Review of Philip Kerr's The Other Side of Silence

I should start by saying that Philip Kerr's The Other Side of Silence (Marian Wood Books/Putnam, March 29, 2016) is the 11th book in the standout Bernie Gunther series and, if you’re not familiar with the series, you should start with March Violets, the book that introduces us to Bernie as a private investigator in 1936 Berlin. Philip Kerr hasn’t written the series in chronological order––in fact, some of the later books in the series are set several years before that first one––but your reading experience will be so much richer if you start with the first books. For the rest of this review, I’ll assume the reader is familiar with the series.


This is another one of Kerr’s dual-narrative novels, which he’s done a few times with Bernie. It starts in 1956, with Bernie working as a hotel concierge on the French Riviera. Because of his World War II misadventures as a reluctant aide to some big-time Nazi war criminals, he’s living under the false name Walter Wolf. The other narrative, which takes up only a couple of chapters, flashes back to 1945 Königsberg, East Prussia, when Bernie was in the German army, falling in love with a young radio operator while the Russian army encircled the city.

In 1956, Bernie’s life is uneventful, taken up with his job, playing bridge, and drinking away the time. That is, until he is invited to play bridge with the famous author Somerset Maugham, who lives in an opulent villa on the coast. Maugham, who had been a longtime agent for the British secret service (I didn’t know that, did you?), asks Bernie to help him deal with a blackmailer named Heinz Hebel. Bernie recognizes Hebel as Henning, a particularly despicable character whom Bernie had the displeasure of dealing with more than once, including in 1945 Königsberg.

Maugham called the French Riviera
"A sunny place for shady people"

Once this blackmail plot gets going, and you don’t have long to wait, it becomes a dizzyingly complex but thrilling game of Cold War espionage, betrayal, vengeance and revenge. And, as Bernie explains, there is a critical difference between vengeance and revenge.

The last Bernie book, The Lady From Zagreb, also has a plot that has one storyline about Bernie’s war experiences and another that is more espionage oriented. I liked that book, but I thought the espionage element was the much stronger storyline in that book. In this new book, the espionage plot is a far bigger part of the story. The flashback story is excellent, but it informs the bigger plot and blends well, which was not so much the case with The Lady From Zagreb. For me, this was a more successfully coordinated story, and it’s a particularly entertaining one if you know your Cold War espionage history.

Hey, Mr. Kerr, quit gazing soulfully
at the camera andvwrite faster!

My one criticism of this book concerns the romance element. As usual, Bernie has a romantic entanglement. This time around, it didn’t feel emotionally convincing. In fact, at the start, Kerr doesn't make it seem like Bernie even finds this woman attractive. But that’s a relatively minor problem, not enough to be of real concern. And that minor failing is more than made up for by the intricate plot and its clever denouement. I’m already impatient for Kerr’s promised 12th Bernie Gunther novel, Prussian Blue, coming in 2017.

Note: I received a free advance reviewing copy of the book from the publisher, via Amazon's Vine program. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Image sources: Amazon.com, bbc.co.uk, hollywoodreporter.com.

Review of Simon Mawer's Tightrope

Tightrope, by Simon Mawer (Other Press, November 3, 2015)

During World War II, Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered the new Special Operations Executive to "set Europe ablaze" by supporting the resistance to the Nazis in occupied countries. Many young men and women who knew other languages, especially French, were sent behind enemy lines to gather intelligence and work with local resistance groups. Their chances of being captured, tortured, imprisoned and executed were very high––and they knew it from the start.

For years, I've been fascinated by the story of the SOE, and especially of the young women who volunteered for this lethally dangerous duty. In an era when it was rare for a woman to do anything other than graduate from school to marriage and children, these women were trained in the arcana of espionage, including parachute jumping, hand-to-hand combat and silent killing. What was in the minds and hearts of the women who became SOE agents?

In Trapeze (Other Press, 2012), which is the predecessor to Tightrope, Simon Mawer gives us the story of a fictionalized SOE agent named Marian Sutro. She's English and French, grew up in Switzerland and moved to England with her family as things got dangerous on the European continent before World War II broke out. She had friends in France, especially Clément, the young scientist whom she'd had a crush on for years. When Germany overran France, it seemed very black and white to her; a place and people she loved were in danger from an evil invader and she wanted to help.

When Tightrope begins, the war is in its last weeks and Marian is coming home. She wasn't an SOE agent in France for long. She was betrayed, captured by the Nazis, tortured and finally sent to Ravensbrück, the notorious prison camp for women near Berlin, where many real-life SOE female agents were sent. (By the way, I highly recommend Sarah Helm's masterful history of the camp: Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women (Nan A. Talese, 2015).)

Back home in England, nobody knows how to treat Marian and she hardly knows who she is and how she is to live in this postwar world. Mawer evocatively portrays Marian's numbness and alienation, the way she can more easily relate emotionally to her memories of her fellow Ravensbrück prisoners than to her own family and colleagues. To help her recover from her traumatic war experiences, Marian is advised to see a psychiatrist. She tells him that life in the camp appeared to be nothing but gray, but underneath the monochrome their lives were complex, with hierarchies, networks and groups. The way a prisoner made her way through the complex meant the difference between life and death.

Queueing for rationed food in 1947

In many ways, it seemed to me that the same could be said of Marian's life in postwar England. Rationing of food, clothing and other goods continued for years, rebuilding was slow, everybody just seemed to want to keep their heads down, forget the past and get on with things. Gray. But Marian soon learns that the Cold War struggle has begun, another layered reality of complex relationships and loyalties.

Marian is offered a job and she attempts to return to some semblance of a normal life, but her past keeps impinging on the present. She has friends who are nuclear scientists, she has contacts in the intelligence services and, when she returns to Ravensbrück to testify against Nazi prison camp guards, she meets others who are in the intelligence game.

After the US drops atomic bombs on Japan, develops the far more powerful hydrogen bomb and seems to be seriously considering a preemptive strike on the Soviet Union, she wonders what was the point of all the sacrifice only a few years before, if World War III is now on the doorstep. Slowly, inexorably, Marian is drawn back into the ambiguous world of intelligence, with its agents, counter-agents, double agents and moles. Marian is once again in an environment where security and life itself depend on hierarchies, networks and groups. Will her choices lead to safety or betrayal?

Although this is a long and slow-moving novel, and Marian is a difficult character, I was riveted. Mawer makes Marian completely believable, even if often not very likable, and he immerses the reader in the tensions and uncertainty of her position, slowly upping the ante as the story goes on. Mawer has done his research, too, and skillfully interweaves real characters and events from SOE history, and British intelligence during the Cold War, into Marian's story. Details of Marian's SOE experiences will ring true to those who have read the histories. Her experiences reminded me a good deal of the description of what happened to SOE agent Eileen Nearne, which you can read about in brief here.

Former SOE agents Eileen Nearne and Odette Sansom
attend the 1993 unveiling of a plaque
at Ravensbrück, where both were imprisoned

Marian's story is told through the eyes of Sam Wareham, the son of Sutro family friends, who met Marian shortly after her return. Sam was 12 years younger than Marian and had an immediate schoolboy crush on her. His fascination for her continued for years to come, including when he became a member of the British intelligence services. The idea of looking at Marian through Sam's eyes has some benefits in telling the espionage story, but some real detriments, since his character so often has to write about events and thoughts that he couldn't know anything about.

Hayley Atwell in Restless

Though I am dubious about the use of the Sam Wareham character, in other respects I think this is a first-rate novel, and should especially appeal to those who enjoy reading about World War II and/or Cold War espionage, particularly about female agents. I liked it every bit as much as William Boyd's Restless (Bloomsbury USA, 2006), a standout novel that was dramatized by the BBC. The three-hour BBC drama, starring Hayley Atwell, Downton Abbey's Michelle Dockery and the fabulous Charlotte Rampling, was just released on DVD in the US, in case you're thinking of a good Christmas gift for somebody who enjoys espionage movies.

Although I did read Trapeze before reading Tightrope, I don't think that's at all necessary. Tightrope is also a better read than Trapeze, so if there's any question in your mind about whether you'd like either of them, I'd go with Tightrope first.

Just in case you want to read more . . . 

Note: I received a free review copy of Tightrope from the publisher, through the Amazon Vine program. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Review of Lissa Evans's Crooked Heart

Crooked Heart, by Lissa Evans (Harper, July 28, 2015)

Crooked Heart is the story of Noel Bostock and Vee Sedge, a couple of misfits in England during World War II. Noel is a 10-year-old orphan boy, living with his eccentric godmother, Mattie, in her rambling old house near Hampstead Heath. Mattie was a suffragette in the '20s and has a disdain for anything conventional, including the evacuation of children at the beginning of the war, keeping a house tidy, finding a new school for Noel when his old one closes, or listening to the local ARP Warden's lectures on air raid precautions.

Mattie decides to educate Noel herself, going on nature field trips to the Heath and setting him essays on subjects like "Would You Rather Be Blind or Deaf?," What is Freedom?" and "Should People Keep Pets?." Noel is happy not to have to go to school with other children, since his experience is that they are usually stupid and like to bully him for his nerdiness. When Noel and Mattie are not in session in their home school, Noel reads detective stories and Mattie sings old protest songs.

Mattie's eccentricity becomes more marked as she falls victim to dementia. At first, it can be amusing, like when she can't remember the last name of the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral, though she knows it's a bird's name, like Owl or Ostrich. Noel reminds her that it's Sir Christopher Wren, and she thanks him, but responds "I can't help thinking 'Sir Christopher Ostrich' has a tremendous ring to it." Far too soon, the sad day comes when Noel must be evacuated from London.

In St. Alban's, an odd boy like Noel doesn't find any quick takers, but the promise of government subsidy eventually persuades Vee Sedge to take him in. Vee is middle-aged, the sole support of her dotty mother, who spends her days writing letters to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and her lump of a son, Donald, who uses his heart murmur as an excuse for utter sloth.

Vee is barely scraping by, cleaning houses and doing other odd jobs.The war gives her a chance to make some much-needed money on the fiddle, like so many others. Vee's particular scam is to collect for fake charities. The problem is, she's just not very good at it; too nervous and bad at keeping her stories believable and consistent. Noel, the world's youngest management consultant and business partner, turns Vee's business into a far more successful entrepreneurial effort.

The US cover (top) is fine, but
isn't the UK cover striking?

This is all just the setup of the plot; one of the best setups ever. Once Noel and Vee meet, the plot thickens, with the two discovering other much more serious crimes afoot. This partnership will evolve in ways both comical and heart-warming, and these are a couple of characters who feel so real you'll miss them when you close the covers.

But don't forget, this is an English novel, which means that just as there was very little sugar allowed by a wartime ration book, this is a story that is never overly sweet. It reminded me a bit of John Boorman's wonderful semi-autobiographical memoir of his boyhood in wartime England, the movie Hope & Glory.

Review of Henry Hemming's The Ingenious Mr. Pyke

The Ingenious Mr. Pyke: Inventor, Fugitive, Spy, by Henry Hemming (PublicAffairs, May 2015)

I picked this to read because I'm fascinated with 20th-century espionage, but the story is at least as much about the amazing mind of this little-known character. Geoffrey Pyke's mind wandered constantly, putting together different sights and experiences to come up with novel solutions to problems some people didn't even know existed.

Pyke's ideas ranged from using specially designed snowmobiles to tie up more Nazi troops in Norway during World War II and keep them out of the battlefields, building massive aircraft carriers out of ice and wood pulp, and constructing an oil pipeline under the English Channel to supply the D-Day invasion. But Pyke wasn't just a war tactician.

Pyke and his three siblings lost their father when they were young, and their mother told them she would gladly lose all of them to have him back. Being effectively an orphan must have had something to do with Pyke's interest in childhood development, which led him to start a school whose techniques and philosophy are influential even today. Pyke was also influential in the development of the field of public opinion gathering, firmly believing that this could help prevent war and combat anti-Semitism.

Building a prototype of Pyke's ice ship

Though he worked closely with Lord Louis Mountbatten and was known to Churchill, Pyke's commitment to anti-Fascism and his many Communist friends made him a target of MI-5 surveillance at the same time he was working for Britain on the war effort. MI-5 became convinced Pyke was a Soviet agent. Another goal of this book is to answer that question. Read the book and find out for yourself what the author concludes.

This is a quick and engaging read, and I think it should be of interest to people who enjoy 20th-century history and biography. I was left wishing I could have gotten to know Pyke better, but I doubt there was much more the author could have dug out about him.

For the Fourth: Review of Kathyrn Miller Haines's Winter in June

Tossing around some books trying to decide what next to sink my teeth into, I spied Kathryn Miller Haines's Winter in June (HarperCollins, 2009). Just the thing for this time of year, I thought. I wasn't intending to seek out patriotic reading but, I hit the bullseye here; it was just perfect for my mood.

I first came across Rosie Winter in Haines's The War Against Miss Winter. Rosie is a struggling actress in the New York of the 1940s. She has a day job working for a private detective. Acting jobs are not jumping her way, and she is a bit worried about losing her room at a boarding house that rooms working actresses.

Rosie begins honing her detectival skills when she finds her own boss hanging in the closet in his office. Standard for mystery novels, the police want to write it off as a suicide, but Rosie suspects foul play. Life isn't easy in those days, with food rationing, blackouts on a regular basis and jobs a little scarce.  But Rosie, who has cut her chops in the dog-eat-dog world of the theater, is more than capable of handling a measly lot of criminals––especially with the help of her sleuthing sidekick and best friend, Jayne. What stands out about this novel is the pitch-perfect way that Haines captures the ambience and the tempo of the early war years.

This carries over to the third book in the series, Winter in June. By now it is 1943 and the war machine is in high gear. Both Rosie and Jayne have been more successful in their careers, but they would like to be more of a help with the war effort. Through some connections, they've been offered parts in a USO show that is headed to the South Pacific. Where they will be going is not exactly to Bali Hai, that perfect island, but to a camp in the Solomon Islands now held by the Allies.

This opportunity sounds like a gift from the gods to Rosie, because she has heard that her ex-boyfriend has been missing in action and was last seen in the Solomons. Visiting this part of the world will give her a chance to try and find him.

Jayne and Rosie travel to the West Coast and are excited to be part of a five-woman group sailing out on a converted former cruise ship repurposed by the Navy for troop transfer to the Pacific Theater. As Rosie puts it, though, she was expecting to get champagne for her bon voyage, but instead she got a corpse. In the waters near the point of departure, the body of a woman is found floating. The victim is unknown at first, but it is soon discovered that she is a former WAC who had been stationed at the same base, Tulagi, that Rosie and Jayne are assigned to.

Arriving at the base after a somewhat dangerous and uneasy ocean crossing, the girls are allocated living quarters. They are told that they are privileged characters because the tent of stitched-together sheets that they are to occupy for a few months actually has a floor and, more important that that, they have a barrel of water for a sink.

These ladies take everything in their stride, including communal latrines, nails in posts for clothes hangers and the sounds of a predator- and pest-infested jungle waiting to sing them to sleep. The ladies aren't the only females on the island, because there is a contingent of WACs that came a short while back. These WACs don't have the same privileges as the USO, and this causes some friction.  It doesn't help that apparently a member of their troupe used to be a WAC, a fact she kept to herself.

Between rehearsals for their routines for the show, Rosie tries to quietly investigate what has happened to her ex, Jack, and the murdered WAC.

What irks Rosie the most is that after living in New York for two years of the war, she had grown used to being in a part of the world where being a broad meant something different than it had to her mother and grandmother. Because of the war, women were finding themselves in more and more important roles previously dominated by men.

She was used to travelling the streets alone and to seeing women working outside the home, even when there were children. But in the military, it was made pretty clear that this was a civilian phenomenon only. In the world of the armed forces, women were still second-class citizens.

Haines uses the turns of phrase popular in the forties, and the mores of the time to bring authenticity to her story. She made me nostalgic for a time that was before I was born. The women smoked gaspers, batted the breeze, island-hopped to perform sometimes three to seven shows a day and were getting complacent when there was another murder.

The murder investigations do take a back seat to the chronicle of the reality of the women's lives in the USO and in the Pacific Theater of war. But this didn't detract from my enjoyment of the novel. There is one more chapter to Rosie's life, entitled When Winter Returns. That'll probably be when I’ll read it.

Review of Philip Kerr's The Lady from Zagreb

The Lady from Zagreb, by Philip Kerr (G. P. Putnam's Sons, April 7, 2015)

A good detective should always be honest, but not too honest

So says Bernie Gunther to a visiting Swiss detective (and crime fiction author) as Bernie produces from his pockets a bottle of pear schnapps and SS-etched glasses that he lifted from an stately home where he'd been a speaker at an international crime conference. Considering that the stately home had itself been appropriated from its owner by the SS, Bernie's pilfering seems only fair.

This latest 10th adventure of Bernie Gunther, cynical German gumshoe, takes place mostly in 1942, in Germany, Switzerland and Yugoslavia, with some flash-forwards to 1956 on the Côte d'Azur. The 1942 Bernie is back home in Berlin from his time in Smolensk as an investigator with the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau. (Yes, there really was such a thing––and no, of course the Nazis didn't investigate their own genocidal atrocities.)

Coming back to Berlin is a lot better than being in Smolensk, but it has its drawbacks. Bernie, no fan of public speaking, is coerced into giving that address at the international criminal conference. He's also once again summoned by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels (whom Bernie calls––though rarely aloud––"Mahatma Propagandhi" or "Joey the Crip") to do a little job for him. The job is to travel to Yugoslavia to get a message to a certain Father Ladislaus from his long-lost daughter, who is now up-and-coming film starlet Dalia Dresner.

Kerr says he based the Dalia character in part
on film star––and inventor––Hedy Lamarr

Goebbels, whose serial lusts are legendary, has a yen for Dalia. Both Goebbels and Dalia are married and she has resisted his advances, even risking her future at the UFA film studios, which Goebbels controls. Goebbels insists Bernie should do this favor, thinking that Dalia's gratitude will make her agree to be Goebbels's latest inamorata. When Bernie meets Dalia, he's immediately smitten too and will do whatever she asks. Yes, even go to Yugoslavia. That's a tall order during the war, when the Nazis' allies, the Croatian Ustaše, were bloodily laying waste to Serbs and Jews, and every bend in the road could lead to an ambush by various flavors of partisans. Bernie's visit to Yugoslavia is brief, but possibly an even worse experience than Smolensk.

The plot thickens back in Berlin, with Goebbels "asking" Bernie to go to Switzerland on another Dalia-related errand, and SS spymaster Walter Schellenberg adding a side job that turns into a spy/counterspy drama worthy of a James Bond film. If you've read the Bernie Gunther books, you'll know that no matter how unrelated Bernie's two jobs appear, their paths will converge at some point, and the meeting will be explosive.

Kerr wasn't quite as skillful as usual in bringing his two story threads together. The Swiss story was far stronger, involving Swiss neutrality and threats against it, and I found myself wishing Bernie could have spent more time in Zurich, getting into trouble with spies of various stripes, including agents of the OSS, the predecessor to the current CIA. The trip to Yugoslavia was almost perfunctory, despite its blood-drenched horror. And Kerr, who normally weaves history seamlessly into his story, has the convoluted saga of Yugoslavia during World War II presented by using Dalia as a mouthpiece, in a lengthy and painfully stilted explanation to Bernie.

Despite the unevenness of the two plot threads and some clunkiness in exposition, fans of Bernie
Gunther should enjoy their time with this entry. Bernie, the German Sam Spade, is his usual acerbic self. More than a little ground down by nearly 10 years of coexisting with Nazis, he's still open to love––or a reasonable facsimile. As always, he's the bottom-line reason for reading this series. And here's a teaser: we learn the background to a bit of Bernie's personal history that I've wondered about for years.

It's also good to read that Bernie will be back in 2016.  In his Author's Note, Kerr writes that the next novel in the series will be titled The Other Side of Silence.

My Wartime Ration Books

Our friend, Lady Jane Digby's Ghost, raved about Lissa Evans's Crooked Heart here recently, and I just had to read it. She was nice enough to send me her copy and she was right; it's delightful.

Crooked Heart is the story of Noel Bostock and Vee Sedge, a couple of misfits in England during World War II. Noel is a 10-year-old orphan boy, living with his eccentric godmother, Mattie, in her rambling old house near Hampstead Heath. Mattie was a suffragette in the '20s and has a disdain for anything conventional, including the evacuation of children at the beginning of the war, keeping a house tidy, finding a new school for Noel when his old one closes, or listening to the local ARP Warden's lectures on air raid precautions.

Mattie decides to educate Noel herself, going on nature field trips to the Heath and setting him essays on subjects like "Would You Rather Be Blind or Deaf?," What is Freedom?" and "Should People Keep Pets?." Noel is happy not to have to go to school with other children, since his experience is that they are usually stupid and like to bully him for his nerdiness. When Noel and Mattie are not in session in their home school, Noel reads detective stories (I knew I liked that boy right from the start!) and Mattie sings old protest songs:

On the final chorus repeats, Mattie would simultaneously hum and whistle. 'A rare and underrated skill,' she'd remark, 'and one that, sadly, has never brought me the acclaim it deserves.'

Mattie's eccentricity becomes more marked as she falls victim to dementia. At first, it can be amusing, like when she can't remember the last name of the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral, though she knows it's a bird's name, like Owl or Ostrich. Noel reminds her that it's Sir Christopher Wren, and she thanks him, but responds "I can't help thinking 'Sir Christopher Ostrich' has a tremendous ring to it." The sad day eventually comes when Noel must be evacuated from London.

In St. Alban's, an odd boy like Noel doesn't find any quick takers, but the promise of government subsidy eventually persuades Vee Sedge to take him in. Vee is middle-aged, the sole support of her dotty mother, who spends her days writing letters to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and her lump of a son, Donald, who uses his heart murmur as an excuse for utter sloth. Vee is barely scraping by, cleaning houses and doing other odd jobs.

The war gives her a chance to make some much-needed money on the fiddle, like so many others. Vee's particular scam is to collect for fake charities. The problem is, she's just not very good at it; too nervous and bad at keeping her stories believable and consistent. Noel, the world's youngest management consultant and business partner, turns Vee's business into a far more successful entrepreneurial effort.

From this point, the plot thickens, with Vee and Noel discovering other much more serious crimes afoot. This partnership will evolve in ways both comical and heart-warming, and these are a couple of characters who feel so real you'll miss them
when you close the covers. But don't forget, this is an English story, which means that just as there was very little sugar allowed by a wartime ration book, this is a story that is never overly sweet.

If I were you, I'd put Crooked Heart on your wish list. It will be published in the US by Harper on July 28. If you can't wait, buy the UK book (Doubleday, 2014) or, as I'm doing, order a copy of Lissa Evans's previous World War II novel, Their Finest Hour and a Half (Doubleday, 2009), about a young copywriter at the Ministry of Information.

Evans's cock-eyed look at a boy's life in World War II England reminded me a little bit of one of my all-time favorite movies, Hope and Glory. The protagonist is seven-year-old Bill Rowan, who discovers that World War II is the most exciting thing imaginable to come into his life. Learning to identify all the fighter planes and joining a gang that plays in the rubble of bombed-out houses are so much more fun than sitting in school and the crushing boredom of identifying all the "pink bits" on the world map that form the British Empire.

Bill's point of view is based on the boyhood experiences of director John Boorman, which provides some added poignancy in seeing Bill's sister's growing up way too fast; his father, a Great War veteran, heading off to be an army clerk; and his mother, a talented pianist, wondering what might have been if she'd married family friend Mac, who shares her love of classical music. But the real fun begins when the family's own house is destroyed and they must move in with Bill's grandparents, who live outside London, on the river.

Bill's grandfather and Noel's Mattie would have made quite a pair. Grandpa George is at least as eccentric as she, and shares her disdain for public education and any other convention. He's given to fits of temper, melancholic (and wine-fueled) reminiscences of old girlfriends, and a keen desire to teach Bill how to fish effectively and, more importantly, how to bowl a cricket googly so that the two of them can defeat Bill's father and Mac, who played for their World War I regiments. Bill is half-terrified and half-eager co-conspirator.

What both Crooked Heart and Hope and Glory have in common is that they focus on how, amidst the rationing and dropping bombs, it was a time of liberation from social convention. Most of all, though, they're just plain fun.

One of Crooked Heart's reviewers compared it to a couple of her favorite books, Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, and Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle. That made me wildly impatient to read the book, since I Capture the Castle is pretty darned wonderful and The Pursuit of Love is one of my most-prized books, one that I re-read regularly.

The Pursuit of Love is set in the years just before World War II and during the war. This time, the story is more female focused. Written in the voice of Fanny, it's about her wildly unconventional cousins, the Radletts, who are essentially Nancy Mitford's own family, which was both celebrated and notorious in England from the 1920s on.

Fanny's Uncle Matthew is mercurial, anti-social and bad-tempered, famously rude to houseguests. He roars at his seven children, but complacently allows them to tease him and, to everyone's vast entertainment, hunts them with dogs over their countryside. He has his surprising soft spots. He loves to play Caruso records at full volume, and is oddly fond of his in-law, Davey, who is a hypochondriac and esthete.

The seven Mitford siblings in 1935

The real focus of The Pursuit of Love is Fanny's beautiful cousin, Linda, who marries a crashing bore of a banker, leaves him for a revolutionary, and then leaves him in turn for a charming Frenchman. Linda's pursuit of love is comic and bittersweet, and the hazards and liberations the war bring to the entire family are more of the same. This is a book to read whenever you need some cheering up and some non-saccharine sweetness.

I just realized I wrote this entire piece about two World War II books and a movie without once writing "Nazi" or "Hitler." How about that!

Under Pressure: Leo Marks's Between Silk and Cyanide

I'm excited about my book club meeting tonight because we're going to discuss one of my all-time favorite nonfiction books, Leo Marks's Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945. Regular readers of Read Me Deadly are only too aware of my fixation on World War II, and especially espionage of the period, so you won't be surprised that this book is so important to me. Besides, it has everything: adventure, romance, coming of age, nail-biting suspense, brain-teasing puzzles, political infighting, sorrow and hope.

Leo Marks was the son of the proprietor of the London antiquarian bookstore, Marks & Co., at 84 Charing Cross Road. Yes, that's the eponymous bookstore made famous by Helene Hanff's book and the movie starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. Marks's introduction to cryptography came when, at age eight, he read Edgar Allen Poe's The Gold Bug and, fascinated by its description of a coded message leading to a buried treasure, he quickly broke the code behind the penciled letter notations inside the book covers that told the staff how much they'd paid for each book.

Once the Nazis overran Europe in 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill realized that the British would have to take the fight behind enemy lines. Churchill created the Special Operations Executive, whose brief was to "set Europe ablaze." SOE agents were fluent speakers of the languages of the occupied countries, and they infiltrated the Low Countries, France and Norway to help the local resistance, sabotage the German war effort and gather information to transmit back to Britain in code.

After writing to every agency he could think of and lobbying every possible influential contact, Leo Marks was accepted to cryptography school in 1941. His youth (he was just 21), flippancy and, perhaps, his Judaism, meant that after his training, he was not sent off to Bletchley Park with the rest of his class. Instead, he was sent to the new SOE, thought by some to be a collection of misfits. He soon learned that the life expectancy of an agent was poor, especially if the agent transmitted radio communications back to England. Germans patrolled with radio interception trucks to triangulate signals and find agents in the act of transmission; anyone could be stopped and searched at any time and might be found with coding paper on them. There were so many ways of getting caught, and capture meant certain torture, followed by execution or a trip to a prison camp where death was more than likely. No wonder the agents' standard kit included a cyanide pill.

On his first day at the SOE code room, Marks discovered that the main coding system in effect for agents was for them to use a poem as the key to code their messages. SOE knew each agent's poem and could decode the message. One problem with this system was that the codes used poetry well-known to anyone, including Germans, and that poem codes required messages to be lengthy. Another was that an agent under pressure might make a mistake, rendering his message an "indecipherable." That wasn't hard to understand, given how a poem was converted into a code. The agent had to choose five words from the poem, convert each letter in those words to a number, using a prescribed system, then use those numbers as the cipher to encode his or her message, beginning the message with an indicator to tell HQ which five words from the poem were being used. Standard operating procedure at SOE was to tell the agent who'd transmitted an indecipherable to re-send the message.

Young Leo was appalled. Poem codes were insecure and contributed to indecipherables. Requiring retransmission wasn't the answer. "Squads of girls must be specially trained to break agents' indecipherables. Records must be kept of the mistakes agents made in training––they might be repeating them in the field. . . . There must be no such thing as an agent's indecipherable."

Marks's war was with SOE bureaucracy as much as the Axis. Chain of command was reluctant to change any of its practices––especially on the say-so of a smart-mouthed 22-year-old working his first real job. But by buttonholing agents and sly insubordination, he managed slowly to introduce changes. Poem codes were largely replaced with one-time cipher pads printed on silk, which could be placed inside the lining of a coat and wouldn't rustle like paper if the agent was patted down by the enemy.

Though Marks was constitutionally unable to get along with the authorities in the SOE (he was called "not SOE-minded," though nobody could explain exactly what it meant to be SOE-minded), all of that disappeared when he worked with the "squads of girls" battling to decode indecipherables and, even more so, when he prepared agents about to be dropped behind enemy lines.

Yeo-Thomas

Marks had a sort of awed reverence and protectiveness for the agents, from the four Norwegians who pulled off one of the most important actions of the war, the sabotage of the heavy-water plant that was indispensable for the Nazi plans to develop an atomic bomb; to "Tommy," Lieutenant Forest Frederick Yeo-Thomas, who went back and forth to France on missions three times to work with resistance groups, was captured, horrifically tortured by the Gestapo and sent to Buchenwald, but escaped his execution order by taking advantage of confusion in the camp in late 1944 to fake his death and take on a false identity; to several young women.

Female agents were indispensable in the occupied countries. Young men were often rounded up for forced labor, but women were not. They traveled relatively freely, could hide messages and weapons in their shopping baskets or under their skirts, and could get away with so much, simply because the Germans didn't tend to suspect them. Sixty women became agents in the SOE during World War II, and of the 39 who were dropped into France by parachute or fishing boat, 18 were captured, of whom only three survived. Marks trained some of the women who have become most well-known in the years following the war, including Violette Szabo and Noor Inayat Khan.

Violette Szabo

Violette was a tomboy, with an English father and French mother, who'd spent several years in France before the war. Her husband was with the Free French forces and had been killed early in the war, leaving her with a little girl whom he never met. She was popular in the SOE for her boisterous humor, cockney accent and sharpshooting skills. When she had trouble coding with her poem, Marks gave her a poem that he'd written after the death of the woman he'd loved. Violette was captured on her second mission, reportedly after a fierce gun battle with the Germans, and executed at Buchenwald. Violette's story was told by R. J. Minney in his book Carve Her Name with Pride, which was turned into a 1958 film of the same name.

Noor Inayat Khan

Noor Inayat Khan, the daughter of an Indian Muslim father and American mother, grew up in London and near Paris, returning to England when France fell to the Germans. Noor was a published author of a children's fable book and was known as a sensitive and dreamy young woman. Some of her trainers thought she was likely unsuited to be a secret agent. Her coding was poor, but Marks had read her book and used its stories to help her improve it in time for her mission. Noor was sent as a radio operator to Paris, to help its resistance network, but the network was broken almost as soon as she arrived and most of its members rounded up. She had the chance to leave, but she refused, moved from place to place, and continued to transmit messages back to London.

After several weeks, she was betrayed and captured by the Gestapo. Despite her reputation as gentle and unworldly, she fought her captors like a tiger and twice briefly escaped from Gestapo headquarters on the Avenue Foch. She was shackled as a dangerous prisoner and brutal interrogations continued, but Noor is not known to have given any information to the Gestapo. She was transferred to a German prison and later to Dachau, where she and three other women from the SOE were executed on September 13, 1944. Noor was posthumously awarded the George Cross. For more about her, read Shrabani Basu's Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan, or watch the recent documentary, Enemy of the Reich, narrated by Helen Mirren (see the documentary's website here).

Marks's book was embargoed by the British government for over 10 years before it was finally published in 1998. If you have an interest in World War II espionage, cryptography, or just a gripping and well-told story of human behavior under pressure, please give it a try. I just hope my book club members feel the way I do about it.

The poem that Leo Marks gave to Violette Szabo