The Man Next Door by Mignon G. Eberhart was first published in 1944 and is set in Washington and as you would expect of a book set then its subject involves World War 2.

Steve Blake’s older brother was kiiled at Pearl Harbour and as Steve has always been patriotic that just made him all the more determined to join up and do his bit, but it wasn’t to be. Steve is too useful elsewhere, he had been a brilliant lawyer and dabbled in politics but latterly he had become the executive president of an airline manufacturing company, a very important job in wartime.

He is living with his widowed sister-in-law at the moment and her younger sister Angela is throwing herself at Steve but his secretary Maida is also in love with him, he’s a popular guy, except with the chap next door, Walsh Rantoul who keeps picking fights with Steve.

This book involves enemy agents and I suppose it was a bit like those posters Walls Have Ears during the war. It shows how people could get caught up in nefarious activities, dangerous to their country. It was a good read.

America during World War 2 is something which I’m not too familiar with. I was a bit perplexed when Maida looked up at the sky and thought ‘No air raids yet.’ But the US was never in any danger of being bombed, apart from far flung Hawaii. There were no German aircraft carriers and the Japanese would have had to have sailed around Cape Horn to get to Washington DC, but it must have been something which people still worried about – being bombed.