A while back, when we read Holly Roth’s 1954 Cold War novel The Shocking Secret, we said we suspected she’d done better work. Well, we found it. 1955’s The Sleeper is also an anti-communist thriller, but Roth course-corrected after her middling previous effort by making the main communist agent in this story intellectually and tactically brilliant. That’s been a regular complaint of ours, that mid-century writers cheat by making Cold War antagonists too hapless to realistically worry about. They rarely took the easy way out with other types of villains, so we wonder if, considering the anti-commie hysteria of the period, they were afraid of seeming sympathetic. But The Sleeper features an agent who’s smart, charming, and determined to a level nobody else in the story can match.
This spy, an all-American boy type, is introduced to the reader while already in jail. A journalist named Robert Kendall has interviewed him for a profile in a prestigious magazine, but comes to believe—as does the U.S. government—that messages to other spies have been seeded into the article. Quaint ideas about press freedom prevent the Feds from killing the piece. And there’s no proof anyway. Nobody can figure out the embedded message, but time is a factor—the piece is to be published in a few weeks. Drawn into the turbulence is an acquaintance of the jailed spy, Marta Wentwirth. Is she in on the plot? Maybe, but Kendall likes the cut of her jib, and decides she isn’t. How else can he get laid?
As in The Shocking Secret, the protagonist here is just a regular guy and journalist, and Roth is again interested in the Chinese more than the Russians, which is no surprise with the Korean War just ended. She smartly kept her chapters short, and the overall narrative compact. The gimmick of a sleeper agent being able to carefully load an interview with crucial information may seem unlikely, but it ends up believable the way Roth works it. We have a feeling the concept was used previously. If not, it was certainly used afterward. It’s too good not to recycle. We’ll probably try Roth once again at some point. As Cold War focused authors go, this one makes clear that she’s no sleeper.
