Yesterday was mystery Sunday and I read a spy thriller. I loved A Toast to Tomorrow by Mannng Coles, pen name of British writers Adelaide Frances Oke Manning and Cyril Coles. Now I am dying to read the prequel thriller, Drink to Yesterday, and even though it would be a violation of one of the “rules” of my 365 project (that I only read each author once over the 365 days) because these books were written by two authors, I could read another one. And I’m on vacation and rules can be bent on vacation. Okay?
Both A Toast To Tomorrow and Drink to Yesterday were first published in the United States in 1941 and were wildly popular state side (as well as in Great Britain, where they were published in 1939) Both books (and subsequent ones in the series) featured British secret service agent Tommy Hambledon and his dispersed crew of WWI (and II) intelligencers. A Toast to Tomorrow slowly and surely builds a detailed and complicated and thoroughly entertaining (sometimes doggone funny) plot of British daring, Nazi evil and obstinacy, and German humanity. I just could not put this book down once I started.
The historical details in the novel are accurate and the spying stuff is spot on as well, as Coles was in the British Secret Service starting in WWI and continuing up through the Cold War. Coles uses his own history and Manning throws in her writing skills to create the jolly exciting story of Hambledon and his buddies as they fool both the Nazi party and their own leaders at home about who, what, where, when, and how: they use the confusion to confound Nazi plans, save Jewish and political prisoners, and wreak some vengeance for killed-in-action colleagues.
The story begins with a radio broadcast involving Morse code and praise of the Fuhrer, and then moves backward in time to the years just after WWI, painting a moving portrait of the deteriorating lives of everyday Germans. Throughout the novel the German people are portrayed as humans; the Nazis are portrayed as dogs; and the Englishmen are portrayed as quiet, tough, and intensely loyal heroes.
The plot moves along quickly and has the requisite number of turns and very very very close calls: I was jumping up and down in my seat as I read. Spots of humor — laugh out loud — are thrown in to break up the tension, and scenes of pain and loss are also vividly presented to remind us all that the struggle against power-hungry and powerful Nazi Germany was very real, and not just a story. The duo of Coles and Manning wrote this book when Britain was already in the war, having declared war on Germany after Germany invaded Poland (in violation of a treaty with Britain), and when the domestic evils of Hitler had already been revealed through laws demoting Jews to non-citizens and through the horrors of Kristallnacht and the Nazi purges. The story they wrote is fully aware of the aspirations of Hitler, and yet no one imagined then just how far he would go to achieve his dream of a dominant Germany.
This is a fantastic book. Coles and Manning tell as great story, using insight, authentic details and background knowledge, and throwing in enough thrills and chills, and laughs as well, to hold us in our chairs, panting for more. A Toast to Tomorrow is by and far the best spy thriller I have ever, ever read. Read this book!
