Quick Take
- Narration: Karen Cass delivers a confident, intelligent performance that matches the material’s dual registers, journalistic urgency and personal drama, with poise.
- Themes: Journalism under fascism, queer identity in prewar Paris, crime as political metaphor
- Mood: Tense, glamorous, and historically weighted
- Verdict: A brilliantly constructed dual narrative about Janet Flanner’s Paris years that uses a serial killer case to illuminate the political catastrophe unfolding around her, urgent, layered, and superbly written.
I was about two hours into this one when I realized I’d stopped taking mental notes and had simply surrendered to it. That doesn’t happen often with narrative nonfiction, which tends to foreground its own research apparatus in ways that keep you at a slight critical distance. Mark Braude does something different here: he writes about Janet Flanner and Eugen Weidmann as if they are characters in a novel he has assembled from archive materials, and the result is propulsive in a way that most biography simply is not.
I was familiar with Flanner’s New Yorker letters before this, though not in any depth. She signed her Paris dispatches “Genet” for decades, and her voice, sardonic, precise, politically clear-eyed, was one of the more distinctive presences in American journalism between the wars. Braude’s achievement is to show how she became that voice, and to use the disturbing case of Eugen Weidmann, a German con man and murderer who became the last person publicly executed in France, weeks before the outbreak of World War II, as both structural counterpoint and philosophical lens.
Janet Flanner and the Education of a Journalist
The book covers Flanner’s professional transformation from her original New Yorker brief, breezy reports on French art and culture for a self-consciously apolitical magazine, to her increasingly urgent dispatches about the rise of European fascism. Her editor wanted lightness; she delivered warnings. The tension between those two positions, and the story of how Flanner won that argument through the sheer authority of what she witnessed, is one of the book’s most compelling threads.
Braude doesn’t reduce this to a triumphant arc. Flanner struggled with the limits of her platform and her audience’s willingness to receive difficult news. American readers of the 1930s were not particularly eager to be told that something catastrophic was coming. The book is honest about the cost of that willful blindness, and about the specific way it complicated the work of a journalist trying to do her job with integrity.
Weidmann as Historical Mirror
The Weidmann case is genuinely disturbing and genuinely fascinating, and Braude handles it without sensationalism. Weidmann was a German criminal operating in France whose crimes became a media spectacle at exactly the moment when the political climate was making every German-in-France story carry a broader ideological charge. Flanner covered the trial and saw in it a condensed image of everything she had been tracking in her political dispatches: the failure of liberal institutions, the performance of justice, the way ordinary horror gets aestheticized and consumed.
One reviewer describes the book as offering a vision of “the most grim times known in our lifetimes, that of the run up to WWII.” That’s the right frame. The execution, France’s last public one, takes place weeks before the world changes permanently. Braude uses that timing with full dramatic awareness, and the juxtaposition lands.
Karen Cass and the Demands of Dual Narrative
An 11-hour audiobook built around two parallel stories in pre-WWII Paris requires a narrator capable of holding both registers simultaneously, the intellectual cool of Flanner’s journalism and the lurid urgency of the Weidmann case. Karen Cass manages this well. Her voice has the kind of controlled intelligence that suits Braude’s prose without overplaying its literary qualities, and she handles the tonal shifts between Flanner’s professional life and the criminal narrative without making those shifts feel abrupt. The NYT Book Review called the book “endlessly compelling,” and Cass’s narration sustains that quality across the full runtime.
For Listeners Who Came for the LGBTQ History
The book’s LGBTQ genre tag reflects Flanner’s lesbianism and the queer community she inhabited in interwar Paris. Braude handles this dimension with the same intelligence he brings to everything else, Flanner’s relationships and her specific social world among expatriate queer women in Paris is context rather than subject, but it informs her perspective and her access in ways the book acknowledges honestly. Listeners seeking a deeper engagement with queer Paris of the period will want to supplement this with Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank, but as a biographical portrait of a queer woman in that milieu, this is thoughtful and specific.
Who Should Prioritize This One
Essential listening for anyone interested in pre-WWII journalism, the history of The New Yorker, interwar Paris, or the specific way political extremism forces journalists to choose between their editors and their conscience. Also highly recommended for listeners drawn to the crime-as-cultural-lens approach. Skip it only if you have no patience for narrative nonfiction that moves at a considered literary pace.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Janet Flanner, and why does she matter to this story?
Janet Flanner was an Indianapolis-born journalist who wrote a regular ‘Letter from Paris’ for The New Yorker beginning in 1925, signing her dispatches ‘Genet.’ She became one of the most important American voices reporting on the rise of European fascism, often in direct conflict with her editor’s preference for lighter cultural content.
Is the Weidmann murder case the main subject of the book or a secondary thread?
It functions as both structural counterpoint and interpretive lens. Weidmann’s crimes, capture, and execution run parallel to Flanner’s journalistic career, and Braude uses the case as a metaphor for the political catastrophe Flanner had spent years warning her readers about.
How does Karen Cass handle the book’s tonal range between glamour and horror?
Cass is a strong fit for this material. Her narration has the controlled intelligence the journalism sections require, and she handles the tonal shifts between Flanner’s Paris social world and the criminal narrative without forcing the contrast. The 11-hour runtime stays engaging throughout.
Does the book engage seriously with Flanner’s lesbianism and queer community in Paris?
Yes, though as context rather than primary focus. Braude acknowledges Flanner’s relationships and her place in the expatriate queer community of interwar Paris honestly, and shows how that world shaped her perspective and access. Listeners wanting a deeper dive into queer Paris of the period can supplement with Shari Benstock’s scholarship.
