NOVELS ABOUT NAZIS: THE ODESSA FILE

I just read, or rather listened to Frederick Forsyth's memoir, THE OUTSIDER.  The man has had a fascinating life.

After a stint in the RAF, he worked as a reporter, first for Reuters then the BBC and finally as a free-lance,.  Being of a rather independent frame of mind, he made a lot of people in the establishment mad, both at the BBC and in the British government, and found himself without a job and broke.

I'll write a book, he thought and remembered an idea he had had while working in France, that the security around Charles DeGaulle was professional and tough. No one could get to le Grand Charles, except for an outsider. Thus was born the assassin he called the Jackal. 

He had a typewriter so he just sat down wrote the thriller. In about four months. He had, he says, no idea how a book was sold so he started going to publisher's offices in London and was turned away continually. Finally he met a publisher at a party and managed to talk his way into a meeting. He got the typed manuscript to the publisher who read it and bought it, demanding a second book "by Christmas."  A career was born.

The next book was THE ODESSA FILE about the mythical organization set up to get SS and other Nazi's bigwigs out of Europe. I had read the book when it came out in the mid-1960's and saw the movie with Jon Voigt and Maximillian Schell. (It was on TCM the other night too & I watched the ending.)

In his memoir, Forsyth describes how he did his research. He read five or six books on the SS and the Third Reich and then he went an found people to talk to. Simon Wiesenthal, for instance, who is a character in the book. One of his sources, I think, a man in the British secret service, talked to him about big Nazis still thought alive and still wanted.

Don't use a fake Nazi, here's a real one SS-captain Eduard Roschmann, who was the
commandant of the ghetto of Riga in Latvia, which is where the German and Austrian Jews were sent. And murdered by the thousands. (And just to fully comprehend how horrible this was, this was done without gas chambers, the bodies toppled into pits dug in the forest.)

 

Peter Miller is a German reporter and stumbles onto a diary written by a survivor of Riga. As a young German, he is horrified at what he learns about the SS. He tracks down Roschmann but the villain manages to escape to South American. The real Roschmann did the same and lived there as a businessman under an alias. He was actually there when the movie came out. You have to wonder if he read the book or saw the  movie.

According to Forsyth, a man in Argentina did go to the movie and realized that he knew Roschmann by his alias.  I don't know if that's true. Wikipedia says that Roschmann's wife, who had been left in Germany found out that her husband had married an Argentinian woman and got mad. She told the German authorities his alias and they began extradition for bigamy. I guess it's like arresting Capone for tax evasion.

Roschmann, who had escaped both the British and the Americans in 1945,  managed to evade extradition back to Germany and evidently died in Paraguay. I wonder if his wife was sorry. Or glad. That'll fix him.

A LITTLE BLING ON THE COVER

Here's the cover with the medal.

 Kind of takes the focus away from the swastikas which is not a bad thing. I wonder if it makes anyone want to read the book.  I think the cover is mysterious. Maybe the medallion makes it even more so.  At any rate, it is terrific to have won. It means people have read the book and been moved by it and hopefully even more will do so. Here's a link where you can buy a copy!

 

amazon.com/author/margotabbott

 

A GOLD MEDAL

The Last Innocent Hour has won a gold medal or first prize  from Independent Publishers in the category of Military/War Time Fiction. And, yes, I'm going to get an actual gold medal and there will be a sticker facsimile of the medal to put on the cover of the book. 

But what does it really mean? Frankly, I don't know. But as my mother used to say: It's better than a kick in the teeth.

It would be different if it came with a nice check. It's interesting which friends/relatives asked if it meant better sales. No idea, we'll see. And it will be nice for my overall resume. Mostly, it's great that a bunch of strangers read the book and thought enough of it to award it. It's always rewarding when strangers read it and respond favorably.

When I was doing theater in New York - this was always Off-Off-Off-Off Broadway - in little store front theatres. These were Equity waver so there were only 90 seats. We'd invite everyone we knew but sometimes there would be strangers in the house. When we got backstage, we'd ask: Who are the people in  the front row? Who are they here for? Nobody? You mean STRANGERS came to see us?

So, yes, STRANGERS read my book.  I'm happy about that.

I'd be even happier if it were my second novel, the unpublished second novel.  Doesn't even have to be winning medals. The second novel is why I started this whole process of online publishing.

I think getting TLIH published back in 1991 was such a fluke that I never really believed in it. I went through most of the experience in a daze, although it was a fun daze. It was great to have some money and I liked the good reviews. I liked doing readings (I am an actor, after all.)

But I never felt like a real writer. I always thought I'd feel that way once the second novel was published. Then I'd know it wasn't a fluke. Then I could trust what happened.  T hen I could believe.

So here I am, twenty-seven years on, and there's a gold medal.  Better than ....

ONE WAY TO START

After TLIH was published, I had about 10 wonderful years during which I wrote two other novels and had started a third when I needed to find a paying job. Wonderful until the third one, like the second, did not sell.

Unlike a lot of writers, I actually liked doing it. I loved visiting my imaginary world, letting my characters loose.  But I can’t figure out how to do it now, how to sustain it.  I feel I’ve gotten so far away from writing, that I don’t know how to get back. 

Not writing is one of the things I chastise myself for when I wake up at 3 in the am. The other morning, trying to calm down enough to fall back asleep, I remembered how I started writing TLIH., how it was kind of a last ditch effort and how I did it to help myself through a difficult time.

It was 1980-something in New York City and I was a clerk in a junior sportswear buying office at Saks Fifth Avenue. This was in a closet that had been converted – sort of – into an office. There was just room for the three of us, the buyer, assistant buyer and me. There were no computers.

I know. Hard to imagine.  There were three telephones, but no keyboards not even a type-writer but we had pads of yellow paper.

The two buyers were young women, both stylish and ambitious and very good to me. But they were usually out of the office down in the garment district or out on the floor.  I was left alone in our closet with work, as I remember, didn’t demand much from me.

Being married didn’t help. My actor husband was on tour that lasted about three months.

I remember feeling that I was forgetting how to talk, that my brain was turning to mush, that I was going crazy.

One morning, I thought of the story that had been rattling around in my head for a couple of years, of the SS guy weeping on the Ambassador Dodd’s sofa. The ambassador had a daughter and I knew she was in love with the guy. I told myself I should write it down, though I had no idea how to do that. But these scenes played out in my head and all I had to do was write them down. I’d write them using present tense. I’d write it like a script. I was an actor. I was comfortable with a script.

I pulled one of the pads of yellow paper over and started.

One thing led to another and about five years later, I had 1000 pages and a couple years after that, a book.  

Imagine that.

JUDGING A BOOK BY ITS COVER

What a time we live in.  Who would have thought being a Nazi, neo or whatever, would be something people would be proud of? Being rebellious and angry is one thing, but appropriating a symbol without knowing what it really stands for is just stupid.

Of course, symbols are complex things, aren’t they?  

The swastika itself was an ancient design from Asia that the National Socialists appropriated because of their belief in the Aryan origins of the Teutonic race. I imagine they would be in furious denial to know how DNA research has traced all of us back to Africa!

But now even when you see a swastika on a Tibetan pot or a Navaho blanket, it gives you a jolt.  Even oriented in a different direction than the Nazis liked, it is a nasty little spider – and here I’m giving spiders a bad name. 

 

So putting swastikas on the cover of my book was not a light decision – and now I’m not sure I like it. I found the photograph of a National Socialist rally and thought the light and color were effective and suggest the dire events of the novel.

I loved the first cover, the blue one, designed by St. Martin’s.  For one thing there was no swastika, the Third Reich being suggested by the background eagle and of course by the uniform of the man embracing the woman. But the cover definitely told you this was a love story and the new one just tells you the book is about Nazis.

At the East Bay Book Fest, I watched people respond to the cover. I saw a couple of young women shy away and a young man come straight to it. He bought a copy, thank you very much, and I wonder if he was disappointed to find a love story front and center. 

BOOKCASES FULL OF THE THIRD REICH

I’ve realized something in the re-publishing of my novel: I don’t want to spend time in Nazi Germany. Well, does anyone? But when you write a novel, you spend a whole lot of time in the world of your book.  I had been reading about the period for years. In those days, you had to do research from books and I had collected a large library of histories, biographies and picture books on the subject.  My bookcases were all red and black with swastikas dotted around like nasty butterflies.

Of course, I had made up my story so what happened to my characters was my doing. But, I remember sitting at my mammoth desk-top p.c. doing the last of the edits recommended by my agents before they started flogging it around.  I remember how relieved I was that I wouldn’t have to stay in the world much longer. I actually visualized myself swimming up a long dark tunnel towards the light.

Of course, once the novel was sold to St. Martin’s, I worked with their editor, but it was more technical. I could stay on the surface.  I even did a couple of readings and that was ok too, more like an acting exercise.

Then, oh, my, the house I was living in burned down in the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm.  The fire

actually happened on the day before my official publication date.  When my boyfriend at the time and I hurried through the house choosing what to take or leave, I had looked at my books.  I took my yearbooks and a couple of photo albums and my father’s Complete Works of Shakespeare.  All the rest, scores of books, were turned into ash.

Months later, an old friend wondered, half-joking, half-serious, if I had considered that maybe the fire had been attracted to all that nastiness caught between those red-and-black covers.  And he wondered if it was something of a relief to have lost all those books.

I just knew I was relieved I had given Sally a positive and hopefully safe future, which she truly deserved and neither of us had to go back to 1934.

EAST BAY BOOK FEST

The East Bay Book Fest is situated in downtown Berkeley, tucked into a park behind municipal buildings.  This year it took place Saturday and Sunday, June 2 & 3.  Sand Hill Review Press had a table. 


I was planning on being there on Saturday but early that morning, Tory Hartman, our publisher, texted me that she had left behind the box of my books.  Change of plans: I'd attend Sunday.


I did and I had a good time.  Not only did we sell some books but I got to talk to a couple of the other Sand Hill writers.  It was fascinating to me to watch potential customers see the cover of THE LAST INNOCENT HOUR and pick it up - or not.  Buy it - or not.


But perhaps the best part of the day, to me personally, as that one-half of my old agents, Pomada-Larsen, suddenly materialized on the other side of the table.  Michael Larsen in an extraordinary yellow shirt was deep in conversation with several friends.  Then his eyes focused on my book and he looked up and saw me.  Couldn't have staged it better. 


Now if only my hair had cooperated as well.