“Someone had crashed their car inside the Admiralty Arch – the folly of trying to manoeuvre a large Austin 7 through such a narrow space alongside a bicycle. Voices were raised indignantly, a man was shouting and the traffic was backing up…….not far away from this commotion Hubert Newman made his way erratically along Pall Mall…”
This is the opening of Midnight in Vienna and within a few pages Hubert Newman is dead.
It is 1938 and Stella Fry has returned to London from Vienna where she has been living and working. She has had a love affair which has come to an end when she discovers her lover is joining the Socialist Party…
“What does it matter what I believe? It doesn’t change who we are’.
‘I think it matters what you believe”
She is now home, out of work and sharing a flat with Evely Lamont an actress friend.
“although actual fame eluded her she had met Edith Evans and Margaret Lockwood and could imitate both with perfect mimicry. She had taught herself to hold a cigarette like Bette Davis and she studied Vogue like the bible”
Stella had spent her time in Vienna as a private tutor before the Austrian family she worked for, and whose children she loved, had decided to leave and seek safety in New York. She
could speak three languages, had a Royal typewriter, no job and a broken heart and she knew that generous though Evelyn was she needed to find work.
She then sees an advertisement in the Times ‘author seeks typist’. The author is Hubert Newman a famous writer of detective stories. They lunch at the Athenaeum and he finds her knack of "spot the mistakes" perfect for the job. This particular manuscript is a departure from the norm.
“the fact is that this book is not a detective novel at all. It is a literary investigation. It is called Masquerade. I decided to apply my skills as a sleuth to investigate all the alternative candidates for the ‘real' Shakespeare”
He offers her the job and promises to send her the manuscript immediately. The next morning Stella is shocked to hear of his death and then twenty four hours later the manuscript arrives with the dedication;'
'To Stella, spotter of mistakes.
The story has two main protagonists so we are now introduced to Harry Fox, formerly of Special Branch, brilliant at surveillance, suspended for some undisclosed mistake and now a Watcher. It is quite amusing to read that his job is to follow possible subversives such as Auden and Orwell and spends most of his days following his targets. He has his own reasons for being interested in Hubert Newman. He approaches Stella Fry to share his belief that the writer's death was no accident.
I admit that when I first started reading this book I was not immediately captivated as I have been with the author’s Clara Vine books, but I still found I could not put it down and it slowly drew me in until I was intrigued enough to carry on and read it in one sitting.
The story shifts between Vienne and London and Jane Thynne captures perfectly the atmosphere of pre- war Europe and its uncertainties. She is very much at home in this milieu. Oddly enough after reading Midnight in Vienna I watched a programme about the director David Lean and his earlier films made in black and white. I realised that when I pictured the scenes and characters in Midnight in Vienna, as I do when reading, it was the style of Lean with his sharply defined cinematography that came to mind and fitted perfectly with my inner vision of this story. The atmosphere created was almost film noir.
I love Jane Thynne’s writing. I constantly repeat myself when I say how much I appreciate clean writing, straightforward narrative no frills or furbelows – a style of writing which is a pleasure to read and which flow continuously. This title, along with others I have read by this author, exhibits all of the above and by the end I found myself totally involved with the characters. It seems, by the slightly open ended finale, that this is the start of a series and I am already looking forward to the next one.
But oh please, if I am not being too greedy, may we have another Clara Vine?
