100 books like Early One Morning

Graham Greene’s writing has a profound moral gravity, and I found this story–of a petty criminal leading a desperate life on the rim of poverty while manipulating the woman in his life–to be a spectacle of human cruelty I couldn’t look away from.

Rose knows her man is no good but loves him anyway, unaware that he’s courted her solely to avoid prosecution for his crimes. After his death, she goes to Confession and takes solace from the slender thread of good in him–unaware that he has left a recording behind that will reveal the truth and shatter the only happiness she has left.

As a technical matter, the novel is a master class in holding back a final twist of the knife for a book’s very last lines to leave the reader reeling.

I love Kerr’s fastidious attention to detail, which makes me feel I am watching the action he depicts. Set in Berlin during the 1936 Olympic Games, March Violets is the first in the Bernie Gunther thriller series.

Gunther is a former policeman, now a private eye, who has been hired to find out who was responsible for two murders. The world has bruised Gunther, who is a sarcastic but witty and likable hero. From this novel, I learned a lot about Berlin and the period. 

As the first in his series of novels on the 1930s in Europe, Alan Furst's Night Soldier tends to earn the most critical praise, but Dark Star remains my personal favorite. Furst masters the noir ambiance and moral ambiguity of Europe as war approaches, where everyday people are drawn into the world of espionage and intrigue. His settings often lie outside the main urban centers of Paris and Berlin in the remote reaches of Eastern Europe. Furst's novels are impeccably researched for accurate detail-one of my must-haves in historical fiction-and each book will draw you to read the next in his series.

I read Eric Amber when I was young, and again when I was invited to take part in Andrew Marr’s BBC4 documentary Sleuths, Spies and Sorcerers.

Ambler’s books have no heroes or jingoism. He revolutionized spy fiction by injecting realism. He portrays the chaos of Europe in the 1930s, with people trying to survive without papers. In Epitaph for a Spy, Josef Vadassy, a Hungarian refugee, has become stateless after the Treaty of Trianon. In France, he is arrested for spying because of a mix-up with camera film. He is told to find the real spy or be deported, which could mean death. He is left with no choice but to become a spy.

Ambler said that he wanted to write “credible and literate spy fiction.” He amply succeeded in this.

Want to read a thriller that will keep you turning the pages late into the night? Liberation is for you. And – here’s the kicker – it’s based on the real-life deeds of Nancy Wake. When her husband was snatched by the Gestapo, she joined SOE, trained as an agent, and parachuted into France. Nicknamed “The White Mouse” by the Germans for her ability to evade capture, she led a battalion of 7000 Resistance fighters, killed a man with her bare hands and defeated 22000 Germans (losing only 100 men). Even with a 5-million-franc bounty on her head (the largest bounty of the war), the Germans still couldn’t get their hands on her.

After the war, she sold her medals to fund herself. When asked about it, she blithely commented: "There was no point in keeping them, I'll probably go to hell and they'd melt anyway."

Nancy Wake was seriously… show more.

Originally published in 1956, this book is still worth a read, even though more material on the SOE agents is now available. Violette Szabo’s bravery, her death in Ravensbruck Concentration camp at the age of 23 and her posthumous George Cross collected by her daughter Tania, continues to move and inspire.

Special Operations Executive had the directive to “Set Europe ablaze” and from 1942 began recruiting women as field operatives. 39 were sent into France (of which 26 returned), and Kate Vigurs tells their stories in Mission France. Superbly researched and well written, this book is a really good all-rounder. Broken into 3 sections (Foundations, War, and Death & Deliverance), it tells each woman’s story, from their recruitment to either their death or demob. I loved the fact that she covered the lesser-known agents as well as the big names. Be prepared to be moved – these women’s exploits are more amazing than a lot of fiction I’ve read!

Sarah Helm’s biography of Vera Atkins is perfectly titled. On one level, Vera was the 2nd in command of SOE’s French Section, responsible for recruiting, training, and deploying SOE operatives into France. On another level, there were the closely guarded secrets of her own life.

Sarah Helm’s biography revealed a workaholic, an immigrant who became more English than the English, and whose loyalty to her charges, and the Allied cause, was unswerving. After the war, when 118 SOE agent didn’t make it home, Vera launched a personal crusade to find out what happened to them – a mission that took her across Allied-Occupied Germany to the concentration camps. (She found all but one.)

On a side note, Vera Atkins has been fictionalised on both big and small screens, from Ian Fleming’s Miss Moneypenny to Foyle’s War Hilda Pierce. Her legacy remains an inspiration.

Apart from viewing the late Paddy Ashdown as perhaps the best Prime Minister Britain never had, I also know him as an under-recognised author of gripping Second World War books. The community of WW2 researchers is mutually supportive; knowledgeable colleagues have been immensely helpful to me over the years, and I recall helping Paddy with some information for one of his books. Several of them are worth reading, but here he tells the true stories of three men who pitted their wits against each other in the treacherous milieu of wartime France. The stakes were measured in lives, betrayals, and deaths.

If ever another film should be made about an SOE agent in occupied France, it should tell the story of Nancy Wake, a brash, fearless Australian who caused havoc for the Nazis as ‘White Mouse’, the nominal leader of a huge Maquis network. I came upon Nancy’s file at the National Archives, and her SOE training report sums up this extraordinary woman: "She is tough, stubborn and plucky, with plenty of initiative. She has a strong personality, is jolly and sociable, but capable of being rather difficult." Those who came up against her would certainly have agreed, including her handlers. This book is a fantastic description of Nancy’s sometimes reckless bravery and incredible achievements inside enemy territory.