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 ....