Tommy Hambledon is back in England after a long and rather unusual stay in Nazi Germany.* He’s still trying to decide if he likes being back in his homeland when he’s sent to investigate sabotage involving ships sailing from Portsmouth Harbor. But a key informant is killed at the local pub just before Tommy and junior intelligence officer Jimmy Bellair can talk to him, forcing our newly repatriated secret agent to join forces with the local police inspector to find the murderer, whom he suspects will lead him to the saboteur. At his side is his comrade-in-arms from Germany, Alfred Reck, whose view of an England he too has not known for many years is possibly even more sardonic than Tommy’s. Their suspects include a flirtatious young governess who tries to steal Jimmy’s heart, a handsome hairdresser and the decorative blonde who is stepping out with him, an Irish garage keeper, an Italian conjuror, and the Wax Doll, a woman with a secret. Set not long after the 1938 Munich appeasement, They Tell No Tales was first published in 1941.

*Details may be found in Drink to Yesterday (“One of the greatest spy novels ever written.”—Jon L. Breen in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine) and in A Toast to Tomorrow (“One of my all time favorite novels, a kind of soft spy story no less chilling in its portraits of 1933 Berlin and top Nazis than the hard stuff.”—Barbara Peters for Book Sense and Killer Books).

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