S.C. Perkins--Decoding My Fascination with World War II and Spy Craft

DEBORAH CROMBIE: What could be more fun than genealogy, Texas, and WWII spy craft, all in one book?? I loved S.C. Perkins' first Ancestry Detective Mystery with protagonist Lucy Lancaster, a Texas genealogist, but when I read the description of this second book, my finger hit the BUY button faster than you can say family tree!

What a perfect summer read! Here's Stephanie to tell us how all these elements came together.

S.C. PERKINS: I was five years old when World War II became something I recognized, courtesy of two of my father’s favorite television shows. One was Baa Baa Black Sheep, staring Robert Conrad and featuring the exploits of a misfit band of World War II fighter pilots in the South Pacific. The other was reruns of the sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, about American POWs who became resistance fighters while in a German prison camp. 

Thanks to my movie-loving mother, more wartime-set classics came into my life, from musicals like South Pacific, comedies such as Operation Petticoat, and, when I was a bit older, excellent dramas that included The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Great Escape, From Here to Eternity, and The Longest Day.

My interest in espionage also came from when I was very young and from what I saw on television. However, there was one scene from an otherwise fuzzy memory of a black-and-white show—so fuzzy I can’t remember the name of it—that truly launched my fascination with spy craft. The scene was of a spy finding a microdot hidden in a book.

Image courtesy of Pinterest

I was absolutely, completely stunned when I saw this. Was it really possible to reduce crucial information to the size of a printed period and hide it almost literally anywhere? Apparently it was, and since that moment, in my eyes, not even the coolest gadgets Q thought up in the James Bond films matched the power of the microdot.

What about codes and ciphers, you might ask? Oh, they’re on a level all their own! I’m enthralled by cryptography—though I confess I’m only interested in those types created and broken by humans as opposed to computers. (In fact, I would like to believe that, had I lived during World War II, I would have made an excellent codebreaker.)

So, since my main character, Lucy, is a genealogist, if you’re thinking I’m a certified history lover, you’d be right. Then add in my interest with World War II, spies, microdots, and cryptography? You’d better believe it I would be champing at the bit to put all of my loves into one book—and I decided I wanted to do so when I introduced Lucy’s beloved grandfather in Lineage Most Lethal. His name is George Lancaster, but Lucy calls him Grandpa.

To be honest, I thought about waiting a couple of books to introduce Grandpa, but I knew I couldn’t for a couple of reasons. One, because I was simply too excited. And the other? Well, sadly, it’s because members of the Greatest Generation are in their nineties now and passing away at an alarming rate. If Lucy were to conceivably have a World War II-era grandfather, I needed to introduce him now—and, boy, am I glad I did, because he was an absolute delight to write.

But there’s another reason I wanted Grandpa to be a World War II veteran, and that lies in the secret he’s kept from his family for over seventy-five years.

If you read my first book, Murder Once Removed, you might recall a small detail about the desk Lucy uses in her office located in downtown Austin, Texas. The desk belonged to Grandpa, a former reporter, and it has a large crosshatch carved into one corner.

I remember when I wrote that bit about the crosshatch, that it just sort of came out onto the page, unbidden. Lucy believes it was for Grandpa and his reporter buddies to play tic-tac-toe for beer money back in the day when things were slow. Yet, as soon as I wrote it, I knew it hadn’t been for tic-tac-toe—or, not usually. I now knew what secret Grandpa had been keeping:  he was an OSS spy, and that crosshatch was used to decipher a type of coded message called a Pigpen Cipher.

Also known as a Freemason’s Cipher, the Pigpen Cipher is a type of substitution cipher where symbols formed from the grid are used to represent letters in a secret message. This type of code goes back possibly to ancient times and has been used in one form or another by many groups, including the Knights Templar and Civil War soldiers.

 Image courtesy of Wikipedia

I also had great fun using two other types of code in Lineage Most Lethal, including Morse Code and a book cipher—where a book is used as the key text to both create and decode a message. And the book I chose as the key text for my book cipher? Well, let’s just say I had a great time deciding on another piece of espionage history for that plot point.

When it came to the specifics of the microdot and how and where Lucy would discover it, I considered paying homage to my fuzzy memory of the spy finding the microdot in a book. That was, until I happened to be perusing the International Spy Museum website while researching microdots. There, I saw a little notation about fountain pens becoming a spy gadget. I won’t give my plot away by saying how, but as soon as I read this, I knew I had to use it (though I did have to fudge the timeline just a bit).

There’s one fact that doesn’t need decoding, though:  I had as much fun researching and writing all the World War II and spy-craft information in Lucy’s second adventure as I did the genealogy. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it just as much!

Fun fact:  I actually used the real key text to create the book ciphers you’ll see in Lineage Most Lethal. I figured, if I were going to put all my favorite spy stuff in one book, I was going to go whole hog!

S.C. Perkins is a fifth-generation Texan who grew up hearing fascinating stories of her ancestry and eating lots of great Tex-Mex. Her first book, Murder Once Removed, was the winner of the 2017 Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery competition, and an Agatha Award Nominee. She resides in Houston and, when she’s not writing, she’s likely outside in the sun or on the beach. You can find her at scperkins.com or on Twitter, Instagram, Goodreads, and Facebook at @SCPerkinsWriter.

DEBS: Oh, my, wasn't Robert Conrad dishy? And you know I absolutely could not resist a book that had a microdot hidden in a fountain pen! Tell us in the comments if you are fascinated by spy craft, and Stephanie will give a way a copy of Lineage Most Lethal to one lucky commenter!