A Monumental Mystery

If you actually follow both of my blogs, you'll know that we recently took an awesome trip to Belgium and France, where we spent about half our time exploring World War One-related sites.  You can read all the gory details over on The Right People Travel.

Along the way, my two areas of interest merged and I started to develop a rather brilliant mystery idea.  Here goes.

A body is found (mutilated?  mysteriously dead with no markings?  just a torso?  with ink?) in an American military cemetery in France, or maybe at one of those grand American monuments.  Perhaps the body was tossed from high atop the monument, or arranged among the graves, or pieces line the path, or it was placed in a praying posture in the little chapel.  At any rate, there has been . . . a MURDER.  Of course, the body is probably discovered by a local walking his dog, or a maintenance person, early in the morning, with very French details like the person is smoking, or bringing a bottle of local wine somewhere or something.  (I'm getting a little Martin Walker/Inspector Bruno vibe here.)

Meanwhile Our Hero (probably male, about which I am, yes, conflicted) is a staffer with the American Battle Monuments Commission, and is stuck in dull talks in France during a hot August, when everything is closed and only the tourists are out.  The Yanks are considering pulling back on some of their commitments to local staffing of these places (it is expensive, no one from the States comes anymore, esp. to the WW1 sites), which of course doesn't thrill the French.  Our Hero has been sent as the "expert" on the sites to accompany the Senator (Congressperson?) at these talks.  But the pol is really just on a junket and interested in making a publicity splash, so deals in soundbites and uninformed commentary.  Our Hero privately disagrees with the idea of reducing US involvement, but it's not his show and he tunes a lot out, and tours around a bit on his own.  Until the body shows up, and there will be some connection - not sure what but of course that is the point of the whole mystery - to the site itself.

Will it be a historical connection?  German person dead, descendant of a soldier or commanding officer, killed by a vengeful French person?  You could substitute several nationalities for the killer here:  Belgian, English, American.  You could go the other way.  It could be a decades-old crime of passion.  Or maybe it will be a modern terrorist event, and the victim will be Israeli or Palestinian or a citizen from some former colonial territory of the warring powers, making a statement about how these conflicts just gave birth to modern problems.  Maybe the crime will turn out to have nothing to do with WW1 but instead reveal a human trafficking network that operates through France.  So many possibilities!

The character development piece - which as you might know is key for me - comes as the crime is investigated and the question of jurisdiction comes into play.  Has this crime taken place on French or American territory?  Who should investigate and who will get to prosecute?  Our Hero is no cop, but must work with French authorities - a smart and sympathetic but maybe a little cynical or hard to read or has-a-past French cop - because Our Hero has the expertise on the site itself which may hold the key to solving the crime.  The Frenchie isn't happy about it, but they'll sort it out.  (Note:  there will be NO ROMANCE.  I hate that in crime fiction.)  Maybe there are also some MPs who seem doltish and brutal but are really kind of cool.  Our Hero has a PhD, maybe a family at home, and doesn't stick his nose in but because he knows more about this site than anyone else, he has to be part of the investigation.  He's a good eater.  Or maybe just learning about it, and his French counterpart can't believe he knows so little about cheese.  There will be meals.

That's about as far as I got.  There could be a whole series, taking place at different monuments and cemetaries (WW2 at Normandy or the Philipines!).  But it is hard to keep them from becoming formulaic, so maybe this is a standalone.

By now you surely realize the chief benefit of this project:  much research time will have to be spent in France.  Do I have any takers as assistant?

Who Knows What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men . . .

the SHADOW knows mu wha ha ha ha ha

Today in MYSTERY HISTORY tells us that today is the 85th anniversary of the debut of The Shadow on The Detective Radio Hour.  I learned about the Shadow (and the Whistler and A Tale Well-Calculated to Keep you in . . . SUSPENSE!) listening to the Armed Forces Network when we lived in Germany in the late 1970s.  On Sunday evenings they'd play classic radio shows like these mysteries and Jack Benny.  I can still see that green galley kitchen with the funny little pull-out table, and the clock radio on the windowsill.  And probably a dog somewhere.

The Ways of the World

When you cross something off that is near the top of your to-read list, and then find it again, near the bottom, you know you are just not keeping up.  Here I was thinking that Robert Goddard's The Ways of the World was a newish book set in immediate post-World War One Paris, and therefore good prep for my imminent vacation, when in fact it was published in 2013 (Random House in the UK, Mysterious Press here) and there are already two sequels!

You might also find that your to-read list offers insight into the evolution of your reading tastes.  I'm pretty sure I put this on the list when I started because it was international, and I know I added it more recently because of the WW1 angle.  But I also know that my interests have been honed in the few years since I started keeping track of what I write, and this story doesn't quite thrill as much as it might have.

It is 1919, the War to End All Wars has ended, and Our Hero, James "Max" Maxted, is looking into the possibilities of opening a flying school in England, aided by his loyal wartime mechanic Sam Twentyman (which is one of my more favorite names in crime fiction).  That plan is upended when Max's father dies unexpectedly in Paris, where he has been part of the British delegation negotiating the Treaty of Versailles.  Max and his snotty brother Ashley go to Paris to collect their father's remains, and it becomes clear to Max anyway that All is Not What it Seems with their father's death.  There's an elegant mistress, for starters, and a mysterious list, and some Russian exiles and fairly stereotyped diplomats:  inscrutable Japanese, warm Argentines, loud and heavy-drinking Americans.  And did I mention the elusive German spy and his lithe thief sidekick, Le Singe (The Monkey)?  Yes, even though this story is complicated in the grand tradition of good espionage tales, the characters feel a bit stock. 

I’m sure Max is handsome, and Sam is stocky, and Appleby (the British secret service detailed to the delegation) smokes a pipe.  But I like characters with a little more complexity, or quirkiness, or even ambivalence.  Le Carre and Philip Kerr always satisfy the last, and probably the first, and who can forget the ultimately quirky Bryant and May, or Dr. Siri Paiboun, or those rascals at Slough House?

Lesser characters seem to drop out of the picture, which is a little frustrating.  We hear a lot about irritating Ashley (whom I picture as the ineffective Frahnces from Poldark) and his striving wife, and there is the intimation that they are going to try and have Max removed as executor of the father’s will – but then we don’t hear about them for chapters and chapters, really until towards the end of the book when the tale takes Our Hero back to London.  And while Sam is presented as a kind of sidekick, and does act that way at times, he is really more of an independent operator than one might expect. 

This story is also curiously action-less, at least for the first half.  Max spends a lot of time going around Paris talking to people, to try and find out what actually happened to his father.  This is in fact what normal people would do, but while perhaps realistic it is a wee bit boring for the reader. 

But you have to bear in mind that this is the first of a trilogy, so you can imagine that the author felt he had time to bring characters in and out of the action (such as it was), and to develop that action in a more leisurely fashion than a stand-alone might suggest.  I gather that the story is really wrapped up in the third volume, with a big ending.*  Will I get to it?  Not sure.  I did not love this book, although I certainly did not hate it.  The laxity of this review lays it out:  it did not excite with character or prose, although it did not disgust.  It wasn’t a book that I thought about during the day, when I wasn’t reading it, which is my idea of a really good book.

*Goddard has written a number of books, and according to his website is the "master of the clever twist."  I don't love a clever twista, but they have their uses.

Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968

Heda Margolius Kovaly's Under A Cruel Star is not a work of crime fiction, although it is full of terrible acts perpetrated by individuals against others.  Unfortunately, the Holocaust, and the repressive regimes supported by the Soviet Union in post-World War Two Eastern Europe are all too real, and they happened to millions and millions of innocent victims.  This is the true story of Heda Kovaly's Innocence.

The Holocaust only gets about a chapter here, and Kovaly's time in Auschwitz is completely left out.  She is sent to the ghetto at Lodz, Poland, in 1941, and from there to various concentration camps.  She manages to escape from a forced march at the end of the war, and returns to Prague while it is still occupied by the Germans.  She survives this hell - barely, the book is as much about the anguish of survival as it is about the hell of the camps - only to find herself and her young family immersed in the stranger-than-fiction world of Soviet-style communism.  Her husband, a true believer, became a government functionary.  Kovaly herself never bought into the ideology, although she wanted to believe in a better future for her beloved Czechoslovakia.
  "That I myself did not succumb to the lure of ideology was certainly not because I was smarter than Rudolf but because I was a woman, a being much closer to the reality and the basic things of life than he was.  I was more interested in what was happening around me in the present, among the people I loved, than in the foggy spheres of ideology.  Rudolf could decide on the basis of statistics - mostly falsified of course - that under communism people lived a better and happier life.  I saw from close-up and with my own eyes that this was not true."  (65)
For his belief in science, and search for a better way, Rudolf is caught up in a web of denunciations related to someone else, imprisoned, tried, found guilty, and executed.  Barely a decade later, he and others who were killed as part of this show trial were exonerated, reluctantly, by the government.  This is the story of his wife's survival.  It is truly a memoir, much in her head, an outpouring of memories that need to be on paper to be preserved.  It is harrowing, depressing, unbelievable, and all too real.

When you read this account, you will realize how much of Innocence is drawn from Kovaly's life, and how the isolation of the survivor and the pariah are so similar.  Shortly after her initial return to Prague, Kovaly wanders the city, desperately searching for a place to stay that will not betray a friend to the occupying authorities.  Near the end of her rope she goes to the last person she can think of.
  "I walked up and down in front of the house for a while.  I had decided that I would not try to see anyone else.  Ruda would not be home anyway.  He might not eve live here anymore. Some Germans might have requisitioned his apartment.  It was dangerous and hopeless.  Still, I wanted to do something:  to walk, to think, to see, to postpone death for just a little bit longer.  To have someone talk to me.  To feel for one more moment that I still belonged to humanity."  (36)

Kovaly's survival instinct is her need for connection with other humans, but not just face time, she needs actual engagement, grounded in honesty and respect.  Is that so much to ask?, is really the theme here.  She does find it, and goes on to lead a long life in the US, even living here in Our Fair City for a time.  But her Soviet Prague, even if less violent, is darker and more frightening than William Ryan's Soviet Union - because of course it is real.  Under A Cruel Star is not crime fiction, but true crime.

The Darkening Field

Oops I did it again.  It turns out that William Ryan's The Darkening Field (Minotaur Books, 2011, The Bloody Meadow in the UK) is the second, not the third, in his engaging series set in Stalinist Russia.  (Those are two words you don't expect to find in the same sentence - Stalinist and engaging - but it's true, this is the kind of book I really look forward to reading at the end of the day.)  Regular readers will recall that I liked The Holy Field enough to read The Twelfth Department pretty quickly afterwards, and while I had some quibbles with the latter, I couldn't and still can't argue with Ryan's vivid depiction of the era or his likable hero, Capt. Alexey Dimitrieyvich Korolev.

But reading out of order?  The wheels are coming off!

But I digress.  In The Darkening Field, Our Hero is assigned to investigate the suicide of a young woman on a film set near Odessa.  Why is this Moscow detective assigned to a case so very far away?  Because the victim had a cozy relationship with a very highly placed individual in the feared State security apparatus NKVD, and Korolev, having proved himself trustworthy in that case about the icons, is the only man capable of ferreting out the truth and handling it discreetly.*  Of course, Korolev also knows that if he gets it wrong, he is likely to end up in a cell at the Lubyanka or worse. Trust, in 1930s USSR, is a close-run thing.  

Setting and historical detail are Ryan's strong suit, and you can learn a little bit about why he chose the Soviet film industry as the backdrop for this tale from his Author's Note and more on his website.  The film crew - Ukrainfilm, the whole thing modeled loosely on Eisenstadt and his crowd - is working in a small village near Odessa, and is housed at a local agricultural college.  But this is no University of Wisconsin-Stout, rather this college has taken over a former great estate that used to belong to an elite family, vanished, of course, in the Revolution.  The fading pre-Revolutionary glamour of the grounds adds enormously to the atmosphere, but it also makes you feel a little guilty like when you read about the antebellum South, and think, that sounds like a lovely house, but right, slavery.  So go the elite everywhere, although the Russian aristocracy arguably had it a lot worse than Southern slaveholders.  In any case, no one is too concerned about their loss.

Ryan chooses instead to concentrate on the ugly side of collectivization in the Ukraine - the famine and destruction and death in the name of wiping out the bourgeoisie, then the peasants' retaliation against the State forces, and their subsequent crackdown and reprisal.  It was a terrible cycle that relatively few locals survived, and that left parts of the region scorched and empty and nursing their grievances until an opportunity for revenge presented itself.

"Korolev had heard rumors of what had happened in the Urkraine in 'thirty-two and 'thirty-three - dangerous words heard late at night from sodleirs who'd had too much to drink in the Arbat Cellar.  How the Red Army and the NKVD hard forced the peasant to give up ever scrap of food and ho, faced with starvation, they had resisted, futilely, and the shoulders of the Chekists had shot them down.  The car passed more than one smoke-blackened church, their domes charred black skeletons, and each village was dotted with roofless ruined buildings.  Korolev couldn't help but notice that the few hunched peasant he saw seemed older than their probable years, with barely the energy to lift their feet from the ground." (41)

Now we are all too familiar with the brutal excesses of the Stalinist era, but in 1937 you only knew about it if you'd lived it, and that is the key to this story.  And if you know your European history, you also know that there are some folks in Germany around then who were happy to exploit any fissures in the Communist monolith, to serve their own ends.  Odessa being a port town, there are plenty of opportunities for illegitimate transfer of information and material (read:  espionage and sabotage), so that factors in here as well.  It would give away the story to say more, but I'll just note that allegiances - of all kinds - are not always what they appear.

But here is the thing about Revolutionary excess.  As we've seen in so many of these detectives-in-repressive-regime stories, such behavior allows Our Hero to maintain his Revolutionary ideals while decrying the horrific acts perpetrated in its name.  Communism is awesome except when Stalin does it, and then you'd better be careful that you aren't distantly related to a counterrevolutionary or you may find yourself in Siberia at best, or with a bullet in your back.  Ryan adds a twist to the trope, by including a recurring role in his books for the Thieves, the famed precursor to the current Russian Mafia.  Their colorful leader, Count Kolya, also trusts Korolev, and lends a hand in an enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend kind of way.  Of course, the Thieves hate any government, so this isn't so much anti-totalitarianism as it is self-preservation on their part.  Korolev gets a sidekick here, too, a plucky Odessa cop named Slivka who just happens to be related to the Thieves.  She's tough, wears a leather jacket, and looks the other way when he inadvertently references the Holy Mother.  Ryan deploys an array of characters who have private reservations about the regime, but do what they need to do to survive.  It makes it easy to like a story, but you might wonder how long this theme can be sustained?  When will Korolev's private humanity be denounced?  Or will it just wear away, unable to withstand the constant tension of living in a world where simply "asking the question seemed to risk turning the suspicion into fact," and the fact could get you killed.  (244)  Today's New York Times has a review of Rosemary Sullivan's Stalin's Daughter.  Having lived in the belly of one of the most repressive regimes in modern history, it is no wonder that Svetlana Alliluyeva has some issues. Granted, her relationship with Stalin was rather different from Korolev's but it makes you wonder about the emotional toll from walking that tightrope.


*Because as everyone knows, a suicide of a character connected to another prominent character in any story is never a suicide!  But as