Once Upon a Time in Havana... Guest post by Rennie Airth

Today I welcome back Rennie Airth. Rennie Airth wrote a guest post (A Cautionary Word) in 2014 for Mystery Fanfare. Rennie Airth  grew up in South Africa and after starting out as a journalist turned his hand to writing fiction. The first novel in his Madden series, River of Darkness, was published in 1999. Three others followed and the fifth in the series, The Death of Kings, was just published January 3. He is the winner of France's esteemed Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. His works have been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity Awards, among many others.

Rennie Airth:
Once Upon a Time in Havana...

Before I took to writing mysteries I had another life as a foreign correspondent working for Reuters. For years I wandered about the world and although the glamour that is sometimes associated with those two words – foreign correspondent – sadly eluded me I had some experiences that even in retrospect still strike me as being better suited to the realms of fiction than hard fact. This was one of them.

Accompanied by a more senior colleague I had flown down from New York to Cuba – via Mexico City, since there was no direct air link -- with instructions to re-open the Reuters bureau in Havana, our previous correspondent having been expelled a year or so earlier on the bizarre and wholly fictitious grounds of being a gun-runner and the invitation from the Cuban authorities to return had been accompanied by the lure of an exclusive interview with Fidel Castro. Why were the Cubans being so friendly all of a sudden? It’s a long story which I won’t go into now and had to do with some buses which the British government had agreed to sell to Castro over strong American objections. Suffice to say, on the appointed day we sat as instructed in the lobby of one of Havana’s once plush but now fading hotels waiting for our host to make his appearance.

And there we continued to sit – throughout that afternoon and the two that followed. It was my first intimation that dictators not only march to a different drummer – they stick to their own time tables.

Finally my irate superior informed the Cuban Foreign Ministry that not even the President of the United States would keep a pair of journalists kicking their heels in this manner and if Castro had not appeared by the following day he himself would return to New York leaving me to deal with the situation as best I could.

Whether this had an effect or not I don’t know, but the following afternoon, as we sat in our accustomed chairs in the lobby, we heard the sound of approaching sirens and within seconds a posse of military cars drew up outside the hotel. Within moments the lobby was filled with armed guards, a precaution that struck us at the time as exaggerated given that there was no conceivable threat to the Maximum Leader anywhere in the vicinity. We were informed that Castro was waiting in a car outside and that we were to accompany him to a baseball game. The interview would take place later. Given no choice in the matter, we quickly piled into one of the other cars and were whisked through the city, sirens screaming, to the stadium where we were finally introduced to the man himself. Dressed in his customary military fatigues, and somewhat distant in manner -- Fidel had a curious gaze that always seemed fixed on the middle distance rather than on what or who was in front of him, as though he had some other picture in his mind – he nevertheless graciously offered us a cigar each and presently I found myself seated in the bleachers one row below him puffing away contentedly as the game got under way.

Castro’s attachment to baseball was well documented and was perhaps the only facet of American life or culture he had any time for. I couldn’t say the same for myself. Although I had attempted to familiarise myself with the national game during my time in Washington, where I’d been posted earlier, my efforts had been hampered by the perennially dismal performance of the hapless Senators (Washington! First in war, first in peace, last in the American League.), and it was only with difficulty that I was able to mask my boredom with the proceedings on the field which, to be fair, seemed of little interest to the spectators either. They were far more excited by the presence of Fidel among them.

At last the game ended and I rose to my feet. I assumed the promised interview would now take place and wondered where it would be conducted. It was some minutes before I realised that while others had also risen to stretch their legs, no one was going anywhere. Only then did the grim truth dawn on me. We were in for a double-header.

It was growing dark by the time we left, our departure having been delayed by the crowd that had gathered outside the gates to catch a glimpse of their idol. All around us we heard the murmured words. ‘El caballo…el caballo.’ Later I was to learn it was a nickname the locals had for their leader. Superstition still held sway over many and the horse was among the most potent symbols in the Cuban version of voodoo, santeria.

Neither I nor my colleague could muster much Spanish between us, and before we left the stadium a question was put to us by Fidel’s interpreter, a charming man called Rene Vallejo, who was also his doctor. Castro wished to know if we were interested in agriculture? Given the circumstances, it was a question to which there was only one possible answer and before long, still in the same military convoy, we were speeding out of the dimly lit city deep into the even darker countryside. Our journey continued for an hour or so and then came to an abrupt halt on a small dirt road. We were directed to climb out of the car onto a narrow grass verge where presently Fidel joined us. Flashlights were produced and we saw there was a barbed wire fence beside us and beyond it the unmistakable shape of a cow. While two guards held the strands apart Castro clambered through the fence and then invited us to join him. Standing there in the pitch dark he proceeded to treat us to a long discourse on the results of an experiment he had been conducting with this particular animal and two others of its kind, all three of which had been fed a special diet of hay and alfalfa plus other ingredients which had resulted in them producing an unusually large yield of milk. Armed with this knowledge, he said, it was his intention to transform the Cuban dairy industry. Within a few years the whole island would be awash in rich creamy cow juice with all its associated dairy products. It was my first experience of Fidel the Fantasist, but by no means my last.

I won’t burden you with how the rest of the evening passed, except to say that it was far from over. We got our interview in the end. It took place in the early hours in a small house in the suburb of Vedado, one of several Fidel used, switching his living quarters from day to day we were told as precaution against the CIA’s plans to assassinate him (something we didn’t believe then, but which the world was later to discover was true – hence all the bodyguards). And although it produced little in the way of news it did give me a further insight into the mind-set of this extraordinary man. Fidel could never tell you anything once: he had to repeat it three or four times, and this more than anything explained the astonishing duration of the speeches for which he was famous, orations of Wagnerian length that could go on for three or four hours yet appeared to hold his huge audience spellbound; indeed there was more than a hint of grand opera about these performances. I can still see him standing before a bank of microphones fondling their twisted, snake-like heads in an openly sensuous manner as the words poured out of him.

Nor was that day the only time I saw him close up. Quite often he appeared at the embassy receptions to which members of the foreign press corps – there were only a handful of us – would also be invited. These evenings followed an unchanging routine. Having met with the ambassadors of various nations – always in a private room -- he would announce that he was ready to talk to the capitalist press. And so we would sit there in front of him, trapped for hours on end, yet another captive audience (one among us at least thinking glumly of all the delights even a socialist Havana still had to offer in the shape of beautiful girls and disreputable bars) while he drank glass after glass of brandy and rambled on, inveighing always against the wicked Yankee imperialists but also confiding to us his plans, or rather dreams, for the future. How one day he would change Cuba from the sugar farm it basically was into a throbbing industrial nation: how different the future would be from the past.

By a curious coincidence, the last time I saw him in the flesh, like the first, had a baseball connection. We of the foreign press had received a tip that he was playing in a pick-up game somewhere on the outskirts of Havana, and when we got there we discovered that not only was it true, but that his younger brother Raul, now Cuba’s president, but then a seldom seen figure, was also present. They were on opposing teams and Raul was pitching. Possessed of a venomous slider – or so one of my more knowledgeable colleagues informed me – he was making short work of the batters facing him and it wasn’t long before the Commandante himself was striding to the plate, bar in hand.

Sadly, we saw little of him that afternoon. Three balls, three swishes and it was over. The last glimpse I had of Fidel he was on his way back to the dug-out looking far from pleased.

Junior had struck him out. 

Rennie Airth: A Cautionary Word - Guest Post

Rennie Airth, winner of France’s esteemed Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and the author of three critically acclaimed John Madden novels returns with THE RECKONING, the latest in the series. Rennie Airth was born in South Africa and worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters news service for many years.  He wrote two previous novels, SNATCH and ONCE A SPY.  Airth’s River of Darkness was nominated for the Edgar, Anthony and Macavity Awards. He lives in Cortona, Italy. Rennie Airth wrote an article for the London II issue of Mystery Readers Journal that appeared in 2011.

Rennie Airth:
A Cautionary Word

‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.’

 (And no woman either, presumably.)

Dr Johnson’s famous dictum must have occurred to more than one writer as he (or she) toiled to produce yet another tortured paragraph on those black days when the words won’t come. The peculiar punishment we inflict on ourselves ranging from the simple struggle with a recalcitrant sentence to the greatest terror of all, the never-to-be-mentioned curse of the writer’s block, is a form of masochism unique to our calling. No one forces us to write, after all. But daily we confront our computer screens heedless of the dangers we risk to our fragile egos.

Nor are we alone in our misery. What about all those other sufferers, victims of the collateral damage we inflict? What about the wives, husbands, partners; what about the children (God help us)? What about the neglected dogs longing to be taken for a walk? All have to endure this orgy of self-flagellation, forbidden to make a sound or inquire if the writing is going well, left to struggle as best they can with the mundane business of daily life (which in the case of the writer as often as not is exactly what he is trying to describe, however fruitlessly). As he sinks deeper into the fictional world he has created and tries to bring his characters to life, the real people around him, like Tolkien’s ring-wraiths begin to fade and grow insubstantial. It is the figures in his imagination who hold centre stage.

There are writers of course who have solved the problem of inconvenient interruptions. Flaubert had his mother who looked after him in Normandy until he was fifty, feeding him great meals, pampering him as best she could; and turning a blind eye to the periodic trips he made to Paris to satisfy the grosser demands of the flesh. Proust, on the other hand, took refuge in his cork-lined room. Outside it he had his faithful Celeste who kept him fuelled with croissants and café au lait and even took down whole paragraphs of the wonderfully convoluted prose which Marcel dictated to her as his physical powers were failing. We salute them all.

Children, of course, are a separate problem, and one not easily solved. Being as they are, insistent, noisy, and generally unimpressed by the earth-shattering importance of whatever it is that’s going on behind the closed door where their parent closets himself (or herself) day after day, they present difficulties best dealt with by strategies of avoidance. The work must be done in their absence. Here summer camps (and the longer the better) can prove a boon. Few writers, though, have shown the courage and scorn for popular opinion that distinguished Evelyn Waugh’s treatment of his brood. It’s reliably reported they were only permitted to see him once during the day in the late afternoon ‘for ten, I hope, awe-inspiring minutes’. Rough stuff, you might say. But my goodness, he wrote some wonderful books.

So there we have it. The agonies and…I was going to say ecstasies, but alas, we’re seldom that fortunate. Rather, like marathon runners, we finally reach the tape, exhausted; written out. But at least we can say the work is over. The book is done. All that’s needed now is to find some way to sell it. Publishers do what they can, of course, but how often we have wished for a touch of magic; for that unexpected blessing that seems to fall from on high on some books, lifting them from the shelves where they sit side by side with their competitors hoping to catch a buyer’s eye into some other realm where their titles are suddenly on everyone’s lips; where the possibility of sales seems limitless.

Years ago when I was a reporter in Washington I remember an occasion when it became known – by what means I never discovered – that among the books President Kennedy was taking to Hyannis Port on a week-end break from Washington was a recently published book called The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. The effect was electric. Almost overnight it was impossible to buy a copy anywhere. Far be it from me to suggest that JFK’s bedside reading was responsible for the success of John Le Carre’s wonderful Cold War thriller. But it certainly didn’t do it any harm.

But even our fondest hopes can be disappointed. More than two hundred years have passed since the great historian Edward Gibbon thought to improve the prospects of his monumental history, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by presenting his latest volume to one of Britain’s royal dukes in the hope that his patronage would send sales of the work soaring. Alas again. Although the story is well known – it was included in Boswell’s life of Johnson – it’s perhaps worth repeating here. Presented with the hefty tome by its author, the duke could only groan. ‘Another damned, thick, square book,’ he is reported to have said in dismay. ‘Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?’

President Kennedy was leaving for a week-end.

A is for Airth: Rennie Airth

Mystery Readers Journal's latest issue focuses on London Mysteries II: Crime fiction set in London. This issue is available as a PDF and in hard copy. For more information and the table of contents, go HERE. This article appeared in the London Mysteries II issue of MRJ. Perfect for the Author Alphabet Meme here on Mystery Fanfare.   

A is for Airth: Rennie Airth

Rennie Airth's work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and has been nominated for the Edgar Award in the US, the Historical Dagger award in Britain and won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France. Born and educated in South Africa, he spent his early years working in journalism, first for the Johannesburg Star and later for Reuters as a foreign correspondent. His postings included Washington, Havana and Saigon. Turning from journalism to fiction, he wrote Snatch and Once A Spy before starting work on the John Madden trilogy, an idea that came to him after he found a scrapbook devoted to an uncle of his who was killed in World War I. 

RENNIE AIRTH:

Although the books I've written in the Madden series are sometimes described as historical, I prefer to think of them as heralds of the modern age. Historical for me means men in funny hats and people travelling in horse-drawn carriages. Once women's skirts rose above ankle length the old world crumbled.

The idea of embarking on the Madden series came some years ago from an idle thought: how would the police have dealt with the problem posed by serial killers before they were recognized as such—before the very concept of forensic psychology had been developed? By chance, at around the same time I happened to be going through some old family albums and came across a scrapbook kept by my paternal grand-parents in memory of their elder son who was killed in the First World War. Paging through it I discovered something I hadn't known before: that the telegram they had received advising them of his death had arrived the same week as another from the War Office informing them that their second son, my father, who like his brother was an officer in the British army, was missing. Luckily he proved to have been captured, but I was struck by how appalling these twin blows must have been to them at the time and from that point on I began to read more about that terrible conflict and the scars it left on society. These two trains of thought came to-gether and eventually led to the first of the Madden books, River of Darkness, in which the psychological damage inflicted on both protagonists, hunter and hunted, by their experiences in the trenches plays a major part in the story.

I'd resolved from the start, too, that I wouldn't get trapped in a long series following the usual pattern of one case after another. Rather, I wanted to place Madden and those around him—his wife and family, and his colleagues at Scotland Yard—in the context of their time; to see them grow older and their lives develop quite apart from the mystery elements in each story. Hence the clear historical links which all three books have. The first, as I said, takes place in the shadow of the Great War, the second, The Blood-Dimmed Tide, against the rise of fascism in Germany and the looming threat of another war, while the third and most recent, The Dead of Winter, has the bombed-out ruins of London in the closing months of the Second World War as a backdrop.

Mystery writers are sometimes asked which they think is more important—plot or character; I would unhesitatingly plump for the latter. Of course it's necessary to have a good story; apart from anything else it prompts the reader to keep turning the pages. But there aren't that many plots when you think about it, only variations of them, while human nature is infinite in its variety. I set out from the start to give my characters lives larger than the stories they happened to be caught up in and to watch them as they developed over a period of time that now spans more than two decades.

That said, getting the atmosphere right, avoiding anachronism, is always crucial in books set in the past. The physical side is easy enough. It's not difficult to bone up on what people ate, how they dressed, what cars they drove etc. But what's more important is determining how people behaved to one another. At the time when my books are set, particularly the earlier ones, they were generally politer than now, more gentle. Set against that, however, was the hierarchical nature of society, a product of the notorious British class system. Certainly there was too much forelock-touching for our taste, too much deferring by the so-called lower classes. But all this was a necessary part of the books' atmosphere. Mostly it boiled down to how people spoke to one another and in that I was helped by my memories of my father, who grew to manhood in that period. Whenever I wrote a piece of dialogue I was uncertain about, I'd ask myself how it would have sounded to his ears. Or, better still, would he have put it that way?

To return to the question I started with—how the police might have hunted a serial killer then—I resolved early on to introduce a form of 'profiling' into my plots, while recognizing that this would have been resisted by diehard elements in the police force at the time, and for that reason I created the character of a Viennese psychoanalyst, Dr. Franz Weiss, who appears in the first two books. A pupil of Freud's, he is able to offer invaluable advice to the detectives investigating the series of murders, and being Jewish he also becomes a symbolic figure in the second of the two stories as the Nazi party comes to power in Germany. It was through the character of Weiss that I was able to explore the roots of Amos Pike's murderous impulses in psychological terms recognizable to a reader of today, though perhaps not to one of the time in which the book was set. He became to my mind like the dark figure in Yeats's poem, slouching not towards Bethlehem certainly, but perhaps into our modern consciousness.

Although this piece is included in a 'London Mysteries' issue, in fact the capital plays only a small part in the Madden books. True, there are periodic glimpses of Scotland Yard and readers of the series must be well used to the view of the Thames and the tree-lined Embankment it offers. And the third book does feature a London damaged by war and bone-weary of the long struggle. It's a city I never knew, of course, and barely recognizable in the present-day metropolis. But the image we all carry of London in those days, with the bombs falling and the searchlights piercing the night sky, is so familiar that even as I was describing them I half felt I'd been there.

However, most of the action in the books takes place in a still unspoiled countryside, and this is deliberate. The image of terror stalking the fields and quiet country lanes of England seemed a potent one, given that the books' overarching theme is the change brought about by the First World War: not simply to society but to the very way we think about ourselves. Still suffering from the after-effects of his experience, Madden is one of the few to understand the dire message of the carnage inflicted in the trenches. That now we truly know ourselves and the world will never be the same.

Philip Larkin summed it up best in a marvellous poem titled 'MCMXIV.' He pictured a crowd of men, moustached, good humoured, waiting patiently in long lines, happy to be setting out on what seems like a holiday. He doesn't say why they are there, but we're told what they are leaving behind—the familiar shops and pubs, children at play, flowering fields; and marriages that will last 'a little bit longer'—and we soon sense without being told that that this is 1914 and they are enlisting in the army. He ends the poem with a single, devastating line:

Never such innocence again.

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Following this Mystery Author Meme? Be sure and check out B is for Block: Lawrence Block