An Officer and a Spy, a novel by Robert Harris

 

An Officer and a Spy is the novelized story of the infamous Dreyfus Affair, one of the black marks on the modern history of France and the French Army.

 

I often hear friends say:  I only read non-fiction because fiction is just a made up story that has little to no significance other than entertainment. I beg to differ.  I’m a history fan and read a fair amount of it, but I’ve found that often history books trap you in heavy details, dismissing the personal aspects of the story.  Novelized histories, on the other hand, wrap the reader in personalities that explore the inner workings of the historical tableau.  Yes, that is true even in the historical romance genre, with a glance into how people lived and died and loved and lost. Historical romance novelists collect a trove of reference material.  As an example of historical novels that make you “live in the time,” is A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. I often say, unless you have read that book, you will never understand how the French revolution affected French society and the people who lived through it.

 

A Soldier and a Spy is another novel that takes you inside and makes you live through the intrigues and government of the Third French Republic of the 1890s.  Yes, it is very much a history lesson, but one with a human face.

 

Perhaps you are familiar with the injustice done to Captain Alfred Dreyfus.  For those who don’t yet know the story, in the 1890s, Dreyfus was charged and convicted with being a spy.  He was stripped of his rank in the most public of places.  His disgrace complete, he was sent to the far away Devil’s Island,  a tiny and isolated place where he was kept under horrible conditions for years.

 

This is where the novel unfolds. The French Army Lieutenant  Colonel George Picquart. discovers that there be another spy in the army.  In his quest to identify the second spy, he uncovers mountains of evidence and deceit that rises to the pinnacle of both the army and the government.

 

The novel turns and twists as the truth is found and washed away and found again, always doubtful, always less than the full truth.

 

In this novel, author Robert Harris leads the reader through dust clouds of discovery to the startling ending.

 

If you enjoy spy stories, you’ll be thrilled and astonished at the reality of the complications of proof and truth and the consequences of both.

 

An Officer and a Spy is a great read that will keep you up at night and linger in your dreams. Besides the quest for truth, the novel is a valuable, personalized history lesson that echoes in today’s headlines.

 

If it isn’t in your city library, you can easily find very reasonably priced used copies online.

A Game of Spies, by John Altaman

 

A Game of Spies, by John Altaman

 

As my three faithful readers know, I’m into World War II spy thrillers.  Why that era?  Perhaps the good and bad, dressed in stark black and white. Perhaps, I lived before and shades of forgotten memories creep into the present.  But, a more common answer is that there are some damn good…Oh, pardon me Martha, I meant to say some darn good writers who have picked out the era to produce novels that envelope you in the time, the excitement, populated with indelible characters, and a terrifically bitter taste of constant danger.

 

Who are my favorites:  For flying, from the skies of England to the scorching sands of the Sahara, there is only one:  Derek Robinson.  No one else comes close.

 

https://stroudallover.blogspot.com/2017/08/a-good-clean-fight-by-derek-robinson.html

 

https://stroudallover.blogspot.com/2013/06/a-splendid-little-war.html

 

https://stroudallover.blogspot.com/2012/03/another-gem-from-derek-robinson-piece.html

 

https://stroudallover.blogspot.com/2012/01/goshawk-squadron-novel-of-breakneck.html

 

 

For the behind the scenes of spying and resistance across the broad expanse of Europe, leading up to and through the war, one name springs out, Alan Furst.  Yep, wrote about his novels, too.

 

https://stroudallover.blogspot.com/2022/05/a-hero-of-france-by-alan-furst.html

 

https://stroudallover.blogspot.com/2022/01/the-world-at-night-paris-1940-by-alan.html

 

https://stroudallover.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-foreign-correspondent-by-alan-furst.html

 

https://stroudallover.blogspot.com/2020/11/mission-to-paris-by-alan-furst.html

 

https://stroudallover.blogspot.com/2020/11/mission-to-paris-by-alan-furst.html

 

https://stroudallover.blogspot.com/2020/10/under-occupation-by-alan-furst.html

 

https://stroudallover.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-spies-of-warsaw-book-review.html

 

 

Now it’s time to add another name:  John Altman

 

Just finished reading A Game of Spies, a twisting, turning, streak of a novel, where nothing is certain, nothing is either believed or doubted.  Yes, spy craft is a game of uncertainty, in a stew of true and false, double crosses, and true believers.   Altman captures both the time and the motives and characters in the steamy atmosphere of France and the Low Countries, as the German army and the German nation’s egomaniac leader plot the beginning of the war.

 

I can’t help but compare this novel to those by Alan Furst.  Same time, same place, however the differences are stark.  Furst takes his time in developing characters and atmosphere. The plot slowly evolves. Altman, on the other hand, feeds the readers a buffet of characters with a streamlined plot and a host of twists and turns.  It is not until the second half of the book that characters maintain clarity, and are distilled into the good and the bad.  Even so, there are still lingering doubts.  All hinges on the kernel of the plot. Will the English find out the German war plan or not.  And, if they do, will they know what to do with it.

 

Many know the broad stroke history of the Second World War, but few of us know behind the scene details on which hinged every major event.  Unless we are historians, our minds infused with letters and other documents, old newspapers, and interviews with the players, we don’t even know what we think we know.

 

Furst especially, but also to a lesser extent, Altman, have done the research for you, and doing so have written intricately woven and finely plotted novels that will immerse you in the time, while keeping you on the edge of your seat.

 

Of the two authors, if you want to linger in the time, smell the cigarette smoke, reach into the hearts of the characters and live in the murky political mud, pick Furst.  But, if you want a racehorse, grab A Game of Spies and hold tight on the reins.

 

For me, it doesn’t depend on the skill of the authors, for both are keenly observant artists. It depends strictly on my mood.  Sometimes I enjoy a smooth ride, observing every detail of the neighborhood, and other times I want to feel the wind in my face.

An Honorable Man, by Paul Vidich

 

An Honorable Man, by Paul Vidich

 

An Honorable Man is set in the early, turbulent 1950’s in American.  World War II was over, but the cold war had just begun.  And with the cold war came internecine skirmishes between the tried and true Federal Bureau of Investigation and the new kid on the intelligence block, the Central Intelligence Agency, an organization that had its roots in World War II and the Office of Strategic Services.

 

Add to that what has become known as The Red Scare, when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin alleged that the U.S. was infested with Soviet Agents, throughout the government and the nation, and waves of conflict washed over every government agency and every government employee.

 

You may see tangential elements in our own time.  Substitute any number of today’s angry labels for ‘communist’ in the 1950s.  Pick your own metaphor, but The Red Scare, like so many other sloppy paintings was like putting on lipstick with a wet mop. Yes, there were communists in government, but the splatter fell on the good and the bad and the innocent.

 

Have you heard of The House Un-American Activities Committee?  Think of the 1950’s so-called blacklist in Hollywood.

 

The whole political time carried the stench of an open sewer, and yet intelligence activity prodded on, with the CIA and the Soviet counterpart doing their best to outsmart each other.  In the U.S. there were scandals and spies and trials.  On the Soviet side there were roundups and executions.

 

Paul Vidich takes the reader into the messy past, with characters on each side and devoted to each agency, with point and counter point.

 

And in this novel there are spies and counterspies and conspiracies and counter conspiracies, but all focused on the human element, the decisions and indecisions and personal angst, and person tragedies

 

Some authors tell a story and others, the very best ones, make you live a story.  It’s what has been said many times, that a good novelist turns poetry into prose.  Vidich lives up to that high standard, with short, but effective descriptions that bring moods and situations into focus.

 

Some examples:

 

“The monastic cell suited his suffering and after he’d returned divorced from Vienna and his life was turned upside down.    He’d moved in on a temporary basis, but one month became three years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve.”

 

 

“I need to speak to you,” Beth said, urgently, “Can I come in?”

 

There were hints of greasepaint on her neck when she’d rushed to leave the dressing room after her evening performance.  She still wore mascara, and she’d been crying, which had made her eyeliner run.”

 

You will grow to know these characters in An Honorable Man.  They confide in you.  They bring out the best and worst in each other. But, even so, you’ll find you don’t know all their secrets, but the tightly woven plot makes you yearn to know.  An Honorable Man will lead you down back alleys and into the world of spies and the realm of constant suspicion.   Tight. Exciting. Keeps you on edge to the last page.

The World At Night (Paris 1940) by Alan Furst

 

The World At Night (Paris 1940) by Alan Furst

 

I’ve written reviews of Alan Furst’s novels, all of which take place in the dark and somber days leading up to and during the Nazi era.  I get a hunger for them.  When you pick up The World At Night, as with his other novels, you don’t really read them, you live them, your overcoat clutched tightly to your chest, as you wander darkened street, embraced by the heavy fog of war, passing friends and enemies, without full knowledge of who is who.  

 

Furst’s fully packed novels, of which The World At Night is a prime example, blanket the scope of the filthy whirlwind that swept Europe, tearing it apart from 1939 to 1945, capturing the period year by year, from the Balkans to France and England, and Spain, always with a cast of indelible characters that follow crooked roads to survive or perish. 

 

Characters are innocent men and women smeared with the horror of war, as they plot their way from day to day.  And as they do, things always happen to push them into positions they don’t want to be in.  They’re not spies, but circumstances make them spies, still wedged between friend and foe.  They’re not resistance fighters, but many times they must fight. And meanwhile life goes on.  They fall in love, bargain with those they hate, meet in both elegant and seedy cafés, always treading on the razor’s edge.

 

Jean Claude Casson is not Parisian, but he lives in Paris and does his best to mind his own business.  He’s connected with the film world, which even in the midst of conflict carries on the business of making movies, writing scripts, collecting actors, scraping for financing, and finally getting stories on the silver screen.  He knows people.  A lot of people. Some want to use him, in fact most do, for both political and personal reasons.

 

The war in Europe was not just fought on the battlefields, by hordes of well-armed armies and ships and airplanes, but by the common people, the store clerks and farmers, restaurateurs, journalists, writers, and yes, the movie crowd.  Nor was it seldom fought by just one country and within one country.  I mentioned whirlwind and that’s the way it was.

 

Paris, Lisbon, Warsaw, even Berlin and London were a dark and active collection of those who lived underground in every sense of the word.  Trust?  Trust no one.  The need was a tangle of money, weapons, organizations of all sorts, and friendships made and broken for every reason under the sun, moon, and stars. 

 

To use an old cliché (I haven’t heard of any new ones), Furst has a way with words, and his heavy knowledge mined from libraries, letters, and persons who were there, weaves the words into a world of truth, torment, and terror, love and circumstance.

 

I must give you an example of the use of his remarkable prose!

 

He shaved, smelled the lotion he used to wear, then put the cap back on the bottle. Went for a walk. Rue de Vignes. Rue Raffet. Paris as it always was – smelly in the heat, deserted in August.  He came to the Seine and rested his elbows on the stone wall and stared down into the river --Parisians cured themselves of all sorts of maladies this way.  The water was low, the leaves on the poplars parched and pale.  Here came a German officer.  A plain, stiff man in his mid-thirties, his Wehrmacht belt buckle said Gott Mit Uns, God is with us.  Strange god if he is, Casson thought.

 

One of the wonderful things about Furst is how he sets the stage so elegantly, and when the twists and turns and action come, you know the setting, the smell of fresh bread, the taste of the wine, the burn of brandy when you come in from the cold, the deep and unselfish reasons you turn away from a friend, the complications of who you know, and who’s involved and what the stakes are; a perfect tableau for what is to come and why it startles and keeps you reading and makes me wish I could go back to Paris, now that it is Paris once again, and I thank god I wasn’t there when it wasn’t.

 

My other book reviews on Alan Furst:

 

The Foreign Correspondent

 

Mission To Paris

 

Under Occupation

 

The Spies of Warsaw

 

 

 

 

The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst

 

The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst

 

Yes, I’ve written about Alan Furst before and YES I am addicted to his tales of intrigue, wrapped around a Europe that is drifting toward war.  Paris, Spain, Berlin, The Balkans, all hold prominent places in his wonderfully written and carefully researched novels.  In The Foreign Correspondent, Furst takes the reader into the foggy darkness that hovers over the rich, the famous, the down-and-out corners of 1938 Paris.

 

Carlo Weisz is a foreign correspondent for Reuters, living from story to story, always searching for more.  He becomes entangled with Italian expats who are publishing an anti-fascist newspaper.  The Italian secret police are operating all over Paris and have already killed one member of the anti-fascist group. The others are still meeting, but on the run.  Among their number is a traitor.

 

Allow me to digress a moment.  I know some, who don’t know any better, will toss off fiction as a waste of time, a flim-flam effort of butchering history.  I heartily disagree.  Moi?   Surely this solid rule follower wouldn’t dare compare mere fiction to well researched history!  Oh, yea, oh yea, I would indeed.  I’m not at all denigrating historians, but well researched novels breathe the breath of life into an historical context.  With Alan Furst, history lives.

 

You lovers of historical romance novels know exactly what I mean.  Girl meets Lard, is captured by a pirate, rescued by the Lard and whisked away to his ancestral land in the Scottish highlands.

 

No matter how you feel about the substance or thinness of the plot, the details tell you more about personal lives and customs and other details of the mid-centuries than you’re likely to find in any history book. History deals with facts.  Historical novels, in their many forms, deal with life.

 

Another example from my own jaded past:  I studied the French Revolution in high school and beyond and am familiar with the bones of this huge event. But I never really understood the way lives were caught up in the bloody, nation ravaging turmoil until I read A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens.  Yes, that’s right, he of Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol fame.  A Tale of Two Cites deals, not with events as much as people caught up in events.

 

The same is true of Alan Furst’s novels. When you read Alan Furst, you are taken bit by bit through the race to war, you learn what the people of Paris (in this case) were going through, and the people in Berlin, and the people of Italy, and countries that were on both sides of the politics, and those who were stilling on the fence, just hoping to survive.

 

The protagonist, Carlo Weisz, can’t bring himself to sit on the sidelines, no matter the danger.   To complicate things, British spy agencies also want to discover the operations of the Italian and German anti-fascist group, but for different reasons.

 

Furst leads you into smoky cafes and fashionable homes and restaurants, where lives are bought and sold, and where good and evil lurk in equal number. Sometimes it’s a conundrum, with both faces of Janus residing in one man…or one woman.  The tension is palatable, the danger is real, and survival is fragile. Life and death may hinge on a single word, or a single time and place, or a single friend, or the twist of a key in a lock.

 

As a bona fide member of the media, Carlo has access to many people at all levels of government.  It’s up to him to sift truth from falsehood and friend from foe. Sometimes they co-mingle.  Often he struggles in the dark, while many lives depend on his raw judgment. 

 

From start to finish, we are drawn in by a story that captures the period, the people, and the smell of a fetid wind of a war that change Europe forever.

Mission to Paris, by Alan Furst

 

Mission to Paris, by Alan Furst

 

Mission to Paris is one of those all too rare novels that strips away the characters’ coats of armor to revel real people, pushed and transformed in the awkwardness of real situations.  

 

I get so tired with the ho-hum triteness of perfection.  I think you know what I mean; characters always knowing the perfectly clever replies, making the right moves, with perfect timing, always choosing the best wine, staying in the best hotels, getting the girl, and forever being one step ahead of numerous adversaries. 

 

Frequently tucked into the clutter of plot, there’s also the triteness of heavy-handed romance.  Boy gets girl, loses girl, gets girl.  Even reminding yourself of the pattern makes you want to toss the book hard enough to dent the wall. 

 

Alan Furst, in all his novels, and definitely in Mission to Paris, avoids those careless blunders of perfection and the lack of them is the key to chiseled characters, dented and scratched by age and experience and inexperience, that glued me to each page.  This novel, that purports to be a spy novel, is more a study of humanity, supported by an intriguing and ever shifting and intensifying plot.

 

It is autumn of 1938 and the setting is Paris, a Paris straining under the threat of war.

 

To refresh your memory, in 1933 Hitler came to power in a Germany still seething over its treatment by the Allies at the end of World War I.  In many German political minds, France was the mastermind of this villainy.  While peace was now in hand, Germany burned with the need for white-hot revenge and the object of that revenge centered on France.

 

In 1938, the Germans were playing political poker, holding their cards tightly and making the world guess.  Would there be war?  Should France rearm?  Surely everyone wanted peace, n’est pas?

 

Despite this Parisian world of intrigue and uncertainty, Warner Brothers wants to film a movie, staring Fredric Stahl, Austrian by birth, but now a Hollywood heartthrob.  Stahl is mostly non-political and simply wants to make the movie and get back to America.  He speaks his native language, German of course, but also English and French.  He is also a star of some magnitude, making him the perfect chicken to be flavored, stewed, and served to an array of politicians and plotters of all the major players.

 

And while he innocently meets old friends and enjoys his favorite city, the pot begins to boil. Stahl is not immune.  He feels the heat building.  And suddenly the plot intensifies to heart stopping intensity.

 

The beauty of the writing and finely drawn characters alone carried its own joy, transporting me to that time and place.  Then the carefully crafted plot, carried me into the caldron of passionate intrigue and nail biting intensity.  This is a book that will haunt you and even make you doubt your own courage, as you’re engulfed in the rising flames of war.

 

Pick up a copy of Mission to Paris, by Alan Furst, and like all his other spy novels, you won’t want to put it down.

Under Occupation by Alan Furst

 

Under Occupation by Alan Furst

 

I don’t usually offer two book reviews so close together.  My three faithful readers may disapprove….until they see this is another Alan Furst World War II spy novel!  Then, they’ll pour a generous snifter of Cognac, settle into a comfortable chair, and, be swept back to the cold, rainy, maelstrom in unsafe, cobbled streets of occupied Paris, 1942.

 

The main character, Paul Ricard , is not a spy, he’s a spy novelist, at least  until one dark and stormy night, on his way to the café Saint-Germain, one of his countrymen streaks past him, a shot rings out, then another.  Ricard rushes to help the fallen stranger, and before the man dies, he manages to thrust a folded piece of paper into Ricard’s coat pocket.

 

Two things about Alan Furst. He doesn’t leave your conscience alone, with the twists and turns of uncertainty.  His sense of time and place become a web that captures your imagination.  Ricard is only one of the sharply drawn characters that suffer under the pressing heel of the Nazi  jackboots  Listen closely.  Do you hear the crack of their pistol shots, the shrill blast of the sirens, shiver when they are arrested, thrown in the back of a black Citroen, and taken to the basement of Paris’ infamous Gestapo Headquarters?

 

At war with a heartless enemy, intent on silencing decent, and killing all opposition. Parisians lived in a bitter world of mistrust, gathering the mental strength to fight back in a desperate city, where a neighbor’s or a colleague’s smile and handshake could be the poisonous fangs that send you to a slow and torturous death, exposing your friends , colleagues, and even your family, just to put an end to your gut wrenching pain.

 

And yet, writers, shop keepers, normal men and women still stood proudly in opposition to the overpowering enemy, meeting at night in quiet, smoke filled bars and cold apartments, gaining and passing secrets, organizing routes of safe passage, and continuing to bring the fight to the Nazi war machine that terrorized one of the most beautiful and civilized of cities.

 

Furst leads the reader on a remarkable journey of dark alleys, and nights of thinking any moment could bring a knock on the door that spells doom.  He brings home high voltage fear, raw courage, and the bravery it takes to persevere despite the cost.

 

Alan Frust will take you to 1942’s Paris, if you can stand the journey.

The Spies of Warsaw - A book review

 

Read any Alan Furst?  I just read The Spies of Warsaw and found it intriguing, and so well written.  I cheerfully admit to being a spy addict,  especially of the World  War II variety.

 

One aspect frequently ignored is the cloud of events leading up to the war.  And, if you add to that, the points of view of other participants in the coming conflict, you have a really intriguing plot.

 

Europe has always been a web of intrigue, with friends spying on both friends and enemies. 

 

Alan Furst takes us back to Poland, 1937, with a French Colonel Mercier, a spy master, assigned to the French embassy in Warsaw, poking his nose into the affairs of Poland and Germany and Russia, trying to collect enough pieces of the puzzle to surmise what is coming next and the best ways for France to react.  And not only are other spies in the picture, but the undeniable intrigue within the bowels of the bureaucratic French high command. 

 

Furst takes us to embassy cocktail parties and dark streets that are scattered with bits and pieces of people’s lives. Some want to defect and others have black hearts, still others just want to survive.

 

There are diplomatic rules to observe and ignore, things that ‘just aren’t done,’ but are done to suit the national purpose. And in the background are love affairs and attempts to flee the coming conflagration.  Hearts are broken, and lives are lost in the unreadable tangle of political espionage.  Today’s friend may often be tomorrow’s enemy and vice versa.

 

Nothing is certain in this incredible story that leads the reader through the labyrinth of unlikely paths.  Instead of a page-turner, I would call The Spies of Warsaw, a thought provoking wonderland of then and now.  After all, does the political climate, in the broad sense of the term, ever really change?  National interests coincide then and now, friends change sides, both in the personal and national sense.   In fact, The Spies of Warsaw could also be an allegory of our personal lives.

 

But, if you don’t want to get into the depths of analysis, The Spies of Warsaw is also just a damn good, well written spy novel, full of all the twists and turns that shock and confuse to the very end, just the way you want it!

 

Time for me to grab another spy novel by Alan Furst!  Fortunately, there are many.

A Single Spy by William Christie

A Single Spy

The New York Times called A Single Spy, “A panoramic, smart, hugely enjoyable thriller.”  Even so, it sat on my ‘to read’ list for quite a while.  These days I go for quick, spicy reads and at almost 500 pages A Single Spy threatened to keep me occupied through the spring and into the summer.

But, I do like World War II spy stories, so eventually I plowed in and found I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.  It’s one of those well told tales that grip you so hard, that when you’re starving and your significant other calls “Soup’s on,” you beg for a few more minutes to finish the chapter, but then you lie and sneak in another chapter.

The author, William Christie, must have done an amazing amount of research to authentically reach into the life of a boy from the desert, both an orphan and thief, being threatened and recruited by the Soviets to be infiltrated into Nazi Germany as a spy.  Alexis Ivanovich Smirnov must accomplish mission after daring mission, while wading through the dark and muddy waters of suspicion and intrigue, with his life at risk with every step. 

Christie captures the intense action of the underbelly of war, with chiseled, indelible characters and a never ending string of secret plots and fast paced action, with Alexis living on the edge at every turn.

Stalin and Hitler, two of the most vicious and destructive creatures in human history, created tightly controlled regimes, build on cruelty, lies, and egocentric ambition.  Imagine being placed in the middle, where no one can be trusted and mere suspicion can end your life. Christie places Alexis in the midst of these almost unimaginably tumultuous societies.  His sense of detail and authenticity is so razor sharp that the reader is no longer reading, but living in the midst of danger, with every decision testing your courage and your humanity.

I suddenly found that 500 pages was not too long, but too short.  The pages flew by me like leaves in an autumn wind.  Twists and turns and a streaming plot kept me entranced from start to finish.  I didn’t just read about Alexis, I was right there beside him for every moment of mind numbing action.

Like World War II novels and well told spy stories?  Try on A Single Spy; you’ll find it’s a perfect fit.

Holy $moke by Derek Robinson

Hungry for a book that snaps your eyes open and dares you to put it down?  Here’s a tip!  Holy $moke, by my favorite living writer, Derek Robinson.  Holy $moke is a smorgasbord of spies, intrigue, laugh out loud fun, and indelible and unlikely characters, all driven by a swiftly moving plot.

About time a book came along that is so startlingly original that I forgot about my afternoon nap and my before dinner cocktail.  All done without the clichés of murder, seduction and gunnery.  Wait a sec…no sex, blood, violence and still spellbinding???  Let me give you the whole picture.  My favorite writer doesn’t depend on weepy and psychologically damaged characters either.

Let’s set the stage.  As World War II ebbs toward its ragged conclusion. Allied forces are advancing by fits and starts through Italy. Southern Italy is liberated, but no one is quite sure what’s filling the vacuum. In the north, German forces are putting up a hell of a fight.  In Rome, the fascist government is deposed, leaving a political and commercial void in its wake.  Ordinary Romans try desperately to put food in the mouths of their families and gather together the shards of their war shattered lives. 

Meanwhile, General “Wild Bill” Donovan, the brainy, bellicose founder and leader of the Office of Strategic Services has his OSS agents scouring the city for leftover scraps of intelligence.  He’s not messing around and neither are his underlings, who haven’t produced viable information in ages.  The pressure is on.  The message is clear:  find new veins of intelligence gold, or find yourself banished to some backwater, where you’ll wait out the war filling out forms and filling filing cabinets, while your brain atrophies and your raw fingertips bleed.

Enter Virgilio del Pronto, an out of work writer, recently released from prison and looking to restart his so-so career.  With Rome’s newspapers and magazines in ruins, finding a writing job is damn near impossible. Plus, more than just an empty belly is pressuring him.  There’s Virgilio’s caustic wife, an unpleasant person in the best of times, who never lets him forget he’s unemployed.  “How lucky I was to marry a writer…Instead of a ditch digger who brought home a wage.”  Yes, I often identify with that.

But some things Virgilio has in abundance are acquaintances, all of whom are very aware of his fluid imagination and gift for the written word.  We’d call his approach ‘networking.’  He calls it survival.

Then, out of the blue, with persistence and a truckload of luck, Virgilio strikes gold.  A vein of it.  And it’s just what the American OSS agents need.

Robinson mines history and inserts vivid strands of humor into another of his seamlessly free flowing tales of the improbable. Reminiscent of his Eldorado series (The Eldorado Network, Operation Bamboozle, Artillery of Lies, and Red Rag Blues), Holy $moke leads you through a neatly constructed and mesmerizing sequence of events, all founded on equally improbable truth.  Along the way, he paints a clear picture of life under Allied occupation, while weaving a magnetic tale of Vatican intrigues, including oddities such as the German Ambassador playing tennis with the Japanese Ambassador.  Yes, even after Rome’s liberation, Axis Ambassadors to the papal enclave still played on.

All of this is preposterous, yet in large measure it happened.  You’ll be turning pages and chuckling as Derek Robinson leads you through this romp of a novel!  Pick up your copy early in the day; otherwise you’re going to lose sleep! 

I always read Derek Robinson’s books twice.  Once for enjoyment and again for even more enjoyment!

Check out his web site:  http://www.derekrobinson.info/ or order directly from the author at;   delrobster@gmail.com

Although Holy $moke is self-published, don’t forget to look for his other supremely entertaining books on Amazon.com or Amazon.uk.  There must be twenty, both novels and non-fiction. His series of flying novels, from both World War I and II are the best I’ve ever read.  But, I warn you, all his books are as addictive as potato chips at a cocktail party and while you’re laughing and eagerly flipping pages, you’re also getting sneaky glimpses into real, unvarnished history!