Where can a wanted man hide in a country full of returned war heroes? It’s 1952 and Frank Danby has been looking over his shoulder for the last ten years, forced to lead an itinerant life, getting work wherever he can while trying to keep one step ahead of the police. Returning to London, he finds a job in an East End pub, where he becomes entangled with Grace, the young and beautiful wife of … Grace, the young and beautiful wife of the landlord. Then the law comes knocking. Facing a justice system prejudiced against him, Frank must find a way to escape the gallows.
Too Many Heroes is a gripping period thriller, exploring love, belonging and betrayal in a country still recovering from WW2. A must for fans of the post-war novels of Philip Kerr, Kate Atkinson and Sara Sheridan.
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I received a free electronic copy of this historical novel on September 18, 2019, from Netgalley, Jan Turk Petrie, and BooksGoSocial. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this novel of my own volition, and this review reflects my personal, honest opinion of this work. This is a WWII novel I can happily recommend to friends and family.
Too Many Heroes is an exceptional historical novel, breaking new ground at least for me. We meet Frank on June 28, 1942, trapped in the rear gun turret of a badly damaged Wellington B Mark IA, headed back to England after a bombing run over Germany. Once English soil is beneath them, the rest of the crew refuse to bail out but stay aboard to keep turret-trapped Frank company as they come into their Lincolnshire base with one engine running and emergency crews in place. In a freak accident, the plane breaks apart on landing, leaving the rear turret behind on the runway as the Wimpey crash lands and immediately catches fire. All of the crew are lost with the exception of Frank in that exposed turret. During his medical recovery, Franks’s home is hit by a stray German bomb and his wife Clara is killed, though their son survived. He goes through a lot of soul-searching during that hospital stay. In the end, he leaves the lad with his wife’s sister Annie and husband, the parents of two young boys of their own. And rather than returning to duty as ordered, Frank goes AWOL. He has no living crew left to return to as they all died keeping him company on the way down, and he cannot bomb German civilian families’ homes any longer after seeing the destruction of his own home and family.
We take up Frank’s story about 10 years later, on May 15, 1952, on a seasonal job of shearing sheep, and still fighting nightmares, both waking and sleeping, from the war. This temporary job finished, he takes a train for London where he hires on as a bartender at a small neighborhood pub called Eight Bells.
We meet Grace for the first time in Mid-June, 1952. Grace and her husband Dennis, a weak-willed, older homosexual man, are the owners of Eight Bells. Grace, still young and attractive, married Dennis when she was barely legal and has been for the last couple of months caring for her sick mother in Brighton, her first trip away home since she married. Always she with little help from Dennis has managed the work of the pub and their attached apartment. Paying a bartender is not in the budget. Dennis took on a bartender while she was gone, leaving all the bar chores to Frank while he spent unlimited time at the track and making bad deals with bad people. Grace comes home to a mess, and Dennis is beyond helping at the moment though Grace is unaware of the bad company he is keeping. Knowing it has to be temporary, Grace keeps Frank on.
They work well together and develop a friendship as Dennis drifts further and further away. Inevitably they are drawn into a romantic relationship but Frank cannot be honest with her about his past. They discuss running away to Australia with the new citizenship offered by Australia and New Zealand – 10 pounds passage by ship to Sydney and instant citizenship. Many jobs in all fields vacant and the country needing citizens to settle their country. They could be together down under.
And then Dennis drowns in the Thames the same night Frank drops out of sight and doesn’t show up for work for 48 hours. He won’t tell Grace where he was or why he didn’t let her know he couldn’t work. If it was murder, Frank doesn’t have an alibi. After the police elk out his past history, he becomes the only person they are looking at – and it is murder. And Grace, after being informed of Frank’s past by the police, knows he didn’t kill Dennis, but can not forgive him for going AWOL and abandoning his son. Or can she?
In her afterward, Jan Turk Petrie relates the process England went through to clear those men still charged with desertion in the mid-1950s. Very interesting – and so many men, most of whom served at least part of the war before disappearing into the woodwork. My family has a few military men and women in every generation going back to 1776 – I would never have dreamed I could enjoy reading about a man like Frank, who deserted with only a few more bombing runs to fulfill his contract and hiding in plain sight for years. Who knew?