ABSTRACT
“Terrorism” had become a sign without a precise signifier, and so, opposite sides could lob the term at each other. Two points put the early history of “terrorism” into context. First, the ubiquity of “terrorism” in contemporary discourse obscures its relative rarity in the very late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries. Second, while “terrorism” is rarely used positively, the term does not imply something so horrible and novel that it escapes language. The Dynamiter brings together several interrelated stories about three young men who, in search of money and occupation, become detectives after learning that 200 pounds would be “paid to any person giving information as the identity and whereabouts of a man observed yesterday in the neighborhood of the Green Park”. Dynamite bombs dropped from the air, on the other hand, represents something entirely new, entirely unprecedented, and in Tom Greer’s fiction, they constitute the next iteration of terrorism.
