Something To Remember You By ~ A Perilous Romance is the third novel from actor Gene Wilder. The title does a disservice to the book, as it deals with the French Resistance in the Second World War, and the Nazi concentration camps where they forced Jews and other prisoners to construct gas chambers. There is a serious thriller here disguised as a light romance.
Tom Cole was a medic in the trenches outside Bastogne when the Germans attack and several of his unit die. Recovering in London he meets Anna, a beautiful girl in a cafe and they fall in love. One day she doesn't appear at the usual time, he finds she has completely disappeared. A Danish Jew, she works for the French resistance and has slipped into Copenhagen undercover to teach bomb making. Persistently trying government contacts he finds she has been captured with three other Jewish women and sent to the Natzweiler death camp. A newly minted Intelligence Officer, Tom enacts a plan to enter the camp disguised as a high ranking Nazi and rescue the women. It's audacious and chilling - there are tense scenes of violence and heavy moments when the piles of Jewish women's bodies are being cleaned out of the gas chambers that are in contrast to the nostalgic title. This is not the only time Tom will risk his life, as he decides to go back into the camp again, undercover as a French prisoner to endure tortures in the hope of rescuing others from certain death.
The tone is as light as Casablanca, and Wilder's simplistic style keeps the action moving along, I think to the detriment of the story. I felt it would have benefited with a longer length - there is enough intrigue and subterfuge to be written as an intense spy thriller. Certainly the presentation of a paperback size in a hardcover format, the title, and the cover art all form the opinion it only offers a wartime love affair - if it were presented as the serious novel it is, it would have won more readers. Though the writing is clean and simple, the affair he creates, the danger and tension, the offices of British Intelligence - are all spot on. I started reading before bed at eleven and stayed up reading it right through.
Entertaining and engaging, I recommend it.
2013 / Hardcover / 164 pages
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