My French Whore

A dynamic duo is born as multitalented narrator Scott Brick meets multitalented actor, writer, director Gene Wilder. The result is the perfect pairing of author and narrator. In 1918, Midwesterner Paul Peachy enlists and is sent to France. Because he speaks fluent German, he's asked to interrogate the notorious German spy Harry Stoller, who has surrendered to the Allies. Then Paul is captured, but he convinces his German captors and French mistress that he is Stoller. Scott Brick makes the double role of Paul and Harry completely believable. His flawless French and German accents never slide out of character, and he builds the dramatic intensity to the inevitable heartbreaking conclusion. Brick never falters in his narration, and the listener is mesmerized by the surefooted masquerade. M.T.B. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

October 2, 2006
A simple, straight-faced love story about a brave coward and a scarlet woman drives actor Wilder's touching debut novel. (His memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger
, appeared last year.) It's 1918, and Paul Peachy, an unassuming train conductor and amateur actor in Milwaukee, finds his marriage has run out of steam, and decides to enlist as a dough boy. At nearly 30, Paul has seen little of the world, as his naïve and candid dispatches from the French trenches make clear. Paul, who speaks German, is brought in to interrogate notorious German spy Harry Stroller. Soon sent into the front line, Paul deserts and, in an extraordinary sequence, passes himself off as Harry Stroller. Taken to the local schloss
and treated like royalty by the German officials, Paul is given a French whore, Annie Breton, for comfort, and he gradually comes to care for her once she reveals herself to him more than physically. Despite some ensuing heroism, the game's soon up for Peachy, and the novel takes the form of the final, eloquent notebook of a man still finding out who he is.