kind. If you come for subtlety, Davis will frustrate you; if you come for momentum, power games, and resource-driven scheming, Davis delivers.