Private Schulz

The revised, expanded version of Martin Noble's black comic novel, adapted from Jack Pulman's much-loved and highly acclaimed Royal Television Society award-winning television series.

A few weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War, recently released convict Gerhardt Schulz is transferred from an underpants factory to the SS. Private Schulz is determined to sit out the war but, under the fiendish Major Neuheim, he is soon involved in kidnapping British spies on the Durch border and bugging rooms in Berlin's notorious Salon Kitty brothel.

It is here that he falls in love with Fraulein Bertha Freyer, the high-class prostitute with a psychological block that prevents her from doing it with anyone below the rank of Major. When the British begin dropping clothing coupons on Germany, Schulz comes up with a retaliatory scheme for swamping Britain with forged five pound notes. When against all odds Adolf Hitler himself approves the scheme, Private Schulz finds himself being parachuted into England to bury a canister of fivers in the Kent countryside. Schulz just needs a personal plan to get out of the war alive - with a few leftover notes.

Reviews of the 1st Edition:

I absolutely treasure my copy of Private Schulz. The novel is both compelling and first rate. (Richard Gould)

Martin Noble's novel based on Jack Pulman's Private Schulz is the funniest book I've read since The Good Soldier Schweik. (George A. Athans)

If you laughed at the frustrated, unfortunate Private Schulz in the recent BBC television series, then you will love the book version. The novel is able to go into more detail than the TV original, both in characterisation and plot. The result is a finely drawn and hilarious tale of the SS plan to flood wartime Britain with forged £5 notes - with Schulz as the unwitting and unwilling private using the scheme to make some dishonest money for himself. (Evening Echo)

If you liked the series, you'll probably love the book. Jack Pulman never lived to see his creation on screen, and the script was novelised expertly by Martin Noble. Set in the Second World War, the events cover the clever but hapless Schulz's attempts to get hold of some of the money his SS bosses have literally been making from a wartime opportunity: the forged English five pound notes of Operation Bernhardt, designed to disrupt the British economy just when it needs to work. The novel goes beyond the limits of the series, and fills in all the characters further, and introduces new ones, who all stand in Schulz's way at various times, or help him in any way they can.

Schulz's story is a tale of the powerlessness of the individual in the face both of totalitarian regimes and incredible bad luck. Schulz, his frightful boss Major Neuheim and his opportunistic collaborator Bertha all find out in their own ways that the ill-gotten gains that come to them have been created out of evil, and that no good will come of them, which turns it into a modern Midas Touch, in some respects, and an examination of the unforgiving ways of greed, and its dubious rewards.

Martin Noble has done real justice to Jack Pulman's creation. (Niko Nezna)