Mr. Churchill’s Secretary: A Novel by MacNeal
The novel starts out with a bang. We hear that the lady is tidying up her desk right before she dies. That immediately creates suspense. You wonder how she dies and why. She seems to be fine right now. There’s disbelief at what seems an impossibility and you read what follows about her making her way through war-torn London in May of 1940 with a suspension of disbelief. But instead of getting killed by a bombing (which wasn’t historical in May of 1940) she gets killed when she enters through a door and a German spy stabs her. I think this preface is a trick or a hook just to grab your attention and a rather gross trick at that. Naturally after that we get introduced to the real sleuth, Churchill’s secretary, and the main part of the action begins. In the nineteenth century when suspense and mystery novels began with practitioners such as Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Haggard no one ever thought you had to grab the reader’s attention with such a “slash and stab” device.
The novel starts out with a bang. We hear that the lady is tidying up her desk right before she dies. That immediately creates suspense. You wonder how she dies and why. She seems to be fine right now. There’s disbelief at what seems an impossibility and you read what follows about her making her way through war-torn London in May of 1940 with a suspension of disbelief. But instead of getting killed by a bombing (which wasn’t historical in May of 1940) she gets killed when she enters through a door and a German spy stabs her. I think this preface is a trick or a hook just to grab your attention and a rather gross trick at that. Naturally after that we get introduced to the real sleuth, Churchill’s secretary, and the main part of the action begins. In the nineteenth century when suspense and mystery novels began with practitioners such as Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Haggard no one ever thought you had to grab the reader’s attention with such a “slash and stab” device.