Wall Street Journal Book Review: Tom Nolan, Hitting Hitler in the Wallet (reviewing Graham Moore, The Wealth of Shadows: A Novel (2024)):
The star of Graham Moore’s historical thriller “The Wealth of Shadows” has no illusions about where he stands in 1939. Ansel Luxford is a “middle-aged tax attorney in a neatly knotted bow tie” who has placed his own accomplishments in “the great, yawning expanse of the middle that slowly, inexorably, devours the best and worst alike.” Yet something Ansel sees one morning on his trolley ride to work in Minneapolis stirs his long-buried youthful idealism: a hundred-some uniformed American Nazis marching down from a St. Paul bridge. He imagines himself confronting “the biggest, blondest Nazi of the bunch” and declaring: “Not here. You can have Germany, you can have Italy, but not here.”
Ansel—who has a family to think of—stifles that urge. But a few days later, he’s in a hotel bar in Washington, D.C., angling for a job at the Treasury Department, where he once worked. He’s sought out a driven curmudgeon, a Treasury economist named Harry Dexter White, and Ansel makes the pitch for his employment with a prediction of upcoming international events pegged to the price and availability of Scotch whisky and German schnapps. “You can tell the future of the world in those bottles,” Ansel claims to White, “if you only know how to read them.” When asked what he sees in the spirits market, Ansel replies: “Germany is going to invade Poland.” …
White makes the tax attorney a member of his super-secret Treasury unit: a cabal of economists with the urgent goal of wrecking Hitler’s plans.
“The United States cannot engage in military warfare against Germany,” White says, citing the U.S. neutrality laws then in place. “So we are here to wage the only kind of belligerence we can: economic warfare. We’re going to crash the German economy.”
The ensuing tale of financial analysis and banking maneuvers may not come off as a natural backdrop for an espionage story. But Mr. Moore, who won the 2014 Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for “The Imitation Game”—a film that also involved intellectual behind-the-scenes work in World War II—finds appropriately cinematic material in the efforts by White and his team. Cutting swiftly between dialogue-heavy scenes, “The Wealth of Shadows” blends economic theory, skulduggery, deduction and derring-do.
Soon after his meeting with White, Ansel and family pick up sticks and move to the nation’s capital. White’s covert operation is no Manhattan Project. The other members of the crew are sharp-witted and capable but professionally undistinguished: not a Nobel winner in sight. …
A jaw-dropping end section documents how much of this fiction is based on real people and facts. The pleasures of Mr. Moore’s tale extend all the way to its final footnotes.
