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Archeology doctoral candidate Lily Sampson has spent the years since her 1938 dig in Jerusalem in Chicago, completing research on the artefacts from that dig (THE FLY HAS A HUNDRED EYES). Now it is October 1942 and she is stranded in Tangier, waiting for permission to resume digging for Neanderthal artefacts in the Caves of Hercules, near the sea. For anyone who has seen CASABLANCA, the milieu is familiar. Morocco has been under the control of Spain since the fall of France. Nazis are everywhere. But Sampson stays, partly in the hope that the dig will be reopened and partly because crossing the Atlantic at this time would be dangerous. Lily sees a German pass a piece of paper to a Frenchwoman with a toy poodle in a cafe. She follows the German back to her hotel where she sees him entering her room. Professor Hammond Drury, the man who hired her for the dig, passes by and she tells him what she had seen. They go into her room, by now empty of intruders, and Drury finds a bug in a pipe in the bathroom which he disables. He takes her to a cafe, where they meet Bill Donovan (yes, that Donovan, of the Office of Strategic Services). Lily is then asked to work for the US government in order to help Operation Torch, the 1942 invasion of North Africa by the Allied forces. THE TORCH OF TANGIER may be less a mystery than a social history of the times and people in North Africa during the war, but it is a fascinating picture of a mysterious place in a critical time. After Baron retired, she got bored, so at the age of 75 she wrote her first novel, THE FLY HAS A HUNDRED EYES, (sort of a misnomer, since a fly has 1000 eyes, but she is an archeologist, not a biologist) which was published by a small but elite press. Poisoned Pen Press was astute enough to publish her second book, THE TORCH OF TANGIER, which is a highly polished work by an 81-year-old .
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, April 2006
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