Oneworld buys story of Jean Moulin's betrayal

Bill Swainson, editor at large for non-fiction at Oneworld, has bought world English language rights in a narrative non-fiction account of the death of French resistance hero Jean Moulin. Swainson acquired Patrick Marnham’s The House by the River from Veronique Baxter at David Higham Associates.

The book explains “one of the great mysteries” of the French Resistance, the background to Moulin’s death in 1943, the year he was appointed by De Gaulle as head of the Resistance.

Marnham previously wrote about the subject in The Death of Jean Moulin: Biography of a Ghost (John Murray, 2000), but can now reveal a “much bigger and more devastating story”, Swainson said, involving the betrayal of two apparently separate Resistance networks, as well as “a heroic French family, a vast British deception operation, and inter-service rivalry between M15, M16 and SOE."

“A series of extraordinary tip-offs, chance encounters and new discoveries, combined with meticulous research in archives in France and Britain” led to the story being revealed.

Marnham is a former Paris correspondent for the Independent and literary editor of the Spectator, and his previous books include The Man Who Wasn’t Maigret: A Portrait of Georges Simenon (Bloomsbury, 1992) and Wild Mary: The Life of Mary Wesley (Chatto, 2006).

Swainson said: “The storyline of The House by the River is as intricate and ruthless as one of Le Carre’s Cold War thrillers, and yet it is all true, right down to how, as an English student improving his French in the early 1960s, Marnham actually stayed as a guest of one of the Resistance leaders in the very house by the river, not so very many years after the events he is only now able to recount took place.”

Publication is planned for spring 2019.