The High Castle: A 1920s Adventure Novel

Steiber's tale evokes the Jazz Age with its descriptions of the derring-do of an American in Europe between the world wars. Jake Barnes, a correspondent for the New York Herald, tears off from London on the trail of conspirators who murdered his British friend. Wenching and boozing, Jake drives at breakneck speed through France and into Germany, where he spies on Baron von Greb, a flying ace who had been shot down during the Great War. Posing as tourists, Jake and his inamorata are unmasked and helpless in the baron's eyrie, but the brash pair resort to stunning tricks, surviving in spite of terrible odds. Von Greb and his henchmen are thus foiled in their plot to kill a German patriot who is damned for associating with Zionists and the ""Jew genius'' (Einstein). The unsinkable Jake inspired his friend Hemingway, so it is explained, to christen the hero in The Sun Also Rises with his name. March 3