The Art Heist: Guest Post by Claudia Hagadus Long

I have a really hard time killing anyone.

For a normal person, not being able to murder would be, well, expected. Or at least hoped for. But for a mystery writer, it’s a real challenge. 

Mysteries need a certain framework: there’s a killing. Dead people don’t tell tales (though as many forensic mysteries have taught us, their bodies do!) There’s a sleuth. If it’s a police procedural, we learn how a brilliant homicide detective solves the killing, against the interests of his department superior. If it’s a “retired, damaged cop/investigator/PI” we watch as the sleuth overcomes his or her personal demons to uncover Truth. And when it’s an amateur sleuth, we follow her through the unwilling stage, the compelling part, and the final-danger-discovery, to bring the malefactor to justice in time to feed her cat. 

But every one of those stories needs a body.

What’s a deeply empathetic mystery writer to do?

Enter the Art Heist. Art Heist mysteries are a hoot to write, and a pleasure to read. 

A heist mystery may have a body somewhere, but it’s the theft of the precious art object that starts the ball rolling. Something valuable, possibly well-known, certainly well-guarded, emphatically precious, is going to disappear. Sometimes, the plot allows us to side with the thief: maybe the object was originally theirs, or their people’s, and was taken unfairly or with malice. If the thief or thieves are charismatic enough, if the plan to steal the art is complex enough, and the current owner is on the wrong side of virtue, we root for the success of the heist. Think Oceans 11.

If the thief is a villain, though, then thwarting the theft, at great personal risk, or recovering the object after the theft, also with great personal danger, becomes the engine of the story. Justice still has to prevail and a real villain must be brought to justice.

All three of the Zara and Lilly adventures are heist mysteries. In Nine Tenths of the Law, Zara and Lilly chase a menorah, stolen from their mother in 1939 by the Nazis, through modern-day New York City. It had been shown at a museum, and before they could make a claim, it had disappeared. Zara and Lilly learned more about their mother’s past, and their own relationship, than they could ever have dreamed of in that chase. In Our Lying Kin, a vengeful thief seeks the recovery of the Archives of Degenerate Art, journals belonging to the Reich. 

In the newest Zara and Lilly adventure, Sisters at an Exhibition, a Caravaggio sketch is declared a fraud. 

Before the curator who authenticated it can defend her findings, the Caravaggio, and the curator, disappear. Zara and Lilly find themselves drawn into the chase, which takes them from San Francisco to New York City, and then to Alsace, France, where another story lies buried deep below a farmhouse that was burned to the ground during the War.

Is there humor? Well, Lilly never met a man—or a scam—that she didn’t at least wink at! And cynical, methodical Zara’s sarcastic tongue may get them in more trouble than they can handle. (Just wait until you read about the change in Zara’s hairstyle…) But interlaced with the humor, the heist and the hair, there is a twisted tale of a journal kept by the “children of the forest” (children, mostly boys, who hid in the forests to try to survive during World War II), the realities of rebuilding a life torn apart by loss, and the love that binds the sisters, no matter what their differences. 

Maybe with so much loss, there’s no need to have a murder. Certainly, there can be a mystery, and amateur sleuths, and a complex plot full of danger, without adding to the toll of bodies in literature. 

There’s even a cat.

Come for the art heist, stay for the family stories!

***

 
Claudia Hagadus Long is a lawyer and bookstore owner in Calistoga, California. Her nine novels the Zara and Lilly mystery series, including SISTERS AT AN EXHIBITION (Sibylline Press) and NINE TENTHS OF THE LAW (Kasva Press); and the Simpato Mysteries, BEYOND A REASONABLE DUCK, TRUCK A DUCK, and MURDER WITHOUT A DUCK (Sibylline Press Digital First), humorous mysteries with cannabis-cookie-selling nuns and plenty of duck puns! www.claudiahlong.com
 
 

Yes, Virginia, Hate Can Be Legislated: Guest Post by Libby Fischer Hellmann

How do you feel when you hear the word “Holocaust?” Many of us react with an involuntary shudder or stomach flip. We feel uncomfortable. We probably want to change the subject. There’s a general consensus that the period between 1932 and 1945 during which six million people perished was the worst tragedy in human history. 

We know in generalities what happened to Jews, Catholics, Poles, and others. We know about Nazi persecution, deportations, concentration camps, and mass killings. Oh yes, I can say. My late father-in-law was the sole survivor of his family. He escaped to the US in 1939. 
 
But what, specifically, was he escaping from? Exactly what laws were enacted by Hitler’s government that inexorably tightened the noose around (primarily) Jewish necks? I didn’t know specifically, and I suspect most of us, nearly 100 years later, don’t either.
 
In my research for Max’s War I learned. There was a method to Hitler’s madness. The Nazi government would issue a flurry of laws, more or less at the same time. Then they would wait to see their effect. If those laws weren’t immediately enforced to the degree they expected, Joseph Goebbels—who was extremely talented but almost as evil as Hitler—would stoke public opinion by crafting propaganda. Goebbels searched for opportunities to inflame hatred by publicizing situations, to the point of staging public events to imitate approval of whatever law was in question. His efforts helped antisemitism flourish. The result? Laws against Jews were strictly enforced.
 
1933

But first Hitler had to consolidate power. He didn’t waste any time. In February 1933, barely a month after he became Chancellor, a suspicious fire burned down the Reichstag, the parliament building. The next day, the Nazis blamed the Communist Party for the arson and banned them from government. Hitler then used the fire to persuade Hindenburg to suspend individual rights and due process of law. It’s widely thought that the Nazis staged the fire.

In March, a month later, Hitler asked the Nazi-controlled Reichstag to pass the Enabling Act. From that day forward Hitler alone had the power to make laws. The government also opened its first prison camp to house political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others classified as “dangerous.” The camp was located in Dachau. 

In April a flood of educational edicts came down. Classes in physical education were now required for all pupils. Jewish children rarely “made the team.” A new course was added to the national curriculum: Racial Science. In the lower grades, students learned about “worthy” and “unworthy” races, with the not-so-subtle conclusion that Aryans were the “master race.” In high school stereotypes about Jews began to surface along with square roots and history. Students were urged to wear their Hitler Youth and German Girls League uniforms to school. Thanks to Goebbels, antisemitic Nazi propaganda posters, slogans, and articles began to cover school bulletin boards. Teachers began to share them with students. 

April brought other mandates as well. Jewish teachers were banned from teaching at German schools and universities. The government also issued the Law Against Overcrowding in Schools, which limited the number of Jewish students in a school to no more than 5 percent of the school population. 
It was in April that the government also encouraged a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses. At some stores a Nazi Brownshirt with a rifle prevented German shoppers from entering. Some stores were attacked, their wares destroyed. 

In April the Nazis also passed a decree that defined a “non-Aryan.” Any individual who was descended from a Jewish parent or grandparent was automatically a non-Aryan. 

On May 10 students in Berlin burned more than twenty-five thousand books considered “un-German” in a massive bonfire instigated by Goebbels who declared, “The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end.” That night students all over Germany marched in staged torchlit parades against the same un-German “spirit.” 

In the middle of July 1933, the Nazis banned all political parties except themselves. On the same day, the Reichstag passed a law that permitted the forced sterilization of any German with a physical or mental handicap. A third law passed the same day that stripped Jewish immigrants from Poland of their German citizenship. 

It was a busy year.

1934

In August 1934, Von Hindenburg died. Two weeks after that, Hitler combined the posts of president and chancellor and gave himself the name Führer. The military swore their allegiance to Hitler. Civil servants, including teachers, government workers, and professionals, were forced to do the same. Goebbels was the mastermind behind country-wide demonstrations of loyalty to the Führer.

A new flurry of  laws excluded Jews from the arts and the newspaper business. Hotel and restaurant owners could no longer serve Jews. In some areas Jewish children were no longer allowed to go to public school. Jews had been barred from the legal profession, the civil service, and, of course, from teaching in schools. Books considered un-German, including those by Jewish authors, were banned. Local police turned a blind eye and sometimes even participated when Jewish citizens were harassed or subjected to violent attacks. Banners, posters, and articles denounced Jews as traitors to Germany. 

The end of May 1934 brought another blow. Jews were barred from serving in the German armed forces. A few months earlier, Hitler had defied the Treaty of Versailles by reinstating the draft, rearming, and expanding the army. A secret law reorganized the army into the Wehrmacht, making Hitler its commander-in-chief. 

Because of the rearmament, the economy rebounded. Jobs were plentiful. For the first time in five years, Germans had money to spend. Goebbels made sure every German knew Hitler was the reason why. Hitler became a hero. He was worshipped by most Germans. Goebbels’s shrewd use of radio, newspapers, and staged events was so successful that many average Germans came to support even stronger antisemitic laws. 

1935

The full brunt of repression came in 1935.

In September 1935 the Nazis announced two new laws. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor was the first. It defined who was a “pure” German, a Jew, and an individual with mixed blood, and went on to ban interracial marriages. The Jews, it said, were guilty of “racial defilement” where Aryans were concerned. 

The second law, the Reich Citizenship Law, stripped German Jews of their citizenship. They could no longer vote or take part in government functions, although they still were expected to pay taxes. The new law of “Protective Custody,” the arrest and detainment of Jews, political opponents, and others, was revealed. The government could arrest and imprison individuals who disagreed with Nazi politics for as long as was required. Dachau was one of the locations used as a prison camp, and prisoners were abused and starved. Some were murdered. 

And so a pattern was established: A law passed. Goebbels publicized the law and staged events that depicted from the German people. Jews were increasingly victimized and pushed out of society. Those who could, fled. The ones who couldn’t leave were sitting ducks for arrest, imprisonment, and, eventually, the Final Solution. As the Holocaust Encyclopedia puts it, “Before the Nazi takeover of power in 1933, Europe had a vibrant, established, and diverse Jewish culture. By 1945, most European Jews—two out of every three—had been killed.”

It’s important to understand that the German people, then and now, consider themselves a nation of laws. Germans are disciplined. They like order. They follow the law. It’s also important to know that Hitler did not stage a coup. He wasn’t elected directly by the people, but in 1933, in the middle of an economic depression, he’d been appointed by the president of Germany, because the Nazis had significant representation in parliament. It was all legal.
 
Which is why what happened to the Jews of Germany and Europe could happen again in another part of the world. No revolution or coup is required. The leader would need a compliant parliament so that repressive laws could be proposed, voted on, and enacted. It would also be helpful to have a master of propaganda to reinforce those laws. But that’s all. He or she could even occupy a neighboring country if their military was up to par. So far, no autocrat has succeeded beyond their own borders. But what happens when they do, as Putin is trying in Ukraine? Even more important, what will the rest of us do to prevent it?

***

Libby Fischer Hellmann left a career in broadcast news in Washington, DC and moved to Chicago a long time ago, where she, naturally, began to write gritty crime fiction. She soon began writing historical fiction as well. Eighteen novels and twenty-five short stories later, she claims they’ll take her out of the Windy City feet first. Max's War, set during WWII, is Libby Fischer's Hellmann's latest novel. 
                                                                                      

***

Why I Write Historical Fiction: Guest Post by Kathryn Lasky

Kathryn Lasky: 
 
A picture is said to be worth a thousand words, and I would add a caveat to that. Actually a picture might be worth several thousand words. For it was a picture of my mother and her sister aboard the Statendam. The year was 1934. The midst of the depression. My mother Hortense Falender, a social worker in Indiana and her sister Mildred, a recent graduate of Wellesley college, were going on their first trip to Europe.  They were standing by the rail of the ocean liner in their trim slim mid-calf skirts, nipped in at the waist, jackets with shoulder pads, and jaunty berets. How they afforded this trip is a mystery, but apparently my mother on her salary as a social worker who had also paid for my aunt’s Wellesley tuition made it work.

This single picture for me says it all. Two daring young women, setting out on the brink of World War 2 for Europe. They would land in Oslo. They did not travel first class but were often invited up to first class to dine by some of the handsome men. One in particular was a Prince, heir to the King Oscar Sardine company. My Aunt MiIdy had an enormous crush on him. She was quite the flirt. But alas the romance was interrupted shortly before the end of the voyage when one of the men at the table made a hideous comment about Jews. “Those Nazis have the right idea.” The two sisters, who were Jewish, jumped up from the table and left and so did the Prince, or as my mother called him the Big Sardine. He was equally flabbergasted. 

Although my Aunt Mildy  and the Prince continued to write each other, she did not become a royal bride. But she did join the WAVES, the women’s naval reserve or Women’s Volunteer Service, when the war broke out. I have another photograph that I can see now from my desk of her on her wedding day to my Uncle Jack. They are both in uniform. She in her WAVE uniform. My uncle wore his Lieutenant’s uniform where a month later he would be in the Ardennes carrying a radio on his back in the Battle of the Bulge. Another relative of mine was under the command of General Patton in North Africa. Mind you this was all before I was born. But I was intrigued and was hooked on history. By the time I was in sixth grade I was plowing through WW2 novels. For me, it was a not simply a history lesson, but it brought the war closer; it gave texture to those times.

Today with the 24-hour new cycle, Facebook, and the internet, we are under constant bombardment. There is no real texture; at least not in the way that is palpable. They talk about the metaverse but that metaverse has no texture, no character. It is as manipulated as Disney Land. It’s plastic. It seems artificial and we as consumers have become numb, or perhaps anesthetized. We cannot absorb and consider and ruminate, but perhaps most important we cannot feel. Books make you feel. So, the dread and horror that my mother and aunt felt when the man made the terrible antisemitic remark at the dining table on the ship, that moment has haunted me. 

I recreated the moment in Light on Bone—different setting but the same year 1934. Georgia O’Keefe is sitting at a table with  Charles Lindbergh and his wife and a few others having cocktails at the Ghost Ranch. That part is true, and she did have drinks with him. The conversations goes along smoothly until Lindbergh announces that he has accepted an invitation from Herman Goring to visit Germany. Lindbergh is  terribly excited as he might actually meet Adolph Hitler. Then one person at the table asks Lindbergh if he thinks that France is so aggrieved by the last war that they might actually pick a fight with Germany after all France has suffered. Now I’ll read the paragraph that was directly written with my mother and aunt in mind. It is Georgia’s response to Lindberg’s reply at the table

“Well, sir.” Charles looked down at his plate. “I do fear that [war] it could come. Sooner or later. And I worry about the British and I worry about Roosevelt, and the Jews that he has surrounded himself with.” 

Georgia dropped her fork with a clatter on her plate. She simply did not know what to say. How had such talk become acceptable dinner conversation? He turned to her.
“Oh, I didn’t mean to alarm you, ma’am.”
“My husband is a Jew.”
“But he’s not a war agitator.”
“Of course, I know that! But you have just neatly reduced the complexity of the human race to three categories and stuffed them into one goddam sack.”
 She stood, balled up her napkin, and threw it down.
  
This is of course fiction, historical fiction. But by this time Lindbergh’s antisemitism was just starting to be known. And I have to say that writing this scene was very cathartic. One of course has to be careful. I don’t write to get even. You can’t write to grind axes. That to me is bad historical fiction. You can’t write to settle grudges. You have to write to convey what you feel are eternal truths. These are not diatribes I am writing. They are scenes vividly re-imagined to fit seamlessly into a narrative.  

To me a metaphor comes to mind---sewing. I took sewing lessons once. I was lousy. Unlike Georgia O’Keeffe by the way who made many of her own clothes. But to me the biggest challenge in sewing was making a dart. Darts are a dressmakers punctuation mark. A technique for shaping garments by curving straight fabric to the body. I cannot make a dart in sewing to save my soul, but I have learned how to make them in literature. What I just read you was a Dart. I slipped it in there, or rather stitched it in to fit a moment in the narrative. But for me in particular (not to get too emotional about it) it was a piece of my own family’s history to fit a circumstance. My Mom and my Aunt Mildy got to have their say through the voice of Georgia O’Keeffe. 
 

This is why I love to write historical fiction—not simply to get back at the bad guys and even the score. But honestly to peer deeply into history, perhaps in somewhat the way that astronomers think about the stars. To quote Neil DeGrasse. “I think of space not as the final frontier but as thenext frontier. Not as something to be conquered but to be explored...Not only do we live among the stars, the stars live within us.”

***

Kathryn Lasky is the author of five mysteries and over one hundred books for children and young adults, including the Guardians of Ga’Hoole series, which has more than eight million copies in print, and was turned into a major motion picture, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole. Her books have received numerous awards including a Newbery Honor, a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and a Washington Post-Children’s Book Guild Nonfiction Award. She has twice won the National Jewish Book award. Her work has been translated into 19 languages worldwide. She is the author of six mysteries. Light is Bone is the latest. She lives with her husband in Cambridge, MA.

VETERANS DAY MYSTERIES // VETERANS DAY CRIME FICTION

Veterans Day, originally known as Armistice Day (also known as Remembrance Day), is November 11. Veterans Day commemorates the armistice signed between the Allies of World War I and Germany at Compiègne, France, for the cessation of hostilities on the Western Front, that took effect at eleven o'clock in the morning — the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" 1918.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson first proclaimed Armistice Day November 11, 1919. The U.S.  Congress passed a concurrent resolution seven years later on June 4, 1926, requesting the President issue another proclamation to observe November 11 with appropriate ceremonies. The 11th of November is"a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as 'Armistice Day'." It was later changed to Veteran's Day.

I love to read mysteries that reflect regions and holidays, so I'm reposting about Veterans Day with several additions. Julia Spencer-Fleming's Once Was a Soldier,  Jacqueline Winspear, Renie Airth, and Charles Todd's mystery series are at the top of my list of Veterans Day Mysteries. There's also the Joe Sandilands series by Barbara Cleverly. And Bulldog Drummond is a WWI veteran in the Sapper/H.C. McNeile books. Add to that Walter Mosley's WWII Vet Easy Rawlins. Don't miss Marcia Talley's All Things Undying in which Hannah Ives helps to locate the grave of a WWII serviceman. James Lee Burke is another great mystery author whose Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux is a Vietnam Veteran. And, of course, the Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers where the mystery turns on the poppy in the lapel.

Mysteries in Paradise about Remembrance DayBV Lawson's 2007 post of Veteran's Day Mysteries is great. No need to duplicate her efforts. Be sure and read her blog, as well as all the comments. Another fine list is In Remembrance Fiction in Times of War (not all mysteries) from the St. Charles Public Library. I also did a Memorial Day post here on Mystery Fanfare that covers some of the same territory.  is also a great resource.

You'll want to read J. Kingston's Pierce's article 9 Mysteries Set in the Immediate Aftermath of WWI on CrimeReads.

Wikipedia has an entry about Veterans Day Mysteries. Several hardboiled heroes have been war veterans. Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer and many others from World War II, and John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee from the Korean War. "The frequent exposure to death and hardship often leads to a cynical and callous attitude as well as a character trait known today as post-traumatic stress characterizes many hardboiled protagonists."

And a few more Vietnam War Veterans Mysteries:  

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

Quarry by Max Allan Collins

Dragonfish by Vu Tran

The Given World by Marian Palaia

The Sympathizer by Viet Than Nguyen

First Blood by David Morrell

Dog Day Afternoon by Vern E. Smith

The Man Who Won the Medal of Honor by Len Giovannitti

Going After Cacciato by Tim O'Brien

Operation Burning Candle by Blyden Jackson

The Odd Angry Shot by William Nagle. 

Iraq War Veteran

The Drifter by Nick Petrie (and others in the Peter Ash series)
Young Blood by Matt Gallagher

The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers

For the young set, one of the first Veteran-related mysteries: Cherry Ames: Veterans' Nurse by Helen Wells. 

As always, let me know any Veterans Crime Fiction that you recommend.

Read a Veterans Day mystery today and remember the men and women who have served our country. Thank you for your service.

In Memory of Veteran - Major Joseph Rudolph, M.D., WWII

Three Hours in Paris: Guest Post by Cara Black

CARA BLACK: 
THREE HOURS IN PARIS

Today the world has changed and we’re in uncharted waters. I’m trying hard to wrap my head around how to help readers find THREE HOURS IN PARIS, and think about its relevance today since this interview I did with my editor. On one level my book is a story about resistance and the fight against fascism. We’re living in a time when so much going on echoes the past. Yet, given a situation like the one Kate Rees, my protagonist, finds her self in; choosing to fight back in a way she can, lends itself to today. Fighting back can be interpreted in everyday ways; speaking out, questioning and making your voices heard ie #metoo. Not all of us would or could fight back Kate’s way but every act of resistance is Resistance.

Kate to me is an everywoman - a daughter, a sister, a mother, a wife - who finding herself against the circumstances of war and tragedy, struggles and persists and doesn’t let up. She knows the world wasn’t always like this. That it will pass but in so doing there’s a toll taken. Yes, her struggle and survival is hopeful because it’s about persisting and doing what you feel is the right thing. Hope you’re staying safe and reading all the books in your TBR pile!

An Interview with Author Cara Black and Her Editor Juliet Grames 
(reprinted with permission of Cara Black and Juliet Grimes)

What made you decide to write a story about a female assassin? 

CB: Years ago, I read my father’s copy of The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth, and then I saw the 1973 film. This is the tale of a brilliant for-hire assassin tasked by the OAS with killing de Gaulle. Pitted against him are the government, who flounder in the dark to prevent the assassination attempt until they draft one of their own Parisian police. It’s a riveting cat-and-mouse story—we know before reading that de Gaulle survived, but it’s still so suspenseful, so tense, so delicately balanced. My throat catches every time I rewatch the film, which I do every year. Every time I pass the Montparnasse train station I look up at the Jackal’s window where he was aiming at de Gaulle and calculate the rifle angle. I think that inspired my window for Kate in Montmartre. I wanted to try my hand at writing an assassin story—but with my own spin, one that could include pieces of the WWII resistance history I have hoarded over twenty years of researching the Aimée Leduc novels in Paris. 

But there was also a historical template for female assassins in WWII. The Russian army had a regiment of highly successful female snipers. The star female assassin, Lyudmila Pavlichenko, was credited with 309 kills, the highest of a woman and in the top five of all snipers. In 1943 she was invited to the White House, met Eleanor Roosevelt and toured the USA. Of course, the United States didn’t enter the war until after Pearl Harbor in 1941 but I was still intrigued by that what if: What if an American woman had been a sniper in WWII? Why not?

I read a newspaper article in 2010 about the death of a quiet and reclusive elderly lady in a British coastal town. The woman had no known relatives and no friends, but when local authorities entered her home they found she was far from the typical pensioner. They discovered among her possessions a medal from Britain as well as France’s highest wartime honor, the Croix de Guerre. She was Eileen Nearne—aka Agent Rose, one of the female spies dispatched by Britain into occupied France in World War II by the SOE. Eileen Nearne became a clandestine radio operator, was caught and put in Ravensbrück but survived. There are stories like this that beg to be told; women who worked as spies, who signed the Official Secrets Act during the war and never broke their silence.

Kate to me is an everywoman—a daughter, a sister, a mother, a wife—who, due to tragedy and loss in war, seeks revenge and rises to the challenge of using her skill set. In war time, “doing one’s part” is a larger-than-life task, and so rising to the challenge includes becoming a larger-than-life character.

During the Second World War, secret services around the world knew women made perfect agents: in many ways, they were invisible as a man wouldn’t be. As innocent as they might appear while walking with a basket of eggs or mopping a floor, they could escape detection and perform sabotage, set up resistance networks, operate radios, and infiltrate occupied buildings as cleaners, mail couriers, housewives. The possibilities were endless.

Kate is recruited by a British intelligence officer to work for Section D, a deniable branch that specializes in foreign interference and sabotage. How much of your description of Section D is real? 

CB: Section D was real, and some of its records have even survived the war and been declassified, although of course many more were destroyed, so it is impossible to know its full scope and nature. I envision a clandestine department that specialized in missions like Kate’s—ungentlemanly war, fought by recruits of Irregulars who performed sabotage and assassinations in Occupied Europe.

What about the technology you mention? Was it real? 

CB: All of the technology I mention has a basis in real wartime inventions, although I have taken fictional liberties. At the beginning of the war, in the British race for building airplanes and fighting equipment, many tools were also being developed for clandestine warfare. I became intrigued when I discovered information about the S-phone, very cutting-edge, which the British developed, buried in a Stanford University library archive. I was also fascinated by the way Lee Enfield rifles were adapted to sniper capabilities as prototypes before field and general operational use. There was even a lipstick gun which I was dying for Kate to use, but alas, it didn’t quite fit in the story.

Kate has very little formal training in spycraft but endless creativity for inventing ways to get herself out of jams—for surviving. Where did you get these ideas? 

CB: I was inspired by the idea of what skills Kate would have had to develop as a girl growing up on a series of Oregon ranches. Ranch work is a tough job, and would have been even harder in the 1930s. Life was subject to incessant rain, blizzards, falling trees, insect infestation or crop failure. Cattle would get stuck in barb wire, tractor tires puncture, equipment breaks—all these problems need to be solved on the fly, with few resources. One would learn to think on one’s feet, make do and get creative with what’s available. So Kate, who grew up in a rough and tumble environment with five brothers, learns to hold her own and becomes resilient.

This is your 20th book. Do you have any advice for aspiring writers about the writing life? 

CB: Just write what you’re passionate about. If there’s a what if that won’t leave you, listen to yourself.

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