I recently saw (again) the film, starring Michael Caine and the late Donald Sutherland, and this awakened in me an interest in reading the original book. There were a couple of pleasant surprises. For one thing, Jack Higgins is a very good story-teller. And for another, with some notable exceptions, this is the same story as the movie tells, but with more depth. Higgins explains at the outset that this book, unlike most other World War II novels published in Britain and the US, casts the Germans as heroes. And this is true — some of its falls into the trap of the myth of the “unblemished Wehrmacht”, casting the SS as the real villains. Apparently the scene where Lt. Col. Kurt Steiner confronts the SS, who are rounding up Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, may have been based on a similar incident that actually happened. But the idea of the “unblemished Wehrmacht” is a myth, as the German army was just as culpable in the Holocaust as the SS.

In a prologue and epilogue to the book, Jack Higgins casts himself as a character, learning the “true” story of the German attempt to kidnap or kill Winston Churchill. This is particularly problematic as the book ends with several pages dealing with what happened next to the main characters in the book. These include both real (Himmler, Canaris) and fictional (Steiner, Liam Devlin), with no attempt to distinguish between the two. It is a fairly long book and the movie felt somewhat tighter, getting rid of unnecessary complications in Higgins’ story-line. But both the book and the film were enjoyable and have held up a half-century after they were written and produced.