Taking its title from the shape of the swastika, Crooked Cross was immediately recognised as essential reading and widely praised, including in the pages of the Observer of July 1934, where Gerald Gould judged it “a very good novel” that avoids any “propagandist tendency” by letting “the story stand on its merits”.
Rediscovered, a young English novelist’s warning of the Nazi threat Crooked Cross, Sally Carson’s ‘electrifying masterpiece’ from 1934, to be republished.
Carson’s book, Crooked Cross, predicted the scale of the Nazi threat and is to be republished for the first time this spring, ahead of the 80th anniversary of the end of the second world war.
A 1937 West End production was hailed by the New York Times’ theatre critic as the “tragedy of a Bavarian girl’s love for a Jewish doctor in the early days of the Nazi revolution” that captivated “without indulging in propaganda and without bias”.
The critic for the Times of London also praised Carson’s approach: “The real strength of the play lies in the nature of its criticism of its subject … Through it all she never preaches, or loses touch, through hate or prejudice, with the human beings she represents.
