Divine, A. D. They Blocked the Suez Canal.

Divine’s topical mid-1930s thriller is concerned with a British attempt “to help the cause of Abyssinia and to stymie the Italians” in their aggression by sabotaging the Suez Canal. His English and American plotters determine to sink two ships in the narrowest part of the Canal in order to prevent further troops, gasoline and other essential supplies from reaching Italian forces in Abyssinia, thus forcing Mussolini to come to terms with the faltering League of Nations. In spite of “treachery in their midst” (interestingly enough, Divine, friend of the Abyssinians, has no problem making the bad guy a Jew), they succeed in scuttling two ships heavily laden with concrete and scrap iron in the Canal, make their escape in a seaplane and get clear to a Mediterranean island where they lie low until the international repercussions of their escapade have blown over. Divine clearly believed that the League of Nations was the only workable bulwark against the steady rise of 1930s international aggression, noting “the true battlefront was at Geneva, the true cause of all the little nations of the world against aggression, the cause of peace by collective security” was the League. Though the author’s characters are pretty must of the cardboard variety, his passages describing Port Said and the Canal in the 1930s are highly evocative and of interest to today’s reader.