His historical novels include the Nick Revill series, set in Elizabethan London, a Victorian sequence, and a series of Chaucer mysteries, now in in e-books.
It’s well known that there were
plenty of Nazi sympathisers and
admirers of Hitler in
England in the years running up to the outbreak of World War Two. They didn’t
all switch allegiance when hostilities broke out, and fears of a ‘fifth column’
- an expression that came out of the Spanish Civil War - weren’t just
scaremongering propaganda to make sure people didn’t talk carelessly. There
really was an enemy within. Yet, at the same time, all the German agents in
Britain had apparently been neutralised or ‘turned’ by the secret services.
It’s this shadowy and intriguing set-up which
Anthony Quinn delves into in his excellent romantic thriller Our Friends
in Berlin. Quinn is the author of a well-realised trilogy of novels,
set mostly in London in the 1930s, 50s and 60s, each evoking a period and using
linked characters to reveal a history which is simultaneously near and distant
to us. Now he turns his attention to the decade he’s missed so far, the 1940s
and the war-time city, a dangerous, battered place but with a hint of glamour.
At the beginning Jack Hoste, seemingly a tax inspector,
visits a marriage bureau even if it’s not a wife he’s in search of but a
particular woman, a friend of Amy Strallen who works at the bureau. Marita
Pardoe is an anti-semite, a Nazi sympathiser and perhaps worse. Hoste is a
buttoned-up figure but he strikes up a friendship with Amy even if it’s unclear
how far he’s using her to reach Marita. And what is Hoste’s interest anyway?
Early on in the novel he lends a ready ear to those who are ready to pass on information
to the enemy and who end their meetings with a Heil Hitler.
The action in Our Friends in Berlin
is more psychological than physical, even if there is an attempted
assassination and other violent deaths. For much of the book the reader is
unsure exactly where the loyalties of several characters lie - lie, being the operative
word. And they are sometimes unsure themselves, since one of the things Quinn
is doing is showing the tug-of-war between friendship and patriotism,
heightened by the extreme circumstances of wartime.
The publishers invoke Robert Harris and le Carré
on the cover but the setting and style of the novel also recall an earlier
generation of popular writers like Nigel Balchin and Graham Greene.
Highly recommended.
