The Information Officer: A Novel [Audio CD]

 

 

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In this cinematic war-time novel Mills combines the elements of espionage with a love story in a setting that is evocative as it is beautiful. Central to the Information Officer's machinations is the young and handsome Major Max Chadwick, assigned to the Mediterranean island of Malta as the axis powers perpetually strafe the island, intent to wipe out every aspect of the Allied presence. Working in the Information Office and disseminating information to the locals to embolden their resolve, Max offers up for public consumption a cocktail of cold, factual and apparently unbiased news. Along with the monitoring of enemy radio stations in the Mediterranean, this the kind of work best done in the shadows of government. But Max's position and his very existence on the island is threatened when a serial killer is found to be murdering "sherry queens" dance hostesses who work the bars and bawdy music halls that infested the lower ends of Valetta, a disreputable quarter dubbed the Gut.

Max is even more disturbed when he's Called the mortuary, the body of a woman found in the street, the girl young and innocent beauty that the cold pallor of death can't erase. There's a raw and ragged gash ran from beneath her right ear toward her collar bone . She's not just an unlucky victim of the war, but a man who had violated and killed them. The only evidence a his pocket a torn shoulder tab Freddie ;had recovered from the clenched girl's fist. It is these heinous crime that thrusts Mill's complex spunky protagonist into his role as a defender of innocent victims, war-time Malta rife murder and mayhem with opportunities for espionage made all too real.

The victims have carefully selected from the lower reaches of society, their deaths tainted with just enough ambiguity to arouse suspicion and get Maltese tongues wagging. But Mark is frustrated by Malta Command who simply suppress the matter, quite content it summed for local girls to keep on dying. The result is an unsavory hodgepodge of imagination run wild, exacerbated by the journalist's inflamed rhetoric and the loss of common sense in favor of public panic and rage against an unknown threat. Max is sure a monster is on the loose who will stop at nothing to protect his identity, but his investigations produce random associations that won't hold up in court is not the point.

Meanwhile, Max's British colleagues revel in their little get-togethers, especially his commander, the self important Captain Pendleton, his ex-pat friends Rosemund and Hugh, a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Artillery, and his colleagues Freddie and Elliott, the tall American. But it's the handsome, hopeless Max who is torn between two such different women: Mitzi, a Maltese girl of mixed ancestry a brings a blanket over his confused feelings and also Lillian with her tales of dead girls and cover-ups deaf to the dictates of his weary body, thoughts of Lillian and Mitzi swirling endlessly, aimlessly around and around in his head, overlapping intertwining. As Malta is decimated finding solace in the warmth of her body. Brief and breathless, Mitzi shows no signs of guilt over her betrayal of her husband Lionel, just a hunger and urgency in the arms of Max. Max is a solemn soul at the best of times. The seed of fear germinates in his chest when Lillian goes missing, suggesting something far more sinister. Max is blind to Lillian's feelings but to his own too, and he makes a terrible mistake one that will plague him for the rest of his life.

Mill's prose is as grand and as cinematic as the trials of his intrepid hero, Malta is brought vividly to life. laced with a old fashioned cinematic grandeur, a biblical landscape, sun-bleached, shade-less harsh to the eye. The town and villages scattered like dice on a table top, Valetta and her twin harbors, lay a seemingly endless expanse of viridian-green water as Max walks the streets searching for answers, pummeled by the bombing runs, the splatter of shell bursts smudging the sky, the arcing lines of tracer fire from the Bofers joining the fray. This is a world filled with desperation, sorrow, hope and forgiveness where human drama is summoned with bold strokes. Exhaustion is blunted by fear, the Maltese exhibiting a kind of resigned apathy, a weary fatalism against the whistle and shriek of falling bombs, the thump and crump of explosions, the staccato bark of the Bofors. Meanwhile, the truth is fed to them to shore up their morale, Max and his friends caught up against a bureaucratic behemoth, that has ruled their lives, feeding off the downpour of bombs. From the trials of war to the machinery of administration, Max doesn't number himself among them, insulted, intimidated, threatened with court-martial, even blackmailed, Max survives to fight another day. The true identity of the killer is shrouded in mystery, puppet master surveying them all from on high, constantly pulling their strings and jerking their limbs, a surprising and unexpected enemy. Mike Leonard March 2010.

Our information officer is Max Chadwick, part of the British colonial office occupying Malta during the second world war. Female 'companions' from the local bars and dance halls have been the victims of random murders and Max fears that should a connection be made between the murderer and British forces will anger the people of Malta. His best solution for the problem is to find the murderer and thereby remove the necessity of providing incomplete and disturbing information. A small island where the cast of suspects is limited to British officers provides an excellent setting for a murder mystery. Combine this with the unique importance of Malta for the Allied forces, and Mr. Mills has discovered a formula that makes his novel exciting and also educational. Romance is also part of the mixture with a amorous affair with a married woman set against the less passionate but more true relationship with a Malta national. The ingredients have created an entertaining and enlightening read.

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