Just in

Our Friends in Berlin/Anthony Quinn

At The Rust we do have our pet topics and debates: sporting attendance v TV watching; Simon Campion-Brown’s anarchic – some might say sclerotic – view of the body politic; and here in the book review department these last few months we have become rather obsessed with British fascism in the thirties.

Phil Willetts, in Rendezvous in the Russian Tea Room, wrote of how Britain ‘a first spymaster  Maxwell Knight broke up a ring of fascists based round a tea room in Kensington patronised by White Russians.

Cressida Connolly’s After The Party is a superb account of how a woman can naively  become involved in the Fascist Movement.

When I learned that one of my favourite contemporary writers – Anthony Quinn – had a new book published I first assumed it must be the latest in his series Curtain Call, Freya and Eureka! but actually it was an espionage novel set during and after the Blitz.

Anthony Quinn has a vivid sense of location.

I have always been interested to know – and often asked my parents – to what extent ordinary and commercial life continued during the Second World War. As this novel explains , a lot.

Times were hard, food was scarce – danger, death and destruction ever-present – but life went on. Jack Hoste is a senior agent of the Section which would now be MI5, controlling a group of Nazi-sympathising fifth columnists.

The real danger is one Marita Pardoe, a virulent anti-Semite and dangerous operative. The driver of the novel  is the battle of wits between Hoste and Pardoe and how Amy Stallen, a friend of both who runs a successful marriage bureau, becomes involved and manipulated by Hoste. It’s a cracking read but it’s never really explained why Marita was allowed such freedom, as she surely would have been pulled in, like the 80,000 Mosleyites.

This would have been at the expense of the novel but – as it is based on accuracy in every other respect – it does leave an unsatisfactory after-taste.

Avatar photo
About Melanie Gay

A former literary agent with three published novels of her own, Melanie retains her life-long love of the written word and recently mastered the Kindle. She is currently writing a historical novel set in 17th Century Britain and Holland. More Posts