Author’s literary influences shine through in ‘The Rumor Game’
Some readers of this column will recall that my favorite series of crime novels are those the late Philip Kerr wrote featuring Bernie Gunther. They were set during various periods between the 1920s and 1950s. Bernie was a cop in Berlin as Hitler was coming to power. He really hated the Nazis.
The Gunther books are dark and drenched in moral ambiguity. Many of them were set during the Second World War.
As I was reading “The Rumor Game,” the latest historical crime novel by Thomas Mullen, I kept getting flashes of Bernie Gunther. The book is set in Boston during WWII. One of the main characters is an FBI agent named Devon Mulvey.
Mulvey is a Catholic, which was unusual. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover apparently didn’t let Catholics become FBI agents until this period. The fictional Mulvey was one of the first ones. This reminded me of Adrian Mvkinty’s superb series featuring Sean Duffy, a fictional Catholic cop in Northern Ireland during the period known as The Troubles and one of the few Catholics in the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
Our other protagonist in “The Rumor Game” is a newspaper reporter named Anne Lemire. She grew up in the same Boston neighborhood as Agent Mulvey. Lemire wants to be an investigative journalist but is restrained by her bosses because of her gender.
Lemire writes a column about wartime rumors in Boston. She examines often hysterical war-related rumors and tries to debunk them. As she is scouting out stories she
happens upon a troubling situation: Some unknown parties are distributing antisemitic materials.
Bear in mind that at this point, June 1943, the United States was fighting the Japanese in the Pacific but we had not yet sent troops into Europe. There were isolationists here who did not want us to ever fight the Nazis.
We know that before long Mulvey will cross paths with Lemire; that’s the way these novels work. Mulvey has been seducing lovely, lonely women. Bernie Gunther did the same things in Kerr’s series. By 1943, Mulvey didn’t have very much competition, as most young men were off serving their country.
Early on in “The Rumor Game,” there’s a funny scene in which Mulvey wakes up in a woman’s
bed and as he tries to sneak away he discovers he cannot find his pants. Eventually, reporter and FBI agent cross paths and there are romantic sparks. But there’s no time for that because there are American Nazis to apprehend and corrupt cops standing in their way.
I spoke to Mullen recently and asked him to name some of his favorite authors. First he mentioned Philip Kerr, then Adrian Mckinty. The man has excellent taste. “The Rumor Game” is one heck of an engaging read.