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A sensation when it first appeared in 1938, Taylor’s powerful story alerted a complacent, isolationist United States to the rising Nazi menace (alas, too late), all in the guise of a grimly satisfying thriller, easily digested over a lunch hour. Through a sequence of letters starting in 1932 between Max Eisenstein, a Jewish art dealer in San Francisco, and his business partner Martin Schulse, newly repatriated to his native Munich, we witness with alarming immediacy the insidious progress of fascist ideology. Reluctant at first (“Is he quite sane?”), Martin soon falls under the resistless, dehumanizing sway of Germany’s “Glorious Leader,” opening a perilous chasm between the friends. With masterful economy, Taylor (1903–96) uses the silences between letters to disturbing and ultimately devastating effect.