ANDREW GARVE – The Ashes of Loda. Harper & Row, US, hardcover, 1965. Publisher earlier by Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1965. Popular Library, US, paperback, 1966. Perennial Library, US, paperback, 1978

   Andrew Garve (a pseudonym of Paul Winterton) has produced some forty well-crafted novels of suspense. In addition to their consistent high quality, what is notable about them is their diversity, both of setting and type. Garve writes adventure, espionage, detection, and even romance with equal facility.

   His stories are set in such far-flung locales as the English countryside, Australia, Africa, France, and Ireland. His heroes are often policemen or quite ordinary men who rise to meet unusual circumstances with unusual fortitude, and often his villainous characters are so finely developed as lo win the sympathy of his readers. Garve’s readers can count on a good adventure with a tantalizing central puzzle that will keep them reading until all is resolved.

   The puzzle in The Ashes of Loda involves the past — specifically the war record — of a Polish chemist, Dr. Stefan Raczinski. Was he, as he claims, merely a survivor of the German concentration camp at Loda, or was he guilty of war crimes in that camp? The question threatens to tear apart the relationship of the two people who care most about him: his daughter, Marya, and her fiance, Lord Timothy Quainton.

   Tim, a newspaperman normally stationed in Moscow, meets Marya while on leave in London. During their courtship he discovers an old newspaper article condemning Dr. Raczinski in absentia for war crimes. Marya adamantly ref uses to believe this, but there is enough doubt in Tim’s mind to make him launch an investigation when he returns to Russia. It is an investigation that will leave him cut off from all official help-and eventually marked for death in the middle of a Russian winter.

   Garve is well acquainted with Russia and her people, since he was a foreign correspondent for the London News Chronicle in Moscow from 1942 to 1945. He puts this. knowledge to good use in this exciting story, particularly in the sequence in which Tim finds himself stranded in the countryside, trying to escape the police, foraging for the essentials, and trying to survive the deadly winter weather.

   Garve’s other novels that make use of his knowledge of Russia include Murder Through the Looking Glass (1952), The Ascent of D-13, and the The Late Bill Smith (1971).

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.