Robert Harris

Robert Harris (born 1957, Nottingham, UK) [- first became known as a journalist and political commentator before turning to historical thrillers and alternate-history fiction. His meticulously researched and highly-praised novel about the Dreyfus case earns his inclusion in this bibliography:

Harris, Robert, (An Officer and a Spy [hc, Knopf, 2014]) 978-0385349581 [pb, Vintage, 2014] 978-0345804853 [See related film] [The focus of the book is not primarily on Captain Alfred Dreyfus himself, but on Colonel Georges Picquart, the French intelligence officer who gradually discovers that Dreyfus — a Jewish officer falsely convicted of treason and exiled to Devil’s Island — is innocent.

The novel opens in Paris in 1895 during Dreyfus’s public degradation ceremony, where crowds scream antisemitic insults as his insignia are torn from his uniform. Picquart initially believes in Dreyfus’s guilt and is rewarded with promotion to head of French military intelligence. But while examining intercepted documents and intelligence reports, he realizes that the real spy is another officer, Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy. As Picquart pushes deeper into the evidence, he uncovers forged documents, institutional corruption, military cover-ups, and an entrenched culture of antisemitism within the French Army and government. His pursuit of truth gradually derails his own career and threatens his life, though he did achieve final vindication and promotion..

The book was translated into French by Natalie Zimmermann and published to wide acclaim in France in 2015. There and elsewhere it served to revive interest in and familiarity with the Dreyfus case and its issues of anti-Semitism, establishment suppressions of inconvenient facts, miscarriage of justice and the important role of whistleblowers in democratic society. Critics widely praised the novel for combining documentary precision with suspense-novel pacing. Harris structures the story almost like a spy procedural, using Picquart’s gradual discovery of hidden evidence to create mounting tension.

The novel won several major prizes, including the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. It was later adapted into the 2019 film An Officer and a Spy (French title: J’Accuse), directed by Roman Polanski, with Harris co-writing the screenplay. See the entry on this film in companion list of Movies-Films-TV Series. [ChatGPT]