The Schirmer Inheritance is a 1953 novel by Eric Ambler.[1] It was adapted for television in 1957 by ITV.[2]

Plot

George Carey is a former WWII bomber pilot and recently qualified lawyer. In 1951 or 1952,[3] Carey is tasked with going through the Schneider Johnson files, to check that nothing has been overlooked in the search for the heir to the Schirmer fortune.

The search leads through the history of the Napoleonic Wars and a German soldier who defected from the French Imperical Army, through this soldier's 19th Century descendants who immigrated to the US and accumulated there a great fortune - the Schirmer fortune - which was left unclaimed when the direct family line died out with no inheritors to be found.

An extensive serach for more indirect Schirmer relatives finally leads to a German WWII soldier who took part in the Axis Occupation of Greece and who - when the defeat of Nazi Germany was clearly imminent - defected from the Whermacht and joined the Greek Communist guerrilas. As such he took an active part in the Greek Civil War and in the aftermath of the Communist defeat became a leader of the diehard gurrilas holed up in the mountains.

Thus the indefitagable lawyer George Carey finds a paradxical situation: at the very time when the Cold War keeps escalating, a staunch Communist guerrilla leader holed up in the mountains of north Greece turns out to be the sole legal inheritor of a large fortune in Capitalist America. Should he wish to, this Communist has the perfect legal right to come to America and take possesion of that fortune. A tangle to test the talents of even the most capable of lawyers.

References

  1. ^ Lewis, C. Day (26 July 1953). "With a Flair for Creating Alarm; THE SCHIRMER INHERITANCE. By Eric Ambler. 246 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $3". The New York Times. Retrieved 27 December 2021.
  2. ^ Burton, Alan (31 January 2018). Looking-Glass Wars: Spies on British Screens since 1960. Vernon Press. ISBN 978-1-62273-290-6.
  3. ^ Wolfe, Peter (1993). Alarms and epitaphs : the art of Eric Ambler. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. p. 89. ISBN 0879726032.
Allikas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Schirmer_Inheritance
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