Midnight in Vienna

"I’m not usually a reader of historical fiction . There are too many nonfiction history books that I would prefer to read. Midnight in Vienna is the exception. It was a suggestion from the Spybrary community and I thought. ‘Okay, let’s give it a go.’ It’s 1938, the eve of war, and I think there are parallels with where we are today. You have Neville Chamberlain going to Munich and other places, trying to appease Hitler. Memories of World War I were still too stark and much of the country was thinking, ‘We can’t face another war. The politicians will figure it out.’ Then you had Churchill saying, ‘We’re sleepwalking into this. We need to rearm and get ready. Hitler is totally fixated on going to war.’ That comes across in the book. You can just feel the mood in 1938 London. No one’s really sure how things are going to pan out. That was very clever. You can tell that Jane has conducted a huge amount of research in conveying that atmosphere. The plot revolves around a detective writer Hubert Newman, who dies suddenly. That’s the backstory, the intriguing piece of this book. Was it a natural death? Or was there something dodgy about it? Newman was a cozy detective novelist who is less cozy than he seems. The two main characters in the book are Stella Fox and Harry Fry, who are very different from each other. Stella has been out in Vienna working as a tutor to a Jewish family. They’re realists and can see the writing on the wall and flee to the US. So Stella comes back to London and gets a job for Newman typing up his book. When he dies the very next day, she’s obviously shocked. And then this big package arrives, which is the manuscript. It is dedicated to her, Stella, ‘spotter of mistakes.’ It’s a book about who Shakespeare really was. But there are clues in it, revealing a modern day threat to national security that Stella picks up on and then investigates. Harry is a former MI5, Special Branch gumshoe. He’s been kicked out under a cloud for reasons that are revealed later on. Again, Jane weaves in fact with fiction. So you start off with Harry tailing George Orwell because he’s on a list of dodgy lefties, creative types that they were following. Harry also follows Wallace Simpson. At one point he visits Dorothy L. Sayers , the famous mystery writer, because Hubert Newman was a member of her Detection Club. I won’t spoil it for your readers, but that scene really made me giggle. It’s very cleverly done. There’s a class divide. Stella is middle/upper class—she’s staying with a friend who’s a socialite. Harry is working class. That’s how it was between MI5 and MI6. MI5 were in the main recruited from the working classes, whereas MI6 recruited the elite set such as Maclean, Blunt, Philby et al. Stella and Harry wouldn’t normally get on or mix in the same social circles, but they join forces to find out what’s really going on. Stella goes out to Vienna at one point to conduct the investigation. Again, Jane has done a tremendous amount of research on Vienna in the late 30s, and what it was like to live there under the heel of the Nazis. I was really enthralled with this book, because I couldn’t quite see where it was going."