Operation Mincemeat is one of the better known operations of the Second World War, thanks to the film of the same name which was turned into an improbable musical. It caught the imagination because it was so very macabre: the body of a British officer would be found washed up near the coast of Spain bearing details of an intended action in Greece and Sardinia — to distract attention from the real operation, the liberation of Sicily. The body would be brought to the Spanish authorities who would, in turn, hand it over to the German intelligence in Spain before returning it to the British. It was a convoluted operation in which, it seems, Ian Fleming, the James Bond creator, had a part and it succeeded. The unfortunate corpse was that of Glyndwr Michael, a tramp who died from ingesting rat poison, but who as a drowned officer became Captain (Acting Major) William Martin.
This was the scenario for Operation Heartbreak, the only novel of Duff Cooper, best known as the husband of the beautiful Lady Diana Cooper, to whom he was consistently unfaithful, a persecutor of PG Wodehouse and Tory politician. What we get is an alternative life of the man who ended up as the corpse and it was typical of the author that Glyndwr Michael becomes William Maryngton, not a plebeian tramp but a decent sort of gentleman who always wanted to be a soldier but who just missed out on the First World War and was just too old to fight in the Second. Poor William is a failure in almost every department, including his hopeless love for Felicity, the tantalisingly unreachable girl whose war work turns out to be more exciting than his own.
The story is briskly told but with the unconscious insight and detail that you get from inhabiting the time and place in which the novel is situated. It doesn’t match Evelyn Waugh’s work of the period — you don’t feel that we lost a great novelist in Cooper — but it’s poignant and moving, all the more for being adjacent to reality.
Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper is out now (Penguin Classics, £9.99)
