The Rheingold Route
by Arthur Maling
Summary
John Cochrane used to be a United States Treasury agent. He now lives in London under an assumed name, divorced, stranded and making a living as an illegal currency courier, which in the late 1970s meant carrying other people's money across European borders in ways their governments would not have approved of.
A man called Peter Evans telephones and asks for a meeting. The job that follows looks routine and does not stay that way, and Cochrane finds himself moving across Europe on a route that gives the novel its title, after the Rheingold Express, the luxury train that ran from the Netherlands down into Switzerland.
This is a professional's thriller rather than a spy novel. There is no ideology in it and nobody is saving anything. Maling is interested in procedure, in how money actually moves and what the man carrying it has to think about, and the tension comes from competence under pressure rather than from chases.
It reads like what it is, a well made commercial thriller from 1979, and the period detail is now half its charm: a Europe of border posts, physical cash, telephone boxes and train timetables, where a man with a false name can genuinely disappear and nobody can reach him between cities.
It is not a lost masterpiece and it does not pretend to be. It is a tight, adult, unshowy piece of work by a writer who knew exactly what he was doing and had no interest in doing more than that, which is a rarer virtue than it sounds.
Historical Context & Significance
The Rheingold Route was published by Harper and Row in 1979 and won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1980. It was also nominated for a National Book Award, an unusual reach for a genre thriller of that period.
Arthur Maling was a Chicago writer who came to fiction after years in the family shoe business, and much of his work drew on the financial world in a way that was uncommon in crime writing before the 1980s.
He is now among the least remembered Edgar winners. The novel is out of print, he has had no revival, and he is encountered mostly by readers working through the Edgar list in order. That is worth stating rather than dressing up. A prize list is a record of what one set of judges valued in one year, and a book can be entirely competent, entirely deserving on the night, and still slip out of print within a generation.