A BIG BOOK WITH A STRONG FEELING: JOEL DICKER'S DISAPPEARANCE OF STEPHANIE MAILER

 

In 1994, a brutal quadruple-murder shook the seaside resort town of Orphea, in the tony Hamptons on Long Island. The body of a jogger was found in the road outside a house; inside the house the mayor, his wife and young son all lay dead. Two young state troopers cracked the case, and in a car chase drove the killer off a bridge into a river, where he died, a presumed suicide.

Twenty-five years later, one of the those troopers, Jesse Rosenberg, is about to retire. He's now a captain, known as Captain 100%, for his perfect record in solving cases. But his retirement reception gets crashed by journalist Stephanie Mailer, who tells Jesse that he is, in fact, Captain 99%. He did not solve the biggest case, the one that made his career, and enigmatically, she says he failed to see what was right in front of his eyes. She leaves and tells him she will see him later. But she doesn't. That night, she disappears.

The Swiss writer Joel Dicker's follow-up to The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair is, at first glance, a complex locked-room (or locked village) mystery, in which the stories of twenty years past are revisited and opened up to new examination. But in reality, it is a digging into character: a series of character sketches whose interaction centers on the crime, and whose changes come about as information is discovered and revealed. In a sense, this creates a story-telling dilemma, in terms of what information to release to the reader, and when to it. From the point of view of the classic locked-village mystery, this can be a fault, as sometimes that which is withheld would seem normal to have appeared much earlier by the process of natural selection.

But Dicker has avoided that trampling over the basic whodunit puzzle, with the aim of revealing more about the characters, through the nifty way the novel is structured, with multiple flashbacks and multiple points of view. These intertwine: Jesse's own very unusual upbringing, and his first love Natasha, for whom he pines, have their own impact on the tale, while the former police chief, Kirk Hayward who has moved out to Hollywood and written a play which supposedly will reveal the name of the true killer—a situation which does create more mystery but also makes one wonder about the sense of realistic policing (and indeed realistic murdering!) once the play becomes the focus of the town's theatre festival, the high point of its tourist season.

“I wanted to try something different,” Dicker said during his virtual UK book launch. “I wanted a challenge, to write a choral book with lots of characters and sub-plots. But this is Orphea—and Orpheus was, of course, all about not looking back, which is a great irony. Before Chief Hayward's play, the festival's production was going to be Uncle Vanya; despite Jesse and Natasha's backgrounds in Russian it's hard to see parallels between Vanya and the situation in Orphea except for one, perhaps: in Vanya happiness seems to be something that eludes us in this life. It's interesting that Dicker's characters all seem to be chasing some kinds of unachievable happiness, but in his ending Dicker plays further with that. His approach to the book echoes some of this: “it can work like a crime novel,” he said, “investigation becomes like a guide, a path you follow to the characters.”

Dicker said he chose the name Stephanie Mailer partly out of connection with Norman Mailer. “I create a character before I give the name,” he explained, and when I thinking of the town I wanted to have a lake called Deer Lake, which reminded me of Mailer's novel, The Deer Park. It was that simple. Or not quite, because in the translation, from the French, Deer Lake becomes Stag Lake, so the Mailer connection disappears!

The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer is a big book, with a deep cast of characters and a plot woven through two decades. There are multiple twists before the end, but the real pleasure may come from the construction itself, like a play (perhaps Chekhov's The Wood Demon?) with a big cast, an expansive set, and a sea of revelations. Talking with Dicker, I mentioned my favourite Swiss writers, Jacques Chessex and Friedrich Durrenmatt, both of whom used the framework of the crime novel to investigate issues of both character and society. Both, however, worked primarily in shorter books. “Yes,” he said, “a book is what we see before we read; a big book may scare the reader but give a very good feeling to have finished. A short book is a strong feeling.” What Dicker has produced is a big book, but with a strong feeling.

The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer by Joel Dicker

translated by Howard Curtis; MacLehose Press £20.00 ISBN9780857059208

this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

T.J. NEWMAN'S FALLING

 My review of TJ Newman's highest of high concept thrillers, Falling, has just been published at Medium. You can link to it avoiding the paywall with this friends link here. It's a great read: make the click to find out why....

F LEE BAILEY: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obit of F Lee Bailey is in today's Guardian; it went online yesterday and you can link to that here.

The paper had hoped for a somewhat shorter piece, of course highlighting the OJ trial, but as it was I tried to hold myself down to just his more famous/important trials, and each time felt it was necessary to explain them at least briefly for an audience who probably don't even recognise the name Patty Hearst, much less Sam Sheppard or Albert DeSalvo.

I mentioned that, in light of the Medina court martial, William Calley was the only officer convicted in the My Lai massacre. I didn't mention that the major who didn't find anything unusual in the action that day, nor when questioned by someone from the Inspector General's office the following year, was Colin Powell, whose recollection of that questioning in his own memoirs doesn't jibe with the IG's tape of it.

It would have been nice to delve further into a couple of the stories: Sam Sheppard became a professional wrestler after finally winning his release from prison, and died young not long after. Efforts to win him compensation for false imprisonment have failed. Hearst (and William and Emily Harris) were not with the rest of the SLA when six died as the LAPD trapped them in a house, but Patty had shot during an earlier robbery to protect them. Bill, aka General Teko, Emily and two other SLA members lived second lives until arrested in 2002. There's a Robert Redford movie, The Company You Keep, which, while based on the life underground of ex-Weathermen members, covers similar ground.   

There was one interesting thread that did get lost; his marriages. Because Bailey and his first wife, Florence Gott, married in 1960 and divorced in 1961, but had two sons. I could not find anywhere a date for his second marriage, to his secretary, Froma Portney, with whom he had a third son. I was constructing a scenario to explain these circumstances, but there was no way of my proving any of it true. However the idea he divorced Froma in 1972 and immediately married his third wife, Lynda Hart (who didn't make the paper, sadly) would be what lawyers might call evidence of a pattern of behaviour. He divorced Hart in 1980 but didn't marry Patricia Shires until 1985, and they stayed married until her death in 1999. I probably should have mentioned, as well as his failure to win admission to the Maine bar, and before his later bankruptcy and finally move into a hospice near one of his sons in Atlanta, he ran a consulting business from an office above his girlfriend, Debbie Elliott's hair salon in Portland.

 

BEHIND THE LABEL OF "NORDIC NOIR": ARNE DAHL'S EUROPA BLUES

I've written a review at Medium, nominally about an Arne Dahl Intercrime novel, but more about the place of Scandinavian crime fiction and the label of "Nordic Noir". You can link to it here, without having to sign up to Medium, though that would not be a bad thing.

THRESHOLD: A POEM

I am in the process of assembling a collection of poems, and going through some which I hadn't really looked at in some time. In some cases they were in files with other poems for other possible groupings, or were simply in a file with other previous published poems. In any case, Threshold is a qualifier on both counts, and it may well make the cut for the new collection. I wrote it originally in February 1983, inspired by a photograph, the cover of Mary Kinzie's book The Threshold Of The Year, which brought back some memories. It was published in 1990 in the Azya Free Collection, from Tokyo, and as it is a work in progress, I have reworked it somewhat this year. 

THRESHOLD

In a cloak of new snow the trees look

Darker, more imposing. It's getting colder.

I take comfort seeing a new sawn stump,

Coming upon it by surprise, as if someone

Else, not me, had chopped it down, as if

Each snowflake were indeed unique, and in

The shadow of these woods I were not alone.

JO SPAIN'S PERFECT LIE

No, it's not a book about golf. Instead, it's early on a sunny Tuesday morning when Erin Kennedy wakes up next to her husband Danny. She's Irish, and a book editor, who moved to New York after a family tragedy; he's a former NYPD cop now working homicide in a sleepy shore town in Suffolk County, Long Island. Then, at 7:15, there's an insistent knock at the door: Danny's partner Ben, and two uniforms, are there to arrest Danny. He walks to the balcony, and with a look back at Erin, jumps to his death.

Eighteen months later, Erin is in court, charged with murder.

Jo Spain's thriller is a finely designed construction, jumping about in time between the period of the trial, the time of Danny's death, and the sexual assault of a Harvard co-ed, told from the point of view of her house proctor, four years earlier. This is not an easy trick to manage, but movement between stories is deft and what helps is the setting, especially as the story moves between Harvard of the past and Suffolk County in the present. They are backgrounded sharply: the insular, almost claustrophobic world of Harvard increase a sense of danger about the campus; the Suffolk community is put into stark contrast by one of Erin's allies, Cal, who comes from the Gatsbyish side of Long Island, an uneasy fit into her world.

Of course the need to find the resolution of each bit of story creates a web of interwoven cliff-hangers which make The Perfect Lie compulsive reading. But there is a problem, in order to maintain the recurring doses of suspense, you have to withhold a lot of information from the reader: from the Harvard backstory and its other protagonists, or the location of its assault, right up to details Erin's trial taking place in the present. This is an easily disturbed structure, and it also requires a certain amount of expository prose once the revelations begin, in order to answer some of the questions readers are going to need resolved. The artificiality of withholding can be irritating at times, but the positive side is that it keeps the reader guessing, and the resolutions are, in the main, satisfying. Spain builds Erin's character well, and Dave's by reflection, but to some extent the other characters are limited by their function to the plot: learning too much might uncover too much revelation. And the moment of that revelation was, if anything, underplayed—perhaps the need to explain how we got there overpowered the actual menace of the situation itself. Cold blood needs to be presented as a dish served quickly.

There is also the danger of bending modern reality: given the amount of investigation Erin and her friends undertake, it seems improbable that aspects of one person's identity could be kept secret by their missing it. The pedant in me also wishes that the American characters didn't occasionally use Anglicisms, which Erin in narration can say to her heart's content. But an American lawyer would never say “inland revenue” meaning the IRS (Internal Revenue Service). Freshmen in America are never called “freshers”, things like that. Small irritations for a natural born Yank, but like the larger question mark, not enough to slow down the suspense train which barrels ahead on its Long Island Railroad (or railway?) tracks.

The Perfect Lie by Jo Spain Quercus £14.99 ISBN 9781529407242

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

GORDON LIDDY: MY GUARDIAN OBIT

My obituary of G Gordon Liddy, the Nixon plumber of Watergate renown, who after getting out of prison turned into a right-wing showman with considerable success, appeared in the Guardian on April 8th; it had already gone up online, and you can link to that here.

For once, this appeared almost exactly as I wrote it: I had not been given a word count, but after over-writing Larry McMurtry I set one for myself and tried to stick to the facts, ma'am, and hope the readers were adept at reading between the lines. I hit my own word count almost precisely, and everything went smoothly.

Looking at other obits, I was amazed at how often he was billed as the "Watergate mastermind". Let's face it, Watergate was not exactly a brains operation, and when I looked at much of Liddy's career, I saw a similar pattern, by which a certain amount of macho bluster and spotlight chasing overpowered his responsibility for a series of, shall we say, mess-ups. In a way, E. Howard Hunt (that first initial thing has been a right-wing pseudo-upper class trope for a long time) was similar: remember Hunt was a long-time spy novelist, and many of his CIA operations seemed planned as if they were fictions. The two of them paired was trouble in a clandestine specimen jar. 

Watergate was one thing I would have liked to go into in more detail, but that would be opening a pandora's box. You could look at my obit of James McCord, of the CIA's Special Research Staff (at the Guardian here --also my Last Words interview about him here) for a sense of some of  my feeling about the nature of the burglary itself...and also the idea that both Hunt and McCord were accused of being in Dallas the day of JFK's assassination. Jim Hougan, who at the time was the DC editor of Harpers, wrote a seminal book on Watergate, Secret Agenda, part of which surmised that the bungled burglary was a deliberate act by the CIA to weaken Nixon (there was virtually no chance he would lose the '72 election to McGovern), perhaps because of "the Bay of Pigs thing" as Nixon referred to it in the infamous White House tapes. It wasn't until after Liddy's obit had been published that I discovered he had been one of the people associated with Norman Mailer, Edward Jay Epstein and other "deep politics" researchers who called themselves "The Dynamite Club". The easiest way to discredit those who believe in conspiracies is to send them down rabbit holes which distract them from the real prize and also eventually may discredit them: I can just see Liddy doing that to the guys in this club.

I didn't see the need to expound further on Liddy as right-wing shock-jock, pitch man, and huckster: who knows? he may have believed his own shtick, at least superficially. He certainly believed his uber-mensch persona, which was probably as close to the real GLL as we will get. I take his autobiography Will with a grain of salt, but it still might have been interesting to go deeper into those "bund" roots in Hoboken, and the way he celebrated this in his later years. However, the idea of Nixon as the leader whose own will could power America "back" to greatness (in the face of hippies, anti-war and civil rights protesters and the like) was so demonstrably false that when it was resurrected in Reagan's kinder gentler return to the Disneyland 1950s or Donald Trump's much more visibly Teutonic MAGA mode, it was no surprise many Americans bought it both times, and Liddy was there to cheerlead every authoritarian moment,and like a vulture profit from it. 

LARRY MCMURTRY: MY GUARDIAN OBIT

My obituary of Larry McMurtry is online now at the Guardian, you can link to it here. It should be in the paper paper soon. It has been cut considerably, because I over-wrote it, and it was a good edit: keeping the most relevant information and the spirit of what I wrote. So this is not a complaint, but an addition.

Because I knew McMurtry's work well, especially his early novels, which I believe are his best and I think, for example, the praise (with some caveats) Jim Harrison gave them was justified; this was in his review of All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers, which is my other favourite of his books (I'd like to re-read it and see if my older sentimental self still enjoys what my younger romantic self did). It seemed to me that the caveats Harrison mentioned were what drove much of his later work, which I found less interesting: his proclivity for writing too much, for extending ideas into series, came from his ability to create characters, and I would use the word picaresque to describe it. In many ways he was like an 18th century novelist; he would take characters he liked, and introduce them to other unusual characters he created (and understood) and let that all fly. But this is not part of what was trimmed from the piece; it is the spirit underlying what I wrote.

There remain a couple of small points that needed explaining, but because of 'reorganisation' weren't. Thalia, the Texas town that is the setting of his first three novels, is a fictionalised version of Archer City; I thought that really needed to be clear right from the start, because, like the Houston-set books which followed, it showed how he transformed his own experience (for example: his father's running his grandfather's ranch echoes the set-up of Horseman Pass-By (Hud). 

And when he held his Last Booksale, it was from his four remaining Booked Up stores in Archer City. For some reason the Guardian said only one was in his hometown: but I'd actually clarified the point to them. This was important because, in another line excised from the copy, I explained his purpose in putting his stores, which grew into six at their peak, in his hometown was his effort to turn Archer City into a Texas version of Hay-on-Wye. I thought the English reference would have kept it in the piece, but what do I know?

One small loss, which I also couldn't understand, was the name Peter S Beagle from the short list of his Stegner colleagues and friends. Beagle, who is still alive, was a major success at a young age, already a success while he was at Stanford with the would-be novelists. He's published the fantasy novels A Fine And Private Place and The Last Unicorn (which is always in best-of lists still) and I See By My Outfit, his tale of a cross-country journey on a motor scooter, well ahead of Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintence. Maybe I should have dropped his middle initial to save space.

The biggest excision was one I expected, because I included a lot of material about Ken Kesey; on the surface very different from McMurtry, but a close friend whose career had some strong parallels with his until Kesey diverged. If this weren't enough reason, however, the idea that McMurtry then married Kesey's widow, on whom he appears to have maintained a crush for 50 years (he said that at the time Kesey would never let the two of them even talk together!) made it important. Anyway, here is what I wrote: 

... Stanford University’s Creative Writing programme, where his classmates included Peter S Beagle, Wendell Berry and Ken Kesey. Kesey attended the Stegner seminars taught by Frank O’Connor (The Last Hurrah) and Malcolm Cowley (Exile’s Return) only because Stegner, who disliked him intensely, was abroad.

...It may not be a coincidence that in Kesey’s first novel, the best-selling One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), the main character, played by Jack Nicholson in the Oscar-winning film, is named Randall McMurphy, or that Kesey’s second novel, Sometimes I Get A Great Notion (1964) revolved around a father/son feud within a family logging firm in Oregon; when it was filmed in 1970, Newman again played the rebellious son.

Let me repeat: I was not surprised these bits got cut: it's an obituary, not a literary analysis. But the idea Kesey simply snuck into the Stegner Fellowship seminars is intriguing, if not crucial to understanding McMurtry. But to me the teaching by O'Connor, whose novels tend toward the sentimental family saga format McMurtry used, and Cowley, chronicler of the Lost Generation, seemed a fascinating influence.And the parallels I mentioned are delineated here, and I found them convincing. And then there was the Merry Pranksters.

After Stanford, McMurtry taught creative writing for a year at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, then back at Rice. In 1964 Kesey and his Merry Pranksters got in their San Francisco school bus driven by Beat icon Neal Cassady, with the Grateful Dead on board for music, and began a cross-country journey to New York. Tom Wolfe’s chronicle of the trip, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, became a best-seller, including the Pranksters’ arrival to visit McMurtry in Houston. As the bus pulled into his driveway, a tripping Cathy Casamo, also known as “Stark Naked”, spotted McMurtry’s son playing on the lawn. Unclothed, she jumped off the bus to hold him. McMurtry recalled "James, in diapers, had no objection to naked people, and the neighbours, most of them staid Republicans, took this event in stride; it was the Pranksters who were shocked". Far from being harmed, James McMurtry grew up to become a country music star.

McMurtry stayed off the bus. He won a Guggenheim fellowship and produced a seminal book of essays about Texas, In A Narrow Grave (1968), whose themes included some of those reflected in his fiction: cowboys “finding it bitter to leave the land...to the strange and godless heirs they had bred.” 

Again, you can understand, as I did, why that basically had to go, but I did suggest re-inserting one sentence about Kesey's visit, if only because Wolfe made such a thing of it. But I loved McMurtry's own later response to it: it clarified difference between him and Kesey, and I thought the early mention of his son's later career fit well right there. I also love the quote about the bitter leaving of the land, because that theme starts in Horseman Pass By and continues through Lonesome Dove.

But the quote from Leaving Cheyenne stayed in.“Nobody gets enough chances at the wild and sweet”, Johnny McCloud says. They aren't quite the story's last words, though. He then wishes he'd had a Kodak, so he could've captured Molly sitting on the steps in her blue and white dress. So memory stays with us all. 

NOTE: I wrote an essay on Leaving Cheyenne/Lovin Molly a couple of years ago. You can link to that here on this blog 

YAPHET KOTTO: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of one of my favourite actors, Yaphet Kotto, was online at the Guardian last Friday, 26 March; you can link to it here. It should appear in the paper paper soon. 

It is pretty much as I wrote it, but there was of course A lot more to say. The most curious thing was how difficult it was to be sure of the information about his biographical details; various sources had his name two different ways; the stories about his father's name and origins changed when he told them; was his mother's maiden name Marie or was that her middle name; more details about his maternal grandparents, who raised him, and how they (Roman Catholics) managed to raise him Jewish were all, in the end, left for supposition. I couldn't find much about the Mobile Theatre Project in the Bronx, which is where he first trained, or where he played Othello aged 19; I assumed it was for them and not professional, but I couldn't find details.

Besides Judy Holliday, he claimed a couple of other actresses as mentors, including Mary Astor--how he got into that position is an interview question I didn't see posed in the ones I found.

There were, of course, other black actors of note besides Sidney Poitier, though he was only real 'star': Ivan Dixon, Ossie Davis, Abby Lincoln, Ruby Dee and the like; Bill Cosby in the first starring role on TV.  But Kotto was a different story, and I believe he helped open the door for great "character" actors like Forest Whittaker or Lawrence Fishburne --the preference for matinee idols continues to this day, particularly on TV: think of any number of very attractive black actors whose careers have stalled in TV, or of the ones who have made successes, from Denzel to Halle Berry.

And of course nowadays, black British actors might be taking those roles, which may be because many of them come up the traditional way, and get judged by their acting, rather than their faces, though no one's going to compare Idris Elba's looks with Kotto's.

Bone is a film that should be seen again. First because it really is Larry Cohen's take on Boudu Saved From Drowning (though he would have probably denied it) and second because it would probably offend most of its audience. It was Cohen's first feature and if you know his work you will understand why, but Kotto's character is not the problem in the film, it really is, like Jean Renoir's film, a satire of the bourgoise; something its big budget Hollywood remake, Down And Out In Beverley Hills found it difficult to be,

Similarly, I can't emphasize strongly enough how important a movie Blue Collar is, not least for the way race divides working people against their own interests, but at the same time because race is not understood as the same kind of problem on both sides of the colour line. And Schrader's casting of Kotto, Keitel and Pryor, none of them pretty boy Hollywood types, escaped the swamp of what the Firesign Theatre once called portrayals of  "tales of ordinary working people as played by rich Hollywood stars".

And it would have been nice to discuss Homicide, where Kotto in a way was the star, and also the comic centre. There is a famous episode of the show, "Subway", in which Vincent D'Onfrio plays a commuter pushed in front of a train, and trapped between the carriage and the platform. Andre Braugher plays Frank Pembleton, the detective on the scene, who is aware that D'Onfrio's spine has been severed and he will die as soon as the trains are separated. Thinking of Kotto's career brought it to my mind; two tremendous actors, neither a matinee idol, who act the hell out of the two-man show which is at the episode's core. Yes, there is space for them, but how much? How well will Jamie Hector do? As Al Giardello tells Pembleton: "Come on Frank, it's a new age. The world's becoming a perfect place." RIP Yaphet Kotto

LOU OTTENS: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

 My obit of Lou Ottens, who invented the audio cassette, and the portable tape recorder, and had a hand in the creation of the CD, is online at the Guardian; it should appear in the paper paper soon. You can link to it here.

This happens to be a piece which appears exactly as I wrote it (after one brief rewrite when a sort of re-organsation was required. It was one of those rare times when I was asked for 800 words and filed exactly 800 words; I didn't bother to recount after I did the touch-up!

It occurred to me that Ottens reminded me of a number of engineers I have worked with in my years of broadcasting: very bright men who are practical problem solvers, very calm and reasonable, and who enjoy nothing more than a problem to solve. It's always the producers, or the talent, who often couldn't plug the machine into the wall, who get all excited. It's much more fun to work with them!

NORTON JUSTER: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the writer (and architect) Norton Juster was published in The Guardian online on 11 March, I am hoping it will appear in the paper paper soon, but you can link to it online here. 

The odd thing about it was I couldn't actually remember when I read The Phantom Tollbooth; I may have been too old or advanced in my reading to have latched on to it the first time. In fact I may have been introduced to it by my college roommate Winsor Watson; that idea popped into my head long after I had filed my copy. And I don't recall ever reading The Dot And The Line; but it's on You Tube and when I showed it to my son, who's 17 and very good at maths, he loved it. I realised I had never read The Phantom Tollbooth to him; my copy was probably left in storage in London.

And as I wrote it the day before my birthday, the quote from the Terrible Trivium seemed especially apt: “If you only do the easy and useless jobs, you’ll never have to worry about the important ones that are so difficult.”

The piece as printed is virtually as I wrote it; the only omissions were part of the first quote from Jules Feiffer, which talked about their lifelong friendship, and then the second quote from Feiffer which closes the piece; it was cut short. The rest of it, which would have ended my story, was "He was my oldest friend...and we managed to concoct a classic together. I miss him badly. Who knew?".Somehow I felt that "who knew?" was the perfect way to summarize Juster's life, and indeed, his work.

VARIAN FRY: LOST AMERICAN HERO

I wrote this review for the Financial Times in 1999, and it was published in January of 2000. It popped up, unbidden, in my computer as I was attempting to store material, and it seems as if I had at some point restored some elements which may have been edited from the original. But Fry's story has been retold since, and deserves to stay in the forefront of our attentions today as a warning about the way no good deeds go unpunished, especially as we see Breckinridge Long reflected in both the Trump and Johnson regimes, and also in the way so-called geniuses ignore those who sacrifice and risk to help them, indeed, save their lives.

In August 1940, Varian Fry, an unassuming American editor, arrived in Vichy France on a brief fact-finding mission, representing the Emergency Rescue Committee. He carried a list of 200 worthy artists, writers and intellectuals endangered by the Nazis, whom the ERC had been founded to aid. When he was finally expelled 13 months later, Fry had created an underground operation which saved thousands, not just the Max Ernsts and Marc Chagalls, but “ordinary” refugees, as well as hundreds of British servicemen. Yet Fry, a true heroic figure of the Second World War, died in obscurity, teaching high school in suburban Connecticut.

 

“Pimpernel” is a particularly apt title, because Fry seemed an unlikely candidate for such heroism. A pampered child who feigned illness to escape school bullying, he became a precocious aesthete at Harvard. His modest career on liberal magazines was transformed in Berlin when he witnessed Kristallnacht, and received a blunt assessment of the Nazis’ plans from their international spin-doctor, a fellow Harvard man. His Associated Press reports were the first to warn that Germany intended to “exterminate” the Jews.

 

Fry’s low tolerance for political in-fighting had seen him sacked from Spanish Civil War relief, and there was no hint of his practical abilities when he landed in France. Yet within weeks he created an organisation which hid refugees, forged papers, smuggled people into Spain, and kept one step ahead of the Vichy authorities. The players were worthy of a movie cast, and Andy Marino retells their stories with piquant details not included in Fry’s contemporary memoir SURRENDER ON DEMAND.

He can also be more honest than Fry about those he saved. Many showed little gratitude and worse, endangered those who saved them. Lion Feuchtwangler revealed his escape route to the New York press. Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler meant to sneak across the Spanish border with 17 pieces of luggage, supposedly filled with her first husband’s manuscripts.

 

Marino deals best with Fry’s twin enemies: Vichy’s officials, keen to out-shine their German masters, and the US State Department, to whom Fry was persona non grata. The consular section headed by Breckinridge Long was overtly anti-Semetic, with no desire to fill unused immigrant quotas with Jews, reds, and other undesirables. The US also wished to maintain Vichy’s paper neutrality, keeping its fleet out of Nazi hands. Fry’s conflicts with the government (who denied him the Swiss visa offered all Americans for safety in case of a German invasion) soon had his own committee trying to force his replacement. When he returned to America they fired him. 

 

Returning to journalism, he detailed, in 1942, the extermination of some 2 million Jews in Nazi death camps, facts which the Allies finally acknowledged officially only the following year. By now Fry’s marriage had also collapsed, and it's not until this point Marino begins to examine the book’s most intriguing question: what made Varian Fry such a successful secret agent? It’s understandable when Fry’s personality fades into the shadows of wartime derring-do and a gallery of memorable characters. But Marino also glosses over Fry’s early years. His subtle hints about sexual orientation underlie an equally subtle theme which Marino himself only faces in his conclusion. By then, with Fry’s second marriage and attempts to play corporate family man broken up, it is too late to hear suggestions of his inner torment; his participation in the Kinsey report, and some of the demons which drove this man. It’s as if he’s inherited Fry’s own reserve. Marino concludes, perceptively, that the pretending and repressing which tormented Fry also prepared him for his clandestine life as spy. But with better writing and organisation, we should have apprehended this crucial fact from Fry himself. 

 

Through the efforts of Andre Malraux, France finally granted Fry the Legion d’Honneur in 1967, though for services to the Resistance, not for saving refugees from Vichy. Five months later Fry died, alone. In 1996, Israel named him “Righteous Among the Nations”, the only American so honoured. The US government continues to ignore his accomplishments. 

 

 AMERICAN PIMPERNEL

by Andy Marino

Hutchinson, 1999, £16.99, 403pp