The Sleeper

by Holly Roth

Genres: Thriller

Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

Holly Roth (1916-1964) was born in Chicago and grew up in Brooklyn and London, but regarded herself as a New Yorker. Her education was the product of many schools, colleges and private tutors, but she emerged with a BA. She worked as a model, then moved on to newspaper and magazine work. She was married to Joseph Franta. She died after falling off a small yacht in the Mediterranean, and her body was never recovered. She also wrote as K.G. Ballard and P.J. Merrill.

Reviews

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad but a bit thin

[Bill Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ostensibly a Cold War spy story, but actually a parable about trust. A writer is asked to record the story of a man convicted of treason. The traitor kills himself, which seems unlikely given the man’s character, but the authorities come to believe that the suicide was a signal to the enemy: the writer and a woman acquaintance of the prisoner are soon burglarized - the enemy is looking for a message left by the traitor. A push-pull romance develops between the writer and the woman, but he cannot convince himself that the woman was not in cahoots with the traitor. She in turn, does not trust the motivations of the writer, believing him to be playing her along through the direction of US military intelligence.
Roth does an excellent job of playing the reader, I thought. Good mystery, tete a tete romance, a chilling action sequence describing the writer shinnying down an air shaft and a very clever resolution. The nickel (for me) didn't drop regarding what this book was really about until near the end. The McGuffin ends up being information regarding some ludicrous plan to infiltrate Red China and win the hearts and minds of the population; surely satirical. This absurd example of international gamesmanship is counterbalanced by a very simple truth played out very subtly throughout the book - at both a personal and an international level - until there is trust, there is no progress.

[Ronald Koltnow · Rating 3 out of 5]

A non-thriller, but in a good way, THE SLEEPER deals with the events that follow a Communist sleeper agent's betrayal of his country. A freelance journalist, a lovely young woman, and all of the intelligence agencies in America try to find a confidential message that spy "Buddy" Hollister had stolen from the military. Published in 1953, in the heat of Cold War paranoia, this is a novel about ambiguities. There is little action, and most of what remains is offstage, but the search for the message escalates into suspense. The first 100 pages is merely three men in a living room talking. A great deal of the talk is about how hard it is to understand other people. Spies, lovers, soldiers, journos, all question what they know and what it means. We are all sleeper agents on an emotional level. Style Note: "Insane" seems to be Roth's favorite word. She uses it frequently, even twice in one short paragraph.

[R.R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gut feeling: this book gave me no feelings in my gut. A spy story with a bland protagonist in a wishy-washy romance, where the sinister government agents are nice guys really, and the terrifying menace of the Soviet machine is represented by some blokes who like messing up apartments. Hollister, the young Soviet sleeper agent who is already dead when the book begins, is a fascinating character -- Patricia Highsmith would have written the book from his point of view, and made me root for him. There is also one moderately thrilling passage in which our hero, Kendall, scales a ventilation shaft using sheer willpower, but that's the kind of thing Ian Fleming would have given us by the dozen before the end of chapter three, just as a warm up for the main event.

[Debbie Robson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m finding lately that I am enjoying good old fashioned storytelling as opposed to a lot of the various modes of writing that have been fashionable of late - including unreliable narrators, the erosion of reader/writer relationships and metafiction.
In The Sleeper, Holy Roth combines excellent narrative skills with an inventive storyline. This is my fourth book by Roth and my admiration for her hasn’t dimmed. In fact she’s been giving me lessons on writing. Firstly: keep the plot moving. She is one of the best at this - although I don’t read much crime fiction so can only compare her to the writers I generally read. Secondly, and more importantly for me, her writing actually came to my rescue.
I am in the middle of a rewrite of my latest manuscript and was unsure how to turn my first person diaries into third person narratives. In The Sleeper Roth deftly moves backwards and forwards in time. Here she is handling a flashback and this was the lightbulb moment for me in regards to my own work. Note the skilful characterisation too:
“Gregory spoke up in a conciliatory voice-he had a pleasant voice, and a pleasant boyish face-‘Just because it was so pointless, Mr Kendall. Look-why don’t you tell us all about it?’
‘Well certainly. If you think it necessary.’ Kendall make an effort to overcome his feeling of antagonism, and as a result, his voice sounded flat, almost purposefully uninteresting. ‘As I told you the first incident occurred yesterday afternoon. It was about four o’clock. I had just come home from downtown...”
CHAPTER TWO
“It was about four o’clock, and Kendall had just returned from downtown. When the doorbell rang....”
Simple but very effective switch from a scene being retold to a scene being told in the moment.
Here is Roth at her astute best. (And this is a crime novel of the 1950s I remind myself.)
“Then he was astonished. How many times in your life, he wondered, do you speak completely without volition? And why wasn’t she also surprised by the invitation? She was looking at him in silence, impassively. In spite of all his analogies to Quakers and winter nights, the only real difference in her appearance, he decided, was the hairdress. That made all the difference, though.
He said, ‘You should always wear your hair way way.’
That time he had surprised her. Her eyebrows lifted and a slight flush relieved the natural paleness of her face. Then she looked past him at the mirror set into the wall. She stared into it unself-consciously and without fussing. She didn’t comment that she was dishevelled; she didn’t produce lipstick or power. She just looked.
Then she said, ‘It doesn’t look - abandoned?’
‘Perhaps. A little. But good.’
A very different read. Now I’m off to ebay to buy my next Holly Roth.

[Robert Hudder · Rating 3 out of 5]

A spy novel written in the 50s with a hint of romance. I found this kind of fun. It is interesting to read about communism and possible H bomb plots. There is a little bit of mustiness to some of the language but it holds up with the tension.