Title: The 21 Escapes of Lt Alastair Cram
Author: David M Guss
Publisher: Macmillan
Pp: 432 including index
Price: £18.99
When I took my review copy of this book out of the padded envelope my first thought was that looked great. It looked like a real book from a real publisher (no matter how hard non-traditional publishers try, they just do convince the naked eye in the way that the older houses do).
I asked for a copy as I had read a couple of reviews in the weekend press of three or four weeks ago and very much liked the sound of it from those reviews. I was hesitant to start reading for a couple of reasons. One, I was very busy with real work, the kind that pays the bills. Two, I wondered if it might fail to live up to expectations.
Having finally read the author's Preface, I felt I could relax, not least because the author cited The Wooden Horse (the first WWII escape book I read as a child in the late 1960s) and Pat Reid's The Colditz Story (my second). The author then mentioned two other books and authors in the genre that I had never even heard of on the same topic.
George Millar's Horned Pigeon and Jack Pringle's Colditz Last Stop sound intriguing, and are available via Amazon, but at elevated prices that I would find difficult to justify in current economic conditions.
We're off to a good start, I thought, and plunged into the opening chapter, which features Operation Crusader (the British Eighth Army's plan for relieving the garrison at Tobruk), devastating losses, the capture of Lt Cram by a frightened young German soldier, his handover to Italian troops, their attempt to convey him and more than 300 prisoners out of Libya by sea, his escape, his being mistaken for a young Italian woman and pursued by an ardent would-be lover, his escape by climbing up the side of a rocky gorge, close encounters with several helpful Sicilians, their philosophical musings on the nature and purpose of war, theories about sexual repression among Nordic women and the origin of war and his recapture. All between pages nine and 26.
Unusually for a book written by a modern American writer, it is accessible and cracks along at a lively pace.I am hugely looking forward to reading the rest.