The Best of Our Spies (Audible Audio Edition) Alex Gerlis Stephen Critchlow Jammer Audio Books
Download As PDF : The Best of Our Spies (Audible Audio Edition) Alex Gerlis Stephen Critchlow Jammer Audio Books
France, July 1944 In the Pas de Calais, Nathalie Mercier, a young British special operations executive secret agent working with the French Resistance, disappears.
In London her husband, Owen Quinn, an officer with Royal Navy Intelligence, sets off on a perilous hunt through France in search of his wife. With the help of the Resistance, he finds Nathalie, but then the bitterness of war and its insatiable appetite for revenge catch up with them in a dramatic fashion.
The Best of Our Spies (Audible Audio Edition) Alex Gerlis Stephen Critchlow Jammer Audio Books
You figure out pretty early where this novel is headed: the Allied attempt to mislead German intelligence about where they’d invade in northern France. It figures in a lot of books, fictional and nonfictional, about World War II.I was worried that the book would place all its chips slowly revealing something to me that I already knew about. But this happily goes well past that, and kept my interest to the last page.
There are lots of moral ambiguities here. The Frenchwoman Nathalie Mercier trains before the war to spy for the German Abwehr, but gets cold feet and flees when Germany invades France in 1940. They catch her and force her back into their service. She slips into Britain among the refugees from Dunkirk, finds nursing work, and gets herself transferred to a military hospital.
Owen Quinn, severely wounded when his ship sinks in the Med, starts a passionate romance with his nurse as he’s recovering, and shortly thereafter marries her. And he’s transferred to naval intelligence. He has no idea she’s using him. What will happen when he finds out?
The British, having caught and doubled Nathalie’s radio man, let her keep operating unknowingly so that they can funnel false intelligence back to Germany through her. In their own way they can be as ruthless as the Nazis. They don’t hesitate to use, fool or even expend their own people.
The Abwehr, for whom Nathalie works, is meanwhile the most anti-Nazi organ in Hitler’s government. Its head, Admiral Canaris, won’t employ Nazis. He maintains back channels to the Allied governments, he knows Hitler is losing and thinks the sooner the better. The Abwehr, the German foreign intelligence service and mostly after standard military and strategic intelligence, doesn’t have the taint of war crimes about it.
France itself is full of ambiguity. Very few of its citizens resist, although many more will claim to have been after D-Day. (Gerlis includes some factoids stunning if true: that no German soldier is killed in occupied France for an entire year after the French surrender, and that the first Germans seen by deported French Jews were when they got off the train at Auschwitz, because their arrest in France had been entirely handled by the French.)
Many collaborate and the rest just go along. Collaborators snap up the property of Jews who have fled or been arrested.
And Gerlis paints a darker side of Liberation here: one where kangaroo courts execute accused collaborators, and where denunciations of one’s neighbors continues just as it had when the Nazis ruled. The Resistance itself is a fraught business, where those who cross the Resistance run the risk of torture and murder, the same risk the maquis run if the Gestapo catches them.
No spoilers here, so I don’t want to say too much about how the plot develops. I give Gerlis credit, though, for taking it into some difficult areas. What does an Allied officer do when he finds out the wife he adores is a Nazi spy? What is a satisfactory resolution to this love story? Can Quinn ever forgive his own side for its deceptive use of him?
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The Best of Our Spies (Audible Audio Edition) Alex Gerlis Stephen Critchlow Jammer Audio Books Reviews
Wartime espionage is absolutely fascinating as was this tale for most of its length. The beginning was riveting making it a page turner based on pace and premise. Then the twists and double-crossings became a bit implausible and the manipulations too forced. I respect the effort but after the third sleight I began to feel manipulated.Still, the setting and promise of an intriguing end held me. I wish Gerlis had focused more on the Allied and Axis spymasters as they were more interesting than those in the field.
I think he struggled between action and literature. In the case of the latter he produces a few good lines but they are too conservatively peppered in a plot that buckles under its own weight
“Don’t worry. It is not a crime to love the wrong person. Most people manage it at least once in their lives.”
“It is what comes in the wake of an invading army that is the true measure of a conquest.”
There are also some less-than-good examples
“In the strange half world in which he now lived, he knew better than to ask.”
“Everything starts off by being confused. And then you realise what you have to do and you go and do it and everything becomes clearer. And then, things get in the way. Events. People. Places. Emotions become involved, even if you don’t intend them to or even want them to. So you end up being confused again.”
This was representative of the division I felt in reading The Best of Our Spies. It was both solid and admirable while being weak and frustrating. This will not dissuade me from reading more of Gerlis' work as he will no doubt evolve and improve.
A number of excellent nonfiction books have been written about the exploits of British Intelligence in World War II, some of them by the practitioners themselves. Double Cross The True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben McIntyre stands out among recent examples. The title refers to what was variously called the XX Committee, the Twenty Committee, or the Double Cross Committee, a high-level body in British government charged with mounting a number of secret operations to deceive the Germans about the location of the Normandy Invasion. Their work, code-named Operation Fortitude and kept secret for decades, was spectacularly successful. It probably made the difference between the success or failure of the all-important invasion.
Naturally, an historical event so rich in detail and possibilities has also given rise to many spy novels as well. The most satisfying of those I’ve read is The Best of Our Spies, by Alex Gerlis. Working on the foundation of historical fact, including some real-life characters as well as the locations where the action really took place, Gerlis has woven a deeply engrossing and suspenseful tale that does as good a job as any nonfiction book in conveying what Operation Fortitude was really like. Though the principal characters are entirely fictitious, the lives they led may well come as close as any historical accounts to the reality lived by some of the many intelligence officers and agents involved in the scheme.
A spy story that conveys authenticity
The best writers of espionage fiction — John le Carre, Charles Cumming, and Olen Steinhauer, for example — are careful to avoid turning their protagonists into superheroes. They write about, often wallow in, the moral ambiguity of their characters’ work. Gerlis does, too. Both Owen Quinn and the young Frenchwoman whose stories dominate the novel are problematic characters, deeply affected by the events around them. For anyone with any empathy at all, it would be difficult not to feel their pain.
Most of the action in The Best of Our Spies takes place over the four final years of World War II. The scene shifts rapidly from one chapter to another, moving back and forth from a number of locations in England, to a succession of French towns and cities as well as the headquarters of the Abwehr (German military intelligence) in Berlin. The novel is full of surprises despite the fact that the major events in the story are so well known.
About the author
In the last few years British TV and radio journalist Alex Gerlis has turned to writing historical novels about espionage. The Best of Our Spies was the first, in 2012. His second, The Swiss Spy, was published in 2015.
You figure out pretty early where this novel is headed the Allied attempt to mislead German intelligence about where they’d invade in northern France. It figures in a lot of books, fictional and nonfictional, about World War II.
I was worried that the book would place all its chips slowly revealing something to me that I already knew about. But this happily goes well past that, and kept my interest to the last page.
There are lots of moral ambiguities here. The Frenchwoman Nathalie Mercier trains before the war to spy for the German Abwehr, but gets cold feet and flees when Germany invades France in 1940. They catch her and force her back into their service. She slips into Britain among the refugees from Dunkirk, finds nursing work, and gets herself transferred to a military hospital.
Owen Quinn, severely wounded when his ship sinks in the Med, starts a passionate romance with his nurse as he’s recovering, and shortly thereafter marries her. And he’s transferred to naval intelligence. He has no idea she’s using him. What will happen when he finds out?
The British, having caught and doubled Nathalie’s radio man, let her keep operating unknowingly so that they can funnel false intelligence back to Germany through her. In their own way they can be as ruthless as the Nazis. They don’t hesitate to use, fool or even expend their own people.
The Abwehr, for whom Nathalie works, is meanwhile the most anti-Nazi organ in Hitler’s government. Its head, Admiral Canaris, won’t employ Nazis. He maintains back channels to the Allied governments, he knows Hitler is losing and thinks the sooner the better. The Abwehr, the German foreign intelligence service and mostly after standard military and strategic intelligence, doesn’t have the taint of war crimes about it.
France itself is full of ambiguity. Very few of its citizens resist, although many more will claim to have been after D-Day. (Gerlis includes some factoids stunning if true that no German soldier is killed in occupied France for an entire year after the French surrender, and that the first Germans seen by deported French Jews were when they got off the train at Auschwitz, because their arrest in France had been entirely handled by the French.)
Many collaborate and the rest just go along. Collaborators snap up the property of Jews who have fled or been arrested.
And Gerlis paints a darker side of Liberation here one where kangaroo courts execute accused collaborators, and where denunciations of one’s neighbors continues just as it had when the Nazis ruled. The Resistance itself is a fraught business, where those who cross the Resistance run the risk of torture and murder, the same risk the maquis run if the Gestapo catches them.
No spoilers here, so I don’t want to say too much about how the plot develops. I give Gerlis credit, though, for taking it into some difficult areas. What does an Allied officer do when he finds out the wife he adores is a Nazi spy? What is a satisfactory resolution to this love story? Can Quinn ever forgive his own side for its deceptive use of him?
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