Philippe Collin's wartime thriller "The Barman of the Ritz" depicts the Nazi occupation of Paris as seen through the eyes of Frank Meier, the real-life barman of the title who served cocktails to high-ranking Nazi officers all the while hiding his Jewish identity.
This gripping suspense narrative spans 1940 to 1944 but is largely confined to the sumptuous interior of the Ritz hotel. Here an atmosphere of subdued terror is evoked in often bizarre details. A chambermaid patrols the corridors, collecting jackboots to polish overnight. Coco Chanel's maid carries her employer's gas mask on a velvet cushion. Hermann Göring, a frequent guest, wallows in hot baths to soothe his morphine addiction.
At the bar where Frank once served Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, he now attends to the writer Ernst Jünger, "one of the Führer's protégés," and officers such as Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel, who will later be hanged by Hitler. In one telling scene, Frank overhears an aristocratic German officer comment, about Nazis, that "our sense of propriety is no match for their rampant sadism," and is shocked to realize that Hitler's commanders "are at each other's throats."
Like all barmen, Frank is a watcher and a listener, which makes him an ideal narrator. His fears and longings emerge mainly in diary entries that reveal a complex man who "has spent a lifetime running from his past," but whose present collides with history. In the novel's opening scene, Frank watches "his last customer of the old world," Otto von Habsburg, "drowning his sorrows in gin."
Four years later, Frank is still at his post as the Americans arrive and Hemingway shoulders his way to the bar. "'Hey, Frankie! How's life?' he asks, as though they last saw each other only a month ago." The real Frank Meier died three years later, in 1947, of unspecified causes, having been charged with profiting from the occupation.
A scandalous African-American household is at the center of Nafissa Thompson-Spires's "The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford," set in 1920s Oklahoma. The title is both playful and accurate: Richard Milford, called Rich, proves almost as difficult to kill as Rasputin, with whom he shares many unsavory characteristics. As for the wives, only one possesses a marriage certificate.
In the small town of Newville, Lally Milford shares her husband with Georgette Wise, Sophronia Willis and Vivianne Hartford -- though not by choice. Theirs is a fractious sisterhood complicated by many children, "at least eleven of them, barefooted and wild-eyed. Word tell, some of them cut their milk with moonshine." (Rich's business is illegal hooch.)
How each woman was snared by Rich -- and how they collectively prevail -- is revealed in chapters that alternate among their narratives, and in the recollections of Alberta, Rich's sardonic housekeeper. The town's opinion is expressed by an unnamed narrator who observes that one of Rich's problems "was that he conducted himself and his affairs like a White man."
The novel opens with Rich's funeral. The truth of who or what killed him is revealed with tantalizing slyness as Ms. Thompson-Spires shifts perspectives, lacing each monologue with mordant humor. When Alberta, for example, relates Rich's difficult birth, she concludes that the midwife "reshaped the outside of his head but didn't fix the inside."
In his wives, Rich met his match. "We wondered whether four women could really overtake a man as rowdy as Rich," the Newville observer admits, as the scandal fades and the mystery nears its solution.
-- Ms. Mundow reviews frequently for the Journal.