THE COUNTERFEIT CANDIDATE - Book review

Brian Klein’s debut novel The Counterfeit Candidate (2021) – was written during Lockdown, doubtless one of many resulting from that misguided response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

The book is based on the widespread premise that Hitler did not actually die in the ill-fated Berlin bunker in 1945. Stalin believed the Führer had escaped – as did many other conspiracy advocates.

The main action takes place in 2012, in Buenos Aires and San Francisco.

Chief inspector Nicolas Vargas of the BA Police Department is investigating an audacious bank heist, where hundreds of safe deposit boxes have been stolen. Puzzlingly, as he begins to track down the culprits, he comes up against a dead end – and dead crooks, all of whom were tortured before they were executed.

A tenuous link leads to San Francisco and the powerful Pharma group The Franklin Corporation. The head of this corporation is Richard Franklin, whose son John has just secured the Republican Presidential nomination which is highly likely to lead him to the White House.

Vargas enlists the help of San Francisco Lieutenant Troy Hembury, a 50-year-old muscle-bound African American, to investigate.

Their probe is soon fraught with lethal danger...

Spelling out anything else would spoil the story. This is fast-paced writing, with slick scene shifts and flashbacks, to be expected from an accomplished television director with over 25 years’ experience.

Pick it up and you won’t want to put it down until the end.

And then there’s the sequel, already out: The Führer’s Prophecy which again features Vargas and Hembury, some ten years after the events in the first book. 

THE ENGLISH LADY - book review

William Harrington’s Second World War espionage novel The English Lady was published in 1982. It comprises three parts: 1931-1934; 1938-1940; and 1941-1942 (though the final pages are 1981).

Lady Nancy Brookeford has grown up knowing the rich and famous movers and shakers of Great Britain and the United States, including the Prince of Wales, Winston Churchill and President Roosevelt! ‘Her face was faultless, clear, smooth skin; a small nose, a small mouth with full mobile lips; large, deep-blue eyes; straight, unplucked brows... She had a reputation for being pretty and intelligent’ (p5). The family had relations in Germany, one of whom was Helmut Bittrich, a cousin, who taught her to fly when she visited that country.

Her skill as a pilot combined with her looks gained the attention of Germans, especially Nazis, not least Von Ribbentrop and Hindenburg, and in the early 1930s Göring and Goebbels. By 1934 she found herself being employed as a pilot for Lufthansa. Before long she was brought to the notice of Hitler, who seemed enraptured by her...

However, Hitler was not the only one under her spell: Reinhard Heydrich was intensely interested in her: ‘He was a sensual man – his narrow eyes wandered over her like exploring fingertips... He liked to fly, to fence, to play the violin, and to make love to beautiful women. This was the positive side of his personality. He showed a dark negative in the performance of his official duties, she supposed. Maybe she need not see that side’ (p132).

And then, when returning to England for a funeral, she is faced with a proposition she cannot refuse: to become a spy because war was imminent.

Haydrich observed ‘We have to prepare for war. To save the peace, you prepare for war’ (p183).

A phrase handed down from the fourth century Romans, perhaps: si vis pacem, para bellum. Interestingly, part of this was used as a motto by a German arms maker – parabellum guns and cartridges.

There is plenty of intrigue among the Nazi hierarchy, several of them intent on ridding the country of Hitler and then suing for peace – among these was Admiral Canaris. Nancy is often in the thick of it, all the while getting closer to Heydrich.

Two aspects of the novel create suspense and verisimilitude. The detailed behind-the-scenes behaviour of the Nazi hierarchy and the quite exhilarating flying sequences.

Certain events are touched upon, notably Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass, and Hitler’s detestation of the Soviets. Both monsters, Hitler and Heydrich, are given human faces, no mean feat, though I doubt that this will endear some readers to the book.

Any student of the Second World War will be aware where the book is leading when Heydrich is transferred to Czechoslovakia. While Nancy frequently uses the airfield at Lidice, the book does not mention this town’s awful fate.

William Harrington was a lawyer turned prolific novelist, writing a half-dozen Columbo books and over 17 standalone novels. He died in 2000, having committed suicide aged 68. 

GARDEN OF BEASTS - Book review

 

 

Jeffery Deaver’s standalone book – ‘A novel of Berlin 1936’ - was published in 2004 and it’s an interesting departure from his normal suspense psychological thrillers.

Paul Schumann is a mobster hitman who only kills those who deserve to die. ‘Committing an evil act to eliminate a greater evil’ (p93). Unfortunately his latest hit goes wrong and he is caught and given a choice: he can go to Berlin and kill Ernst, one of Hitler’s top men responsible for rearmament, or opt for the electric chair. A no-brainer.

Once in Berlin, however, things go awry and he is being hunted by a dogged Berlin Kripo detective Kohl. The depth of detail for the period is very impressive and never swamps the story.

Paul learns a great deal about the new Germany under Hitler who took power a mere three years earlier.  The SS ‘were originally Hitler’s guard detail. Now they’re another private army. The Gestapo is the secret police force, plainclothes. They’re small in number but very dangerous. Their jurisdiction is political crimes mostly. But in Germany now anything can be a political crime. You spit on the sidewalk, it’s an offense to the honor of the Leader so off you go to prison or a concentration camp.’ (p79)

Interior Minister Göring ‘ordered every policeman to carry a weapon to use them liberally. He’d
actually issued an edict saying that a policeman should be reprimanded for failing to shoot a suspect, but not for shooting someone who turned out to be innocent.’ (p84)

Kohl and his fellow policemen found it difficult to do their jobs particularly when interviewing potential witnesses: ‘since Hitler had come to power blindness had become the national malady…’ (p89)

Paul befriends his landlady Käthe and she tells him about her boyfriend who was brutally murdered by National Socialists in front of her near the lake in the Tiergarten, the Garden of Beasts. Just one more piece of evidence against the evil regime.

Deaver creates characters you sympathise with and believe in and fear for their safety in the treacherous state of the Third Reich. The claustrophobic environment, where children will betray parents to the authorities, where jobs, livelihoods and even lives could be forfeit if you don’t acquiesce, where freedom of speech is trampled upon: it must have been terrible to live there then. (Imagine how bad it could have been with the social media trolls and cancel brigade!)

A riveting page-turning thriller with a couple of neat twists – Deaver’s hallmark – and a satisfying resolution.

Recommended.

Book review - Rogue Male

Geoffrey Household’s classic novel Rogue Male was published in 1939, which gives it immediacy for that time. The unnamed narrator, a British aristocrat, has just failed to assassinate the tyrannical leader of a European country – whether it’s Hitler (probable) or Stalin is not explained. He is captured by secret service men and tortured and questioned but tells them nothing. They believe he is working for the British government; he insists he is a private individual and was simply hunting near their leader’s House.

The first implausible plot-point then arrives. Instead of killing him as an inconvenience, they engineer an ‘accident’, throwing him off a cliff with his belongings. ‘British aristocrats meets with unfortunate demise while hunting’. But, naturally, our resourceful narrator survives the fall (or we wouldn’t be reading the story) and, though seriously injured, sneaks away before the local police can ‘find’ the ‘unlucky tourist’.

The survival and escape from pursuit are Household’s strengths in this tale. He describes the difficulties well, and we can empathise.

To begin with, we don’t know why he should have set out on this mission. As he says, ‘I am not an obvious anarchist or fanatic, and I don’t look as if I took any interest in politics.’ (p1) I have to wonder how does someone look who is interested in politics. The first clue to his motivation is here, however: ‘One can hardly count the upsetting of one’s trivial private life and plans by European disturbances as a grievance.’ (p9)

The ploy to use an unnamed narrator is to bolster the feeling that this is in effect a true story. ‘Lest what I write should ever, by accident or intention, become public property, I will not mention who I am. My name is widely known.’ (p8)

More than once, Household’s narrator appears to judge people by appearance, attributing base motives. While hiding in a field, he fears he may be detected. ‘There were several peasants on their way to the fields. I could only pray that they wouldn’t enter mine. They would have had some sport with me before handing me over to the police; they seemed that sort.’ (p22)

Where Household’s narrative falls down, and thus diminishes the ‘believability’, is in his description of the characters he encounters during his escape. They are virtual cyphers, without colour in their eyes, without facial features of note. ‘Mr Vaner received me in his cabin. He was a dashing young man in his early twenties, with his cap on the back of a head of brown curls.’ (p35) Plenty of writers don’t over-describe, arguing that the reader can visualise the character however they like. But in a novel that purports to be ‘real’, every tiny detail adds to the verisimilitude. The intimacy of detail lends credibility.

As a thriller, it succeeds in several aspects: the chase, the suspense engendered by hiding and the risk of discovery. The action, when it occurs is muted, reported rather than visualised. There is little ‘show’, only ‘tell’. The deathly struggle in the Underground is without visuals; fine, it’s dark, but there’s no visceral feeling of being there. (p55) The dramatic moment is lost.

Writers must observe, and Household was a keen observer, and described the world well: ‘… wandered through the quiet squares which smelled of a London August night – that perfume of dust and heavy flowers, held down by trees into the warm, well-dug ravines between the houses.’ (p57)  And, another: ‘I have noticed that what cats most appreciate in a human being is not the ability to produce food – which they take for granted – but his or her entertainment value.’ (p76) Yes, there is humour, despite the tense situation. And, surprisingly, considering the beginning of the novel, ‘To be shot from ambush is horribly unnerving.’ (p105)

The narrator decides to go to ground – literally – and constructs an under-earth burrow, stocking up with tinned goods. ‘Space I have none. The inner chamber is a tumbled morass of wet earth which I am compelled to use as a latrine. I am confined to my original excavation, the size of three large dog-kennels, where I lie on or inside my sleeping-bag.’ (p118) The description of the construction of his lair is well done, to make it very real and claustrophobic. Here, in a hedgerow (there were a lot more in England in 1939!) he makes the acquaintance of a cat. ‘We live in the same space, in the same way, and on the same food, except that Asmodeus has no use for oatmeal, nor I for field-mice.’ (p119)

One of his persistent pursuers goes by the name of Quive-Smith and the final confrontation with him is quite suspenseful. Here, we learn from Quive-Smith that ‘It’s the mass that we are out to discipline and educate. If an individual interferes, certainly we crush him; but for the sake of the mass – of the State, shall I say?’ (p136)This might indicate the Soviet frame of mind, rather than that of the Nazi. Hence, the leader could conceivably be Stalin, not Hitler; it matters not, both were worthy of assassination, as millions of dead souls would testify.

It is only when we get to p143 that we glean the motivation behind the narrator’s abortive mission. A nameless woman, his only love, put up against a wall and shot by followers of the leader. This section is woolly. We don’t know why she was done to death, though it’s likely she objected in some manner to the leader’s creed. And we certainly don’t see her in the narrator’s mind’s eye; so we have no empathy.

The story is told in three chapters, originally scribbled in an exercise book, which he posted to his solicitor friend, Saul (another character without description).

Reading this now, we know that whatever the narrator’s intention at the end of this written record, he failed. [However, there is a sequel, Rogue Justice (1982), in which we follow the narrator on his subsequent killing spree against Nazis.]

This book has been considered superior to Buchan’s The 39 Steps (1915), but I don’t believe it is. Certainly, it employs much that became familiar in thrillers – long flight and pursuit and the resourcefulness and pluckiness of the hero as exemplified by Buchan’s novel. They are both books of their time, and indeed both have inspired future thriller writers. If you’re a fan of thrillers and you haven’t read either of these, now is a good time to remedy that omission.

Writing – research – Nazis – psychic-04

For the final glimpse into the book PSYCHIC DISCOVERIES BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN by Sheila Ostrander & Lynn Schroeder (1970) this copy 1976, we’ll look at the Nazis and Hitler.

It’s already been mentioned (in psychic-01 here that Hitler was a believer in the occult. A good number of authors have mined this subject, among them Dennis Wheatley, Daniel Easterman, James Twining, Graham Masterton and James Herbert.

According to this book, Czechs said the Nazi movement was deeply involved with the black arts. Hitler was born in Braunau Inn in Austria, a town long famous for the large number of mediums it produced (including Willy Schneider, who had the same wet nurse as Hitler!)

Apparently, Hitler was trained in mediumship by Prof Haushofer of the University of Munich. (See The Morning of the Magicians).

One man who fought Nazism was Stefan Ossowiecki (1877-1944). He was a telepathist, clairvoyant, and could resort to astral projection. He helped the underground during the war, giving information on lost and imprisoned people. Holding a scrap of clothing, he was able to reveal where victims had been executed, and where they were buried.

Documented accounts speak of him locating specific bodies in mass graves layered with the dead.

On the day of Warsaw Uprising, he was killed by the Nazis; his body was never found, as he predicted.

***

From time to time, Tana Standish crossed paths with Nazis – bearing in mind that she was active in the 1970s and 1980s.

One nasty Nazi was Dr Wolf Schneider, who was born in 1920. He was responsible for torturing Tana in Czechoslovakia in 1975 (The Prague Papers). He didn’t employ black magic, just plain evil shock electric shock treatment. He was later recruited by Spetsnaz officer Aksakov in The Tehran Text mission.

Tana was not versed in astral projection, though she was learning to harness remote viewing - which is another subject worthy of comment in a later blog. Aided by recourse to bio-feedback, she used this in a haunting and poignant scene in The Tehran Text.

Tana Standish can be found in The Prague Papers and TheTehran Text.

Writing – research – Psychic-01

Research for my third Tana Standish novel (The Khyber Chronicle) has re-introduced me to one of my old books, Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain by Sheila Ostrander & Lynn Schroeder (1970) my copy 1976.

As a writer of fiction, one doesn’t have to believe everything, particularly where the so-called pseudo-sciences are concerned. A significant proportion of the population (US, UK, elsewhere) believe in the existence of some form of supernatural or psychic phenomena, though it does seem difficult to prove under strict laboratory conditions.  The writer’s mission is to suspend disbelief, and in this case that requires a certain amount of research in the literature on the psychic subject.

When creating my psychic spy, Tana Standish, I realised that she couldn’t attempt to utilise too many abilities, only a few, otherwise she'd be 'superwoman', and these 'talents' could not always be called upon at will. Emotions and environment play a part in receptiveness, as we know.

In the 1970s I had amassed a fairly large collection of books on the supernatural; this decade seemed to be the heyday of paranormal phenomena, and it was the ideal period to set my psychic spy series. 

One interesting example from the Ostrander-Schroeder book was Wolf Messing, a Jew. 

In a Warsaw theatre in 1937 in front of a thousand people he predicted, ‘Hitler will die if he turns toward the East’. 

At least one psychic had been murdered by the Nazis for ‘knowing too much about their plans’.

Hitler, apparently a believer of the occult, heard of the prophecy and put a price of 200,000 marks on Messing’s head.

The German Army invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 and Messing hid but he was captured and identified. He was beaten up, losing six teeth, and then taken to a police station. Here, he used all his powers of mind to compel all the police to go to one room where he locked them in, and he escaped to the Russian border. His father, brothers and his entire family were slaughtered in the Warsaw Ghetto.

At Brest Litovsk he was among many refugees fleeing the Nazis. His telepathy convinced the manager of the Ministry of Culture to give him a job.

People’s thoughts came to him as pictures, he explained, visual images of a specific action or place. If he touched the person, the thoughts were clearer, stronger, but touch wasn’t essential.

Later, Wolf Messing trained NKVD officers and had a number of encounters with Stalin.

He seemed able to telepathically project his thoughts into another person’s mind, to control or cloud them… In one test, he penetrated Stalin’s dacha, got past the many guards and servants by mentally suggesting to them he was Beria (Lavrenti Beria was the feared head of the Soviet secret police). He didn’t look like Beria, either!

Messing died in 1974, aged 75. 

***

Some aspects of Messing's ability would be employed by Tana. She was a child of five when she escaped the Warsaw Ghetto with her brother. Her psychic powers were slight at this time, but growing, despite the hunger and fear - or perhaps because of those life-threatening stimuli. She would have a psychic link with anyone she'd touched. As an adult and a spy, she would not balk at shaking hands with the devil; all the better to slay him...

Tana Standish can be found in The Prague Papers and TheTehran Text.

Make a date - 1st, 14th, 23rd and 30th April

War, Wolf and Who

 

Some time ago a series of my articles were published in a regular monthly column linking a set selection of dates in history. The series was popular. I'm busy coordinating the articles into book form. As today is 14 April, here are a number of linked events for that date plus three other April dates. To avoid repetition, I've simply indicated the relevant date in brackets.

The three dates for this article are:

1, 14, 23 and 30 April

 
April has a close connection with warfare, as an unusually large number of wars have started or ended in April and many military leaders have been born in April. Just a few wars that started/ended in April - American Revolution started (Paul Revere’s Ride: April 18-19, 1775) American Civil War (started April 1861, Ended April 1865) and the Second World War (Germany Surrendered in April, 1945).

The latter had a lot to do with the massed forces of the Allies but it was also highly relevant that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide the day after they were married in their Berlin bunker (30).

As a precursor to the Normandy landings, the Allies needed to penetrate the ‘soft underbelly of Europe’ and the success of the Allied landings in Sicily depended on a British Intelligence ploy to get the German High Command to shift its forces to Greece. Operation Mincemeat was devised in which the submarine HMS Seraph surfaced off the Mediterranean coast of Spain in 1943 and released a dead man into the sea (30). ‘Major Martin’ was carrying papers showing false invasion plans for Greece. This event was immortalised by the film The Man Who Never Was and was one of the greatest wartime hoaxes ever. It fooled the Nazis, which was the point. [An excellent book, by the way...]

 

Which was appropriate in the month of April Fool’s Day. Sadly, not all things that happened on this day (1) were foolish or funny.

In 1924 Hitler was sentenced to jail for five years (1) for his participation in the Beer Hall Putsch (essentially, treason), though he only spent nine months there – long enough for his world-shaking ideas to gestate in the form of his book, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). And on the same day seven years later, the newly elected Nazis organised a one-day boycott of all Jewish-owned businesses in Germany, ushering in a series of anti-Semitic laws which eventually culminated in the Holocaust.

A disaster on a vastly smaller scale than the Second World War was the sinking of the British steamer SS Atlantic (1) off Nova Scotia, killing 547 in 1873. Thirty-nine years later RMS Titanic struck an iceberg (14) and sank the next morning.

The same day that the iceberg was struck so was Abraham Lincoln (14) - by a bullet fired by John Wilkes Booth in 1865.

Two years later the president’s namesake William Lincoln patented (23) the Zoetrope, a machine which shows animated pictures by mounting a strip of drawings in a wheel and rotating it. And in 1894 the ubiquitous Thomas Edison demonstrated the kinetoscope (14), a device for peep-show viewing utilising photographs that flip in sequence, a precursor of movies.

 

And seventy-five years later to the day (14) at the Academy Awards there was a tie for best actress between Katherine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand. Another Oscar winner was Rod Steiger (for In the Heat of the Night in 1967) – he was born on the same day (14) in 1925, sharing the same birthday with Julie Christie (1941), who appeared with him in Dr Zhivago, and Sir John Gielgud, though twenty-one years younger than the illustrious thespian.
 
On the same day (14) in 1986, that actor who never won an Oscar but became president – Ronald Reagan - ordered bombing raids against Tripoli and Benghazi in Libya, killing sixty people, in retaliation for the bombing of a West Berlin nightclub where a US serviceman was killed.

Yet nature still manages to kill more people than man ever could: on the same day and year as Reagan’s raid (14), 2.2lb hailstones fell on a district in Bangladesh, killing 92. Apparently, these are the heaviest hailstones ever recorded. Bangladesh suffers regularly from natural disasters and April in 1991 was no exception (30) when a tropical cyclone killed about 125,000 people.

 
Meteorologists can actually save lives these days though this science was in its infancy in 1865 when Robert Fitzroy died (30). He was the captain of HMS Beagle and took Darwin on his trip to the Galapagos where he developed his theory of evolution. Fitzroy became an admiral and was the first to issue ‘weather forecasts’ – and the sea area Finisterre was renamed after him in 2002 for the shipping forecasts. [See my blog on the novel about Fitzroy here]
 
Definitely less devastating than the Asian tsunami, a modern instance when forecasting didn’t save lives, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake in 1946 near the Aleutian Islands caused a tidal wave that struck the Hawaiian islands (1) and killed 159. Many commentators lay the blame for natural disasters such as these on modern industrialisation. That famous ecologist, Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring and founder of the modern environmental movement, died (14) in 1964.

The ecological movement has become legitimate these days and has followers worldwide. The same can be said for Esperanto, the constructed language invented by Ludovich Lazarus Zamenhof (14) who died in 1917. He introduced it under the pseudonym Dr Esperanto, hence the name. His intention was to create an easy-to-learn neutral language to supplement other languages, not replace them. It currently has two million speakers.

Certainly Esperanto might have been useful for Columbus if it had been invented in 1492 when he was given his commission of exploration (30). Little did he realise what he’d set in motion. Some 311 years later, the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France for fifteen million dollars (30).

 
That’s not a lot of money for such a massive amount of land. The French have probably regretted it ever since. Talking of money, the first UK decimal coins were introduced this month (23) in 1968 in anticipation of the big event three years later.

Decimalisation certainly made calculations easier – especially on the computer which was in its infancy in those days. In fact, the Apple Computer company was formed in 1976 by Jobs and Wozniak (1). Things moved apace after that, of course, yet it was twenty-five years (23) before Intel introduced the Pentium IV processor.

It’s doubtful if modern synthesised music would have been invented without computers. And one of the most famous composers in this field is Morton Subotnick, who was born (14) in 1933 [and it’s pure coincidence that my name is submerged in his!] A composer of the more traditional sort was Georg Friedrich Handel, who died (14) on Subotnick’s birthday in 1759. Two composers with the name Sergei were born in April: Rachmaninoff (1) in 1873 and Prokofiev (23) in 1891.

Prokofiev is famous for many compositions, notably though Peter and the Wolf which has echoes of old vampire stories. Buffy the Vampire Slayer actress Sarah Michelle Gellar was born (14) in 1977 and none of the vampire characters would have been possible without the discovery of blood circulation by William Harvey who was born (1) in 1578.

Another William is the first Dr Who, William Hartnell, who died (23) in 1975 though he’s now destined to be remembered for all Time.

 

Science fiction author Anne McCaffrey, creator of the series of books about the Dragons of Pern, was born (1) in 1926, the same day as the silent movie star of the Phantom of the Opera, Lon Chaney, in 1883. Another actor who featured in science fiction films – Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers – was Buster Crabbe, who won Olympic gold medals for swimming in 1928 and 1932. He died this month (23) in 1983.

 
It would be remiss not to mention that England’s patron saint, St. George, was murdered in 303 AD because of his strong faith (23) and that both William Shakespeare and Miguel Cervantes died on this day in 1616. One wonders what Darwin would have thought about prolific author Edgar Wallace who was born (1) in 1875, the same year as another prolific author Edgar Rice Burroughs. Among many other books, Wallace wrote To Have and To Hold (which starred William Hartnell), The Four Just Men and King Kong, which has been remade into a state-of-the-art feature film by antipodean Peter Jackson. Fellow New Zealander Dame Ngaio Marsh was born (23) in 1899 and wrote about Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn.

  

The two Edgars - Wallace and Rice Burroughs