Watcher in the Shadows
/As I noted when reviewing Geoffrey Household’s A Rough Shoot back in the early spring, Household knew how to open a thriller. In Watcher in the Shadows, another Cold War-era shocker, he sends a postman to Charles Dennim’s front door on page one and blows him in half on page two. The novel barely slows down from there.
Dennim lives a quiet life in a rural English village. He’s an expert zoologist specializing in squirrels and shares the house—now missing most of its windows—with his widowed aunt. What presumably only he, a friend in British intelligence, and the unknown person who sent him a mailbomb know is that he is actually Charles von Dennim, scion of an aristocratic Austrian family and, during the Second World War, a double agent working undercover as part of the SS staff at Buchenwald concentration camp.
Now, ten years on from the war and in his early forties, Dennim prefers not to think about all this. He carries on his research into small mammals and enjoys his leisurely outdoor pursuits, including hunting and horseback riding with Aunt Georgina, an accomplished riding instructor. The abortive mail bomb gives him pause. Perhaps it was meant for someone else, though none of his neighbors strike him as the likely targets of assassination. But a few days later he receives a postcard—a photo of Buchenwald with a X marked over one building, the officers’ mess.
His past is known to someone, somewhere, albeit not in full. Dennim had successfully fed intelligence to the British during his time at Buchenwald and arranged the escapes of several important female political prisoners. He risked his life and his sanity—the moral damage done not only to his mind but to his sense of honor by the secrecy of his role comes up several times—in order to undermine the Nazis, though the nature of his work means neither he nor the British government can acknowledge it.
Dennim investigates and finds that several other men associated with Buchenwald—two officers and a truck driver—had recently been murdered in mysterious circumstances. One was tortured for days, hinting that the killings are motivated by something highly personal. Dennim, not least because he is not guilty of the crimes his enemy apparently seeks to avenge, determines not to be next.
This leads into the bulk of the novel, a series of removes from place to place in the English countryside as Dennim tries to lure the killer into a trap. Thinking of himself as a goat staked out for a hidden tiger, Dennim learns quickly that his enemy is smart, observant, and supremely cautious. A misstep on his own part might send the assassin into hiding for months, long enough to drive Dennim mad or render him complacent, an easy target. He must proceed carefully if he wants to force a confrontation.
Along the way Dennim finds allies in unlikely places—a retired admiral, a pub landlord, a sharply observant working class laborer—as well as, for the first time in his life as a bachelor spy-cum-zoologist, love. Benita, the admiral’s daughter, is no merely obligatory love interest but proves especially important, as by the time Dennim confronts his enemy one-on-one at a remote Cotswolds barn, he has much more at stake in his life than when the hunt began.
Watcher in the Shadows has many of the hallmarks and strengths of the other Household novels I’ve read so far: strong, lean prose, energetic pacing, continuously building tension and suspense, and beautifully realized outdoor settings. But a number of other factors set it apart and make it unusually rich and thought-provoking.
The first is Dennim’s romance with Benita. Household, as I’ve noted about Buchan before him and Ambler, his close contemporary, is not an author one would normally associate with a romantic subplot, but like both he can evoke newly kindled love simply and poignantly, in ways that both enrich the characters and matter to the plot.
The next is the depth of Dennim’s prior experiences undercover. Without giving too much away, Dennim’s secret is known to more people than himself, his enemy, and his few contacts in British Intelligence, and his postwar history is more complicated than his simple career studying squirrels may at first suggest. Buchenwald and secrecy damaged him, and coming to understand this both reveals hidden depths in other characters and plays an important role in learning how to defeat his enemy.
The last is the enemy himself. Again, I want to avoid spoiling the book, but the man trying to kill Dennim has a surprising connection to Buchenwald and to Dennim—that is, to the von Dennim family, now reduced to a widowed aunt and a bachelor squirrel expert but once a powerful noble dynasty. This connection and the mostly vanished world it evokes leads Dennim and his enemy backward in time, past genocide and the amorality of the nation state to the chivalric code of honor shared by those of noble blood. It is blood, in fact, that helps save Dennim’s life at the end.
Plenty of spy novels acknowledge or ruminate on the damage done by the secrecy, deceit, and pragmatism of espionage, but few offer an alternative, much less an alternative rooted in the past. By the end of Watcher in the Shadows, honor and honesty have given two irreconcilable enemies common ground in which to resolve their differences. Dennim’s duel with the enemy moves from the metaphorical—chess, cat and mouse, tiger and goat—to the literal. Their long fight at the barn is a sustained masterpiece of suspense and, thanks to the contrast between old world honor and modern technocratic nihilism running through the book, a challenging moral contest.
I read Watcher in the Shadows for the thrills and suspense and Household, true to form, didn’t disappoint. But the novel reaches a moral and cultural depth I found surprising—and inspiring. This is as good a thriller as any Buchan, Ambler, or Ian Fleming produced, and is well worth reading.
