The Boys From Brazil

Spot the snifter of a Nazi flag on the front cover, there’s something about the title 'The Boys From Brazil' that suggests a group of closely connected colleagues going about their business, probably dirty business, and when you discover who the BOYS really are it blows you away.

My third Ira Levin novel after the fantastic Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives and here we go again with a suspense/thriller from 1976 that slowly burns and keeps you guessing from beginning to end.

Not directly related - if you’ve seen the movie Inglourious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino you’ll remember the Jew hunter played by Christoph Waltz, reminiscent of Joseph Mengele or ‘The Angel of Death’, a real and diabolical character portrayed in this book, and his counterpart, the main protagonist from The Boys From Brazil, Ezra Lieberman as the Nazi hunter who spends his life exposing evil and lecturing about it so that no-one will ever forget.

It’s clever yin-yang writing giving you no idea why the Nazi characters act the way they do or how or if they’re going to be stopped.

However, The Boys from Brazil isn’t quite Ira Levin’s best novel but more like a police thriller with less personal horror than his other books, with lots of historical fiction as it takes you around the world, from Brazil to the USA, and across Europe.

It also feels a bit dated and not quite as burning hot or relevant today, and there are multiple references to very old currencies such as the Brazilian cruzeiro, but it’s a terrific book and worth hunting down the accompanying 1978 movie for buddy read discussion in the reading group Horror or Heaven!