Frederick Forsyth is one of those names I remember seeing a lot on bookshelves when I was a kid in the 80s, but perhaps not so much any more. I had never read one, and now I have. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but this caper about catching Nazis went along quickly enough. It’s strange, looking from a modern perspective, to think that there was a time when the atrocities of the holocaust weren’t really talked about or acknowledged in German society. The Odessa File was written in the late 60s or early 70s, I think, and there was clearly a lot of coming to terms with history still to be done.

It’s a historical document, of sorts, not just of Germany’s post-war psyche, but also of the type of Fiction for Men which I’m not sure still exists. There’s lots of technical details about cars (the main character drives a sporty Jag and this is a crucial plot point in the latter half of the book) and guns and just how the Nazis were organised. The main character is a German journalist with a weirdly British name, hunting down a Nazi who ran a concentration camp. Our hero likes the finer things in life, like sports cars, fine wines and making love to beautiful women. His girlfriend is a stripper, hoping to entrap him in marriage and our hero first fell in love with her when he saw how big her tits were.

Amazing.

The plot pootles along at a fair old clip and while reading it I had the image of Freddy Forsyth, happily bashing away at a typewriter while smoking Rothmans and chugging on Johnnie Walker. I don’t know why, but I found it strangely comforting.