Dragon's Teeth is a 1942 novel by Upton Sinclair.
It is the third in Sinclair's 11-volume "World's End" series, telling the story of the early 20th century through protagonist Lanny Budd. Like all novels in the series, Budd as the point-of-view character finds himself in the company of prominent people, observing great historical events and sometimes participating in them and influencing them.
This edition of the series takes place between 1930 and 1934. Lanny, a child of privilege—his father owns a munitions company, Budd Gunmakers—has married into even more money. As the story opens, his wife Irma Barnes Budd is delivering their first child. The Barnes/Budd clan is rich enough, even with the recent stock market crash, that the family can afford to take cruises on a yacht around the Mediterranean whenever they like. His sister Bess has married a musician named Hansi Robin, a German Jew. When the Nazis take over Germany in January 1933, life for Bess's in-laws gets very bad. Ultimately Lanny must rescue his brother-in-law's family from the clutches of the Nazis, even as Germany itself approaches another crisis with the Night of the Long Knives in 1934.
No connection between this novel and The Dragon's Teeth, the TV Tropes Useful Notes article about Chinese nuclear weapons.
Tropes:
- Author Tract: Lanny's friend Rick is so upset by Ramsay MacDonald betraying the Labor Party and entering into a coalition with the Conservatives that he writes a whole play about it called The Dress-Suit Bribe.
- Big Ol' Unibrow: An SS goon murders Hugo Behr right in front of Lanny, then swings the gun around and begins interrogating Lanny. Lanny cannot help but notice the "black eyebrows that met over his nose."
- Bittersweet Ending: Verging towards Downer Ending. The good news is that Lanny gets out of Nazi Germany safely. He also succeeds in getting Freddi Robin out of the clutches of the Gestapo and to safety. But Freddi is a broken man and the once jovial clarinetist shows Lanny the "claws" that his hands are now, tells Lanny that the Nazis broke all of his fingers, and begs for drugs to kill himself with. And if that weren't depressing enough, Lanny is left weeping in the last paragraph of the novel, reflecting on how his dream of uniting the peoples of Europe through socialism has failed, and instead another war is coming.
- Book Burning: Happens in Germany soon after the Nazi takeover, to Lanny's disgust.
- Call-Forward: As Lanny passes from France into Germany he thinks about how the French are able to do political violence to each other (a riot was just bloodily suppressed) because the Maginot Line keeps them safe from the Germans. Six years after this time setting and two years before Dragon's Teeth was published, the Germans bypassed the Maginot Line by going through the Low Countries, and conquered France.
- Calling Parents by Their Name: Lanny calls his father "Robbie", not seemingly out of active dislike, but at least partially because his mother and father never married.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: Lanny is being held in a Gestapo prison. He is made to watch as the Gestapo beat one Solomon Hellstein, a Jewish banker and an old acquaintance of Lanny's, whom the Gestapo suspect of smuggling gold out of Germany.
- Continuity Nod: Lanny watches Hitler giving a speech and reflects on how Hitler hasn't changed since Lanny saw him speak in a Munich beer hall in 1923. That's a reference to second Budd novel Between Two Worlds and how Lanny was there for the Beer Hall Putsch.
- Cut-and-Paste Note: With a dash of Spy Speak mixed in, as Lanny gets a letter that is nothing but "Ja wohl" made out of newspaper letters and pasted to a piece of paper. This is the pre-arranged signal from Hugo that Freddi is alive but is being held in Dachau.
- Day Hurts Dark-Adjusted Eyes: "The sunlight smote Lanny's eyes like a blow" when he is finally brought out after spending several days in an SS prison cell.
- Day of the Jackboot: It comes as a shock, even to the Nazis themselves, when they take power on January 30, 1933 near the end of the first volume. Things in Germany start getting very rapidly worse.
- Embarrassing First Name: Lanny's mother, a "famous international beauty", is called—Beauty. Beauty is said to dislike her real first name, Mabel.
- Foreshadowing: For the whole Lanny Budd series. Lanny reflects on how he and his wife Irma are pretty much polar opposites politically, how Irma doesn't like Jews and doesn't like Lanny's Socialist friends and is a little too tolerant of Nazis. All this makes him reflect that if he keeps up with his anti-Nazi activity it might cost him his marriage. In the next Lanny Budd book, Wide Is the Gate, Lanny and Irma get divorced.
- Greedy Jew: Discussed Trope in a conversation between Lanny and Johannes Robin, German-Jewish businessman and Bess's father-in-law. He tells Lanny that Jews are "traders" because they were driven from their homeland, and that Jews have to face prejudice everywhere.
- Guilt by Coincidence: One of the terrifying stories of the Blood Purge told to Lanny is how one Willi Schmidt, a music critic, was mistaken for SA Gruppenfuhrer Willi Schmidt, a different man. Schmidt the music critic was taken out of his home and murdered.
- Historical Domain Character:
- Lanny, being a rich and well-connected young American man, gets an audience with Adolf Hitler himself. Lanny is opposed to Hitler's views but notes how Hitler can turn on the charm for an audience. While Lanny's there another Real Life person, Gregor Strasser, drops by, and Lanny witnesses Hitler scream at Strasser for questioning Hitler's decisions. Three years later, after the Nazis have seized power, Lanny uses his job—he's a dealer in fine art—to again get another audience with Adolf, in the hopes of freeing Lanny's brother-in-law Freddi Robin.
- Leon Blum, the socialist who a few years after this setting would become Prime Minister of France, stops by Lanny and Irma's for a chat.
- When Lanny is making the rounds in Berlin trying to get his sister's father-in-law out of the clutches of the Gestapo, he meets with Joseph and Magda Goebbels and then with Hermann Goering.
- Idle Rich: Lanny is "an amiable playboy who traveled about on a hundred-dollar-an-hour yacht, making beautiful music, reading books of history and psychic research." He deals in art, but really only to occupy his time. Lanny is a socialist and does sometimes feel guilty about all his privilege.
- Info Dump: Lanny calls his reporter buddy Pete, who is looking to run a story about Irma giving birth. In a single paragraph Lanny reflects on how the story will say that Irma is the daughter of a "utilities magnate" who died and left her $23 million, that Irma's mom is "one of the New York Vandrighams", and that Lanny himself is the son of Robert Budd of Budd Gunmakers Corporation. This paragraph catches up readers who might have missed the first two books in the Lanny Budd series.
- It Will Never Catch On: Characters just won't believe that Hitler is a real threat. Johannes Robin thinks that if the Nazis do come to power, they'll be too busy with "real world problems" to persecute the Jews. Lanny's Uncle Jesse, the communist, says that if Hitler takes power, the German Communist Party will hold strong.
- N-Word Privileges: Lanny talks on the phone with a friend of his, Italian-American journalist Pietro "Pete" Corsatti. He remembers Corsatti's habit of referring to his fellow Italian-Americans as "wops."
- Old Money: Irma comes from "the New York Vandrighams," an old money family of Dutch stock. Lanny is rich too, but Irma has the conservative attitudes of her class which sometimes causes conflict with her socialist husband.
- Overly-Nervous Flop Sweat: A couple of times during the Spooky Séance, Lanny observes the sweat breaking out on Zaharoff's brow as Madame Zelensky the medium starts revealing some embarrassing secrets, like how Zaharoff did time for theft when he was young.
- Panicky Expectant Father: The book stars with Lanny, in a waiting room of a maternity hospital, stressing out over what's taking so long as Irma is in labor.
- The Purge: The Night of Long Knives aka the Blood Purge, June 30, 1934. Hitler wipes out the left wing of the Nazi Party and basically destroys the SA. Rohm and Strasser are murdered and Lanny sees an SS man shoot Lanny's friend Hugo Behr through the head.
- Sexy Backless Outfit: "Where the back of the dress might have been there was nothing but Irma," as Lanny's wife hosts their first big society party.
- Slumming It: In what the narration calls a "slumming-tour", Lanny and his spoiled Idle Rich aristocrat friends go to visit that temple of working class New York amusement, Coney Island. They are all shocked by the teeming masses of humanity filling up the beach. Lanny, for all his talk of socialism and the betterment of the workers, is disgusted, thinking that the regular folks visiting the Amusement Park have an "emptiness of mind.""Irma, who monopolized a half-mile of ocean front, was disgusted that anyone should be content to squat upon ten or a dozen square feet of it."
- Some of My Best Friends Are X: Lanny eventually calls out his own wife, Irma for being an anti-Semite (she is). She counters by saying that while she doesn't like a lot of Jews, she's best friends with Freddi and the Robin family.
- Spooky Séance: The Budds are so rich that they take a medium, Madame Zelensky, on their Mediterranean cruise just for the amusement. Madame Zelensky gives a seance to Lanny's father's friend, the arms dealer Zaharoff. She, or rather her spirit guide "Tecumseh" (not that one), proceeds to tell a series of extremely embarrassing secrets about Zaharoff that spook the hell out of him.
- A Storm Is Coming: Lanny is trying hard to talk his sister's Jewish father-in-law, Johannes Robin, into leaving Germany after the 1933 Nazi takeover. Johannes doesn't appreciate the gravity of the situation and thinks that maybe he'll go out on his yacht when the weather gets better. Lanny says, very meaningfully, "The weather is going to get worse."
- This Is a Work of Fiction: The story is proceeded by a disclaimer where Sinclair insists that his work is not a Roman à Clef (he actually uses that phrase) and the fictional characters are wholly fictional. This was somewhat disingenuous on Sinclair's part, as he obviously at least got the name "Budd" from the Real Life Budd Company, steel manufacturers who made armaments during World War I.
- Title Drop: On the very last page of the book, as Lanny thinks about how the people of Europe have set themselves up for another violent cataclysm.He had traveled here and there over its surface, and everywhere had seen men diligently plowing the soil and sowing dragon's teeth—from which, as in the old legend, armed men would some day spring.
- Two-Act Structure: Originally published in two volumes. Part I is basically Lanny and his friends observing and talking about politics. Then the Nazis take power in Germany and Part II is much darker.
