JOHN GARDNER – The Werewolf Trace. Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1977. Doubleday, US, hardcover, 1977. Reprint editions include Bantam, US, paperback, 1978,

   What if post-war British intelligence had documentation that seemed to indicate that a recently naturalized citizen was, in fact, a sleeper Nazi agent? That the man in question was quite possibly the son of Joseph Goebbels and was now an heir apparent to the Hitler regime? That’s the basic premise of John Gardner’s The Werewolf Trace, an overall rather disappointing thriller that might have worked far better as a short story than as a full length novel.

   Vincent Cooling works for British intelligence, though he doesn’t much care for his bosses, nor for the “dirty tricks” of spycraft. Although tasked to read through voluminous files that point to the existence of “Werewolf,” a German child soldier now grown up to be a Nazi sleeper agent, he remains deeply skeptical and believes that his superiors are too obsessed with the Nazi past.

   Gardner paints a portrait of a man quite possibly more disturbed by the would-be intrusion into Werewolf’s privacy than by the prospect of an ideological fanatic living in economically depressed 1970s England. It doesn’t make for a compelling, sympathetic protagonist for which one wants to root.

   Enter Werewolf. He’s really a somewhat mild-mannered Scandinavian furniture importer living under the name Joseph Gotterson. He has a devoted wife, Sybil, and a young child, Helen. They live outside of London in a rural area. In a house that is purportedly haunted.

   Yes, you’ve read that right. Gardner chose, for whatever reason, to mesh the spy thriller with supernatural/ghost fiction. I’m all for experimentation in literature, but overall, blending the two here makes The Werewolf Trace lesser than the sum of its parts.

   That said, the writing is clear, concise, and allows for the reader to become fully immersed in the story. It’s just that the story drags on a bit; it really does not have the same degree of tension and excitement found in the comparable The Bormann Testament (1962) written by Jack Higgins or Frederick Forsyth’s excellent The Odessa File (1972), later turned into a movie starring Jon Voight.