War

A Vivid Spy Story

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This is the biography of a wildly improbable life: born into wealth and privilege, Margaret Harrison changed careers from society news reporter to spy. That’s right, fluent in German, she was a spy for American military intelligence in post-WWI Germany. Harrison was tasked with taking the mood of the country from top to bottom. She did so, moving through a country filled with violence and practically dodging bullets in Berlin as various factions fought each other for control.

When she was assigned to discover what was really going on in Bolshevik Russia, Harrison learned Russian and sneaked into that country of vast convulsions, which was at war with Poland. She had no permission, but she had charm and wit and could think fast.  Harrison was totally clear-headed about the risk of crossing over from Poland:

She was aware that once she reached the Russian side, she would have no one to turn to for help: no American diplomats had stayed in the country, no foreign embassies remained to represent her; she had no way to send a message out, and no one she knew to receive a message inside. She would be at the mercy of a dangerous adversary.

Hobnobbing with the literati and enjoying Moscow’s cultural richness amid the shortages of food and just about everything else didn’t last. She was forced to spy for the Cheka, the secret police–but that didn’t last, either. The book tips over into a sort of horror story when she’s arrested and imprisoned for well over a year in shocking, grotesque conditions that severely undermined her health–but didn’t diminish her spirit. 

Multilingual, she was praised by spymasters for the best intelligence from Russia any agent was supplying, and as a media sensation, Harrison became a successful lecturer about Russian reality and her prison experiences. She left out being a double agent. Craving “hardships and adventures,” she went on to get more than her share as a reporter and occasional spy in Japan, Siberia, China, Korea, and Mongolia. Her energy is almost exhausting to contemplate, and the most astonishing episodes are worthy of an Indiana Jones reboot: a film she helped finance and starred in was set in an extremely remote part of Persia. 

Flirting with Danger is filled with a blizzard of famous figures: politicians, artists, and writers from Winston Churchill to Emma Goldman and Maxim Gorky. The author is a supremely confidant storyteller, but she deserved a careful copyeditor who, for instance, was aware that German nouns are capitalized and knew that Germany was not “under authoritarian rule” in 1924. She also needed an editor who could have reined in the profusion of adjectives, many over-long sentences, excessive attention to meals, and florid phrases like this one: “her eyes danced like clouds in a blazing sky.”

It’s also disturbing that the author twice labels gays and lesbians in 1919 Berlin as “sinister” when this was a time of unprecedented freedom and openness for that community. The portrait of Berlin seems skewed, perhaps reflecting Harrison’s own apparent prudishness, and readers will find a much more nuanced assessment of the city right after WWI in Claire McKay’s Life and Death in Berlin.

All the same, Flirting with Danger is a memorable book about an unforgettable woman.  ★★★

Lev Raphael has reviewed books for the Detroit Free Press, The Washington Post and other publications.  Biography is one of his favorite genres and he recently reviewed The Art Thief.

A New Kind of War

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Manipulated into declaring war on Prussia in 1870, ailing and criminally indecisive Napoleon III of France was quickly defeated and captured on the battlefield in a disastrous few months that led to the final unification of northern and southern Germany and the creation of Imperial Germany.

The author tells this familiar story with verve, relying on diaries and letters from ordinary soldiers to military commanders and royalty.  Enthusiasm was high on both sides but the Germans clearly outdid the French military in well-defined battle plans and overall strategy. Just as important, their leaders were in good health while Napoleon III was ill, uncertain, and issued last-minute changes that were confusing.

The French lines of communication were murky and French retreats were mostly chaotic while German advances were far better organized.  The French had better rifles and an early version of the machine gun, but the German armies had bigger and deadlier cannons.  Both sides used railroads to move troops and supplies, but the Prussian did so far more efficiently and their generals had recent experience fighting the Danes and the Austrians.

Though the term “shell shock” wasn’t invented yet, it’s clear that troops on both sides were traumatized by the piled-up bodies of dead and wounded in numbers that had never been seen before. Likewise, no city had ever been shelled so constantly and repeatedly as Strasbourg which at one point was hit every twenty seconds by powerful explosives, and the emotional toll on its citizens was severe.  And the random shelling of Paris seems a presage of the war in Ukraine.

There are many fascinating pages on the varied reactions around France to Napoleon III’s surrender and the fate of his mammoth army. And the tales of extortion and atrocities committed by troops from various German states in response to the slightest resistance are shocking.  The author has an eye for surprising details, like the fact that there was water under the Paris Opera, discovered after drilling through the foundation, and the author claim helped inspire The Phantom of the Opera novel by Gaston Leroux.

As engaging as it is, the book could have been more reader-friendly.  Maps are gathered at the front so you need to keep paging back to refer to them when following the specific movements of troops in battle–or trying to follow them.  None of the maps show the placement and progress of actual armies as you’d expect from a book so keenly focused on a war.

The chapter on the Prussian sieges of Metz and Strasbourg badly needed plans of the complex fortifications.  Just as frustrating, the book lacks a map of the French départments.  You have to go to Google to figure out where there is partisan activity, for instance, when the Germans besiege Paris.  Likewise when the author talks about where people flee to avoid the German and where exactly German atrocities take place.  There are many handsome period illustrations, but their labels are at the back of the book, so if you don’t want to interrupt your reading, you have to guess what they refer to.

Nevertheless, this is a thorough and illuminating study of  a war that created a gigantic pivot in world history.  ★★★

Lev Raphael is the author of 27 books in genres from memoir to mystery and his reviews have appeared in The Detroit Free Press, The Washington post, The Huffington Post and Salon.

 

The Regency Jason Bourne is Back

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C.S. Harris is a fantastic novelist. Her characters are richly observed, her dialogue is evocative, her plots are exceedingly well wrought, and she excels at atmosphere: you see, feel, and smell every scene in a kind of 3-D. Reading one of her books is immersive, it’s time travel, it’s magic.

Harris’s understanding of the Regency era is remarkable for its depth and range, and she is one of the few authors whose series I’ve stuck with over time because she isn’t disappointing.

Her glamorous, debonair nobleman is Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin. He is gifted with “hearing and night vision” that are “unusually acute” and they help him investigate murders–and sometimes outwit stalkers. He’s also a master of disguise, but he’s no Marvel superhero. In fact, Devlin starts off the 18th book of the series with a profound and troubling disadvantage: a painful leg injury that’s likely to keep this ex-soldier from crossing the Channel to Belgium where “the armies of Europe were massing for what would in all likelihood be one of the most decisive battles in history.” 

He badly wants to join former comrades, but that isn’t on the cards, despite the looming menace abroad. Napoleon has escaped Elba and been welcomed back to power in France with jubilation. The exiled emperor’s shadow has fallen again over Europe–and it has surprising power over Devlin as he becomes entangled in a twisted tale of mutilated corpses, espionage, secrets of seduction and betrayal, witchcraft and werewolves. 

Suspects abound and they could well be French assassins from any number of rival factions.  He himself is attacked and warned off in classic PI style by a huge thug and an oily villain.  As you’d expect, he acquits himself well; even with his injury, St. Cyr is not an easy mark.

One of the best aspects of this series is its social range. Between St. Cyr and his amateur journalist wife Hero, we meet people of all ranks in Regency England: actors, fortune tellers, politicians, aristocrats, thieves, men of the law, servants, governesses, thugs, inn keepers, soldiers, beggars, ferrymen, sailors, merchants, tradesman, vagabonds and many more.  We travel through a London that has disappeared like Atlantis, with Harris as our guide. 

Built with short, punchy chapters, this book has it all: mystery, scenery, adultery, luxury, poverty, cruelty, zealotry,  hypocrisy, bravery.  And the series consistently has some of the most beautiful book covers around.

Lev Raphael is the former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press and has reviewed books at Salon, The Washington Post, Huffington Post and other publications.

 

 

Classic War Novel

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If you caught the recent Netflix film All Quiet on the Western Front and wondered about the book it’s based on, don’t hesitate to get the handsome Everyman’s Library edition. You’ll see why it’s considered one of the greatest war novels every written and more than that, you’ll be amazed at how it doesn’t sound translated.  The prose is that clear, that vivid, that compelling. Translation, bringing a book into another language and its culture, is an art and this version of the book is incredibly artful.

The story is simple and complex. Paul and his German schoolmates are basically bullied into signing up for the German army by their jingoistic teacher.  However patriotic they are, life in the trenches changes them utterly. 

Life and death aren’t topics to read about and discuss: they are both majestic and ephemeral. You can be killed at any minute by a sniper, an artillery shell, a mine–or crushed by a tank. Conversely, you can miraculously escape death by stepping out of a bunker for a smoke or an errand. 

The fear, the tension, the horror of seeing people die in myriad grotesque ways are like an acid bath.  The dark realizations hit him early and hard:

“We are no longer young men.  We’ve lost any desire to conquer the world.  We are refugees.  We are fleeing from ourselves.  From our lives.  We were eighteen years old and we had just begun to love the world and being in it; but we had to shoot at it.  The first shell to land went straight for our hearts.  We’ve been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress.  We don’t believe in those things anymore; we believe in the war.”

Paul experiences one horror after another, loses friends, is wounded, has to kill or be killed, and one of the most amazing chapters of the book is the time he’s trapped for three days in a shell crater with a dying man.  But there are also surprisingly moving and even comic moments of camaraderie as he and his fellow soldiers bond around incredible events that soon become ordinary.

The novel is short, fast-paced, devastating and seems oddly current, given the network of trenches that Russia has built in occupied Ukraine.  Anyone interested in the history of WWI or amazing fiction should read this book. ★★★★★ 

Lev Raphael’s introduction to WWI was via a classic, The Guns of August, which he read one summer between sixth and seventh grade.  He recently learned that his paternal grandfather, murdered at Auschwitz, fought in that war.

 

 

Arkady Renko Returns

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Though it’s set in Moscow, Kiev, and Crimea just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Independence Square doesn’t have the epic sweep of The Siberian Dilemma or the rich cultural insights of Tatiana.  

What this novel does have is a very classic, very clever mystery with some terrific misdirection, well-placed clues, and a killer who is, as you’d expect, the least likely person to have been a murderer.

In this tenth book of the series, Renko is struggling with the early onset of Parkinson’s which gives him balance issues and hallucinations, details apparently  drawn from the author’s own experience of the disease. 

Parkinson’s seems to have dulled Renko’s sarcasm about Russia’s cruel absurdities as well as his ability to describe scenes and settings in colorful detail.  However, the book moves quickly and Vladimir Putin is the terrifying menace that hovers over everyone in the book, whether innocent or corrupt.

Renko finds himself investigating two murders after having been stuck by his oafish, vindictive boss doing paperwork at a miserable little desk.  Along the way, his investigation is complicated by brutal cops beating freedom-loving protestors, a horde of nationalistic bikers, a greedy politician, a gorgeous young woman who falls into bed with him, and his former lover, Tatiana. 

Fans of the series will be pleased to see that his adopted son Zhenya is back, still hustling people over a chess board and that Renko is never smug in the way Sherlock Holmes can be.  Reaching one more dead end, he wisely realizes that he “didn’t even know what he didn’t know”–and that scares him, as well it should.

The story is ripped from the headlines with crazed Russians talking about the sanctity of their nation supposedly endangered by Western democracy, Satanism,  and homosexuals.  Too bad that Independence Square skimps on color and texture; when it does plunge into deeper description it feels somewhat muddled.  There’s a freakish set piece near the end where a crowd watches a sort of son et lumière show (with motorcycles!) about Russian history from the Bolshevik Revolution onward and it’s not always easy to visualize.

But that’s redeemed by a heroic effort of Renko’s which skillfully echos many classic edge-of-your-seat movie scenes that are set backstage. ★★★

The former crime fiction reviewer for The Detroit Free Press, Lev Raphael has read all of the previous Arkady Renko books at least twice, some of them three times.

Review: The Real Russia

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Russia has been in the news most recently for the war in Ukraine and previously in terms of election interference or climate change.  But information about what the country is really like doesn’t seem to interest journalists or their editors.

Luckily for us, Russian-born TV producer Peter Pomerantsev has done a deep dive about his experience making documentaries there and meeting people ranging from aspiring small town models to obscenely powerful oligarchs.  Nothing is True and Everything Is Possible examines a country that shifts like a kaleidoscope on steroids as its leaders stealthily fight for global supremacy and tens of billions of dollars illegally slosh through its economy in often unchartable ways.  A country that seems to have lost its mind in the rush to grab wealth wherever it can.

One thing you can count on with today’s Russia is insane impermanence, especially in Moscow. The city itself is in a perpetual paroxysm of building and rebuilding, and the author’s descriptions of those changes are so memorable. “Whole swathes of town are demolished in fits of self-destruction, wastelands abandoned for years and for no apparent reason, skyscrapers erupting before there are any roads leading to them and then left empty in the dirty snow.”

This re-invention frenzy dwarfs anything that Americans have experienced. People become wealthy there with the speed of light and for “its new heroes, life is just one glittering masquerade, where every role and any position or belief is mutable.”   The whole book captures the bizarre reality that has taken hold of Russia and squeezed it dry, while making some people so desperate to feel positive that they’re hypnotized by TV charlatans and self-help cult leaders.

Corruption and bribery rule in every sphere of life, whether getting a driver’s license or snagging exemptions from being drafted into the army.  That’s simply how things get done.  But one of the most egregious examples is the Sochi Olympics.  Those games cost tens of billions more than the previous Olympics–the extra money just drifted away.

That’s what seems to happen across the country with one venture after another, and much of that money has been buying real estate, soccer teams, fabulous art, and companies in London and all across Europe.  Rapacious, dangerously charming Russians seem to have colonized that city, appearing as brash arrivistes but slowly becoming “classy” and moving on from plush city addresses to country estates.

Deep Russian paranoia is stoked by state-controlled media that makes Fox TV seem as anodyne as a chirpy Hallmark greeting card. Against an apocalyptic backdrop, it constantly warns viewers against “Gay-Europa,” Western fascists and the CIA infesting Ukraine, Western plans for genocide against Russia, and “American-sponsored fascists crucifying Russian children on the squares of Ukrainian towns.”

That media machine has produced weeping women who testified to those appalling horrors.  Of course they were fake. It’s all fake news meant to keep the government in power and hide the reality of corruption so widespread that you can’t say it permeates the state. It is the state.

The author notes that the Kremlin “has finally mastered the art of fusing reality TV and authoritarianism to keep the great, 140-million-strong population entertained, distracted, constantly exposed to geopolitical nightmares, which if repeated enough times can become infectious.”

You have to wonder if this is a warning to readers that the same thing could happen in Western countries, perhaps with less drama and less notice–because who could imagine it possible?

Lev Raphael  has reviewed for The Washington Post, The Detroit Free Press and many other media outlets since the mid-1990s.