THE COUNTERFEIT CANDIDATE - Book review

Brian Klein’s debut novel The Counterfeit Candidate (2021) – was written during Lockdown, doubtless one of many resulting from that misguided response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

The book is based on the widespread premise that Hitler did not actually die in the ill-fated Berlin bunker in 1945. Stalin believed the Führer had escaped – as did many other conspiracy advocates.

The main action takes place in 2012, in Buenos Aires and San Francisco.

Chief inspector Nicolas Vargas of the BA Police Department is investigating an audacious bank heist, where hundreds of safe deposit boxes have been stolen. Puzzlingly, as he begins to track down the culprits, he comes up against a dead end – and dead crooks, all of whom were tortured before they were executed.

A tenuous link leads to San Francisco and the powerful Pharma group The Franklin Corporation. The head of this corporation is Richard Franklin, whose son John has just secured the Republican Presidential nomination which is highly likely to lead him to the White House.

Vargas enlists the help of San Francisco Lieutenant Troy Hembury, a 50-year-old muscle-bound African American, to investigate.

Their probe is soon fraught with lethal danger...

Spelling out anything else would spoil the story. This is fast-paced writing, with slick scene shifts and flashbacks, to be expected from an accomplished television director with over 25 years’ experience.

Pick it up and you won’t want to put it down until the end.

And then there’s the sequel, already out: The Führer’s Prophecy which again features Vargas and Hembury, some ten years after the events in the first book. 

PRISONER WITHOUT A NAME, CELL WITHOUT A NUMBER - Book review

Jacobo Timerman’s autobiographical book Prisoner without a name, Cell without a Number was published in 1980, its English translation released in 1981.

Timerman was the editor of La Opinión, Argentina’s leading liberal newspaper. The paper was not popular with the military government because he was not averse to castigate both the Left and the Right for human rights abuses. Inevitably, it came to a head one dawn in ‘April 1977 some twenty civilians besieged my apartment in midtown Buenos Aires. They said they were obeying orders from the Tenth Infantry Brigade of the First Army Corps’ (p9). He was covered with a blanket and bundled in a car and taken away. Eventually, blindfolded and handcuffed, he discovered he was kidnapped ‘by the extremist sector of the army’ (p29) ...which was at the heart of Nazi operations in Argentina...  In effect, they mistakenly believed he was part of a Jewish anti-Argentine conspiracy!

He was held for two and a half years – tortured, abused and humiliated – without charges ever being brought against him.

It was probably because he was internationally known and his wife continued to raise awareness of his plight that he was not murdered – or ‘disappeared’. Certainly, he believed that his only crime was to be born Jewish.

‘Entire families disappeared. The bodies were covered in cement and thrown to the bottom of the Plata or Paraná rivers. Sometimes the cement was badly applied and corpses were washed up along the coasts of Argentina and Uruguay... (others were) thrown into old cemeteries under existing graves... (and some) heaved into the middle of the ocean from helicopters... (while others were) dismembered and burned... Small children were turned over to grandparents or more commonly presented to childless couples in Chile, Paraguay, and Brazil ...’ (p50/51).

Then in late 1979, his citizenship of Argentina was revoked and he was expelled from the country, and then resided in Israel.

Timerman was born in Bar, Ukraine, to Jewish parents. To escape the Russian persecution of Jews and pogroms there, the family emigrated to Argentina in 1928, when he was five years old.

This is a searing account of a brave man. He died in November, 1999, aged 76.

JACKDAWS - book review

 

The prolific Ken Follett’s Jackdaws was published in 2001. His output is varied and broad in theme and place and time. Here, he returns to the Second World War and spies – some twenty-three years after his WWII debut novel Eye of the Needle.

The story covers the nine days before D-Day, June 6, 1944. Twenty-eight-year-old Felicity 'Flick' Clairet, an SOE agent is leading a Resistance assault on a French chateau in the village of Sainte-Cecile, the German communications hub for the area. But it goes wrong and she and her French husband barely manage to escape. Some of their team are killed and others are captured.

The German interrogator is Colonel Dieter Franck who, while not enjoying inflicting pain on his victims, is good at it. The Germans are aware that an invasion is about to occur soon and that will entail the rising up of many Resistance cells. He is certain that if he can break the will of his captives, he can learn details about the various groups.

Flick returns to England and is given permission to try again to crack the chateau communications hub. She recruits the Jackdaws, a ‘dirty half-dozen’ – all-female team to infiltrate in place of the regular cleaners. Not all of them will survive...

This is a typical Follett page-turner with characters you soon come to know and care about. Even Franck evokes a measure of sympathy. The interrogators, the invaders, considered the SOE agents as terrorists. Both sides were ruthless. In these sensitive times perhaps some readers will find certain aspects of the violence depicted as distressing; yet this kind of thing – and worse – happened. I’ve read a number of nonfiction and fiction books about the SOE and Follett’s research seems very accurate – and never slows the pace.

If you want an involving fast read, this suspenseful thriller will fit the bill.

Editorial comment:

Blame the editor. On p312 a coded message mentions Friday 1 June. Yet on p315 we’re told that Friday is 2 June. Oops. [Hopefully it has been amended since my 2002 edition].

FFB - The Testament of Caspar Schultz

Real name, Harry Patterson, Jack Higgins' early novels were written under his own name as well as under the pseudonyms James Graham, Martin Fallon, and Hugh Marlowe. One of the reasons for several names is that he was prolific and publishers are reluctant to bring out too many books by a single author. His early books were thrillers that typically featured hardened, cynical heroes, ruthless villains, and dangerous locales. He published thirty-five novels of this type (sometimes three or four a year) between 1959 and 1974, ‘learning his craft’. Then he wrote The Eagle Has Landed…

A number of his books feature several recurring characters – Nick Miller, Sean Rogan, Martin Fallon (no less!), Liam Devlin, Sean Dillon and Paul Chavasse.

 

The Testament of Caspar Schultz was first published as by Martin Fallon in 1962. It was republished in 1979 under the name Jack Higgins; my copy is the 2011 edition. The book was originally entitled The Bormann Testament but, for various reasons and at the publisher’s behest, the character of Martin Bormann vanished from the book and Patterson created a fictional Nazi leader, Caspar Schultz.  As with some of his other books, Higgins re-released an early version with updates, and so in 2006 this book was republished as The Bormann Testament (thereby restoring much of the earlier version, and adding more too.) I have not read this updated version.

Reading this, you have to bear in mind that it was set in 1960 – only fifteen years after the end of the Second World War. There were plenty of Nazis hiding in the woodwork, succulent meat for thriller writers’ plots. And some ex-Nazis were in reality in positions of authority and trust in the world of commerce and politics.

This is Higgins’ first Paul Chavasse novel. Half-French, half English, Chavasse works for a branch of British Secret Intelligence, the Bureau. The book begins very much like many of that period, the super-spy being called in by the nameless Chief to undertake an assignment.

Chavasse is tasked with tracking down a former Nazi, Schultz, and the man’s recently completed manuscript that explosively names ex-Nazi people currently in high places. Certain neo-Nazis are reluctant to see that manuscript published and are willing to kill to ensure its destruction.

This is early Higgins, with its attendant word-repetition, and yet the seeds of his subsequent thrillers can be glimpsed – pace, humour, a brave heroine, dastardly loquacious villains, not too graphic violence (but enough of it), a McGuffin (the manuscript), suspense, swift scene-change, betrayal and morality.

If you want a fast-paced read, then this will satisfy.

 

The other five Chavasse thrillers are:

Year of the Tiger (1963), The Keys of Hell (1965), Midnight Never Comes (1966), Dark Side of the Street (1967) and finally A Fine Night for Dying (1969).

Make a date - June 4, 12 & 22

Some time ago I published a regular monthly magazine column linking a set selection of dates in history. The series was popular. I'm busy coordinating the articles into book form. As today is 22 June, here are a number of linked events for that date plus two other June dates. To avoid repetition, I've simply indicated the relevant date in brackets. Apologies for the length of this entry! The three dates for this article are:
 

4, 12 and 22 June

If memory serves me right, June in England seems to be a time for pleasant warm evenings watching cricket on the village green, though it’s also the month when fetes are invariably washed out. That’s only one reason why many Brits have become expats in Spain! In 1896 J T Hearne set a cricket record for taking 100 first-class wickets (12).

Then in 1931 forty-eight-year-old Charlie Parker (not the Jazz musician!) equalled Hearne’s record (12); a day later, Tich Freeman achieved the same record. William Attewell was another bowler who took 100 (not first-class!) wickets (in 1884). He played in ten Tests; he was born (12) in 1861 and actually died a day before his birthday in 1927.

Still on the subject of sport – the sport of kings. The Epsom Derby in 1913 was sadly marred by a suffragette, Emily Davison, running out in front of the king’s horse Anmer (4). She was trampled underfoot and died a few days later. In 1994 sports superstar O J Simpson was accused of killing his wife Nicole and Ronald Goldman (12); he was acquitted though held liable in a civil case.

Eight years earlier Argentine soccer maestro Diego Maradona scored (22) against England during the World Cup in Mexico City. You know, that game where the Hand of God scored the winning goal.

Hot air ballooning is regarded as a sport, too. And it all started in 1783 when the Montgolfier brothers demonstrated (4) their hot air balloon.

 

Montgolfier balloon - Wikipedia commons

 

Another pioneer in flight was the pilot of the Gossamer Albatross, which flew across the Channel in 1979. It was man-powered by Bryan Allen.

Irwin Allen produced many films, among them Five Weeks in a Balloon, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. He was born (12) in 1916. He was responsible for many science fiction series on TV, including The Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Lost in Space in the days when fiction was becoming fact, when, for instance, Venera 4 was launched in 1967 to become the first space probe to enter another planet’s atmosphere and successfully return data (12).

In 1633 views on the universe were very different: the Holy Office in Rome forced Galileo to recant his view that the sun, not the earth, was the centre of the universe (22). It wasn’t until 1992 that the Vatican recanted and effectively apologised for the treatment of Galileo.

A transit of Venus in 1769 was followed five hours later by a total solar eclipse (4); interestingly, on the same day in 780 BC the first solar eclipse was recorded in China (4).
 
On the same day Austrian astronomer Franz Xaver, Baron Von Zach, was born (4) in 1754 and he set out to find a predicted missing planet between Mars and Jupiter. His team located Ceres 1, which is the biggest rock in the Asteroid Belt that passes between these two planets.
 
In 1978 Pluto’s satellite Charon was discovered (22), some forty-eight years after the planet itself was actually found. Pluto was the Greek god of the underworld and Charon ferried the dead across the Styx to Hades; in August last year Pluto was declassified, no longer being a planet but merely a dwarf or minor planet, seventy-six years after its discovery.
 
Of course, instead of searching the heavens, many people simply explored our planet. One such man was George Vancouver, who was born (22) in 1757. He claimed Puget Sound for Britain (4) in 1792 and of course Vancouver in Canada is named after him.
 
Canadian actress Norma Shearer died (12) in 1983; she had been offered the part of Scarlett O’Hara in David O Selznick’s Gone With the Wind but he was overruled. Selznick died (22) in 1965; both he and Shearer were born in 1902.

Gone with the Wind poster - Wikipedia commons

Two of Selznick’s most popular films were Duel in the Sun, a western starring Gregory Peck, who died (12) in 2003, and The Third Man, based on the novel by Graham Greene. The Canadian actor Graham Greene, who captivated global audiences in Dances with Wolves, was born (22) in 1952.

The fifth century Capitoline Wolf statue symbolises the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus at the birth of Rome. It’s featured in the epic film Cleopatra, which premiered (12) in 1963.

 
Henry Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon’s Mines and She also wrote a novel called Cleopatra in 1889. He was born (22) in 1856; he stood unsuccessfully for Parliament for East Norfolk in 1895. His tales of Allan Quatermain inspired modern interpretations like Indiana Jones and Lara Croft.
 
Tomb Raider star Angelina Jolie was born (4) in 1975. Her film Tomb Raider also featured Daniel Craig, who is the current movie James Bond, as well as Richard Johnson, who was in the TV movie The Secret Life of Ian Fleming.

Angelina Jolie - Tomb Raider - Wikipedia commons

 
Ian Fleming was actually in Intelligence during the Second World War. In 1940 the end of the evacuation from Dunkirk (4) seemed to offer little hope for the European continent’s future, with Rommel accepting the surrender (12) of 13,000 British and French troops followed by France being forced (22) to sign an armistice with Nazi Germany.
 
Two years later, thirteen-year-old Anne Frank received a diary on her birthday (12) – she was born in 1929 and was murdered in 1945.
 

And of course the war ended in that year with an Allied victory, thanks to Churchill’s leadership, among other factors. Prime Minister Churchill was succeeded in 1955 by Anthony Eden, who was born (12) in 1897.

Churchill, 1940 - Wikipedia commons

 
Perhaps because he was headstrong and stubborn, Winston Churchill didn’t get on well with fellow students in his early school years. He even had to hide behind a tree when some boys threw cricket balls at him. After this experience, he vowed to be as tough as anybody else. So with that cricket anecdote we’ve come full circle for this look at linking dates, people and events.