The 17th Letter (1945) by Dorothy Cameron Disney

I’ve not read much by Dorothy Cameron Disney, just a couple of novels, Death in the Backseat (1936) and Crimson Friday (1943). Both of these were detective stories with a certain lashing of suspense. However, today’s story is a bit different, falling into the camp of an espionage thriller. In particular The 17th Letter was influenced and shaped by the exploits of Franz Xaver Freiherr von Werra, a German WW2 pilot, whose plane went down in Britain. He, along with some other German prisoners, was sent over to Canada, yet once in the country he escaped custody and eventually he made it back to Germany. Ultimately, he died in 1941 when his plane suffered engine failure and crashed into the North Sea. His body was never recovered. Curtis Evans goes into this subject in more detail in his introduction to the Stark House Press edition. Evans describes this novel as ‘a flight-and-pursuit thriller, in the tradition of John Buchan’s landmark novel The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) […]’.