The Nazi Assassins (originally “The Secret Ministry”) by Desmond Cory

Prompted by Keith Phipps recent review of one of Johnny Fedora’s books (“The box of paperbacks book club: Johnny Goes South by Desmond Cory”), I decided to read another of his novels, and found myself quite hooked. I have now read a number of Fedora’s espionage assignments, and remain impressed by the quality of the writing and their enjoyment factor.

OK, they are clearly quite dated (who would call their main character “Johnny Fedora” these days?) but in many ways this is their appeal. Yet, as I will reveal, there is much about the espionage world of the 50s and 60s that still resonates with our current world of the early 21st century. Where these days we see Al-Qaeda and similar extremists as the major threat to our society, in those days it was the German Gestapo and the Communist Russians.

Here, I will focus on Johnny Fedora’s first novel. I read the 1970’s paperback version entitled “The Nazi Assassins”, but it was originally published in the 1950s as “The Secret Ministry”. My first surprise came in realizing that Johnny Fedora predates James Bond, and while there are many parallels between the two (such as being licenced to kill agents who travel the world), Desmond Cory’s Fedora has a flavour all of his own. My second surprise came in realizing that Fedora featured in over 15 novels, outlasting even James Bond to whom all fictional secret agents will inevitably be compared.

I actually read this novel just before Tom Clancy’s “The Teeth of the Tiger” published some 50 years after this novel, and despite the gulf of time between them, the plot is essentially the same. In Tom Clancy’s novel, a secret intelligence agency, called Hendley Associates set ups a professional team (the Caruso twins and Jack Ryan Junior) to assasinate suspicious terrorists. In Desmond Cory’s novel, a secret ministry (hence the book’s title) brings together a “team of seasoned assassins” that includes Fedora to eliminate “Gestapo men… and anybody consider better dead than alive”. So, while this book may be dated, it clearly draws parallels with its modern espionage equivalents.

Johnny Fedora – the character:
Sean (aka Johnny) O’Neill Fedora is first presented to the reader playing the piano “clean-shaven, with a cigarette slumping from his peculiarly mobile lips”. He is described as an unusual young man in his mid twenties with “the eyes of a killer with an incorrigible sense of humour”. Born of a Spanish father and Irish mother, he "got himself mixed up with the IRA on one side and the Spanish civil war on the other". Due to his father’s Republican tendencies, The Falangists killed both his parents. Johnny later immigrated to America where he became a professional pianist in Chicago, and also a gunman. He then left America in one hell of a hurry to France until its occupation by German forces. At this point he came to England and got into the Intelligence group. Later sent to the FBI for 2 years and the Marquis for one, the summation his superiors give of him is that the “only two things that really matter to Fedora.. is killing Nazis and .. playing music. At both of these things he has what amounts to genius”.

On the whole, Fedora is very much the 1960s secret agent, “good-looking” and of the “first-class sort”. Yet as the story develops, we find a maturity not found in many of the 1960s –1970s heroes and secret agents. For him it is not all fast-cars, lovely women, and the elimination of enemy agents. Fedora is a talented pianist, and through music he finds escape from the real and brutal world of the assassin. “Every time he played [the piano] Johnny found himself .. far removed from his existence where he handled a gun with an efficiency that was cold and hard and completely disillusioned”. This disillusionment is something you rarely see in this genre until the post-Bond era (or counter Fleming period) when authors such as Len Deighton and Le Carré showed the darker side of espionage work. In this respect, Cory was arguably ahead of other authors of his time.

The plot:
Fedora is one of several seasoned professionals rounded up by British Intelligence. Fedora’s superiors impress on him the fact that “there are still undiscovered German agents in almost every country, even England. The importance of finding these people and destroying them can not be overestimated”.

He is then sent off to Sussex to be briefed by a colleague (who is a bit like Lord Flashheart of BlackAdder) on suspicious German undercover work in that area. Before he can learn more from him, the colleague is suddenly drugged and bumped off in a automobile accident. At the centre of this story is the Three Diamonds, a nightclub where a number of interesting characters are introduced, including the sultry songstress, Davina. As with the other Fedora novels I read, the plot does not reveal itself until nearly the end, when Fedora has to take on trigger-happy German agents, uncover the real master-mind behind these drug-smuggling operations, and discover if the gorgeous Davina is on the side of the Germans, or against them. In the end, Fedora reveals that the nightclub is partially a front for Germans operating a drugs racket in order to bring chaos to Britain (by drugging pilots etc). Essentially, this is more a detective novel than an espionage thriller.

Verdict:
Given its original publication date of 1951, I found this to be an interesting read. In the post 9/11 world we live in where it is not unfathomable to image covert government agencies eliminating Al-Qaeda extremists, it is interesting to enter a post second-world war world where the situation does not seem to have changed much. In this case, Germany is defeated but a select group of Hitler's henchmen continue to kill. Their hideout is England, and Fedora's assignment is to destroy them. An enjoyable romp into the world of the 1950’s political assassin. This is a “should read” for all fictional espionage aficionados. I count myself amongst the ashamed who did not know that before James Bond came Johnny Fedora.