Through the Past, Darkly: Guest Post by William Shaw

Play With Fire is set in London in 1969, the era when everyone used typewriters and carbon paper. It was written on a Mac.

I like to think about that difference sometimes between then and now. I imagine a room full of beat-hardened constables from London’s Metropolitan Police one-finger typing, fight-scabbed hands angrily stabbing the keys, one at a time.

Back then, the Metropolitan Police force of the late sixties was staffed with men from a totally different era; it was a force that was institutionally corrupt and contained more than a few officers who thought nothing of fabricating evidence to convict whoever they assumed was guilty. This was a force in which the newly formed Drug Squad would later be discovered to be selling drugs they’d confiscated back to drug dealers. As for procedure, in those days there was almost no forensic evidence gathered at a crime scene beyond finger prints. Officers would happily trample mob-handed all over the evidence.

Play With Fire is also set in an era 20 years before the demise of the Soviet Union, which nobody could ever imagine collapsing back then. It seemed monolithic; unstoppable.

The book features a real-life spy exchange that happened that year - members of the infamous Communist Portland Spy Ring were exchanged for an unfortunate British lecturer who had been caught in Russia with anti-Soviet leaflets. The KGB spy ring, who were connected to the Rosenbergs in New York, worked with short wave radio and microdots to pass on secrets about British nuclear submarines. The Cold War was very present in London around that time; it was just one of the facts of life along with red phone boxes, thruppeny bits and double-decker buses.

On one level it feels like 1969 was such a long time ago. And yet, the book also opens at the Rolling Stones Hyde Park concert of that year, when Mick Jagger recited Shelly and released thousands of white butterflies into the air as a memorial for ex-Rolling Stone Brian Jones.

Jones had died in a swimming pool only a few days later and the mystery surrounding the 27-year-old guitarist’s death is part of my story too. Was he deliberately killed, or was it just what happens to young people if they take too many drugs, drink too much and then decide to swim on their own?

On the set list that day in Hyde Park were songs like Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Satisfaction, Honky Tonk Women and Sympathy For The Devil, songs you can still hear any day on the radio, songs that still sound as alive and modern and abrasive as they did fifty years ago. In amongst that old world was the soundtrack for our new one, shiny, new and outrageously arrogant.

That’s what I enjoyed, writing this book and the others in this series so much. In some senses 1969 was such a long time ago, and yet in others it was a year that was still very present in our lives. There was a war going on in 1969, and it wasn’t just in Vietnam. The clunky old certainties of the post-war world were doing battle with blaring, cocky individualism of the rock generation; and that makes for a great backdrop for any crime story.

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William Shaw is an award-winning music journalist and the author of several non-fiction books including Westsiders: Stories of the Boys in the Hood. Prior to becoming a crime writer, he worked at the post-punk magazine ZigZag and a journalist for The Observer, The New York Times, Wired, Arena, and The Face. His latest novel Play With Fire is a gripping police thriller set in the ever-intriguing world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Think Prime Suspect 1973 meets a throwback episode of Law and Order: SVU set in the ’60s!

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.