 Presidential Agent, by Upton Sinclair.
This is the fifth book in Sinclair's Lanny Budd spy series, following Wide Is the Gate. It's 1937, and fascism is on the rise in Europe. Art dealer Lanny Budd, who lives in France, has used his connections and charm to ingratiate himself with powerful Nazis, including Goring and even Hitler. He uses his position to get information from them, which he passes along to socialist resisters. At the start of this book, he becomes an official undercover agent for his new best friend, Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the previous book, Lanny secretly married Trudi Schultz, a member of the German underground. Now Trudi has disappeared from her Paris hideout. She had warned Lanny about this possibility, and told him not to risk blowing his cover by trying to rescue her. Lanny decides to rescue her anyway, but proceeds at what I can only call a leisurely pace. He's pretty sure of where she's being held, but travels back and forth to Spain and even the United States to recruit people he trusts to help. We're reminded that Trudi is undoubtedly being tortured, and every day adds to the danger that she will break, but the planning stage goes on for months. As with all the Lanny Budd books, there are touches of spiritualism. Lanny's friends include a medium who claims to channel the dead, and Lanny's experiments leave room for doubt in either direction. There is historical evidence that some high-level Nazis dabbled in the occult, but it seems unlikely that they'd risk participating in the presence of Lanny, an American. And honestly, the spiritualism requires less suspension of disbelief than the way everyone takes Lanny at his word. The Nazis believe anything he tells them. Lanny invites a locksmith to come from the US to France on false pretenses, and the locksmith agrees afterward to help with the rescue. The night watchman accepts Lanny's friendly offer to share a bottle of booze. (Really?) FDR instantly trusts him, even after Lanny admits that in the wake of WW1 he sheltered a German spy who was a childhood friend - and the friend is now a prominent Nazi. Lanny's former mentor vouches for him with FDR, but the mentor last saw him 18 years earlier. There's also a weird streak of Islamophobia that hadn't been in the earlier books. Lanny repeatedly compares Hitler with Mohammed, apparently just because they're both zealots for their cause. Sinclair normally seems progressive on matters of race, gender, and religion, so this seemed bizarrely out of place. I find the series addictive because Sinclair was very observant about how so many Americans and Europeans fell under the spell of fascism (a subject that's unfortunately timely again). He puts us in the scene as Lanny tries to warn world leaders about appeasing Hitler, as they carve up Czechoslovakia, and Kristallnacht breaks out around him. Popsugar Reading Challenge: A character with a hidden past. 52 Book Club Challenge: A character with a secret identity. Booklist Queen Challenge: Over 400 pages.
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