Nicolas Freeling: The Dresden Green (UK 2001)

From the Publisher:
Near the point where France, Germany and Switzerland meet, Louis Koslov, a translator, sits in his favorite bar. Driven by a desire for power and importance, Koslov sees a chance to act, when an assassination occurs and a priceless diamond disappears.

Nicolas Freeling: The Dresden Green. House of Stratus, ISBN: 1842328441 (July, 2001), 200 p., £6.99.

Nicolas Freeling: The Dresden Green (UK 1975)

From the Publisher:
A day off... a ride in the country. Placid enough by the sound of it. But by the time he was back home, Louis Schweitzer had two murders under his belt and the most fabulous gem in all Europe.

The astonishing three days that followed produced the love of his life, a gang of Iron Curtain thugs, the impeccable, menacing Taillefer, a naked girl at gunpoint and four more murders.

Or was it four? The choice, believe it or not, is yours.

Cover photograph by Alan Spain

Nicolas Freeling: The Dresden Green. Penguin, ISBN: 0140029028 (August, 1975), 192 p., 50p.

Nicolas Freeling: The Dresden Green (UK 1969)

From the Publisher:
A day off... a ride in the country. Placid enough by the sound of it. But by the time he was back home, Louis Schweitzer had two murders under his belt and the most fabulous gem in all Europe.

The astonishing three days that followed produced the love of his life, a gang of Iron Curtain thugs, the impeccable, menacing Taillefer, a naked girl at gunpoint and four more murders.

Or was it four? The choice, believe it or not, is yours.

Cover design by Robert Hollingsworth

Nicolas Freeling: The Dresden Green. A peaceful day in the country... two murders and a gem theft... and then three more days of violence, international gangsterism and murder... four murders... Or was it four? Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1969, Penguin #C2902, 192 p., 20p., 4/-.

Nicolas Freeling: The Dresden Green (USA 1968)

From the Publisher:
Louis liked to keep quiet. For too many years he had killed to stay alive (for any side that expediency made suitable); for too long he had had no country, no single loyalty, no identity. And of course, no family. For they had gone up in smoke with the rest of Dresden.

But that was twenty years ago. For twenty years the man who called himself Louis Schweitzer had been living quietly -- very quietly, even sometimes happily -- as a translator for the international organization Europahaus.

Now his privacy, his quiet, his identity had been shattered by a chance cry, by an encounter he might have avoided if his early training hadn't worked so well. He had killed very neatly indeed, and he might have escaped after all, for he was only an accidental intruder.

But Louis was too familiar with the secret ways of governments. He knew he was marked. Because now he carried the Dresden Green -- all forty carats of it -- and for this many men would try to take his life.

Louis was a stubborn man. Indeed, he would not have stayed alive so long if he had not been. And he was determined that no one man, and no conclave of men, should now profit from the ashes of Dresden...

Nicolas Freeling: The Dresden Green. A Ballantine Books Mystery #71107 (September, 1968), 221 p., 60¢.

Nicolas Freeling: The Dresden Green (USA 1967)

From the Publisher:
"Freeling at his best." -- London Evening Standard
Perhaps it was ordained that Louis Schweitzer, who had for twenty years been a quiet, orderly man -- a translator for the international organization Europahaus -- should have been bicycling through the sunny pasture at the moment the man in the ditch croaked out "Thirst."

Louis found the source of the feeble voice, a man in pain, whose life was beginning to ebb, a man much out of place in that rural setting, lying face down in a ditch in city clothes. A man in trouble -- how bad the trouble was Louis didn't realize at once, but he had recognized him as a Russian. The man refused Louis' help; instead ordered him to go to a nearby quince tree and dig in its roots.

Louis was down on one knee digging when something made him look up. A second man was standing there, smiling and pointing a pistol at him. If the man had shot Louis at once, hadn't taken the time to enjoy smiling at him, a Louis who had been dead for twenty years wouldn't have come back to life, wouldn't have left the pistol-holding man with two neat holes in his head.

And wouldn't have found the buried silver box -- and in it the Dresden Green, all forty carats of it.
Dresden -- Louis' nightmare. Dresden -- destroyed in a rain of fire -- and only the Green survived. The Dresden Green, and with it Louis' quiet life, splintered into danger.

Nicolas Freeling, internationally acclaimed, has here written one of his most brilliant and moving novels.

Jacket design by James Barkley

Nicolas Freeling: The Dresden Green. A Harper Novel of Suspense. New York: Harper & Row, 1967, 221 p., $4.95.