Johannes Simmel, It Can’t Aways be Caviar (1960) (The Monte Cristo Cover-up)
Good Reads meta-data is 558 pages rated 4.26 by 1,299 litizens.
DNA: Austria.
Genre: SpyFi.
Verdict: Amusingly sophomoric.
Tagline: Stir slowly.
Banker Lieven, thanks to the misdeeds of his business partner, gets pressed into espionage service…. by the French, then the Germans, then the English…in this travelogue 1939-1941 – London, Brussels, Zurich, Berlin, Paris, Toulouse, Lisbon, and more.
On each occasion he finds it best to go along to get along. Unlike James Bond of the same era and ilk, Lieven is a pacifist.
He is also a gourmet and wherever he goes he cooks, even in a war ravaged countryside. His recipes dot the book. Wherever he goes, like Bond, the women surround him, and he does his duty by them. He takes license to thrill but not to kill.
It was highly recommended in Jacques Barzun and Wendell Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime (1989), so I went looking for it. Not readily available to this reader but I came across it in the Internet Archive, and read it on the iPad screen from that source. I didn’t finish it, partly because the antics became repetitive and partly because of the awkwardness in screen reading on the iPad. I made it page 100 and noticing that many more awaited I withdrew. It is in print for German readers.