The Socialite's Guide to Fascism

The Spy Wore Red: My Adventures As an Undercover Agent in World War II, by Aline, Countess de Romanones, was on my radar screen for eons, but somehow I didn't get around to reading it until this summer. It wasn't what I expected. I had an idea in my head that the Countess was born into European nobility and had used her position to spy on Nazis. Well, not exactly.

It turns out she was born Aline Griffith in Pearl River, in upstate New York. She was working as a model in New York City, but didn't drink or smoke, didn't go to clubs and wore saddle shoes and schoolgirl clothes when she took the bus to and from work.

Aline's younger brothers were serving in the armed forces during World War II and she complained that she wanted to be in the war, too, but hadn't been able to find her way in. At age 19, though, she complained to just the right person: the brother of a friend, who worked at the War Department. He told her she might receive a call and, after a couple of weeks, she did. She was soon receiving intensive training at the "Farm" (later used, famously, as CIA training grounds), and working with other agents, all of whom knew each other only by their agent names. Aline's was Tiger.

Aline on just another weekend
in the country

Aline had a decent level of conversational French and Spanish, and was chosen to travel to Madrid, where her cover was working at the US oil mission. But her real job was to get into Madrid society, a good many of whose members hobnobbed with Nazis in neutral Spain, and gain intelligence about the Third Reich's plans.

Aline's entrée was her contact, Eduardo, aka Top Hat, who was a foppish regular in society and the clubs around town––not to mention, a kleptomaniac. He had a large collection of jewelry and other gewgaws that he'd lifted from his society friends. Soon after her arrival in Madrid, Aline was spending evenings at society dinner parties, at nightclubs with one of the country's most popular bullfighters, and weekends at the country estate of Count von Fürstenberg, and his wife, the drop-dead gorgeous Gloria.

Aline, licensed to kill

Looking into the background of this book, I learned that quite a few people have questioned its veracity. I don't know for certain whether Aline's story is true to life, but I will admit that some bits of it seemed at least improbable. For example, Aline writes about incidents in which she was targeted for death by Nazi operatives, but she escaped, by chance or wit. These incidents sounded straight out of a B-movie screenplay, where the depths of the Nazi agents' evil are rivaled only by the profundity of their incompetence.

Aline reports that on her very first day in Europe, she's taken to a casino in Estoril, in Portugal, where she almost literally stumbles upon a man in full formal evening wear who has just been murdered with a stiletto. Quite an introduction to one's first spy assignment! And people were forever sneaking into Aline's room to tell her she was the only one they could contact with vital information to pass on to the American government. Seriously? A 20-year-old girl who was supposed to be a clerk at an office? Some of those confiding people ended up dead; some Aline claims to have unveiled as German spies.

Now, I take my World War II history very seriously, but this is one of those times I decided I just had to forget about my doubts and go with Aline's tale. Why? Because it's such a hoot, that's why.

I'm not sure what Aline's up to with all these sheep

Remember how Rick's Café Americain in Casablanca was full of the most colorful characters, from every walk of life, and all around them swirled questions about who was loyal to whom, and who might be a betrayer? Well, Aline's wartime Madrid is just like that, only on a larger scale. Here is Aline uncloaking a society spy for the Germans, who was only too ready to flip and become a double agent for the Americans; finding the corpse of a murdered field agent inside his own piano; going on a mole hunt within the OSS's Madrid station; careening down a mountain road in a car with no brakes, with three heavies in hot pursuit. These are just a few of the scenes, worthy of the most overheated Hollywood spy thriller, that you'll find in Aline's memoir. See what I mean about it being a hoot?

I'd be laughing, too, Aline, if I had those rocks

A little further research indicates that after the war, Aline married one of the grandest noblemen in Spain, Don Luis de Figueroa y Perez de Guzm'n el Bueno, Count of Quintanilla, who later inherited the title Count de Romanones. She became a fashion icon and continued to hobnob with high society, including international celebrities, like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Jacqueline Kennedy, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn.

Now I have to go find Aline's follow-up books, The Spy Went Dancing: My Further Adventures As an Undercover Agent, and The Spy Wore Silk (with the same subtitle). Since Aline, born in 1923, is apparently still alive, who knows what other stories she may yet have to tell.

Aline was hardly the only woman whose memoirs describe using her position in the social world to observe the inner workings of Nazi operatives. And not the only improbable woman to be in that position, as a couple of other tales demonstrate.

You'd think it's never a bad time to be born a princess, but how about 1917 in St. Petersburg, Russia? That's when and where Marie Vassiltchikov came into the world. It's not surprising that she and her family left the country after the Bolshevik revolution. The family members wandered around Europe, and in 1940, Marie (usually called Missie) and her sister Tatiana moved to Berlin, where Missie's friends and her polyglot language skills got her a job at the German Foreign Ministry's Information Office, referred to in her memoir, Berlin Diaries 1940-1945, as the A.A., for its German short name, the Auswärtiges Amt.

Missie's timing in life sure is lousy, isn't it? She couldn't help when and where she was born, but you'd think she might at least have suspected that Berlin in 1940 wasn't the greatest choice. Still, her social life in Berlin was active and glittering, despite the war. Soirées and tea parties at various embassies and society friends' homes were a near-daily event, at least in the early part of the war. The amazing thing is to see all the nationalities of her friends: German, Russian, French, Hungarian, Bulgarian and several more, and the stunning array of titles.

Missie and Tatiana are no longer wealthy, so she does have to spend her days working. She's not crazy about some of the blowhards at the office, and wishes she could have taken the job at the American Embassy she was offered just days too late. She has access to lots of top-secret information and, one day, having been given by mistake a sheet of the special yellow-top paper reserved for particularly hot news, she decides to amuse herself with a made-up story that there had been riots in London, resulting in the king's being hanged at the gates of Buckingham Palace. She "passed it on to an idiotic girl who promptly translated it and included it in a news broadcast to South Africa." Oh, those girlish hijinks!

I shouldn't give the impression that Missie was just some ditzy dame with a useless title, though. While on the job, she met Adam von Trott zu Solz, an English-educated lawyer, with an American heritage (his grandmother was a descendant of John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court). Trott was part of an active anti-Nazi group within the A.A., and he became Missie's boss. Missie's memoir doesn't reveal much about the group's activities, which resulted in the unsuccessful "July 20 Plot" to kill Hitler, but she clearly knew what was going on. She does describe her reactions and those of friends and family when many of the plotters were arrested by the Gestapo, including her visits to the Gestapo to plead on Trott's behalf until a sympathetic man there took her aside and warned her not to return. Soon afterward, Trott was hanged at just 35 years old, leaving a wife and two small children.

Probably the most riveting parts of Missie's memoir are her graphic descriptions of the air raids on Berlin, particularly the extremely destructive raids of November, 1943. She sees a young girl on top of a pile of rubble, picking up bricks, dusting them off and throwing them away. The girl's whole family is under the rubble. As Missie laboriously climbs over smoking ruins to get to work, she sees chalked messages on the walls of wrecked houses: family members leaving word in hopes they will lead to a reunion with their families and friends. When she is out with Tatiana, trying to locate friends, the streets are full of refugees, pushing their meager remaining belongings in baby carriages. Tatiana's favorite antique store is still burning, with the silks and brocades making for a "pink glow [that] looked very festive."

After Trott's execution, Missie thought it best to leave Berlin. She moved to Vienna and became a Red Cross nurse. While there, she met Peter Harnden, an American Army intelligence officer. Missie and Peter married in 1946, and the pair moved to Paris, where Peter became a successful architect. Missie was widowed in 1971 and moved to London, where she died of leukemia in 1978, leaving four children.

Alright, so we've got an American model as OSS agent and a White Russian aristocrat working in the German Foreign Ministry with anti-Hitler plotters. How about an even more unlikely inside observer of the Nazis and their allies? Bella Fromm, a Jew, was a society reporter who kept right on reporting on Berlin social life until she fled the country in 1938, several years after the Nazis came to power in Germany. How the heck did that happen?

Bella was a society columnist for the Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung. She became well-known in Berlin during the Weimar era, and was a regular at parties given in high society which, once the Nazis took over, became dominated by political figures. Her friendship with several politicians, and especially foreign members of the diplomatic corps, seems to have provided her with some protection. Still, she was savvy enough to send her daughter out of the country in 1934 and, while she continued to be invited to parties, her columns no longer appeared under her own name after the Nazis had been in power for about a year.

Fromm finally fled Germany for New York in 1938, where she published Blood and Banquets: A Berlin Social Diary in 1943. She begins with a description of her life in Germany before Hitler came to power, then with what she claims are her diaries for each year from 1930 to 1938, wrapping up with a epilogue of her last encounter with the Nazis.

Questions have been raised as to whether Fromm's memoir reflects actual contemporary diary entries or have been amplified with the benefit of hindsight. Either way, it's still fascinating––in the way watching a snake can be––to read about the cast of goons suddenly elevated to the heights of Berlin society. This reaches an absurd level in Fromm's description of a 1933 party during which the new Führer kisses her hand and makes small talk with her; of course, having no idea that she is Jewish.

Books like these remind me that memoirs can be so much better than history books, or even novels, if you want to get that feeling of being a spy on history.

Review of Leonard Rosen's The Tenth Witness

The Tenth Witness, by Leonard Rosen (Permanent Press; August 16, 2013)

I've lost count of how many novels I've read about the fingers of the ugly World War II past reaching into the present. It's a challenge to make a fresh story on this theme, but Leonard Rosen's The Tenth Witness shows he is more than up to the task.

The Tenth Witness is a prequel to Rosen's impressive and original first Henri Poincaré novel, All Cry Chaos. Most of the action in The Tenth Witness takes place in the late 1970s, before Henri has become an Interpol agent. Henri is an engineer, and he and his partner, Alec Chin, have just landed an exciting project: on behalf of Lloyd's of London, they've built a platform from which they hope to recover the 18th-century wreck of the Lutine, a gold-laden ship that went down off the Dutch Wadden Sea.

While out hiking on the broad mudflats of the Wadden Sea, Alec meets Liesl Kraus, and their attraction is immediate. Liesl turns out to be a very wealthy young woman, the daughter of Otto Kraus, founder of Kraus Steel. Henri is soon introduced to Liesl's family, including her charming brother, Anselm, who now runs the firm's operations, and her uncle, Viktor Schmidt, whose bluff heartiness feels to Henri as if it's hiding something more menacing.

The Wadden Sea

Henri, who has an honorary uncle Isaac, who was a Jewish Holocaust survivor, is curious and cautious about the Kraus family, especially since Anselm and Viktor seem eager for Henri to become involved in some of their overseas businesses. Henri learns that Otto Kraus was a member of the Nazi Party and produced steel for the German war effort, with production fueled by slave labor. After Germany lost the war, Otto had a get-out-of-jail-free card, though: an affidavit, signed by 10 Jewish workers at Kraus Steel, swearing that Kraus had saved lives of the slave laborers; a veritable Oskar Schindler.

The Reichswerke Hermann Göring was
responsible for mining and steel
production in the Third Reich

When hints surface that the whole Kraus-as-Schindler story might not be the real deal, Henri's love for his adoptive uncle compels him to try to unearth the truth, whatever the cost to himself, his career and his relationship with Liesl. The story really takes off at this point, with Alec traveling around the world gathering intelligence. Henri spends almost as much time slogging through archival documents, and Rosen's writing makes that part of the search every bit as tense and compelling as the globe trotting.

Henri's work and research take him to facilities in the third world where workers who are desperate for any kind of employment are treated only marginally better than the Nazi slave laborers, and to countries where individual freedoms and lives are sacrificed in the name of security and progress. Without being at all sanctimonious, Rosen makes us look at the situational ethics so many used during the Nazi era and ask ourselves if we are so sure we'd have done the right thing, not the expedient thing––and if the choices we make today can stand up to close scrutiny.

As with All Cry Chaos, there is so much going on in this novel; murder, romance, science and technology, a chase after Nazis, and the quest for a gold-laden shipwreck. The plotting is intricate but fast-paced, the storytelling lean but with plenty of food for thought and emotion.

Shipbreaking in Chittagong, Bangladesh

Although I call the storytelling lean, that doesn't mean the book is sparing when it comes to imagery. Rosen vividly describes the huge Wadden Sea mudflats and the challenge of walking out to off-coast islands on them and, most important, beating the incoming tide to return safely to dry land; the hair-raising process of beaching a huge, decrepit ship and the work of gangs of laborers who take it apart for salvage; Henri's encountering Argentina's "dirty war" personally; Henri's series of chemical experiments.

Leonard Rosen

In All Cry Chaos, Rosen seemed to know all about fractals and made them an integral part of the plot––along with modern-day terrorism and a high-tech murder––while here, he fascinates the reader with natural phenomena, chemistry and engineering, together with the murder and moral issues. I don't know of another author who so skillfully interweaves so many varied threads in his novels.

Leonard Rosen has created an appealing and complex protagonist in Henri Poincaré, and his novels offer far more than the usual thriller or whodunnit; they have more in common with literary fiction. If you haven't read them yet, pick one and see for yourself.

Note: I received a free review copy of The Tenth Witness. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Two on World War II: Book Reviews of Stuart Neville's Ratlines and Sarah R. Shaber's Louise's War

Ratlines by Stuart Neville

In the US melting pot, nearly 35 million Americans claim Irish ancestry. The only claimed ancestry outpacing Irish in the US is German. But I'll bet the majority of Irish-Americans (and German-Americans, for that matter) are unaware of Ireland's role in World War II.

Ireland adopted a policy of neutrality during the war––or the "Emergency," as it was called in Ireland. As with other neutral countries, like Switzerland and Portugal, Ireland's main concern was to avoid an invasion by either Britain or Germany. There were other reasons, too. The Irish were war weary, after World War I, the Irish War of Independence from 1919-1921, and the Irish Civil War of 1922-1923. No wonder most Irish citizens were in favor of neutrality.

But just because the Irish state was officially neutral, that doesn't mean that there weren't strong feelings about the World War II combatant powers. Irish citizens could volunteer to serve in the British armed forces, and around 50,000 did just that. On the other hand, some felt that Nazism was an understandable nationalist movement, like the one that led to Ireland's independence. And some nationalists, including some IRA members, took the view that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, meaning anybody opposing the British must be right. The IRA shared intelligence with Germany's Abwehr, in hopes that a German victory might result in the British being removed from the north, resulting in a united and independent Irish state.

Otto Skorzeny

Like so many countries after the war, Ireland became a haven for war criminals. (See the documentary, Ireland's Nazis, for more details.) Stuart Neville's Ratlines focuses on one of the most well-known Nazis to find a home in Ireland: Otto Skorzeny, a Waffen-SS officer famous for leading the commando group that rescued Mussolini (temporarily) from imprisonment during the war. (Look at the guy. Is that a face straight out of an anti-Nazi propaganda movie?)

Neville's protagonist, Albert Ryan, fought in the British Army during the war and is an agent now in Ireland's Directorate of Intelligence. In the spring of 1963, he's ordered to report to Charles Haughey, the Minister for Justice, for a special assignment. Haughey tells Ryan to find out who is targeting and killing former Nazis in Ireland, and to do it before they can get to Skorzeny or generate enough negative publicity to jeopardize the upcoming visit by US President John F. Kennedy.

Ryan is introduced to Skorzeny, who is determined not only to combat the threat, but to find out who is behind it all and kill them. Ryan finds himself torn between his duty and his revulsion at having to help––or even be in the same room with––a man he finds repugnant. Ryan's position becomes downright dangerous, as he gets closer to both Skorzeny and his unsavory compatriots, on the one hand, and those who threaten him, on the other.

The classic loner lawman, Ryan has nobody to trust. Even his new girlfriend, Celia, has connections that make Ryan wonder about her loyalties. Ryan takes on all comers in a game that will risk everything, but that will let Ryan live and be his own man if he can pull it off. For espionage thriller readers, this is an exciting work of fiction that takes advantage of an unusual and little-known moment in history.

If you want to read about the real-life ratlines that allowed Nazi war criminals to slip away to new lives in various spots around the world, I recommend Gerald Steinacher's Nazis on the Run: How Hitler's Henchmen Fled Justice (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Ratlines will be published on January 1, 2013 by Soho Crime.

Note: I received a free publisher's review copy of Ratlines.

* * *

Louise's War by Sarah R. Shaber

Sarah Shaber is best known for her Simon Shaw series, having won the Malice Domestic award for Best First Traditional Mystery for Simon Said. Shaber strikes out in a different direction in her new series, featuring Louise Pearlie, a young widow who has left her home in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1942, to move into a rooming house in Washington, D.C., and a job at the new intelligence agency, the OSS.

Louise comes across a file on Gerald Bloch, a French hydrology expert who is a Jew trapped in Vichy France. The file is about to be forwarded to the higher-ups at the OSS, so that they may decide whether to smuggle Bloch and his family out of France and use his expertise on North African aquatic geography in a possible future invasion. Louise is shocked to see that Bloch's wife is her closest college friend, Rachel, whom Louise has been worried sick about.

Louise's disquiet intensifies when her boss, who had the file, is found dead in his office and the file goes missing. Louise doesn't know who is responsible for making the file disappear, so she has to do her own investigation on the sly, knowing that time may soon run out for Rachel and Gerald.

Shaber excels at portraying wartime Washington, with its large houses rapidly transformed into crammed rooming houses and even government offices. The story takes place in late June to early July, and Shaber makes the reader feel every degree of the relentless heat and humidity in a city that the British government rated as qualifying for tropical hardship status for its personnel stationed there. Only a few buildings were "refrigerated," and people like Louise had to rely on draping a wet sheet in front of a fan to generate enough of a cool breeze that might allow sleep.

Despite the heat, Louise and her boarding-house acquaintances manage some fun, including outdoor concerts, making hand-cranked ice cream and listening to radio shows. Shaber supplies all the details that make the time and place seem completely real. I learned from reading an interview with her that some of her research was done by the simple expedient of plugging "June 1942" into eBay's search engine and seeing what came up. Quite an unexpected and clever idea.

Shaber cranks up the intrigue as Louise tries to resurrect the file that may rescue her old friend. Is there anyone in the office she can trust? And what about at the boarding house? Joe, the émigré who lives upstairs, is attractive, but may not be who he says he is. Ada, down the hall, seems to be keeping secrets too.

This was a satisfying, traditional, period-piece of a mystery. Its style reminded me a little of an Agatha Christie. If it had been told in third person, rather than first person, it might have been even more like a Christie story. I'll be the reading the second in the series, Louise's Gamble, as soon as possible.

Louise's War was published by Severn House Publishers in 2011.

Note: Versions of these reviews may appear on other review sites under my usernames there.

Last Night I Went to Bed With a Murderer

I never go to bed alone. Most nights, I have more company than I know what to do with: my husband, our dog and our two cats on the bed make for a slumber in which everyone coordinates turning over like vegetables grilling on kabobs. When my husband isn't home at bedtime, I don't allow myself to pine for human companionship. I'm not picky; male or female will do. It probably won't surprise you, fellow mystery fans, when I say there are few bed partners better than a murderer. Here are some of my recent enjoyable one- or two-night stands.

Doreen Corder begins The Pew Group by Anthony Oliver on the wrong foot. Hers, against her husband Rupert's instep at the top of the stairs. Moments later, he's in a heap, head askew, at the staircase bottom, dead as the parsley on your plate. (She doesn't consider it murder because it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. He wanted whiskey and sex while she wanted an hour of show-jumping on TV. We'll let her take a mulligan on calling it murder.) Antique shop owner Rupert doesn't leave Doreen very well off, but she managed to pick up enough knowledge watching him run his business to give it a go on her own. In fact, Rupert's barely cold before Doreen scores a coup: a pew group, an extremely rare piece of English pottery worth "a king's ransom" comes into her possession.

Everyone in the Suffolk town of Flaxfield wants to get their hands on it and before long it's missing from the cupboard of Doreen's shop. Who took it? There's no lack of credible suspects and Flaxfield has gone on the boil. There are strange happenings in the woods at night, someone disappears and everyone is looking for the missing pew group. Looking over their shoulders are Doreen's mother Mrs. Lizzie Thomas, who has moved to Flaxfield from Cardiff to keep an eye on Doreen, whom she considers flighty, lazy and mean, and Inspector John Webber, who has returned to his hometown while on medical leave from his London job.

This is a very engaging traditional mystery. It sparkles with unique characters living their eccentric lives in a picturesque part of England. The unusual relationships that they develop with each other make this book special. The cheerful and nosy Mrs. Thomas finds Webber attractive but the two are friends and comrades in sleuthing rather than lovers. Oliver's writing is not only ribald and witty, he also gives some interesting information about the antiques trade and the obsessional collectors who support it. It's the perfect read when you're looking for a book that's neither mind-numbing action/dripping bodily fluids nor the blandest of comfort food. Unfortunately, Oliver only wrote four mysteries in the Lizzie Thomas/John Webber series (The Pew Group is the first) but they're all good for some entertaining hours in the sack.

"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child." Those are King Lear's words but Edward Powell's aunt in Richard Hull's The Murder of My Aunt would agree with them. Since the death of Edward's parents she has used family money, which Edward will inherit upon her death, to support him at her home in Llwll, Wales. Edward detests Wales and would like to live in London but this is impossible because he was kicked out of school for outlandish behavior and he has no skills. His narcissistic personality renders him unemployable. Edward spends his days reading racy French novels, spoiling his Pekinese So So and engaging in a battle of wills with his aunt.

Edward's aunt is determined to teach him to be a better person and he is determined not to be taught. After a particularly bad day in which he runs out of gas on his way to Llwll he decides to kill her. Luckily for his aunt and the reader, although he is sharper than a serpent's tooth, his mind is less than razor sharp, and he must try, try, and try again to kill her. [Georgette and Jonas Oldacre, this book might be for you.]

The Murder of My Aunt was written in 1934 and is a classic of mystery fiction. It regularly appears on lists of 100 best mysteries ever written. Edward's petulance and self-serving explanations make a very entertaining narration. The battle between Edward and his aunt is a fascinating study of narcissism and an unhealthy symbiotic relationship. Hull's writing is ironic and literate and if you haven't yet read his book you have a pleasure in store for you.

Three men walk into a Japanese restaurant in São Paulo, Brazil. (I swear this isn't the beginning of a joke. I'm going to tell you about Ira Levin's brilliant 1976 thriller, The Boys from Brazil.) Two are bulky men in dark suits and the third is an older, slimmer man dressed in white who insists on paying for the private dining room adjacent to the room he'd already reserved. When the two other men go over the two rooms inch by inch and then assume the position of guards outside the room, the reader knows something is up.

Gregory Peck as Dr. Josef Mengele

Something is indeed up; way up. The six men who join the man in white, Dr. Josef Mengele, around the table are former SS members and this is what they hear: "'You know what you're going out to do. Ninety-four men have to die on or near certain dates in the next two and a half years. . . They're sixty-five years old, or will be when their dates come around. They're family men, stable; civil servants mostly; men of minor authority."

Laurence Olivier as Ezra Lieberman

Why must these men die? The six aren't told why other than that the plan has the backing of the Kameradenwerk (Comrades' Organization) and that the future of the Aryan race depends on it. They are good soldiers and they do what they're told. They fan out around the world and the 94 men begin dying.

The six assassins aren't the only ones who hear the plot. A young American gets wind of it and calls world-renowned Nazi hunter Yakov Liebermann (based on real-life Simon Wiesenthal, name changed to Ezra Lieberman in the movie The Boys from Brazil), who hears only that 94 men in several countries will die at the hands of the Nazis. He must figure out who, where and why in order to know how to stop it. Liebermann isn't the man he used to be and he knows he can't go to the authorities with this snippet of unproven information. He's old and frail and his sources in government and media have retired or died. Liebermann still lectures but to much smaller audiences at synagogues and colleges. The world's attention has moved on to other things.

The Boys from Brazil was written 35 years ago but it remains a stunning thriller all the same. Levin's pacing and plotting are impeccable. The story alternates between the jungles of Brazil with Mengele, and Europe and the United States with Liebermann. Levin, who also wrote Rosemary's Baby, The Stepford Wives, and A Kiss Before Dying, is a master of suspense. Disregard any voices in your head telling you you don't need to read this book. Don't read anything more about the plot. Levin has more tricks up his sleeve than you think and he'll keep you awake all night until you finish. The next night, you can watch the movie based on Levin's book, starring Gregory Peck, Laurence Olivier and James Mason.

One of Celia Fremlin's publishers once exulted that she was such an expert in domestic psychological suspense that her reader can sense the diapers drying on the line while reading. And it's true. She sets her books among middle- or working-class English families and then lets them walk into a nightmare step by terrible step. Fremlin's eye and ear for the every-day worries of women--what their families will eat for dinner, whether they should worry when Susan isn't home by midnight, what Mrs. Jones across the road will think when Robert runs the babysitter home at 2 a.m.--are unparalleled in mystery fiction. That she then takes these normal worries and magnifies them into something truly frightening is her gift to psychological suspense.

In Fremlin's 1969 book Possession, Clare Erskine is thrilled when her 19-year-old daughter Sarah announces that she is engaged to be married to accountant Mervyn Redmayne. Yes, he is 31 years old but, as Clare tells her husband, they're lucky he has a real job and hasn't joined a firm of psychedelic accountants or quit to do something artistic or take drugs. Sarah's previous boyfriends took advantage of her generous heart and loyalty but here is a man who will safely remove Sarah from their clutches. Clare is not pleased when her younger daughter is adamantly opposed to Sarah's engagement. Even worse, Clare's best friend Peggy reports that Mervyn's mother, Mrs. Redmayne, is an overly possessive mother who will cause no end of problems for Sarah. Clare tries to balance faith in her daughter's good sense and desire to be independent with her worries about Sarah's future. And Mervyn and Mrs. Redmayne give Clare something to worry about.

I don't want to say any more about the plot of this book but I will tell you that Possession had me breathing through my mouth and leaning away from the bed's headboard while reading it. If you're looking for suspense in a literary mystery rather than a page-turning popcorn read, this book is for you. I opened the book when I crawled into bed and then finished it before the cows came home.

Many of us enjoy the companionship of a murderer while snuggling under the covers and before drifting off to sleep. If you can give us any recommendations we'd love hearing about them. Please leave them below as a comment or on the Third Degree page rather than on the wall of a public restroom.