Marilyn's Mystery Reads

The real-life friendship of Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein is brilliantly brought to life in Paul Levine’s historical mystery Midnight Burning.

The year is 1937, the setting Hollywood, and the creeping horror of fascism is spreading over America.  Though their friendship might seem strange on the surface, the movie star/director and the physicist had both differences and similarities in their lives that help bring them together.

Both were born in Europe, Chaplin in England and Einstein in Germany, and both emigrated to the United States.  While Chaplin lived a childhood of poverty and deprivation, being sent to a workhouse on two occasions before he was nine, Einstein was recognized at an early age as a prodigy and received a doctorate in physics.  Chaplin was brought to America by a vaudeville company and became an entertainer; Einstein fled Europe to avoid Nazi persecution and became a professor at Princeton.  But it is their shared love of democracy and hatred of dictatorship that cements their friendship.

As war clouds hover over Europe, the strength of American fascists grows.  Hollywood movie studio executives are told to portray Germany in positive ways; otherwise, their films will be banned in Germany, Italy, and Spain.  Father Coughlin spews anti-Semitic rants to an audience of 30 million listeners each week.  Aviation pioneer and hero Charles Lindbergh urges the United States to keep out of European affairs, misleading his followers about the outsized influence of Jews in politics, and mulls the possibility of running for president with the backing of the Nazis.

A group of American Nazis, led by screenwriter William Dudley Pelley, hatches a plan to assassinate twenty three celebrities, Jews and Christians alike, who speak out against fascism.  To do this, his group called the Silver Shirts plots to break into an army warehouse and steal that number of machine guns, planning on using one weapon for each death.  But the talents of Chaplin, with his background as an acrobat, and Einstein, whose knowledge of theoretical physics is unsurpassed, combine to thwart them.

Midnight Burning is filled with the names of people who were known to everyone in this era, from movie stars (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Janet Gaynor) to Nazis or Nazi sympathizers (Joseph Goebbels and United States Senator Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota).  And the scene in which the Hindenburg, a German airship, attempts to land in New Jersey brings the horror of that disaster through the commentary of journalist Herbert Morrison.  His comment of “Oh, the humanity,” expresses his shock at the 36 lives lost instantly in the explosion.

A helpful Afterward lists the figures, both historical and fictional, who appear in the book, some of whom may not be familiar to everyone.  So skillfully are the novel’s characters drawn that readers may be surprised to learn who was a “real” person and who was not; I know I was.

Paul Levine, perhaps best known for his Jake Lassiter legal series, has written what I hope is the first in a new series.  The characters of Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein deserve another outing.

You can read more about the author at this website.

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