Der Fuehrer's Face

Seeing how my last review was about a book set in 1945 Nuremburg, it seems appropriate to go just a bit further back in time today. The year is 1934, and today’s book, The Talking Sparrow Murders by Darwin Teilhet, was just published. Across the Atlantic ocean, a man named Hitler has just seized power in Germany, and at this point the worst being thought of him was that he was just another crackpot dictator. But Teilhet disagreed – he saw what Nazism was doing to a country that he loved, and he didn’t like it. And his book is a vicious denouncement of all that Nazism stood for.

This is fascinating to see in a 1934 novel. Nowadays, it’s easy to use the wisdom of hindsight and say “Well, people really should’ve known better.” But here we have someone denouncing Hitler and all he stood for long before WWII and the revelation of the widespread Nazi atrocities. Not only that, this is being done in a detective novel, a form often ridiculed by critics as mere “crossword puzzles in prose”. And while there is a puzzle to solve in The Talking Sparrow Murders, the Nazis are constantly hovering in the background, threatening to turn this into a tragedy.

It was a dark and stormy night...

Darwin and Hildegarde Teilhet were American authors who sometimes worked together but sometimes worked separately. I really can’t say much more about them. Teilhet is known among Golden Age enthusiasts as the author of The Talking Sparrow Murders (which I’ve yet to read). Although written in 1934, it had a strong and unrepentant anti-Nazi stance, at a time when the Nazis’ rise to power didn’t seem like an extraordinary issue. After all, Germany had been so unstable it seemed like Hitler was just the latest in a long string of leaders.

But when 1940 rolled along, times obviously changed— in September of 1939, Hitler precipitated World War II by invading Poland, and before you knew it, all of Europe was engaged in warfare. And it was in 1940 that Darwin and Hildegarde Teilhet released The Broken Face Murders, being the fourth adventure of the Baron Franz von Kaz, a comic detective in the tradition of John Dickson Carr’s Sir Henry Merrivale.