a contemporary writer of short stories from whom truth of feeling, splendidness of insight, and a human beauty both aching and real can more confidently be expected."

Though Leffland's interest in how characters measure their responsibility to others remains constant, her fiction covers a wide range of tone and subject matter. In contrast to the bleak lives portrayed in Last Courtesies, says Warga, the novel Rumors of Peace is "about growing up in Northern California during World War II, packed with the aches and pains of adolescence and emotionally armed by the impact of the war." Suse, a girl from a happy family, nurses her fear and rage by following daily news reports of the war and calms herself to sleep by picturing dead and wounded Japanese soldiers. This obsession is interrupted by her infatuation with a Jewish refugee some time after reading Madame Bovary, and by her friendship with two sisters, Peggy and Helen Maria. Peggy becomes a social climber; Helen Maria studies Greek history and becomes an asset to Suse's understanding of world events. "Suse … brings to life Leffland's concern with the nature of moral growth," Linda B. Osborne observes in the Washington Post Book World. Throughout the novel, Suse grapples with questions about war that lead her into the enigmatic heart of human nature: "Why do diplomats argue with detached elegance while soldiers die? Why do some people persecute others? Why does mankind repeat the mistakes of war? Finding no answers from adults, she attacks these questions with her own curiosity, stubbornness, and anger," Osborne relates. And when the bombing of Hiroshima ends the war, Suse understands that the event "brings no resolution to the puzzle of war itself," leaving Suse in a world full of moral questions where the opposition is not so clearly defined, the reviewer adds.

Like the young heroine of her bildungsroman, Leffland was deeply affected by the human cost of the war that came no nearer to her childhood home than Pearl Harbor. During World War II, Leffland was terrified of dying in a bombing raid. She felt intense loathing for the German invaders who were trampling her ancestral homeland. Leffland was still a girl when she became fascinated with Goering, who loomed larger than life in stories told by European relatives. Her fascination later culminated in obsession. On a trip to Yugoslavia in 1977, the author took a side trip to Germany where she visited the places where Goering had lived as a child, had risen to power, and had been condemned for war crimes. After finishing Rumors of Peace, she studied German and began concentrated research on Goering, gathering biographical information and the names of people who could answer her questions.

In 1979, Leffland went to Germany looking for materials on Goering and was aided by his nephew, who had amassed a room full of Goering memorabilia. She was also fortunate to find a man who had once served as Goering's bodyguard, who put her in touch with others who had known the Reichs-marschall. Leffland's book makes use of many of the facts she discovered on that trip, she told Publishers Weekly interviewer Sonja Bolle: "The book is as truthful as I could make it…. But I was free to invent where there were no facts, and of course to omit or to change facts, because of the necessity of making a novel as balanced and believable as possible. In the course of my research, I am sure there must be things I misinterpreted or misunderstood. But I came across inaccuracies in history books, too." She also told Bolle, "I hope that my presentation of Goering shows the sides of him that are overlooked in the various biographies."

Critics concur that Leffland's portrait of the creator of the Gestapo and the death camps is as balanced and insightful as her treatment of fictional characters. Though she takes no pains to mask Go-ering's dark side, she presents him also as a charismatic leader, a loyal friend, an animal lover, and a discerning art critic. He was vulnerable as well as powerful, and eventually lost his position as Hitler's adviser. Don G Campbell notes in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that Leffland's Goering "emerges as probably the most … popular, and perhaps the brightest mind in that twisted inner circle of perverted talents surrounding Hitler…. We are left to wonder: What turns would those massive talents have taken against a different historic background?" A Publishers Weekly reviewer concludes that although Leffland's subject "remains essentially an enigmatic and unappealing character, the growth of his complicity in his country's moral depravity makes absorbing reading."

The Knight, Death and the Devil sheds light not only on the life of Goering, but on the political movement in which he played a prominent role. Thomas Keneally remarks in the New York Times Book Review, "Among other things, [Leffland] gives us a credible sense of why Nazism inflamed so many imaginations. We feel with Goering and others the drag of that dark seduction, the sense of 'entrance to something extraordinary, something absolutely new and breathtakingly alive.' Ms. Leffland's handling of such Nazi dramas as the creepy reconciliation of randy Dr. Goebbels, Minister for Propaganda, and his wife, Magda—a couple 'lodged deeper than ever in the core of the mythos'—is impeccable."

Chicago Tribune Books critic Joseph Coates places Leffland's book among those novels that inform more effectively than the more formal works of history or political science. Coates explains, "By brilliantly dramatizing [the] process—in which victims become oppressors, then victims of their own oppression—Leffland has given us an epic for our century, a tragedy with the narrative tug of a riptide that sweeps the reader through 50 years of mankind's worst moments. Seldom has history been so compelling, or appalling." Keneally concludes, "Those who have spent either much or little time looking at this era will be fascinated by the richness of [Leffland's] picture and the authenticity of this massive work."

Source: Contemporary Authors Online, "Ella Leffland," in Contemporary Authors Online, The Gale Group, 2001.