Spies
My Master Spy. By Marthe McKenna. (Jarrolds. I2s. 6d.) The Lunatic Spy. By Frank Grotmdaell. (Jarrolds. l6s.) Dreaded Hour. By Captain George Hill. (Caseell. Ss. 6r1.) MANY spy books, like medicines, need labels to tell you how to take them, whether neat or cum grano. Not so My Master Spy, in spite of a determined effort on the dust-cover to put you on the wrong track. In its first few pages you meet Captain Clive Granville, who had not only a beautifully proportioned six-foot figure, finely modelled face and leonine head with light crisp hair, but also eyes that shone with lean greyhound awareness and latent courage. Quite by chance he is seated at the same table as Brut Verhagen, a Master Spy, and also the man of affairs of Hauptman Alberic von Schultz, who happens to be in every respect the living image of Clive. To them (also by chance) enter Galie Fhel, a lovely . slinky Baroness, and Admiral von limmann, who exudes a secret air of strategy. When, a few pages later, you learn that Clive is engaged to the beautiful daughter of a shipping magnate Who is in the confidence of the British Cabinet and has a bland butler with ears flattened- by constant pressure against key-, holes—well, you know exactly-where you are., But not in
your wildest hopes can you anticipate that the last chapter, in which hero and heroine embrace passionately and crack a bottle of champagne in the office of the head of the British Secret Service, will be gloriously entitled " Sealed Lips."
However, quite a lot happens between the first chapter and the last. What it is I cannot divulge, but it is all very exciting and includes one first-class mystification which ensnared me into missing a train ; and one short descriptive passage which proves that Mrs. McKenna, when she writes of something which she has herself experienced, can do so very well indeed.
The Lunatic Spy also needs no label. By profession Mr. Groundsell is a deliberately eccentric band-conductor, and he has produced a genuine and very entertaining autobiography in which spying plays only a minor part. Having served a rather stormy apprenticeship in a choir, a training ship and a chemical manure factory, he ran away to become one of the Eight Zerbinis. A remarkable gift for conducting without being able to read a note of music, combined with his early acrobatic training and talent for burlesque, quickly brought him to the fore as an entertainer. The War found him per- forming at the Kerkau Palast in Berlin as " Mister Mazzeltop aus Chicago " and with an American passport. Quite miracu- lously he came to conduct first the Berlin Police Band and later that of the Second Prussian Lifeguards. At this stage of his career he became a spy, and invented an ingenious musical code for the transmission of his messages to Holland. Most of his spying was unsensational and comparatively safe, which, as he points out, is the case with a great deal of methodical and successful espionage. When he did indulge in a sensational adventure he stuck like a good cobbler to his last, and was carried into Belgium and out again inside an orchestral organ. The strain of his dual profession, coupled with post-War depression, brought him into low water, but his many friends, to whose number this excellent book will add considerably, will join him in hoping he will soon be shaking his baton at the public again in his role of " crazy conductor."
Captain Hill deliberately mis-labels his book. His early chapters, though they are probably perfectly true, give the impression that he is treating you to a sealed-pattern sensa-
tiongt spy Ntery. His closinepaMifigitt no doubt-equally true, are mawkishly sentimental. But the body of the book: is extremely interesting and very well written. First as intel- ligence agent, then in, a semi-diplomatic capacity, and finally in the employ of various cominercial groups, he played a very . active and exciting part in the hurly-burly that followed, the War in South-Eastern Europe and Caucasia. The history of , this period is singularly confusing and, on the whole, very little known. It seems to me that few people, are better qualified , to write it seriously than is Captain Hill, who combines what must be an almost unique range of experience with a very . considerable ability for lucid and graphic analysis. A book cast on these lines would certainly have been more valuable and would probably have commanded greater success than Dreaded Hour, with its wealth of personal and sometimes
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