He and a cell-mate apply to be German spies, and are rejected. Which is where he is at the outbreak of war, and still is after the Nazi invasion. The others have already been rounded up and deported back to London, but he faces trial, then jail, on the island.
Luckily for him, he is caught following a solo raid on a local business.
In this presentation of him, our Eddie is the sort of lovable rogue familiar from novels and films, the sort we can’t help liking.Īfter a botched job, Eddie and the gang have scarpered to Jersey in the summer of 1939. But – and it’s an important part of the picture – he is never violent. Using documents that have only been declassified in the early years of the 21st Century – as Macintyre explains in his Author’s Note at the beginning – a picture is built up of an intelligent, brave, resourceful man who has absolutely no compunction about stealing more or less anything. In Macintyre’s presentation of him – and it’s the only one we’ve got – he’s a small-time crook, then he’s a slightly bigger crook working in a gang, then he’s on the run…. He had a map when he set off, but he seems to have lost it….Īfter Macintyre rewinds to an earlier beginning and starts again, it takes all but one of the chapters I’ve read so far to get back to this point. At the start of the book, this man in a suit – we don’t know who he is yet – has parachuted into a field and doesn’t know where he is.
It’s one of the themes of this middle section of the book: the Brits are better at just about everything than the Germans. He was never really the Nazis’ secret anyway: the British have known all about Agent Fritz – giving him the Brits’ all-purpose nickname for Germans is the Abwehr’s little joke – because since the cracking of the Enigma codes they’ve known about most things they do. Macintyre begins at one of the beginnings – at the moment when our man is about to stop being the Nazis’ secret weapon, and start being the Brits’ secret weapon instead.
What can I say? For a start, it’s hugely enjoyable.
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