Cairo, May 1942. The Desert Fox is a hundred miles away or less. Where? No one is sure. But close. Of that everyone is sure. Despite prodigious efforts the British have been unable to staunch Erwin Rommel’s relentless advance.
Egypt is a sovereign state with its own army, but it is neutral in this struggle. Its sovereign, the boy-king Farouk I, has invited the British to Egypt to protect the Suez Canal. Well, that is diplomatic fiction. The reality is that the British have occupied Egypt to protect the Canal, and thought it best to retain the façade of Egyptian sovereignty by leaving the king on the throne in the hope of stability in the rear.
Nationalists in Egypt are ready to welcome a Rommel victory as the means to end British domination and the corrupt local elite that thrives on that domination. Members of the Egyptian Army plot to that end, though there are many divisions among them.
British soldier Jim Ross arrives in Cairo in the custody of an MP who dies of food poisoning unexpectedly and quickly, and Ross switches places with the dead officer as a means of escape. But once in Cairo he is mistaken for that officer and soon finds himself growing into the role. That is a nice twist, and it is well realised.
Ross’s assignment is to find Rommel’s spy in Cairo who is feeding the Desert Fox very detailed information about the British forces, deployments, morale, weapons, Egyptian nationalism, shipping in the Canal, promotion of officers, developments in the Sudan and more. Ross discovers he has a penchant for reading files and making inferences.
Into the mix come many others. There is a resident white Russian prince, a widowed nurse, a Jewish gun runner for the Haganah, Ross’s superior and subordinate officers, and the comely Alice who finds him a man of alluring mystery. Throughout is the rogue Wallingford, a man of infinite charm, bottomless self-confidence, utter audacity, and who is amorally unscrupulous enough to go into politics. Even with a gun to his head, he continues to bargain.
Each character has a personality, but the sharpest is certainly Sergeant-Major Ponsonby who runs the office, and much else. In a complicated set of circumstance Ponsonby is forced to comply with the request of the arrogant women, the wife of a high ranking officer. Meekly he does so. Then, in a phrase Ross learns to respect, Ponsonby makes ‘a few inquiries.’ The woman’s request, though granted, seems thereafter never to progress through the works. At every stage it is misplaced, misfiled, mis-stamped, mis-signed, or mislaid. In the end Ponsonby is proved right, what she wanted was a bad mistake, and he explains the delays in action to Ross by saying ‘the SMs stick together.’
There are also vivid portraits of Egyptians caught between the worlds of the past, the present, and the future. Though the reaction of one Egyptian seems mistaken to this reader. His enemy was the king not the nationalists, but plots must have their devices.
The source of Rommel’s spy is adroitly handled, and is evidently historical fact, though it was all news to me (again). Though the plot device creaked here in the person of Percy, the ersatz South African.
For those that must have it, there is also one skirmish as the Germans advance, and Ross is in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Len Deighton’s name on the cover is always a guarantee of high quality plot and prose.
Len Deighton
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After false starts with some krimis I wanted something to read that I could and would read, so I turned to an old reliable. While sure I had read this before, I remembered nothing of it, not even as I read it. Hmmm. In any case it lived up to my hopes, it was engaging, informative, amusing, and enlightening with a story, a plot, characters, and such that the krimis that I had aborted did not have.
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