Tangled Web UK Review October 2007
Up in Honey's Room by
Elmore Leonard
hbk out September 07
Published by Weidenfeld
at £12.99
We all know that Elmore Leonard is a cracking writer, on the elevated
plane of Ed McBain and Laurence Block, but I don't think this particular
book will rank amongst his best efforts. It is amusing and diverting, but
leaves the reader wondering why on earth he wrote it. It is somewhat
whimsical, with a throw-away style that suggests that the author was
amusing himself and didn't really care whether it sold a few more million
copies. I suppose it could be described as a 'literary doodle' , the writer
having a bit of fun. It is hardly a mainstream crime novel, as against the
exhortations of writing tutors always to have a corpse in the first five
pages, there is no dead body until about three quarters of the way
through.
The story is set in Detroit in the last year of the Second World War.
Honey is a delectable young woman, who in 1939 spent a year as the wife
of Walter, a fanatical Nazi sympathiser who cherished his uncanny
resemblance to Himmler. Honey soon left him, mainly because of his
total lack of a sense of humour, then a few years later is questioned by the
FBI who are chasing spy rings and escaped German POWs. Two Africa
Corps officers on the run from a prison camp, are being sheltered in
Detroit and Carl Webster, a sharp-shooting US marshal from Tulsa is
called in to seek them out and falls for Honey. Otto, the real Nazi of the
pair, falls for a Jewess and runs away with her, while the other one,
Jurgen Shrenck, also falls for Honey.
A hopelessly ineffective spy cell consists of a Ukrainian woman, her
crazy servant, a rich Klu Klux Klan leader and an anti-Semitic doctor,
with Walter tagging along determined to assassinate Roosevelt.
Apart from a some shootings, the whole affair is conducted in an amiable,
leisurely fashion, with some interesting side-lights on meat-processing
and rationing in wartime USA.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
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