The Long Midnight - Alan White

Judging by the back cover, Alan White was fond of the word "long" when it came to titles. The Long Watch. The Long Night's Walk. The Long Drop. And here we have The Long Midnight.

It's set in World War 2, and involves two men - Lt. Colonel Gillespie, and his batman, Sgt. Milner* - making their way to Norway. They are to meet with a partisan group there, one which has had rather a string of bad luck on their missions. The suspected cause is a quisling, a traitor. Gillespie is to find the traitor and remove him, though he's the only one who knows this. As far as Milner knows, and later the partisans, they are there to eliminate some Gestapo higher-ups, and destroy an important titanium mine the Germans are running with Lithuanian slave labor. The British might be planning another invasion, the mine is near a prime location, and they'd prefer there not be many Nazis there.

Also, the workers were members of Lithuania's government before the war, so if they could be saved to help reestablish it after the war, that'd be swell.

It's a short book, not even 180 pages, so White keeps things moving. There are a few flashbacks for Gillespie, to flesh him out a bit, though they don't really work that way. Mostly they serve to bring up peculiar aspects of his personality that don't really manifest again. I can't quite peg his attitude towards women, based on how he speaks about his wife (who was, as he put it, the 'regimental bicycle**'), compared to his discussion in the first third of the book with Aud, a member of the partisans. I suppose White felt the need to explain Gillespie's bitterness at the thought of his wife collecting his pension, though it's not shown whether she had truly fallen for him, or merely seen him as an opportunity, as he apparently believes. The account's a little one-sided.

Those curious interludes aside, White throws one thing after another into the plot. There's always another step to be taken in the mission, another tense conversation, or moment when Gillespie seems to have made a mistake. It works. I know that whatever the immediate problem, there'll be some resolution soon, so I might as well keep reading. No need to set it aside for another day.

It's a quick, tense read, even with the somewhat unnecessary flashbacks (although the one about why he was selected for this mission was amusing). White was a commando himself in WWII, so I imagine there's a certain amount of accuracy in the story, in some of the practical aspects, the trial-and-error, the strain double agents were under (Klaus might have been my favorite character).

I'm guessing it was White's time as a commando that informs the incredible downer that is the final page of the story. Basically every significant positive one could take from the mission is sent down the crapper. it's really remarkable how efficiently he does it. White could be making a point about how frequently the work he and others did came to nothing, or he's disputing the notion one man can alter the course of the war by a single action. I'd be silly to think Gillespie made some outsize impact by what he did, basically. I don't know.

I do know I sat there dumbfounded, staring at the ending after I finished. A day later, I want to laugh at the sheer, audacity, curmudgeonly, approach to it.

* Which makes me think of Foyle's War, though the Milner there was a sergeant in the police force, not the military that I recall.

** If not for the comments section of one of Dave's Long Box's Suicide Squad posts, I wouldn't have any idea what that meant.