Midnight Patriots by Paul Levine; Herald Square Publishing; (c) 2026; ISBN 9798994-263013; 354 pages; $18.95.
By Donald H. Harrison in San Diego
This book is very similar to the author’s previous work, Midnight Burning, in which physicist Albert Einstein and movie star Charlie Chaplin team up to foil a Nazi plot to wreak havoc in the movie industry.
This novel spins a story of Einstein and Chaplin taking the luxury Santa Fe Super Chief from Chicago to Los Angeles, along with fellow historical personages J. Robert Oppenheimer, Charles Lindbergh, Mickey Cohen, Lena Horne, and Fritz Duquesne, a Nazi spy. Other characters in this suspenseful tale are two FBI agents, a rival Nazi spy, a femme fatale working for the Nazis, and a railroad porter who is central to the story’s denouement.
On the 39 3/4-hour journey in November 1940, Duquesne works a plot to murder Chaplin who has infuriated Adolf Hitler with his caricature of der Fuhrer in The Great Dictator. Additionally, he schemes to kidnap Einstein and bring the Jewish genius back to Germany.
Lindbergh, who projects an image of wholesomeness, indulges in an ongoing extramarital affair with the fictional femme fatale; Charlie Chaplin is forever on the prowl, and Einstein participates in bawdy conversation and some Hollywood gossip with Chaplin.
During the train ride, Lindbergh, an “America First” advocate and a genial antisemite, has a debate with Chaplin, a London-bred advocate of American intervention in what so far has been a European conflict.
All in all, the novel is a fanciful portrayal of the time in American history when isolationism was favored by a majority of the citizenry, much to their discredit, and luminaries like Einstein and Chaplin worked to change their minds.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.