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

If you have read novelist John Crowley’s fiction (Endless Things and Little, Big), his new opus may come as something of a surprise—as his penchant is for what some refer to as slipstream or interstitial fiction.

Four Freedoms (William Morrow) is set in the early years of World War II (the worn-out phrase “back in the day” may actually apply here) and revolves around a sprawling aircraft bomber plant—the B-30 Pax (the largest bomber ever built)—and the community in the middle of Oklahoma that was created to support it. All manner of oddballs, drawn by a multitude of reasons and circumstances, end up at the Van Damme factory. Prosper Olander, the novel’s disabled and protean protagonist, serves as the touchstone for Vi, Connie, and Dianne, women who have embarked on liberating and evolving paths that will radically alter America’s social fabric. Crowley creates a quasi-utopian industrial organism with midgets, cripples, misfits, and women taking up the slack as American men ship off to a war. As the novel winds down, Pancho (is the name too obviously a literary reference?), Prosper’s roommate and a malcontent of the progressive stripe, considers attending the United Nations conference held in San Francisco to reaffirm the Four Freedoms that President Roosevelt enunciated on January 6, 1941: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Crowley’s presentation of mid-century America is well and plausibly rendered (down to the price of condoms in 1944), though none more evocative than the mention of Sammy Cahn and Julie Styne’s “It’s Been a Long, Long Time.” It’s a pitch-perfect reference point for yet another transformational shift in America. Listen to June Christie croon and see if you don’t agree.

The Van Damme brothers’ attempt to socially engineer a cohesive industrial community at what was called Henryville brings to mind Henry Ford’s ill-fated Fordlandia—his vision of recreating a Midwestern factory town in the Amazonian jungle. New York University mentor Greg Grandin ably assembles the details of Ford’s grandiose failure in Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books). In 1927, Ford’s initial motive was to manufacture rubber for his automobiles on a plot of purchased land (which happened to be the size of Delaware)—but the plan apparently devolved into something more ambitious and impossible, and not one drop of rubber was ever produced that was used by Ford. Historian Susan Hecht properly credits Grandin as an author who “places the Ford story [within a] much broader social history of Amazonia, and rather than a saga of some novelty or the vanity of the rich, makes the resistance and the failure part of a larger Amazonian history rather than just the exotic ambitions of a man with too much money.” —Robert Birnbaum, Jul. 23, 2009

English writer Philip Kerr, who has authored 19 novels (including some children’s books) and found himself on Granta’s second “Best of Young British Novelists” list in 1993 (along with Louis de Bernières, A.L. Kennedy, Will Self, and Kazuo Ishiguro), may be most well known for what has became known as the Berlin Noir trilogy, the initial volume of which (March Violets) was published 20 years ago. The setting is pre-Second World War Germany; the center of the drama is hardboiled detective Bernie Gunther. Kerr reprised Gunther in 2006’s The One From the Other; in A Quiet Flame (Putnam) we are treated to yet another episode—this one set in post-war Buenos Aires, 1950.

Having served in the SS, Gunther (though not a Nazi) has found it expedient to immigrate to the Nazi-friendly shores of Argentina (can you guess who his fellow émigrés are?), where he is quickly shanghaied into investigating the gruesome murders of two young girls. The trail leads him to encounters with Juan Perón, Evita, a cluster of war criminals, and the indigenous state security apparatus (neo-Nazis), who introduced the quaint policy of disappearing its victims from airplanes 5,000 feet over the Río de la Plata. Long before the Dirty Little War, Bernie discovers a dirty big secret that brings him perilously close to his own parachute-less flight over the Plata. Kerr knows his stuff (made clear in his flight of historical fancy, Hitler’s Peace), though my favorite of his stories still remains A Philosophical Investigation, set in a not-too-future dystopic England with a serial murderer who lures contemporary philosophers into his mad killing spree. —Robert Birnbaum, May. 27, 2009