include Lewis Carroll: Formed by Faith and for children he has written The Book of the Seven Spells and twenty plays that have been seen in over five thousand productions worldwide. A former antiquarian bookseller and avid book collector, he and his wife, Janice, live in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and (when the pandemic allows) in the village of Kingham in England.
Lovett applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Enigma Affair, and reported the following:
The Enigma Affair is a thriller that follows a small-town librarian and a professional assassin as they try to solve a 75-year-old Nazi mystery and defeat a white supremacist villain. In an action-packed story, page 69 is one of the quieter moments. The first action sequences have passed, and our heroes are sitting on an airplane headed to Europe where they will spend the rest of the novel on the run. But, on this page we spend time with each of the two heroes and with the historical villain (Henrich Himmler) all in one page.Learn more about the book and author at Charlie Lovett's website.
We begin with the end of a passage giving some background about Nemo, the mysterious assassin who showed up in Patton Harcourt’s kitchen moments after she came under sniper fire while baking profiteroles. Learning about Nemo and his childhood ticks a box for “this page gives a great peek into the novel.”
The bottom of the page begins a scene in which Himmler speaks to Heinz Kurschildgen, a man who tried to convince Himmler he had mastered the art of alchemy. Himmler’s attempts to use alchemy for the benefit of the Third Reich are at the center of the mystery that our contemporary heroes are trying to solve, so, again, this scene lands a big part of the novel squarely on page 69.
Between these two passages—one about our assassin cum hero, who occupies a moral gray area and one about Himmler, whose morals are anything but gray—is a short paragraph from the point of view of our primary hero, the librarian Patton Harcourt. It so precisely captures what has happened in the novel so far and where the novel is going, that I can’t resist quoting it in full:Patton stared at the paper in front of her and did her best to ignore the man beside her. She had just wanted to make some nice pastries to take to Jasper and now here she was sitting in a first-class airline seat next to a cold-blooded killer trying to decrypt an Enigma message. She couldn’t believe her life had come to this. And she certainly couldn’t believe that the Nazis ever mastered alchemy.There is a lot to unpack in that little paragraph, and the rest of the novel unpacks it. Reading over those lines again, I’m happy that they landed on page 69!
The Page 69 Test: The Bookman's Tale.
The Page 69 Test: First Impressions.
The Page 69 Test: The Lost Book of the Grail.
The Page 69 Test: Escaping Dreamland.
Q&A with Charlie Lovett.
--Marshal Zeringue
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