Apparently British author Mark Mills’s third novel, The Information Officer (Random House) is something of a departure from his bestselling suspense thrillers, Amagansett and The Savage Garden, else I might have made his and their acquaintance sooner.

And the credibility of those who blurb(ed) his new title didn’t hurt either. Novelist William Boyd (Ordinary Thunderstorms) exclaims: “A forgotten corner of World War II rediscovered and expertly revealed to us. Fascinating and shrewdly compelling.” George Pelecanos (The Way Home, The Wire, and the eagerly awaited Treme) praises: “A lush, romantic thriller, skillfully crafted by master stylist Mark Mills.”

So, that’s how I came to open Mills’s new tome. What kept me turning the pages were a series of small, brilliant turns and at least one major feature—that being the masterful pacing of this story, set on the besieged British-controlled Mediterranean island of Malta (“little lump of rock in the middle of the Med”) in 1942 as the Axis is bombing this small way station to smithereens. Malta was the most bombed piece of real estate in the European theater and hasn’t been on literary center stage since Thomas Pynchon’s hilarious early novel, V.

After some foreshadowing preliminaries, the main action begins at one of those well-known devices, the British Imperial cocktail party—this one held at the villa occupied by the garrison’s commander and nicely balanced by flirtation and affairs hinted at and wartime conversations of various R.A.F., submariners, an American liaison officer, a British military doctor, and Max Chadwick, the information officer of this book’s title. It is Chadwick’s misnamed duty to shape the news on Malta to buoy the morale of both military personnel as well as the civilian population.

Chadwick soon learns that someone, probably a British naval officer, is sexually assaulting and murdering Maltese prostitutes (referred to as “sherry queens” in the contemporaneous vernacular). As he is charged with securing the tenuous Maltese loyalty to the war effort, Chadwick investigates the murder(s).

The Information Officer is nothing if not a great piece of entertaining writing—both an homage and lampoon of the compelling and atmospheric novels of Graham Greene and Eric Ambler (a banner also taken up by Alan Furst), vividly rendered and breathlessly ended. —Robert Birnbaum, Feb. 19, 2010

The outpouring of concern and aid for the victims of benighted Haiti’s most recent disaster is, I suppose, some measure of comfort for the victims who inhabit one of the poorest geographies on this planet.

And it’s better than the rabid utterances of that heinous Christian clergyman Pat Robertson, who proclaimed that Haiti is paying for an ancient pact made with the devil. But if disaster history shows anything it is that tragedy strikes, people respond and return to their comfortable lives, and the afflicted carry on.

Haiti has a long history of suffering, not the least that was inflicted by its U.S.-supported dictator, self-appointed President for Life Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his heir, Jean-Claude Baby Doc—a dynasty that was finally deposed in 1986. The end of the Duvaliers did not mean the end of miseries for the Haitian people; the AIDS epidemic and further U.S. interference in Haiti’s politics added instability to an already fragile society. If your concerns and/or curiosity persist beyond this current catastrophe, here is my mildly annotated basic bibliography on Haiti:

All Souls’ Rising; Master of the Crossroads; The Stone that The Builder Refused (Haitian Revolutionary trilogy)
Martin Smartt Bell’s astute and sympathetic portrait of rebellion leader Toussaint L’ouverture.

Breath, Eyes, Memory; Krik? Krak!; The Farming of Bones
Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat is a talented and compassionate storyteller, and her recent novel-in-stories The Dew Breaker, and award-winning memoir Brother, I’m Dying, articulate both obvious and subtle aspects of Haitian culture.

The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist’s Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo; Passage of Darkness: The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombie
Ethnobotanist and anthropologist Wade Davis focused on some of the more exotic elements of Haitian life.

Haiti: Best Nightmare on Earth
A memoir of Haiti by perennial visitor Herbert Gold. “In fact,” he tells us, “Haiti was not bad to me, Haiti was mostly bad to Haitians.”

The Comedians
Graham Greene’s 1966 novel set in Haiti under the rule of Papa Doc and his dreaded secret police, the Tonton Macoute.

Mountains Beyond Mountains
Tracy Kidder’s story traces the life of physician, anthropologist, and Partners in Health founder Paul Farmer, who set up a medical clinic in Haiti.

The Immaculate Invasion
Writer Bob Shaccocis’s account of the 1994 U.S. invasion/intervention in support of the restoration of democracy in the person of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Photograph of Edwidge Danticat by the author —Robert Birnbaum, Jan. 14, 2010

Last year, when word went out that Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio were once again sharing the silver screen in a film based on Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, I was pushed along a path of once again coupling films made from important or at least imposing novels. Yates, by the way, was a hero to a generation of young American writers (having mentored at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and other places) and Revolutionary Road is a novel that has a kind of exponential word-of-mouth that has kept Yates’s work in circulation and finally garnered him one of the accolades he pursued during his life: having a story published in The New Yorker.

At any rate, American classics have faired reasonably well in film: Grapes of Wrath and Moby-Dick (the Ray Bradbury/John Huston version), for example. The Last of the Mohicans and The Scarlet Letter—both with Daniel Day-Lewis—are equal to their textual origins. Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye was wonderfully realized by Robert Altman with Elliot Gould. Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon had Bogart, Sidney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre. Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was wonderfully represented by Robert Mulligan with Gregory Peck (and Robert Duvall as Boo Radley).

Here are some more noteworthy film/novel couples:

• Our Man in Havana (auth. Graham Greene, dir. Sir Carol Reed): Alec Guinness is perfectly cast in the revolutionary rat’s nest of Batista’s Havana; Ernie Kovacs has a cameo.
• The Tailor From Panama (auth. John le Carré, dir. John Moorman): Spoof of Greene’s Our Man in Havana; Geoffrey Rush and Pierce Brosnan give the story some ballast.
• The Conformist (auth. Alberto Moravia, dir. Bernardo Bertolucci): A poignant, soul-searching story with Jean-Louis Trintignant playing the subtle title role with precision.
• Man on Fire (auth. A.J. Quinnell, dir. Tony Scott): Denzel Washington is the man, Christopher Walken lends a fine hand, and Mexico City is photogenic on many levels. Rachel Ticotin (seen all too rarely) and Giancarlo Giannini provide some nice support in minor roles.
• 92 in the Shade (auth./dir. Thomas McGuane): This movie was fun in 1975, which is the first and last time I saw it. Does it hold up as well as McGuane’s writing? Someone let me know.
• Out of Sight (auth. Elmore Leonard, dir. Stephen Soderberg): Does justice to Leonard’s finely tuned humor. The cast—George Clooney. Jennifer Lopez, Ving Rhames, Albert Brooks, Don Cheadle, and Dennis Farina—are pitch-perfect.
• Catch-22 (auth. Joseph Heller, dir. Mike Nichols): My first contemporaneous viewing left me underwhelmed but subsequent auditions have raised the valence of this film with its all-star cast of Orson Welles, Alan Arkin, Jon Voigt, Richard Benjamin, Charles Grodin, and Art Garfunkel.
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being (auth. Milan Kundera, dir. Phillip Kaufman): Juliet Binoche, Lena Olin, and Daniel Day-Lewis try to live in Soviet-violated Czechoslovakia. It’s a pathetic existence but all too real.
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (auth. Ken Kesey, dir. Milos Forman): Kesey’s novel was perfect anti-authoritarian elixir. And what’s to be said about Jack Nicholson? Will Sampson does a nice turn as the big, quiet Chief Bromden.
• Before Night Falls (auth. Reinaldo Arenas, dir. Julian Schnabel): Everything about this film of Cuban writer Arenas’s memoir is perfect—casting, montage, music, lighting—I mean perfect. Javier Bardem is amazing: His credence as a gay poet in revolutionary Cuba is off any scale of measurement. Perfect.
• No Country for Old Men (auth. Cormac McCarthy, dir. Joel and Ethan Coen): An outstanding drama with Tommy Lee Jones and Javier Badem. No doubt you’ve heard of it.
• The Constant Gardener (auth. John le Carré, dir. Fernando Meirelles): Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz stumble into sleazy, globalized, racist exploitation just the way le Carré wrote it, sans any preachiness.
• The English Patient (auth. Michael Ondaatje, dir. Anthony Minghella): Pretty decent movie especially since it was considered almost impossible to cinematize the narrative of Ondaatje’s novel. Of course that impossibility resides in the premise that adapting must be parroting.
• The Quiet American (auth. Graham Greene, dir. Phillip Noyce): Michael Caine delivers one of his typically delicately nuanced performances as an ageing, circa 1954 British foreign correspondent in Saigon who doesn’t want to leave and whose love for his Vietnamese mistress is a skillfully dramatized dilemma—especially as a young Ivy League consultant played by Brendan Fraser complicates both the personal and the political.
• Spider (auth. Patrick McGrath, dir. David Cronenberg): This is a hinky, awkward story about a schizophrenic man who as a youth saw his father murder his mother. How could it not be off-center?
• In The Cut (auth. Susanna Moore, dir. Jane Campion): Moore’s novel about Manhattan homicide detectives bristled with primordial urgency. Meg Ryan woke up for this role and didn’t try to make it cute.
• The Razor’s Edge (auth. Somerset Maugham, dir. John Byrum): Rich people in Chicagoland (Lake Forest, Ill.) enter the Great War. Lives are lost. Lives change. Bill Murray plays a disillusioned American in search of himself—in Paris, India, and Nepal. This is a pretty good film with a wonderfully savvy performance by Murray.
• The 25th Hour (auth. David Benioff, dir. Spike Lee): Ed Norton and a dog dominate this Manhattan story. Brian Cox does an artful turn as a suffering father.

And yet, no one has yet done a film based on a George Pelecanos book. Why? —Robert Birnbaum, Aug. 13, 2008