Searching for Christmas Past: Guest Post by Rhys Bowen

Today I continue our special Christmas Mystery posts with a guest post by Rhys Bowen. Rhys Bowen is the New York Times bestselling author of the Molly Murphy and Royal Spyness mysteries. She also wrote the #1 Kindle bestseller In Farleigh Field and will soon be releasing a new stand-alone novel called The Tuscan Child. Rhys was born and raised in England but now divides her time between California and Arizona.

RHYS BOWEN:
Searching for Christmas Past

I remember my childhood Christmases with great nostalgia. They were simple in the extreme: a few days before Christmas there were good things to buy in the shops. Carol singers stood in groups on the sidewalks or came to our front doors. On Christmas Eve we drove to my grandmother’s house. On the way we stopped to buy a Christmas tree, which was then strapped to the roof of the car. It was never very big, four foot high at the most. When we arrived we decorated it with glass ornaments—some quite lovely in the shape of birds or tiny instruments (my grandfather had been an orchestra conductor).

We went to Midnight mass. I remember when I was old enough to join my relatives and the sound of our feet on the frosty pavements as we walked to church. Then coming home to hot mince pies and mulled wine. In the morning there was a stocking at the bottom of my bed, filled with small gifts. There were seldom big presents. I once got a bike but usually it was a sweater or a long playing record or a book. We had a huge turkey lunch, then tea with a Christmas cake decorated with white icing to resemble a snow scene. Then we sat around the tree and found more small gifts on the branches. Oh, and everything had to stop for the Queen’s speech on television… actually it was on radio in my early years. We played games like charades. We laughed a lot. And that was it. Simple. Non commercial.

So all my adult life I’ve been longing for a simple Christmas like that. The problem is that we have so much, all the year now that small things are no longer treats. In my childhood Christmas was the only time of the year when we ate turkey, found nuts and tangerines and dates in the shops. We rarely had new clothes so a new sweater was a treat. Now we have commercials in which people find a Lexus under the tree. And the stores are blaring out Christmas music from Halloween onward. We are overwhelmed and bombarded with Christmas cheer.

One year a German friend and I were lamenting that Christmas is not as it was in Europe. So we decided (at great expense) to rent a house at Lake Tahoe for the holiday. When we arrived it was a picture-perfect snow scene. The next morning we awoke to rain. And it rained and it rained. All the snow was washed away. The kids couldn’t play outside. There was no TV. Everyone became bored and bad tempered. The other wife went down with a horrible cold and went to bed, so I was left with the cooking. So much for the perfect Christmas!

The closest I have come was when John and I took a Christmas market cruise up the Danube. We’d stop at small towns and wander among the booths, admiring carved wooden toys, smelling grilling sausages, mulled wine, gingerbread. I thought it was magical. Unfortunately my husband soon became bored. “How many angels do you need to look at?” he’d ask. I’d love to do this again, but I’d have to persuade one of my daughters to come with me!

So I suppose this is one of the reasons I enjoy writing Christmas books. At least I can create the perfect Christmas on the page! The Ghost of Christmas Past is the second Molly Murphy novel I’ve set at Christmas time. And actually it’s quite a dark book. It takes place at a luxurious mansion on the Hudson so it has the old fashioned Christmas with all the trimmings, but an undercurrent of loss and sorrow and mystery is never far from the surface. And of course Molly wants to make everything right. She always does! You’ll have to read the book to find out if she succeeds.

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Cold War Variation: Guest Post by Bill Rapp

Bill Rapp began his professional life as an academic, teaching European History at Iowa State University. A graduate of Notre Dame (B.A.), The University of Toronto (M.A.) and Vanderbilt (Ph. D.), Bill has always been particularly intrigued by German history, but the last 35 years working for the U. S. Government has broadened his perspective to all of Europe and much of the Middle East. His career has taken him around the world, including to Berlin as the Wall fell and Germany was reunified. Bill Rapp’s books include the mystery novels Angel in Black, A Pale Rain, Burning Altars, Berlin Breakdown, and Tears of Innocence. He lives in northern Virginia with his wife, two daughters, two miniature schnauzers, and a cat.  His latest novel, The Hapsburg Variation, releases today!

Bill Rapp:
Cold War Variation

Having started my adult life as an historian and then moved on to a career as an intelligence officer, writing Cold War spy thrillers would appear to be the perfect cap to my career. It certainly combines my love of history--especially the European and American pasts--and the last 35 years as an analyst, diplomat, and senior executive at the CIA.

As an historian, I have always been fascinated not just about what transpired in the past, but also on what remained and the influence that has had on the events that followed. As an intelligence officer, I had to work to understand those elements that remained, along with what had changed, and translate that into a usable product for our policymakers. At the same time, I have always had a love of literature. Fortunately, combining elements of all three allows me not only to enjoy the time I spend researching the stories--I spend much of my free time reading histories and mysteries--but also to pursue a dream of mine I have harbored since those bygone days in graduate school: to take my academic training and populate that world with living characters confronting historical challenges and dangers.

Given recent events in Europe and developments in our relationship with Russia, it should come as no surprise that writers would begin to explore the Cold War once more as a field for espionage thrillers. Granted, the continent has changed, as has our major antagonist, not to mention our own relationship with our European allies. But once again we have that tension and conflict that was the source of so much of our nation's policy and the definition of our interests after the Second World War when Europe was the principal field of competition. Admittedly, I have the benefit of hindsight as I recast the stories that enlivened those times, which invariably colors the characters I invent and the work they do. The challenge is not to lose sight of the mentalities and perceptions that drove those characters to act as they did and to provide the readers with an accurate and credible portrayal of the period and the world I am trying to recreate.

I should add that there is a personal element to the stories in this series as well. I have to credit my wife with the original idea on Karl Baier's inception, the protagonist and young American CIA officer in the The Hapsburg Variation. I mentioned to her one day that I wanted to place a thriller in Berlin in the days and months immediately after the Second World War, and that I had an idea for an opening scene but no story yet. She suggested I take her father's case as a model. Not only had he been stationed in the city at that time as part of Operation Paperclip to assess Germany's scientific achievements and capacity and identify the leading personnel, but he had also moved into the house of a man with the exact same name. That provided the starting point for Karl Baier's career as an American intelligence officer in post-war Europe, portrayed in Tears of Innocence. That particular individual--the German, not my father-in-law--never returned, but the American version brought home a box of his German counterpart's memorabilia that included objects as varied as photographs from the occupation of Greece to never-claimed laundry tickets. And sorting through that box actually helped move the plot in the first book in the series along. It's a bit ironic that when I decided to take Karl Baier's path along a different route from that of my wife's father, it was a laundry ticket resting at the bottom of the lot that provided the vehicle to do so. I should add that I made Karl Baier a first-generation German-American not only because that reflects my own family background, but, more importantly, because I wanted to symbolize the ties that bind our country to its Old World heritage. It's a bond that made our emergence after WWII as a global power deeply involved in the future of Europe almost inevitable. It is also the bond that helps propel the people and stories in the Cold War Spy Series that began with Tears of Innocence and continues with The Hapsburg Variation.

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About The Hapsburg Variation (Coffeetown Press; release date December 1, 2017)

In 1955, as the Allies prepare to sign the State Treaty granting Vienna its independence, CIA Deputy Chief of Station Karl Baier becomes enmeshed in the case of a murdered Austrian aristocrat. Then his wife, Sabine, is kidnapped, and he suspects a connection. The stakes rise along with the danger as his investigation takes him from Vienna to Berlin, London, Scotland, and finally Budapest.