German Spy.

Bookseller Notes

A scarce first edition.Newman's Introduction, excerpted to form the lengthy blurb, describes how the present work, 'one of the most startling, exciting and ingenious yarns in the history of the literature of espionage', came to him via 'a Bavarian named Ludwig Grein', who presented himself to the author as his counterpart in the German service - a circumstance based on the misapprehended premise that Newman's work 'Spy' was autobiographical, a common fallacy, seemingly partly derived from the publisher's marketing strategy for the work (which required Newman to temporarily disappear from public view). His own war service, he was at pains to point out, was unremarkable, and he had never been a spy (although one might object that an intelligence agent probably would take that line); greater claims are made for Grein, who, given 'a little luck [...] might easily have won the War for Germany in 1917', though his work required Newman's editorial intervention to make it readable, and 'appears under my name because [...] my name has some slight meaning to libraries and readers, while his has none'. How much some or all of the foregoing is another fictional construct is hard to establish, though it seems to have that flavour.