Initially, L. J. Hurst worked in the backrooms of the media industry. He now divides his time between work for an international scientific publisher and a rather more British independent bookseller. In years past he was a regular attendee at the Shots on the Page Festivals from whence Shots Mag sprung
The re-issue of Philip Kerr’s Hitler’s Peace coincides with the publication of Howard Blum’s factual Night of the Assassins. Their joint interest is the 1943 Teheran Conference where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met, which (if Blum is to be believed) the Nazis were aware of, and where they sent a commando unit under Otto Skorzeny to kill all three heads of government. Unternehmen Weitsprung, or Operation Long Jump, was the codename given to the scheme. Historically, there is one problem: there might never have been a Nazi plan, the whole thing might have been a piece of Soviet disinformation that aimed to make Roosevelt more sympathetic to Stalin’s ambitions. Certainly, Roosevelt abandoned the shelter of the US embassy and moved into the Soviet compound.
Although centred on one man, Willard Mayer, an American academic called in to join Roosevelt’s party as a translator, Hitler’s Peace switches its point of view to German plotters and Wehrmacht special forces. That is important because Kerr sets one of his two (not one but two) Chekhov rifles (Chekhov, you will remember, said that if there is a rifle on the wall at the beginning it has to go off before the end) among the special forces. By making Mayer a second-level figure Kerr makes him an observer with occasional access to the principle figures, but also someone who is himself not trusted completely. That lack of trust, it becomes clear, is being played on by someone with ulterior motives: motives which might even not be those of the Big Three. There might be some other force at work, too.
Kerr’s second great surprise comes in the form of a buff folder containing a report on prisoner-of-war conditions. It is the complete reversal of fortunes that the report brings in the penultimate chapter that turns Hitler’s Peace from an alternate history to a what-might-have-been. It is also the reason for the title of the book, ironically though it used, and is another example of Kerr’s ability to plot his novels and surprise his readers.
I missed this novel when it was first published in 2005 because the advertising at the time (if my memory serves) suggested it was one of the Bernie Gunther series re-titled for the USA. Philip Kerr wrote several of these what-might-have-beens, including The Shot about the Kennedy assassination, though my review from Shots’ printed paper days found that good but not outstanding. Of course, ‘good’ when talking about Philip Kerr is far above ‘good’ for many other authors: Hitler’s Peace is a finely crafted piece of criminal prestidigitation, set among terrible but real events.
