Joan Brady’s America’s Dreyfus

The Hiss case “is probably the biggest and longest-lasting cover-up in history,” Joan Brady told an interviewer from The Guardian shortly after her 2015 book, America’s Dreyfus: The Case Nixon Rigged, was published in England (an American edition, from Arcade Publishing, is scheduled for the fall of 2016).

Joan Brady

People find the case “terrifyingly complex,” she notes elsewhere. “But if you start right at the beginning, you can see that it’s just a hunt. It’s one man tracking another down, cornering him, taking him out.” In fact, she says, “sometimes the lies and contradictions are so brash and naked that a reader’s jaw literally drops.”

Hailed by critics for her “extraordinary vision” and as “a writer of enormous ability and harrowing power,” Brady, an award-winning American novelist and thriller writer living in England, knew Alger Hiss for over 30 years – but only got interested in his case after his death. When she did, she found herself increasingly outraged by a “manhunt-cum-witchhunt” that transformed “the hero of the United Nations into America’s Judas Iscariot.”

Praised for a “compelling” and “convincing” narrative (as The Spectator put it), America’s Dreyfus, written with the flair of a thriller writer, presents prodigious research as a series of discoveries that, one after another, let her see how “facts had been twisted and distorted to link together chains of events conjured out of nowhere.” The Introduction and first pages of Chapter One of America’s Dreyfus have been included on this site with the author’s permission.