Nicholas Blake's The Smiler With the Knife

Ubi es nunc, amice?

In Urbis castra hominis.

Conversation between Alison Grove and Georgia Strangeways in Nicholas Blake's The Smiler With the Knife, Harper and Row, 1939.

I read The Smiler With the Knife as part of my celebration of Orson Welles's 100th birthday.  The Nicholas Blake novel was one of the books, along with Heart of Darkness, that Welles had planned to make as a movie before Citizen Kane but could not get approved by RKO.  One can see what attracted Welles to this story, about a possible Fascist takeover of England, Welles sharing the socialist sympathies of poet Cecil Day-Lewis, who wrote the book under his nom de plume.  Most of Blake's "mysteries" deal with amateur sleuth Nigel Strangeways, but all the sleuthing in this book is done by Georgia, his wife, who infiltrates a secret Fascist organization at considerable risk to her own life.  "I'm asking you to do it for England," says Sir John Strangeways, her husband's uncle.

The book is full of detail about English life, both in the country and in London, and there are bombs and shooting and dangerous chases.  At one point Georgia disguises herself as a Santa Claus and is discovered because she kept her high heels on, just as a fake nun was discovered for the same reason in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes,1939 (Blake's book would have made a good Hitchcock film if he hadn't already made the rather similar The Thirty-Nine Steps, 1935,from a John Buchan novel).  There was significant sympathy for Germany and Italy in 1939 in England; the idea of a Fascist coup was not as far-fetched at that point as it may seem now and Blake does an effective job of demonstrating the reasons for that sympathy.  And Blake is not afraid to use words such as "phlegmatically" and "pusillanimity" when they are necessary and appropriate, though I am not so sure that some of the Fascists may not have been familiar with Latin.  Welles would have been an excellent Chilton Caneloe, the secret Fascist leader,  and perhaps Joan Fontaine as Georgia.

note:  in the Latin conversation above (not translated in the novel; I think Blake assumed his audience would understand it) Alison asks Georgia, who is on the run, where she is and Georgia replies she is in the town of the fort of man, hoping that will convey the idea of Manchester, originally a Roman fort.