mass market paperback
English language
Published April 12, 1984 by Ballantine Books.
For nine months Britain has been occupied - a blitzed, depressed and dingy country. However, it's 'business as usual' at Scotland Yard run by the SS when Detective Inspector Archer is assigned to a routine murder case. Life must go on.But when SS Standartenfuhrer Huth arrives from Berlin with orders from the great Himmler himself to supervise the investigation, the resourceful Archer finds himself caught up in a high level, all action, espionage battle. This is a spy story quite different from any other. Only Deighton, with his flair for historical research and his narrative genius, could have written it.
An excellent alternate-history told in the style of a whodunnit. A chilling picture of England under Nazi rule, fully engaging with the realities of occupation. Compelling characters pursue varied objectives through a fog of war often rendered through London thick weather. A mystery pulls you all the way through without simply checking the boxes of genre tropes. Absolutely recommended.
Having enjoyed Robert Harris’s Fatherland, I decided to check out SS-GB on the basis of Harris’s recommendation. Harris’s debt (which he has acknowledged) is obvious – in a sense Fatherland is merely a retelling of SS-GB, with key elements (premise, characters) transposed from early-1940s London to early-1960s Berlin. But aided by the shift in setting and (or so I would judge) Harris’s greater imagination, Fatherland portrays a world both more vivid world and more horrifying.
That’s not to say SS-GB isn’t worth reading. It’s an entertaining thriller, with a spectacular plot twist in the middle, and some nice characterization, particularly of the protagonist’s two German bosses, one supercilious, the other disingenuous. On the other hand, the “American lady reporter love interest” character is laughably shallow, not to say depressingly sexist.
Eh, give it a go, if, like me, you’re fascinated by the “What if the Germans won WW2” subgenre.
