I chanced upon a copy of The First Wave during the summer of 2006 and was immediately attracted by the cover art. When I looked it up online, I discovered that it was the second book in a series. We requested and received review copies of both books from the publisher. Since they are murder mysteries set during World War II (a genre and period I like), I was only too happy to read and review them!
Now that I’ve read them both, I think I would qualify their genre placement in two respects. Yes, they offer elements of murder mystery, but I found them to have quite a lot in common with the action adventures I also like to read. For example, Bartle Bull’s series set in Africa in the early twentieth century (The White Rhino Hotel, The Café on the Nile, and The Devil’s Oasis). They also reminded me of Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd historical novels (whose lead character travels behind enemy lines in Europe as a secret agent working for Franklin Delano Roosevelt during World War II). Someday when I get caught up on reviews I’ll write an omnibus on each of these oh-so-satisfying series!
Billy Boyle, the main character and narrator of these two novels, is a young Irish-American cop, born into a family of South Boston cops. None too bright as far as book-learning goes, he joins the police force right out of high school. He has just passed his detective exam (with a little help from a family member on the inside) when the U.S. officially enters World War II after the Pearl Harbor bombing. Billy’s extended family steps in again, hoping to spare him the arduous experiences his father and uncles had during the First World War. They pull strings to get him into Officer Candidate School, which he barely passes. Billy’s mother is Mamie Doud Eisenhower’s second cousin, so she manages to get Billy a place on “Uncle Ike’s” staff. Only, General Eisenhower isn’t in Washington, D.C., pushing papers as the family expected. He’s in London directing the American troops on the European front.
The first novel in the series starts in June 1942 when Billy arrives in London, ready to report for duty as a freshly-minted (and very green) second lieutenant. In his first official meeting with General Eisenhower, Uncle Ike gives him two assignments: serve as an aide to Major Harding, a rather brusque career officer, and do detective work on an as-needed basis. The need arises soon enough. Billy and Major Harding are dispatched to ferret out a German spy thought to be privy to discussions about Operation Jupiter, a plan for the recovery of occupied Norway by the Allied forces that was actually a ruse to divert as many German troops as possible away from other locations. Accompanying them are Harding’s attractive administrative assistant Daphne Seaton (a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service) and Lieutenant Piotr Kazimierz (mercifully known as Kaz), a multi-lingual Polish aristocrat also serving on Eisenhower’s staff.
Soon after they arrive at the country house where the Operation Jupiter meetings are being held, one of the Norwegians attached to the government in exile is found dead on the ground below his hotel balcony. Billy, Daphne and Kaz get involved in the investigation once they determine that the death was neither accidental nor a suicide. In various combinations, these three characters travel to different destinations in the English countryside north of London. The investigation eventually leads Billy on a harrowing boat ride across the North Sea to occupied Norway and finally back to London, mystery solved but at a price – Billy is starting to lose his naïvete.
The First Wave picks up very shortly after Billy Boyle ends, in November 1942. Still working for Major Harding, Billy is part of the Allied wave entering Algeria in an attempt to rally support from the Free French and – with their help – to roust the Germans and Vichy French out. Very shortly after their arrival, Billy and Major Harding witness the execution of one of the Free French operatives and are “detained” by opposition forces. Then Billy discovers that his girlfriend Diana (a member of the Special Operations Executive and Daphne Seaton’s younger sister) has also been detained at the same facility. Shortly after Kaz springs the duo from the prison, Billy witnesses another murder (of a shady French businessman) and comes upon two more murders (of a French student and an American supply sergeant at a military hospital). Fortunately for Billy, his assignment to investigate the death of the American leads him right back to the other three murders and gives him an excuse to travel east into enemy territory in an effort to rescue Diana.
Billy is the first-person narrator of both of these novels. As is always the case when an author chooses to focus on the words and thoughts of a single character, the reader only knows what that character knows and sees what that character sees. I actually like this approach. I thought Benn did a good job of staying true to the language and the limitations of a young man away from home for the first time, learning to be a detective under far less than ideal circumstances. Billy’s occasional flashbacks give a good picture of his life before the War and of some of the darker aspects of his family situation – one uncle is a member of the Irish Republican Army, and it sounds as though Billy’s father was involved in some kind of corruption. Although Benn avoids obvious foreshadowing, in at least one instance in The First Wave, I was easily able to anticipate that one character was going to be a murder victim and another character was the perpetrator of that act.
Both of these novels do a good job of portraying the dangers and the moral ambiguities of war. Benn, a professional librarian with an obvious World War II fascination, makes excellent use of historical events and other details, such as descriptions of uniforms, weapons, and vehicles, to lend verisimilitude to his stories. I mentioned in my opening paragraph that I found the cover of The First Wave attractive. Actually, both novels have similar covers, very classy retro paintings of men in uniform watching battle scenes. These were done by Chicago based illustrator Daniel Cosgrove (you can find more of his work here). Both novels are relatively short (just under 300 pages each) and relatively fast reads.
What’s not to like about these books? My list of nitpicks is actually pretty short. As is always the case when I read a book in which place matters, I would have greatly appreciated maps in both of these. I couldn’t easily visualize the distance between the north coast of Scotland and the coast of Norway, or between Algiers and Bône, for example. Sure, I could have grabbed my own maps, but they aren’t in the same room as the couch where I read. I found Billy a little too dumb (at least as he described himself), his boss Major Harding a little too … well, hard-assed. There are pages in The First Wave that repeat nearly verbatim Billy’s background from Billy Boyle – this is the kind of information I might prefer to see in a preface. I also thought Benn tried just a little too hard to keep many of the same characters in both novels, even though it made very little sense for some of them to show up in both England and Algeria.
Assuming these novels do well for Soho Press – and I sure hope they do! – I would expect to see a few more titles in the series over the coming years. Benn is on a roll (according to his Web site, he’s at work on the third installment as I write this), and he’s got plenty of Billy’s time left to cover during the War and in the years immediately after, when Americans would still be all over Europe mopping up. Hey, Lanny Budd’s story continued into the early 1950s. And Upton was already over sixty when he started writing that series.
(Soho Press, 2006)
(Soho Press, 2007)
