Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime, by John Dunning.
New York: Scribner, 2001.
$26 - 368 pages.

Author John Dunning made quite a splash when his novel, Booked to Die, introduced Cliff Janeway, former cop turned bookseller. The book won the prestigious Nero Wolfe Award, and Dunning’s second novel about Janeway, The Bookman’s Wake, made even more fans for Dunning and Janeway.

Readers who were waiting, as I was, for a third Janeway novel may be initially disappointed that Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime is neither about Janeway nor present-day Denver. It is instead a story of murder, intrigue, and Nazi spies set in 1942 in Regina Beach, New Jersey. Jack Dulaney and Holly Carnahan, old friends who have lost touch with each other, come together again in Regina Beach while looking for Holly’s father. Jack discovers that he has a talent for writing radio drama, and when he meets Holly again, she is a singer in a local club who is on her way to stardom.

In searching for Carnahan, Jack and Holly find themselves up against common murderers, IRA hitmen, and the remains of a German Bund. Dunning, who has clearly done considerable research on the early war years, shows us how tangled the alliances of certain individuals in wartime can become - a former Boer, for example, helping the Nazis in order to hurt the English, the Irish revolutionary who allies himself with Boers and Germans for the same reason. The fear of Americans at this time in regard to German intrusions was not unfounded; Nazi spies had landed both in the Northeast and in Florida, and while quickly captured, they nonetheless clearly had people who were willing to help them and places where they might safely hide.

Besides a complicated plot that should satisfy most mystery fans, Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime has other gifts for the reader as well. First, there is Dunning’s extensive knowledge of old-time radio; he has written two nonfiction books on the subject and possesses a collection of some 40,000 radio shows from the 1930s through the 1950s. He gave me a better understanding than ever how exciting radio once was - the writing and production of the shows, the great variety of drama and comedy. Even more, Dunning shows us the difference between radio and television now, and radio in its golden age. Few who have heard some of the old radio shows, even the clunky ones with simplistic plots, would argue that this sort of radio sparks the imagination more than the visual images of today’s television and computer world. Radio works more the way print does, leaving the listener to fill out the characters, to imagine dark, wind-blown nights or sunny beaches. By almost any standard, print and radio are superior in their enhancement of the imagination as opposed to television.

Dunning has also given an extraordinary performance here as a writer, for his prose resembles in an uncanny way the radio and movie scripts of America before midcentury. Here is a paragraph taken from page 16. Read aloud, it sounds like the opening narrative for a half hour detective drama:

“He thought about Holly all afternoon and occasionally he thought about Kendall. He still thought Kendall had done something somewhere. Maybe it hadn’t been illegal, but it had shamed him and kept him looking over his shoulder. Kendall had suddenly appeared at Santa Anita last November, a fellow down on his luck who’d drifted into racetrack life hoping to find some contentment there. It was a lean life. A man could walk horses six hours and make $3. He could sleep free on an army cot in the tack room, and $3 was good money when all he needed was food and an occasional pair of dungarees. Dulaney knew men who had done this all their lives.”

A final pleasure of reading Dunning is that he knows how to build suspense. The reader doesn’t know until the end of the book who will be the victims and who will be the survivors. In fact, the reader never quite knows what the final outcome of this nasty little war within a war will be.

So if you’re looking for a trip back into the forties, a visit to old-time radio, or simply a well-developed suspense novel, Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime is the book for you.

(Jeff Minick owns Saints and Scholars bookstore on Main Street in Waynesville.)

 

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