Midnight Burning: An Einstein-Chaplin Thriller by Paul Levine; Harrisonville, Missouri: Blank Slate Press; © 2025; ISBN 9781943-075966; 2025; ISBN 9781943-075966; 370 pages; $18.95.
SAN DIEGO – In this work of fiction, physicist Albert Einstein and movie star Charlie Chaplin work together to thwart an American Nazi plan to murder prominent Jews in the film industry and to touch off an American civil war.
Visiting Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels okays a plan by William Dudley Pelley, the founder of the Silver Legion of America paramilitary group, to steal weapons from an armory in Long Beach, California, and assassinate key figures in the movie industry in the hope that American citizens will be so rattled that many will support Germany’s plot to rule the world.
Paul Levine, author of a series of mysteries featuring the fictional lawyer Jake Lassiter, writes with his usual wit. The repartee between Einstein and Chaplin is delightful, although in some passages, it is anachronistic. One example has the pair vowing “Never Again!” in 1937, years before the Hitler regime planned and implemented the “final solution” in the Holocaust from which that phrase was born.
However, Levine’s imagined sprightly dialogue more than makes up for such oversights. I liked one scene in which Chaplin served a visitor to his home a glass of Chậteau Lafite Rothschild. The visitor commented that it tasted better than the sweet kosher wine served at the temple. Einstein responded that “motor oil is better than sweet kosher wine.”
The plot touches on movie studios accepting censorship in exchange for permission to show their movies in Germany; the explosion of the Nazi airship Hindenburg; America Firster Charles Lindbergh and antisemites Father Charles Coughlin and Henry Ford; Chaplin ridiculing Hitler in the movie The Great Dictator; and the corruption of that era in the Los Angeles Police Department – all based on facts.
Exciting, but not factual, were the derring-do with which Chaplin and Einstein spied on the German Consulate in Los Angeles and risked their lives at a secret Nazi hideaway in the San Gabriel Mountains.
Midnight Burning is a high octane mix of fact and fiction that will have you smiling through your suspense.
*
Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World