Merlin at War: Influences: Guest Post by Mark Ellis

Mark Ellis is a thriller writer from Swansea, Wales and a former barrister and entrepreneur. He is the creator of Frank Merlin, a Scotland Yard detective fighting crime in World War II London. The third and latest of the series, Merlin At War is being published in the U.S. on October 12th. Mark is a member of the Crime Writers’ Association and the International Thriller Writers and divides his time between London and Oxford.

Mark Ellis:
Merlin at War: Influences

I am a late starter as an author. I only began to write properly after a thirty year career in business. In the latter part of that career I co-founded a computer services business with a good friend. We built the company up and were fortunate enough to sell it after ten years to the American corporation NCR. At that point I seized the opportunity to pursue my lifelong ambition of becoming a writer. In July of this year, the third book in my series about a World War II London detective, Frank Merlin, was published. It is my plan to follow Merlin in his adventures all the way through the war. Princes Gate, my first Merlin book, is set in January 1940, the time of what is now known as ‘the phoney war.’ Stalin’s Gold, the second, is set in September 1940, when the London Blitz was launched and the Battle of Britain raged. The latest book, Merlin At War, is principally set in June 1941, just after the Battle of Crete and just before Hitler invaded Russia. At this pace of historical progression, I obviously have a good deal more writing to do to get Merlin to peace in 1945!

Why did I choose to write about the WWII period? There were a number of influences. My parents lived through the war and my father fought in it. My father died when I was very young but my mother told me many fascinating stories about the period and life on the Home Front. Apart from hair-raising stories of the mass bombing and burning of my home town Swansea by the Luftwaffe, she had many interesting tales of how ordinary life carried on despite the existential threats all around. Using her railway worker’s free pass she would travel up to London from Wales with her friends at weekends to see the sights of the capital and to dance the nights away with dashing officers, even as the German bombs and doodlebugs rained down. Through this and other of her stories, I realised that as the nation battled valiantly for survival, ordinary people tried to carry on living ordinary lives. People dated, married, had babies, laughed, cried, fought, ate, drank, smoked and died natural deaths. They also stole, robbed, raped and murdered and did so at a greater rate than before in peacetime. Reported crime in England rose by almost sixty per cent between 1939 and 1945. Turning all this over in my mind as I contemplated what to write, it seemed to me that this period would a perfect one in which to set detective stories. And so this fascinating world became the world of Frank Merlin.

As to literary influences, there are too many to list here but here are a few who have been particularly important.

1. Georges Simenon – one of the most prolific authors of the 20th century and my favourite detective fiction author. His great creation, Jules Maigret, is one of the giants of the genre. One of his favourite pieces of advice, which I try to always bear in mind, is to avoid being ‘too literary’. By this he meant that writers should avoid unnecessary adjectives, adverbs or other words which are included just to make an effect. He strove for a simplicity and directness in his writing which I think enhances the power of his stories.

2. John Buchan – the author of the first adult thriller I read, The Thirty Nine Steps. I remember devouring it in a day when I was about eleven. He was a master of gripping plots. Greenmantle, the sequel to The Thirty Nine Steps, features in an unusual way in my new book.

3. Evelyn Waugh – not a thriller writer of course but he wrote a trilogy of books, known as The Sword of Honour series, set in World War II, in which there is a wonderful portrayal of life in the period. His main character, Guy Crouchback, like Waugh himself, took part in the Battle of Crete, which features in the opening scene of Merlin At War. A writer with a classically elegant and assured style much to be admired.

4. Alan Furst – the only living author in this list, Furst has written a string of masterful spy novels set in or just before WWII. He beautifully recreates the seedy, dark world of espionage in wartime Europe. He is often compared to Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, two other authors who have greatly influenced me.

5. Patricia Highsmith – creator of the great anti-hero Tom Ripley. Highsmith makes the reader stick up for Ripley, a sociopath and murderer, no matter how awful his crimes. I think of her when I'm devising my villains.

In addition to the authors above, I owe a major debt to the many excellent non-fiction writers on whose books about WWII events and personalities I have drawn and continue to draw. And then there are the many superb thriller and mystery authors writing today whose work I read avidly for pleasure and education. It seems to me that we are living in another golden age of the genre and hooray for that!

Rough Cider in the Making: Peter Lovesey

The latest issue of Mystery Readers Journal (33:2) focuses on Murder in Wartime  Buy this back issue! Available in hardcopy or as a downloadable PDF.

I decided to post some of the articles here on Mystery Fanfare. This one is by Peter Lovesey. Peter is one of my favorite authors--and one of my favorite people! Peter Lovesey has been a crime writer since 1970. He was guest of honor at this year’s CrimeFest and will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2019 Bouchercon in Dallas. 

Peter Lovesey: 
Rough Cider in the Making

The book of mine closest to my own experience is Rough Cider, written over thirty years ago in 1986. It has remained in print and is often mentioned by readers as a personal favourite, a non-series ‘one-off’ written in the first person as if by a university lecturer, who is persuaded or compelled to recall traumatic events from 1943 in rural England during World War II. Much of it drew on my own memories of being made homeless and moved from suburban London to a farm in the West Country.

In 1944 my home was destroyed by a V-1 rocket, one of those pilotless planes that Hitler sent over from France. Miraculously, all my family survived while everyone in the other half of the semi-detached house was killed. My mother had gone shopping when the air-raid siren sounded. She had left two of her three sons in the house. I was at school nearby and our father was away in the army. Mother had told my brother John, who was 14, to make sure that if the warning came he took my younger brother, Andrew, who was 3, under the Morrison shelter—a cast-iron table that had been offered by the government to all houses within range of the rockets. The table held up under the weight of the rubble and the two boys were dug out alive.

Being homeless, we slept for a few nights on the vicar’s living-room floor until arrangements were made to send us to a temporary home out of London. So my mother and her three sons took a long train journey to Cornwall in the West Country and were found accommodation on an isolated farm. The farmer and his wife and grown-up son had no choice but to accept this family from miles away. We were ‘billeted’—to use the terminology of the time. With hindsight I can understand how our hosts must have felt to have a woman in a state of shock and three noisy kids foisted on them at harvest time, but for us it was difficult to understand why we were not more welcome. The farmhouse was dark inside and lit by oil-lamps, and had curtains across all the doors to keep draughts to a minimum. As an 8-year-old, I found it spooky. Good thing I wasn’t without my family, as many so-called evacuees had found themselves earlier in the war when they were sent to the country for their own safety.

We didn’t remain there long—perhaps as little as a month. My father, on compassionate leave, found us a temporary house back in London, and we returned, much relieved, to the bomb-infested suburbs. But the memory of that time is still vivid in my mind. When I came to write Rough Cider forty years later, it was easy to get back into the thought process of a child, watching events unfold without fully understanding them. I began the book with a sentence that plunges the reader straight into that world:

“When I was nine, I fell in love with a girl of twenty called Barbara, who killed herself.”

Of course, the writer’s imagination moves on from remembered things to events that didn’t happen in reality. There was no suicide on the farm, no murder and no cider that I can recall. But the novel is centered around a plot involving an American soldier posted to England, and as a boy I did get to meet GIs at the local American Army base. After our return to London, we Lovesey boys were invited to a party put on specially by the GIs for ‘bombed-out’ kids—and it was wonderful. I can still remember the silent films they projected onto a screen for us—Buster Keaton and Chaplin—and the magician, and the food! Food we didn’t know existed. I was one of the first British children to taste a Hershey Bar and chewing gum. No wonder I can understand how the boy Theo came to idolize the soldier called Duke.

So there it is. I mustn’t give away more of the plot. Rough Cider remains a personal favorite for reasons you will now understand.

Three to Get Ready: Guest Post by Bill Schutt

Zoologist and author of Hell’s Gate and Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures,  Bill Schutt’s new nonfiction, Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History, debuted to widespread acclaim in 2017. His 2nd novel, The Himalayan Codex, was released yesterday and has already garnered a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly.

Bill Schutt:
Three to get Ready

Mystery Fanfare readers might find it somewhat odd (but in some ways, I hope, interesting) that in the past year I’ve had three books published: a non-fiction book on cannibalism and a pair of WWII-era thrillers (Books 1 and 2 in the R.J. MacCready series). I should also mention that when I’m not writing or hanging out with my family and friends, I’ve got a full-time gig as a Professor of Biology at Long Island University—Post. So, how did that come about? Perhaps a better question might be: Why haven’t my wife and son murdered me in my sleep? The answers to these and other book-related questions will follow, if you’d care to tag along with me for a few paragraphs.

First bit more personal information (and I promise it will fit into the story). I’m a Cornell-trained zoologist who spent much of the past 25 years studying bats—especially vampire bats (their anatomy, behavior and evolution, mostly). The bulk of that research took place in Trinidad and Brazil as well as my home base at The American Museum of Natural History in NYC (where I’m a research associate in residence). It was in Brazil that I first visited the central plateau region that became the primary setting for my first novel, Hell’s Gate. I remember looking up at the spectacular cliffs and telling a friend and colleague Betsy Dumont, “Jeez, if it were 70 years ago and someone really wanted to hide something from the rest of the world, this would be the place to do it.” Years later, after teaming with my coauthor, J.R. Finch, (and with the guidance of my agent Gillian MacKenzie) we not only came up came up with “something to hide” (a declassified Nazi super weapon), but also an offbeat hero (zoologist and Army Captain R.J. MacCready) to investigate the nefarious Axis plot. Finally, Finch and I added the residents of the plateau cliffs to the mix—the last hundred individuals of a species of prehistoric vampire bat (Desmodus draculae). I knew that these fantastic creatures inhabited the region until fairly recent times and that sealed the deal. Of course we made our vampires a tiny bit larger—with raccoon-sized bodies, 10-foot wingspans and some rather unique predatory behavior. Hell’s Gate came out in June 2016 and we were simply thrilled at the response—many readers commenting on the real-life science in our novel (much of it explained further in an extensive afterward section).

Okay, one book down and two to go.

I had been looking for a follow-up to my first popular science book, Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures, published in 2008. (Readers may be detecting a pattern here.) I’d seemingly found a niche between the sensationalist books that were out there on vampirism and the few scholarly works on the subject. I’d decided to demystify the topic, eliminating the jargon and injecting some humor—where appropriate. Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History (February 2017) turned out to be my next logical step and before you can say, “Don’t eat that!” I was working with Donner Party researchers, wading through mud holes teeming with cannibalistic spade-foot toad larvae, and being served placenta à la osso boco in Plano Texas. Note: Amy Gash, my editor at Algonquin has a strong stomach and a great sense of humor.

Happily, the incredibly talented J.R. Finch and I had signed a two-book deal with William Morrow, working with the amazing thriller editor, Lyssa Keusch. In The Himalayan Codex (June 2017) we decided to take “Mac” (who’s been described as “the Indiana Jones of Zoology”) and his invaluable Brazilian assistant Yanni, to a colder climate—the remote mountain valleys of Tibet. The critters in our novel are bigger this time and the bad guys just as evil. But instead of the young German rocketeer storyline we ran in parallel to Mac’s trek in Hell’s Gate, we decided to alternate our 1946 tale with one in which the Roman historian and naturalist, Pliny the Elder, journeys into the same snow-bound and mysterious region nearly two thousand years earlier. Our readers already know that we’ve populated our novels with interesting real life historical figures (Hitler’s favorite test pilot, Hanna Reitsch, for example in Hell’s Gate) and we plan to do so in the third R.J. MacCready novel, an adventure that takes Mac and Yanni on a Cold War adventure with some seriously nasty surprises. The plan is for us to follow our heroes through the 1950s and beyond, blending the geopolitical events of the day with a touch of cryptozoology. Finch and I hope our readers will continue to come along for the ride.

Is Short the New Long? guest post by Libby Fischer Hellmann

Author Libby Fischer Hellmann, a transplant from Washington DC, moved to Chicago over 35 years ago, where she naturally began writing gritty crime novels. Her 14th book, WAR, SPIES, AND BOBBY SOX, a collection of stories about World War Two on the homefront, will be released March 1, 2017. She has been nominated for a lot of awards in the crime writing community and has even won a few.

Libby Fischer Hellmann
Is Short the New Long?

I’ve never been one to follow trends. When I try, I always seem to catch them just when they’re on their way out. That goes for my writing too. Today’s bulky 400-500 page thrillers are popular, and I envy authors who can write long. I’m not one of them. Here’s my idea of a story:

Well, okay. It’s not that bad. I love creating stories in my head. Figuring out who does what and why. Dreaming up brave protagonists and evil-but- sympathetic villains. That’s the fun part. It’s the writing part that intimidates me. I’ve always felt insecure about the level of my craft, and writing is still the hardest thing I’ve ever done. So I stop when I think I’ve told the story.

The same goes for subject matter and setting. Over the years an enormous body of fiction has been written about World War Two, and I love reading it. In fact, when I recall novels like Nightingale, All The Light We Cannot See, The Book Thief, Sarah’s Key, the Bernie Gunther and Alan Furst crime novels, Unbroken, and The Winds of War, I am gob-smacked by their beauty and power. What could I possibly add?

Still, part of me yearns to write something about that time period, mostly because World War Two was the last era in which there was such clarity between good and evil…such opportunities to create complex, conflicted characters, or explore the timeless themes of heroism, cowardice, and sacrifice.

Another World War Two junkie, herself a prolific reader, encouraged me to try. The very first short story I ever wrote was set in the late ‘30s in Chicago’s Lawndale as the country geared up to fight Hitler. But she nudged me to write more, to go farther. I knew I didn’t have the wherewithal to write about battlegrounds of Europe, Nazis, or the Resistance, but she planted a seed and eventually a story came to me. What if (the two most powerful words for a storyteller, btw) a German refugee was forced to spy on the early years of the Manhattan Project in Chicago? I had been studying espionage techniques for another story, and this was the perfect opportunity to try them out on paper.

But I couldn’t commit to a novel. It was too scary. So I wrote a novella, The Incidental Spy, which begins in 1935 and ends in 1942. It turned out rather well, I thought, so I started to think about a companion novella. I had visited Bletchley Park in the UK and planned to write a novella about spies and espionage across the pond, but it didn’t go well – I just couldn’t make it compelling.

Then, as fate would have it, I was in exercise class when someone started talking about the German POW camp that lay just a mile down the road.

The what? Where?

My ears perked up, and something in my brain clicked. Suddenly I had that feeling that comes to a writer when they know what story they’re going to write next. I started doing research and found that nearly half a million German and Italian POWs were incarcerated in the US between 1943 and 1945. Half a million! That’s all I needed. The companion story to Spy, POW, basically wrote itself. Again, POW was a novella—I told the story in about thirty thousand words. Then I packaged the two novellas together, added the short story I mentioned, and the result is this:

Why novellas instead of a novel? Writing shorter takes enormous pressure off me. Given my insecurities about the era and writing in general, it’s comforting to know I don’t have to sustain a story over seventy thousand words. I can, as Elmore Leonard advised, “leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” I can strip the story down to its essential elements of plot, character, dialogue, and narrative and make sure they work. Plus, I don’t need to do as much research for a shorter story.

In fact, I’m growing fonder of the novella format every day. As a reader, what do you think? Are two novellas as satisfying as one novel?

November on AcornTV: Deep Water, Close to the Enemy

What's new on AcornTV this month?

DEEP WATER
Exclusive U.S. Premiere beginning Monday, November 7, 2016

New four-part Australian drama DEEP WATER makes its exclusive U.S. Premiere on Acorn TV beginning Monday, November 7, 2016, followed by a new episode every Monday through Nov. 28. Inspired by true events, Noah Taylor (Game of Thrones) and Yael Stone (Orange is the New Black) stars as detectives assigned a brutal murder case in Bondi, where they begin to uncover mounting evidence to suggest the killing is connected to a spate of unexplained deaths, "suicides" and disappearances of gay men throughout the 80s and 90s. Available at Acorn.TV and on a variety of devices.

When the mutilated corpse of a young gay man is found in a smart Bondi beach apartment, Detectives Tori Lustigman (Stone) and Nick Manning (Taylor) are assigned the case. Is this a brutal domestic murder, a robbery gone wrong, or a gay hate crime? With mounting evidence to suggest the perpetrator has killed before, they start digging through old investigations. The discovery is shocking. They uncover up to 80 possible murders of gay men in New South Wales that occurred in the ‘80s and ‘90s – unexplained deaths, ‘suicides’ and disappearances. Many of these killings were linked to youth gangs targeting and beating up gay men, a blood sport that went largely unpunished. Is this a result of shoddy police work, indifference, or something far more sinister – prejudice in an era of panic over HIV and AIDS?

Haunted by the disappearance of her teenage brother, Tori's fascination with the case soon turns to fixation. When more ritualistic murders occur with the same bizarre signature, Tori and Nick will need to put their relationships, their careers and their lives on the line to finally reveal the truth.

The series co-stars Danielle Cormack (Wentworth, Rake), Dan Spielman (The Code), William McInnes (The Slap), Jeremy Lindsay Taylor (Serangoon Road), Craig McLachlan (The Doctor Blake Mysteries), Ben Oxenbould (Rake, The Code), Simon Burke (Devil’s Playground), Victoria Haralabidou (The Code), and Simon Elrahi (Janet King).

CLOSE TO THE ENEMY
Exclusive U.S. Premiere beginning Monday, November 14, 2016


Seven-part period drama CLOSE TO THE ENEMY makes its exclusive U.S. Premiere on Acorn TV beginning Monday, November 14, 2016, followed by a new episode every Monday through December 26.

From acclaimed filmmaker Stephen Poliakoff (Perfect Strangers, Lost Prince, Dancing on the Edge), this Acorn TV Original Series and BBC One production features an impressive ensemble cast, including Jim Sturgess (Across the Universe, 21), Alfie Allen (Game of Thrones), Alfred Molina (Spider-Man 2), Angela Bassett (American Horror Story), August Diehl (Inglourious Basterds), Lindsay Duncan (The Honourable Woman), Freddie Highmore (Bates Motel), Robert Glenister (Hustle, Prime Suspect), Charity Wakefield (The Player, Wolf Hall), and Charlotte Riley (Peaky Blinders).

Set in a bomb-damaged London hotel in the aftermath of the Second World War, Close to the Enemy follows intelligence officer Captain Callum Ferguson (Sturgess), whose last task for the Army is to ensure that a captured German scientist, Dieter (Diehl), starts working for the British RAF on urgently developing the jet engine.

Reparations: WWII in Scandinavian Crime Fiction by Barbara Fister

The following article by Barbara Fister appeared in the most recent issue of Mystery Readers Journal: Scandinavian Mysteries (Volume 30:4). This issue is available in Hardcopy or PDF.

Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series. She maintains a website and blog devoted to Scandinavian crime fiction in English translation.

Barbara Fister: 
Reparations: The Second World War in Scandinavian Crime Fiction

Many readers’ perceptions of Scandinavia as a peaceful, socially-progressive region have been shaped by childhood history lessons. Sweden was neutral during World War II. Norwegians bravely resisted German occupation. Finland fought for its independence both from the Soviets and the Nazis. Danes followed their king’s example and wore yellow stars of David to show solidarity with Danish Jews. In fact, these stories are at best half-truths, patriotic narratives that helped Scandinavian countries recover their dignity as they established strong post-war societies.

The reality was messier. Sweden’s iron ore supported German munitions factories and enriched Swedes. Thousands of Norwegians fought for Germany on the Eastern Front. Finland maintained a democratically-elected government throughout the war, but was allied with Germany against the Soviet Union, which had attacked Finland and seized territory. Danes took heroic efforts to help Danish Jews escape deportation to German camps, but neither Jews nor gentiles wore the yellow star in Denmark.

Crime writers have been drawn to debunking these patriotic myths while interrogating national identities, an urgent issue as immigration increased following the end of the Cold War. Neo-Nazi nationalist movements developed strength in the 1990s. Extremist nationalism showed its most horrific face when a white supremacist systematically murdered 77 Norwegians, most of them children, in July 2011. These perturbations have led writers to probe their nations’ historic relationships with Nazism.

Kerstin Bergman writes, in her excellent critical survey, Swedish Crime Fiction: The Making of Nordic Noir that many Swedish writers have undertaken this task, but their historical reckoning only goes so far.  Nazi sympathizers in fiction are never viewed as truly Swedish but rather as aberrations that need to be acknowledged and rejected. In Henning Mankell’s Return of the Dancing Master, a colleague of Kurt Wallander on sick leave investigates a case that reveals an extensive Nazi network hidden beneath the placid Swedish surface. Yet the reader doesn’t conclude that Swedish culture accommodates hateful beliefs; rather, the message is that racism is something foreign that needs to be diagnosed and rooted out, just like the detective’s potentially silencing illness – cancer of the tongue.

Stieg Larsson, who mashed together practically every popular culture trope in his crowd-pleasing Millennium Trilogy, was a left-wing journalist who exposed the doings of the neo-Nazi movement and was the subject of death threats as a result. It’s not surprising that he added to the general misogyny and warped sexual appetites of his wealthy industrialist antagonists in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo a Nazi past.

More recently, Camilla Läckberg addressed the legacy of the war in The Hidden Child. Läckberg’s highly traditional and romantic series features extraordinary murders committed on a picturesque island. The murderers motives are often traced to bad parenting. Läckberg’s happily married protagonists uphold traditional family values and gender roles as they solve crimes. Though The Hidden Child addresses Sweden’s involvement in World War II, it’s sugar-coated. Decent Swedes secretly supported the Norwegian resistance while only horrid people took the side of the Germans. The mystery revolves around a diary and a Nazi medal that one of the series protagonists finds among her mother’s effects which may unlock the mystery of why she was so unloving. The story layers the present investigation and the past, depicting the war experience as if Sweden was an occupied country that bravely resisted the Nazis, not a neutral state that took in Jewish refugees while it provided significant and profitable material support to Germany. Though it’s an effective page-turner that attempts to depict the lasting trauma of war, it paints a rosy picture of Swedish patriotism in wartime.

Åsa Larsson creates a more complex story in Until Thy Wrath Be Past, which also has a layered chronology. In the present, police in northern Sweden are investigating the death of two divers who were searching for a plane that went down in a lake during the war. A dysfunctional family, ruled by an odious old man and his greedy wife had made their wealth during the war when ore mined in the north was shipped to Germany. In this case, the motivations of the Swedes who worked with Germans are more thoroughly explored and the extent of the country’s involvement with the German war machine is exposed, but those involved are depicted as greedy and monstrous outliers who don’t reflect Swedish values.

Perhaps the most intriguing exploration of a Scandinavian nation’s denial of the past is found in Jo Nesbø’s The Redbreast, which also has extensive passages set in the past following the fate of a group of Norwegians who fought the Soviets alongside the Germans during the occupation. After being wounded, one of them ends up in Austria where he falls in love with a nurse and schemes to smuggle her to safety as the world around them burns. In the present, the police are wondering if neo-Nazis will disrupt the celebration of Norwegian Independence day. Detective Harry Hole tries to connect the purchase of an illegal long-range rifle with a series of murders and discovers that the killer they seek likely fought on the Eastern Front, is an excellent sharpshooter, and quite possibly is suffering from multiple personality disorder.

At one point in the novel, a reporter asking a public official about Norway’s occupation likens it the Austrian Anschluss, a notion that the official strongly denies and finds completely puzzling. Yet throughout the novel, the patriotic notion that Norwegians generally supported the resistance is put to the test. In the world of the novel, many Norwegians joined with the Nazis and took their punishment when the war ended. Most were content to support the Nazis until it was clear they were losing the war, at which point, when it was a safe bet, they denounced the occupiers. In this analysis, the rise of neo-Nazism is not simply an aberrant response to immigration but an outgrowth of suppressed history. Eventually the killer does turn out to be two people in one body: a flamboyant Eastern Front sharpshooter coexisting with an elderly man who convinced others he had been a loyal member of the resistance. Nesbø suggests the nation itself is suffering from a split personality – a public persona that is peaceful and tolerant concealing a national identity that is too close to Nazism for comfort.

This historical reexamination of race and identity is extending into new areas. Two recent Danish novels, The Purity of Vengeance by Jussi Adler-Olsen and The Forgotten Girls by Sara Blaedel take a fresh look at punitive ways the Danish state treated women who were deemed defective and locked away, justifying their treatment with eugenic theories as recently as the 1970s. The Nina Borg series by Leena Kaaberbøl and Agnete Friis tackles the difficulties immigrants encounter in contemporary Denmark. Arne Dahl and Jens Lapidus have written ground-breaking series that explore the entanglement of Swedish society with a globalized Europe. Scandinavian writers who have challenged the accepted narrative of the wartime past have contributed to this work by exposing the historic roots of a contemporary challenge: redefining Scandinavian national identities in a multicultural world.

Memorial Day 2012: Joseph Rudolph

Memorial Day is a day to remember those who served our country. My father, Joseph Rudolph, was a Captain in the Army during WWII. He served the front as a physician and received the purple heart. Such stories he told, but not until almost 40 years after the war.

Miss you, Dad.

Joseph Rudolph 1942