The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars (Neversink) - Softcover

Maurice Dekobra was born in Paris in 1885 and first became known as a subversive journalist before becoming one of Europe’s biggest bestselling novelists in the 1920s and ’30s. He taught at the University of Berlin, shot big game in Africa, canoed on the Nile, and translated Defoe, Jack London, and O. Henry (among others) into his native French. In Europe, he remains an author of great renown—even meriting his own adjective, dekobrisme, for his stylistic invention.

Neal Wainwright translated many of Maurice Dekobra’s books and the two became close friends—so close that Dekbobra dedicated The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars to him.

René Steinke is the author of the novels The Fires and Holy Skirts (2005 National Book Award finalist), a fictionalized account of the life of the artist Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Bookforum, TriQuarterly and elsewhere, and she teaches writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

This may be the most popular book you’ve never heard of. French author Dekobra (born Maurice Tessier) was wildly popular between the world wars, and The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars (1925) was an international best-seller. Though largely forgotten since then, its quick-moving intrigue set in widely dispersed European locales—before the jet set, there was the train set—helped provide a template for a whole new genre. (In acknowledgment, Alan Furst gave the book a cameo in The Foreign Correspondent, 2006.) Its contemporary popularity owed much to the character of Lady Diana Wynham, the “madonna” of the title, a beautiful playgirl who makes no apology for her long list of lovers or her extravagant lifestyle. But the narrator is Prince Séliman, who serves as Wynham’s unpaid secretary while recovering from a nasty breakup. He’s a perfect gentleman, but that doesn’t keep him from enjoying the frisson of his lady’s hugs and kisses. When the instability of Sumatran rubber and Bengal oil ruins Lady Diana’s finances, she attempts to recover Georgian oil fields lost to Soviet nationalization. A high-ranking Communist official, Varichkine, offers assistance in exchange for a night in bed; Lady Diana ups the ante by extracting a marriage proposal. Go-between Séliman, not quite a pimp, is sent to the field where Varichkine’s mistress, “the Marquise de Sade of Red Russia” and another powerful, complicated character, lies in wait. The sexual politics will seem as odd today as the erotic overtones are tame, but this nutty mix of sex farce, spy novel, political tract, and bantering comedy is still a uniquely flavored treat. --Keir Graff