Death in Captivity (1952) is a fascinating book, set in an Italian Prisoner of War camp during World War II. The author, Michael Gilbert, deftly juggles two major interconnecting mystery types. It is a wartime-escape story, with the Allied officer-prisoners working feverishly on a tunnel that they hoped would allow them to escape from the camp, Campo 127, and begin a long, nightmarish trek across much of Italy in an effort to rejoin the Allied armies on their invasion of Italy. And it is also an impossible murder story. Death in Captivity is the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.
The murdered man, a Greek soldier named Cyriakos Coutoules, was widely suspected by the other Allied officers to have been a spy for the Italian guards at Campo 127. The body was discovered by the escape team digging out that tunnel. The tunnel, while under construction, was barely wide enough to allow one individual to dig his way through the sand and other obstacles he might encounter. Coutoules had been suffocated, but access to the tunnel where he died required four strong men to open and close the entrance way. There was no way someone could have gotten into the tunnel to kill Coutoules or to put the body there to be found. And yet it had happened. And when the Italian officer in charge of the camp decided to arrest one of the Allied officers and charge him with the murder ,it was quite evident that the officers would have to solve the murder themselves – and quickly – if they were to protect the wrongly-accused man and also preserve the secret of the tunnel on which they had based all their plans for escape.
It’s a harrowing story – and it’s worth noting that the author, Michael Gilbert, was himself a prisoner of war in just such a camp and took part in several escape attempts. Despite the grim wartime background and the brutality inherent in war itself, Death in Captivity nevertheless is filled with flashes of wit and even humor that manage to ease the tension somewhat – only to have that tension ratcheted up again by a master storyteller.
Death in Captivity is a powerful and moving book. It will be republished early in May as another in the British Library Crime Classics series which are published in the U.S. by Poisoned Pen Press. (It's already available on Kindle.) This edition features an introduction by mystery historian Martin Edwards, who calls the book "one of the finest achievements of a crime writer of distinction." I’d have to agree, and I recommend it very strongly indeed.
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