Written originally as the outline for the screenplay of the famous 1949 film of the same name, Greene sets the story in Vienna just after World War II, employing the sectors established by the conquering British, Americans, French, and Russians to provide tension, mystery, and an almost palpable aura of menace as residents and visitors alike must deal with four different governments, four sets of officials, and four collections of laws as they move throughout the city. With massive bomb damage, the city is still emerging from devastation. Black markets, selling everything from food to penicillin, abound. Rollo Martins, the author of cowboy novels written under the name of Buck Dexter, arrives in Vienna to visit an old school friend, Harry Lime, only to find that he has arrived on the day of Lime’s funeral. Investigating Lime’s death, Martins learns that a neighbor saw the traffic accident that killed Lime and observed three men carrying Lime’s body from the scene. Only two of those men have been identified–the third man has vanished. (To read the full review, click on the title of this excerpt.)
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Indicating in the subtitle that this is “A story of darkest Earl’s Court,” Hangover Square is set in what was, in the 1940s, a seamy, low-rent district of London, a place in which those who were down on their luck, out of work, or homeless could manage to scrounge through life. Bars and cheap entertainment provided evening activities for people who often did not get up before noon. George Harvey Bone, the main character here, is out of work. Like the other unemployed and under-employed people he associates with, he lives on the fringes of the entertainment business-part-time actors and actresses, managers, and movie makers who party long and hard, fueled by massive quantities of alcohol. George’s drinking might have triggered his earliest “blackouts,” but here they have become more frequent and more debilitating–psychotic episodes of schizophrenia which end with the demand that he kill Netta Longdon to save himself.
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If you have never heard of Patrick Hamilton, you are not alone. Described by the [London] Daily Telegraph as “a criminally neglected British author,” Hamilton wrote nine novels from the 1920s through the early 1950s , along with the famous dramas of Rope and Gaslight. Almost Dickensian in his sympathetic attention to London’s poor and struggling classes, Hamilton may finally be gaining the widespread public recognition he so richly deserves. A writer of enormous gifts, Hamilton’s sense of time, place, and voice bring backstreet London in the 1930s alive with sense impressions. At the same time, he creates characters the reader instinctively cares about, even when they are being foolish. In Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky, three overlapping novellas filled with dark humor focus on three different characters associated with a pub called “The Midnight Bell,” providing a close look at ordinary people living at the margins of society and doing the best they can in often fraught circumstances.
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Resembling both McEwan’s Atonement and Frayn’s Spies in its plot, this 1953 novel, recently reprinted, tells of a pre-adolescent’s naive meddling in the love lives of elders, with disastrous results. Set in the summer of 1900, when the hopes and dreams for the century were as yet untarnished by two world wars and subsequent horrors, this novel is quietly elegant in style, its emotional upheavals restrained, and its 12-year-old main character, Leo Colston, so earnest, hopeful, and curious about life that the reader cannot help but be moved by his innocence. Leo’s summer visit to a friend at Brandham Hall introduces him to the landed gentry, the privileges they have assumed, and the strict social behaviors which guide their everyday lives. Bored and wanting to be helpful when his friend falls ill, Leo agrees to be a messenger carrying letters between Marian, his host’s sister, and Ted Burgess, her secret love, a farmer living nearby. (To see the full review, click on the title at the top of this excerpt.)
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Devastated by the surrender of his country just five days after the Nazi invasion, twenty-three-year-old Erik Hazelhoff, decides to resist. A university student in Leyden, Hazelhoff, joined by friends, makes several attempts to get to England so they can fight the Germans, before finally succeeding. Connecting with Francois van ‘t Sant, Private Secretary to Queen Wilhelmina, who is in exile in England, Hazelhoff and three friends agree to help start “Contact Holland,” an Underground communications network between Holland and England. Ferrying spies across the North Sea into Holland proves more difficult than they have imagined, and with winter weather, high seas, and no communications network in place in Holland, their good intentions do not produce the desired results. In this autobiographical account, Erik Hazelhoff conveys in dramatic detail the many attempts to establish Underground connections through Scheveningen, and in equally dramatic detail the political scheming between Dutch bureaucrats living in London, who simply want to continue the government’s legal existence, and Van ‘t Sant and the Queen, who want real results. (To see the full review, click on the title at the top of this excerpt.)
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