Tea at Trianon: Too Bad to Die

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Too Bad to Die

Francine Mathews’ thriller Too Bad to Die features none other than Ian Fleming, author of the James Bond novels, as the hero who must save the lives of the “Big Three” from an assassination attempt during World War II.

President Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Premier Joseph Stalin are meeting in Cairo and Tehran with their various entourages, to plan an invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe. As they debate the various aspects of the proposed invasion, Roosevelt struggles with ill health. Churchill, in the meantime, is growing in distrust of Stalin while fighting bronchitis. Stalin, of course, is looking beyond the war to expanding the Soviet empire. After M16 agent Fleming is informed by code breaker Alan Turing that a double agent known only as “the Fencer” is in their midst, plotting to kill the three leaders, he finds that he is also a target.

Thus begins an adventure as harrowing as anything that might happen to Fleming’s protagonist James Bond. Writing with elegance and grit, Mathews keeps the reader in a state of suspense, venturing into the world of high diplomacy as well as into the sewers of the underworld. Both worlds are places where deals are made, sometimes at the price of a soul or two. Mathews explores the psyches of her characters during the tense days and cocktail-drenched nights in Tehran. Fleming’s brains and intrepidity, his inner conflicts as well as his suave recklessness, make him a character as intriguing as one in his own books.

This review was originally published in the May 2015 edition of the Historical Novels Review.

(*The book was sent to me by the Historical Novel Society in exchange for my honest opinion.)