This is the latest version of the cover of my soon-to-be republished historical novel.

THE LIFE OF MY BOOK: THE LAST INNOCENT HOUR

Covers for hardback (l) and the paperback (r)

In 1991, I was directing a production of "Hansel and Gretel" for Berkeley Opera when I got the news that my agents were about to sell my first novel, "The Last Innocent Hour" to St. Martin's.  It was $500,000 for a two-book contract and was that ok with me?

The phone was just outside the rehearsal room and I remember I sat on the floor while I listened to the fantastic news.  It was fantastic - as in fantasy, as in un-real, a dream.  But it really happened and the book was published in hardback then about four years later in soft cover.  It was also published in  England and was translated into several languages.

I did some book fairs and a few interviews.  Did some readings - which I love doing - I am and always have been an actor!  The novel received decent reviews and sold well, although it never became a best-seller.  I heard that there were nibbles from Hollywood but nothing came of that.

In the late morning of October 20, I stood in my little office of the house in the Berkeley Hills and was glad the book was safe.  It was published and the firestorm that was heading for the house could not destroy it.  The fire and the subsequent general upheaval that resulted distracted me from that second book for a time.

But eventually, I found a place to live and wrote a book about Shakespeare's theatre; St. Martin's passed. So I wrote a book about the Bozeman Trail forts. Nobody wanted that one either.  I started a fourth book about Virginia City during the Bonanza but quit after a couple of chapters.  I had had a good run but I had to go to work.

These are the brownshirts, the SA.

The Last Innocent Hour, my first and only published novel, has had quite an interesting life.  As I wrote in the author’s notes, I was fascinated by Martha Dodd’s autobiography when I read it back in the late-1960’s at Cal.  She described the young SS officer crying on the sofa in her family’s sitting room sometime during the week-end of June 30, 1934, which came to be called the Night of the Long Knives. The Nazi party purged the leadership of the Sturmabteilung, the brownshirts and many other inconvenient opponents to the regime.  The officer had made friends with her father, the American ambassador to the new Third Reich, and needed to talk about what was going on.

As Lenin wrote: every revolution devours its children, which was certainly true that week-end. But the image of that young man stuck in my head.  The SS, the Schutzstaffel, began as Hitler’s bodyguards and grew under with the ambitions of Heinrich Himmler to control the police, including the Gestapo and the concentration camps. They recruited middle and upper-class, college-educated men, they were the elite, the Nazis Praetorian Guards.  So how did a young man go from being someone I’d probably know to Dr. Mengele or Reinhard Heydrich who engineered the Final Solution?

Lena & Reinhard Heydrich in 1931

Certainly anyone who knows anything about the rise of the National Socialists must question how they came about.  I would guess anyone who took a Western Civ class at some point had an essay question on the subject.

What I did was write a story about it.