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Hour of the Cat

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Great fiction, like all art, echoes and reflects the time in which it is created. This happens whether the author intended it to or not. Great fiction forces readers to look at themselves, and their world, and think.

Case in point was Philip Roth's THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA. This novel asked readers to imagine what would have happened if America went fascist in 1940. What if?

Another example is Peter Quinn's excellent new historical novel, HOUR OF THE CAT.

Quinn, author of BANISHED CHILDREN OF EVE, does not have to ask what if? He deals with the horror of what actually happened in America and Germany in the late 1930s. He writes a powerful story about ordinary, well-meaning people suddenly plunged in an epic battle between "the good, the true" and unthinkable evil. And in this novel, like life itself, the ultimate triumph of good and truth is far from assured.

Quinn effortlessly weaves a tale of suspense that alternates between New York City and Berlin from 1936 to 1938. HOUR OF THE CAT starts routinely enough as a hard-boiled private eye story. Ex-New York City cop Fintan Dunne is hired to save the life of a man on death row convicted of a murder he did not commit. Meanwhile in Berlin, real historical figure Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and other German military officers are trying to figure out how to stop Hitler and his henchmen before they plunge the world into the abyss.

Quinn captures perfectly the sense of dread from that period. Dunne, Canaris and another real historical figure, Colonel William Donovan --- former commander of New York's famous Irish brigade, the Fighting 69th --- have all survived the horrors of the Great War. They are haunted by the dead slaughtered in places with names like Ourcq and Somme but confident that it can't happen again. Reasonable men will stop it.

But not only will it happen again --- this time it will be far different and worse. This is the dread that grows with the novel. The Nazis are not only interested in old-fashioned geographic conquest, but in the pseudo science of eugenics: the belief that "life unworthy of life" should be controlled and eliminated.

Quinn reminds us that the eugenics movement was not just limited to the Reichchancellary, but had its advocates in America, where forced sterilization of those considered physically or mentally challenged was the policy in many states. The Nazis took it further, using it as an excuse to murder an entire race.

Twice in this book, we hear the words of Reinhard Heydrich, number two monster in Hitler's SS: "facts are paltry things in the face of destiny." And while the madness of eugenics has been consigned to the trash heap of history, the ability of governments to ignore facts still has deadly consequences. Witness the recent Downing Street memo that said "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" to justify war in Iraq.

Great fiction echoes.

Quinn manages to skillfully draw you deep into the story and keep you guessing at every turn. Pretty soon, PI Dunne is battling police corruption, falling in love with a hooker and searching for a Nazi SS agent on the streets of New York. Eventually, both sides of the Atlantic meet in a violent clash.

Dunne is a perfect noir creation: alone, alienated, down on his luck, a drinker but not drunk with iron clad integrity and a willingness to stand up for the underdog. At one point, he quotes his father, "There are only three types of men in the world. Bullies, their stooges, and them who refuse to be either." Dunne is clearly the latter and would be right at home sitting at a bar with Raymond Chandler's classic noir PI, Philip Marlowe.

As he did with his previous novel, Quinn again proves that he is a great novelist with the eye of a historian. This is a book jammed packed with historical details. Quinn takes us on a walk through the Hoover flats --- the shanty city of the homeless and victims of the Great Depression --- that existed on 12th Avenue by the Hudson River. We witness an ugly German-American Bund rally in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, much like the ones my father described seeing when he was a boy and lived a few blocks away.

And throughout the book, Quinn writes with economy and compassion about common people struggling to survive and do the right thing in life.

Dunne sees a lady sleeping on a subway train heading to the Bronx and thinks, "Sweet Dreams, lady: a momentary respite from a lifetime of pennies put away to no effect, gobbled up by the machinery of history, by high-sounding theories that couldn't erase the ordinary miseries of lost jobs, savings, aspirations, an unemployed husband who sat around the house for years until one day he put on his hat and coat, went out the door, and never came back. Sleep was the cheapest escape of all, as long as your dreams took you to a better place."

HOUR OF THE CAT is a brilliant book. Read it. It will haunt you. Its characters will stay with you long after the final page. Most importantly, it will make you think and perhaps ponder the words of H.G. Wells: "history becomes a race between education and catastrophe."

--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan

Partly social history, partly a novel of ideas, and partly a story that moves with incredible speed and power, Peter Quinn's "Hour of the Cat" is the ultimate thriller for people who think. Set in the late 1930s, as eugenics, fascism and the thunderclouds of impending war darken the landscape, "Hour of the Cat" seems at first like a simple tale of an unsolved murder, but it soon evolves into an epic about the world gone mad. "Hour of the Cat" sweeps back and forth from New York to Berlin and from historical fact to brilliantly realized fiction. Quinn's story combines real-world figures like German Gen. Wilhelm Canaris (who tried to overthrow Hitler in an early coup) with unforgettable fictitious characters like Fintan Dunne, an Irish cop with a million chips on his shoulder. Elegant, complex and bloody, "Hour of the Cat" plunks readers right into the midst of the terrifying and exhilarating period just before the outbreak of World War II. But this is no sterile book about abstract ideas; it's a richly interconnected saga about human beings full of love and anger, hate and hope. It brings all the extremes of human nature to life. I loved this book, and you will too.

Like Chinatown, Peter Quinn's Hour of the Cat employs the traditional hard-boiled detective story for a memorably dark vision of the past: in this case, how America's eugenics movement influenced the Nazis' euthanasia program.

The haunted background of Quinn's hero, Fintan Dunne, is carefully limned: orphan, soldier on the killing fields of France in WWI, and policeman forced out of the NYPD for refusing to compromise his principles. While inspired by Raymond Chandler, the dialogue of this Gotham gumshoe is the type of brash street patois one would expect from someone forced to rely on his wits. Moreover, Quinn's plot develops logically out of character and circumstance. (The hurricane that climaxes the novel is fact -- and an apropos metaphor for what Winston Churchill called "the gathering storm" of the Nazi menace.)

While Dunne battles the clock to save an innocent man from execution, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of military intelligence in Nazi Germany, struggles to balance his duty as a soldier against his realization that Hitler is about to plunge Germany into a ruinous war. Along the way, Quinn throws a spotlight not just on Nazism's racial theories but on relatively obscure corners of American history: legislation in more than 30 states permitting forced sterilization of those deemed "mentally unfit"; a pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic organization called the German-American Bund; and, in the (fictitious) person of chief of homicide Robert Brannigan, a corrupt metropolitan police force all too willing to use brutality against minorities.

Informing and entertaining, this thriller transcends the detective and historical fiction genres with spot-on description, biting dialogue, and issues with all-too-contemporary relevance: How society treats its most vulnerable citizens, and who gets to determine what constitutes, as the Nazis put it, "life unworthy of life." After reading it twice, I only wish it were longer.

This is an engaging novel on many levels.
First, it is a superior thriller. The only problem is that as you try to cast the film noir version, you keep coming up with the old stars: Pat O'Brien, Gary Cooper, etc. not the recent crop of pretty faces without talent.

Second, it is a wonderful historical snapshot of New York in the thirties, in particular Irish New York. There is a two page rendition of a priest making his rounds which is the best depiction of a clergyman since James Gould Cozzens' Men and Brethren. It is the sort of book in which you wish for an author's note telling you what is real and what is fiction.

Third, it is the story of two very different men coming to grips with evil. The theme here is Edmund Burke's "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." The author is very fair to good men who do nothing: there are plenty of valid excuses to turn a blind eye, but of course, ultimately such excuses are a moral failure.

Finally, it is the story of the eugenics movement and how it influenced Hitler. The author could have mentioned that Planned Parenthood was a leader in this regard, with its newsletter publishing articles by Nazi scientists during the '30s. I think that the author was correct in leaving this out, however, because that would only allow modern political issues to intrude on historical crimes. You can consider eugenics purely as a moral issue. And that makes for a very effective book.

The old adage: "rub two coins together and you get three" comes to mind when considering HOUR OF THE CAT, where fact meets fiction in a world that would not otherwise be seen. It's magic.

Two cities: New York and Berlin; Two Accidental Heroes: a New York private detective and Admiral Canaris of the Third Reich; one world on the verge of its second war. The parallel experiences of two very different characters-one fact in fiction, one fiction in fiction--in two very different circumstances proves to be an exhilarating form for Peter Quinn's tale.

As in the author's Banished Children of Eve, Quinn's use of real people as characters adds color, familiarity and surprises in an already vibrant world. Fintan Dunne, our stateside underdog, is a private investigator with dumb-luck. This veteran-gone-divorce-detective resists taking on the murder case that comes knocking at his door. But the case has nice legs that hook Dunne in the best of noir fashion and we're off on an exhilarating and seductive race for the truth in a city in the prime of its adolescence.

Across the ocean, and in alternating chapters, Quinn offers a unique experience with Canaris, Hitler's reluctant nemesis. His physical ailments and bowel issues are like the ulcer brewing within Germany. Canaris is between a rock and a hard place when it comes to following the Führer's orders and the pressures of the SS conspiracy to foil Hitler's plans for world domination and ethnic cleansing. There's no end in sight to the confusion and deceit and no escaping the impending chaos. It comes down to playing the survival game, a game of cats and a very big nasty rat, in an extravagant and volatile capital city.

More like his Dunne than Canaris, the author doesn't flinch when it comes to one of his main themes: eugenics. Not even the Americans are as innocent as they pretend. And Quinn tackles the issues of inaction and ignorance in his realistic description of the era, and coolly reports on this story which ends at the dawn of World War II. Like the greatest of storytellers, Quinn reflects life, impressions, cause and effect, cat and rat (or rat and cat) and does so without pretense, but with an expert wit, and sincere wonder and humility at the world he's spinning.

Hats off and thanks to Peter Quinn for bringing this brilliant tale into the world. Can't wait to see what comes out the next time he rubs those two coins together.

If I had a fraction of Peter Quinn's talent, I wouldn't have to waste time at a salaried job. I really hope this first-rate period thriller gets the attention it deserves. A murder mystery that ties up every loose end, the action alternates between New York and Berlin in 1938, and the characters include both fictional ordinary people and real-life politicians and heads of state. I haven't seen such wonderfully meticulous attention to detail in creating the time and place since I read Herman Wouk's The Winds of War (coincidentally having just come back from Berlin) in 1973. The author gets everything right, the language, the atmosphere, the cars, the clothes, the attitudes. It's like a trip in time. One really good example is what summers in New York were like before most buildings were air-conditioned. He even brings in the Hurricane of 1938, which struck Long Island and New England, quoting from RA Scotti's book Sudden Sea, which I read a few months ago. The theme of the book is the pseudo-science of eugenics. central not only to the Nazis' objectives, but also big in the U.S. Anyone interested in this topic may also want to check out Jodi Picoult's Second Glance. I would say don't miss Hour of the Cat.

I thoroughly enjoyed Quinn's first novel "Banished Children of Eve" and couldn't wait for his next. The wait was worth it!. "Hour of the Cat" kept me intriged as to how he would pull it all together. It was most interesting to see how he pulled all the seemingly disparate characters together. History fans will love the great insights regarding fate and momentum of events that are scattered throughout the story.
I learned alot and enjoyed the story.
I too (as an earlier reviewer mentioned) couldn't help thinking about who would star in this if it were made into a movie. Ian Anderson would be played by Sean Connery.

Peter Quinn's Hour of the Cat is a thriller, a mystery, and a history book all rolled into one incredible doozer of a book. The protagonist Fintan Dunne is a 1940s ex-cop and private dick whose investigation of a possible frame-up leads him (and the reader) into the eye of the fire-storm that is Nazi Germany on the eve of World War II. I recommend this book to people who like thrillers and mysteries to be thought provoking and challenging. Hour of the Cat is flat-out one of the best books I have read in a dog's age.

I liked this book very much. There were several different stories going and they all came together at the end. The history of this period was fascinating and I cared for people in the story. This book is much better than some of the books that were on the bestseller lists for the past spring and fall.

A novel set largely in New York in the years leading up to WW2 is both mystery and history and delivers on both. Providing the link throughout is eugenics, sterilization and euthanasia. Quinn merges the fictitious with the factual and includes the real Admiral Canaris, Reinhard Heydrich, and Wild Bill Donovan. The individual plot lines take time to merge and reach a conclusion but along the way the reader is treated to excellent histories of WW1, the inter-war years and a solid portrait of New York in the late 1930's. What struck me is the angst and anguish demonstrated by the characters who witnessed first hand the horrors of the WW1 as they sense the inevitability and futility of another world war. I am looking forward to reading Quinn's latest, The Man Who Never Returned.