The Peddler's Trade

The Peddler's Trade is a picaresque, satirical novel based on my five years in West Africa from 1955 to 1960. The central character, through a series of comical accidents, finds himself working for the Spillswell Flour Company while, without knowing it, carrying the credentials of a clandestine agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. He stumbles along the West coast of Africa in the throes of becoming independent as corrupt and incompetent colonial regimes are about to be replaced by equally corrupt and incompetent African governments. Behind the sardonic humor the book dramatizes the tragic chaos about to envelop the region. A chaos which continues in more virulent form today. The feckless central character rides an airline as ludicrous as Don Quixote's Rosinante flown by a drunken, lubricious former Polish fighter pilot while falling in love with the supposed Chanteur Sewing Machine representative, Leila Defesse, who is in reality an agent of the French CIA, the Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure. The book mirrors the satirical works of Evelyn Waugh in the nineteen thirties, "Scoop" and "Black Mischief" in which Waugh painted a devastatingly prescient portrait of the African disaster looming over the horizon. Still the best two books ever written on the Dark Continent.