Paul Gallico is one of the most varied writers I’ve encountered. Not just in terms of quality – though that’s probably true – but in terms of the types of books he writes. He’s perhaps best known in the blogging world for Flowers For Mrs Harris (also published as Mrs ‘arris Goes To Paris); in the wider world, it’s probably The Poseidon Adventure that is his biggest legacy, even if only for the film adaptations. But even there we can see his scope – from the whimsical story of a charlady buying a Christian Dior dress to a disaster narrative about a ship sinking. Along the way, Gallico writes fey stories of animals, ghost stories, dark stories of abuse, something akin to a detective novel, and more. Perhaps the most common thread is a fairy tale feel – whether that is the light, magical variety or the dark, unsettling side of the fairy tale world.
All of which is to say, when I bought Trial By Terror in 2016, I had no idea where it would fall on the Gallico spectrum. This pretty dreadful cover wasn’t very helpful. Penguin did some excellent covers in the ’60s and ’70s, but this was not among them. And, based on this cover, I assumed this was a horror novel of some variety. How wrong I was!
What Trial By Terror actually covers is very 1952: the early days of Hungary’s Communist state. Jimmy Race is an American reporter working for the Chicago Sentinel – specifically in their Paris office, though there is very little in the novel that gives any flavour of Paris. I suppose Gallico just needed the office to have a little more proximity to Hungary than would be found in Illinois.
Jimmy is a larger-than-life man – tall, bulky, flaming hair – and a total firebrand. When news breaks of a man ‘confessing’ to being a spy in Hungary, it is clear to all that the confession is, at the very least, coerced. Jimmy wants the newspaper to blast this on their front page, threatening retaliation to Hungary’s Communist regime – a much-feared but, in 1952, still relatively mysterious entity. And let’s just say he doesn’t take kindly to being counselled with caution.
“None of ’em have any guts, gimp, or gumption,” he continued. “They haven’t any competition and it’s made them all as soft as mush in the go-get-‘im department. They sit around on their hams and think because they’re getting out a rag in Paris instead of Kokomo they’re hot stuff. They can yawn themselves into their deadline and snooze themselves to press, and if they don’t go in on the button, so what? If anybody comes up with an idea there are five guys before Nick waiting to beat it to death before it can get around and cause them some inconvenience. And if it ever does get to Nick, he strangles it quick just in case it might hurt the feelings of some Frog sitting in the ministry or at the Quai d’Orsay. There isn’t a reporter or an editor on that sheet fit to be called a newspaperman.”
The ‘Nick’ mentioned is the head of the Paris office and the last in a line of editors who have the power to quash Jimmy’s enthusiastic ire before it gets to the page. One of the things I liked about Trial By Terror is that Gallico is generous to all his characters, and the reader knows that Jimmy’s assessment of Nick is unfair. There is no villain among the newspaper staff: we are invited to sympathise both with Jimmy’s righteous anger and Nick’s wise hesitance. Other characters include Nick’s clever, sophisticated wife, who co-manages the office, and the dowdy, devoted Janet whom Jimmy (of course) calls ‘kid’ and inadvertently strings along. I’d have happily read a whole novel set in this newspaper, and Gallico has set up a whole bunch of interesting dynamics.
But Jimmy certainly won’t stay put. He asks to go to Vienna for a story – and goes missing. He had previously told Janet that, given half the chance, he’d sneak into Hungary and expose the regime for what it is. And that’s exactly what he’s done.
From there, the novel goes back and forth between the Chicago Sentinel team desperately trying to work out what has happened to Jimmy – and to Jimmy’s ordeal in a Hungarian prison. He was caught immediately. He is not physically tortured, but kept in a bare cell and interrogated at irregular intervals. Without a watch or any predictable patterns to the day, he has no idea what time or even what day it is. The man who interrogates him most often – Mindszenty – does so with intense politeness, even a feigned reluctance to have to go through the process. He also (Jimmy sees) truly and irreversibly believes that Jimmy is a spy working for a foreign government, rather than a foolhardy journalist. Over and over, day after day, the questioning continues.
He [Jimmy] could consider man as a reasoning animal and therefore master of his wits and his tongue. He would have been willing to wager that while scientficically applied torture resulting in the destruction of bone and tissue might very well break him and lead him to admit to crimes he had never committed, a psychological or psychiatrical attack upon his mind and will could never lead to the same result. He believed one of two things: either Mindszenty and the others were mentally weaker than he or the enemy had discovered something entirely new and were applying heretofore unheard-of methods. Neither of these things was true, but by the time Jimmy was aware of it, it was also too late.
There is physical violence eventually, though thankfully it isn’t described too vividly. Gallico isn’t out to shock us. He is much more interested in the psychology of this sort of mental torture, and of the very believable way in which a strong-willed, passionate man will be worn down in ways he doesn’t suspect, or even fully realise is happening.
What prevents Trial By Terror from being a gruelling read, though, is the fact that we have the parallel story of the newspaper staff strategising to get Jimmy out. Some of that story is a little convenient, but enough of it is about character rather than plot that it doesn’t really matter.
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed and appreciated this novel. I’m not sure how much Gallico could have known about what was really going on beyond the borders of Hungary, and there must be more accurately researched novels and non-fiction about the regime in that period, but I doubt anybody is going to read Trial By Terror as a piece of historical record. But the title and the cover also do the novel a big disservice. This is a very well-written character study of somebody caught in a creepingly terrible situation, and the impact on people who care about him. In 1952, it was Hungary. Today, it could be any number of other places. It shows a string to Gallico’s many-stringed bow that I didn’t know he had, and adds evidence to what an interesting and versatile author he was.
