[StephenHarper]

The British novelist Pauline Glen Winslow is pretty much forgotten today. Her 1984 novel I, Martha Adams was featured on the cover of the catalog of the leading Objectivist book service at the time, so many Objectivists must have read it. 

Unfortunately, her novels declined in quality in the 1980s and she apparently gave up writing in the early 1990s. All I have been able to find out about her was the information on the dust cover of her books. She was living in Manhattan (Greenwich Village) and in Connecticut with her husband (a musician) and her cat. She must have kept a very low profile.

The novel I want to review is from 1981, The Windsor Plot. People who saw the recent popular movies Darkest Hour and Dunkirk (and perhaps even The King’s Speech) might be interested in reading this novel. Instead of taking place during the time of the fall of France and the evacuations at Dunkirk in May and June 1940, this novel takes place mostly in July 1940, during the early phase of the Battle of Britain, though there is an extended flashback to the action at Dunkirk.

The hero, a 27-year-old British sergeant (who was the son of a former guard of Churchill and had known Churchill when he was a child and Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer), is awarded Britain’s highest military award by the King (for his heroic action during the withdrawal in Belgium and France). Churchill attaches the hero to his service and sends him to Portugal to investigate German attempts to get the Duke of Windsor to join the Axis cause. But, the Nazi plot in this novel is much wider than it was in history and it has a much more capable man leading it: Admiral Canaris, instead of the incompetent SS. The hero needs to use all his skills to outwit the Germans and prevent the plot from succeeding. The plot’s goal is to kill Churchill and replace him with someone like Lloyd George and kill the King, replacing him with the Duke of Windsor, then to negotiate a peace treaty on German terms.

/sb

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