DAY OF JUDGMENT - Book review

 Vintage Jack Higgins! Day of Judgment was published in 1978. This is the third and final Simon Vaughn novel, as originally written under the pen-name Martin Fallon.

It’s 1963. The story mainly centres on Berlin and East Germany. Father Sean Conlin, a survivor of the concentration camps Sachsenhausen and Dachau, was responsible for smuggling people out of Communist East Germany. Unfortunately, on one such mission he was betrayed, captured and taken to the nearby Schloss Neustadt. The Communists intend to employ a rogue American, Harry Van Buren to brainwash the old priest so he could reveal he was working for the CIA; he would announce this publicly at the time of President Kennedy’s visit to Berlin, thus creating massive embarrassment and public humiliation for the West.

Secret agent Vaughn, ‘the beast of Selangor’, is tasked with rescuing Father Conlin from the seemingly impregnable schloss before the president’s visit in a few weeks’ time. Vaughn brings together a formidable team, including Lutheran monks, an American Jesuit, an ex-Luftwaffe ace, a Jewish undertaker, and the ex-SS caretaker of the schloss itself.

The method of penetration into the schloss is imaginative, quite unique and particularly unpleasant and fraught with danger. The map provided actually gives away the means of access, but does not detract from the actual drama and difficulties encountered.

Towards the end there’s a poignant sequence involving Father Hartmann, a man who has found his purpose in life at last.

Higgins effortlessly creates the claustrophobic communist environment the characters have to contend with; as Kennedy remarked at the time: ‘Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we never had to put up a wall to keep our people in.’ 

Sadly, even now, freedoms we take for granted were – and are – crushed or perverted in certain communist states.

Day of Judgment is An exciting, fast-paced page-turning adventure. (But this copy has a very poor dust jacket.)

Editorial comment.

Oddly, in the text ‘judgement’ is spelled with an ‘e’ – unlike the book title.

A female character ‘wore a man’s trench-coat and a scarf tied peasant-fashion round her head’ (p12). I’ve lost count of the Higgins books where the ‘scarf worn peasant-fashion’ is used.