Detectives Beyond Borders' Peter Rozovsky and "Crime During Wartime"

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: I'm delighted to introduce Detectives Beyond Borders' Peter Rozovsky, writing about "Crime During Wartime," a panel he moderated at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany.

Enjoy!

PETER ROZOVSKY: I changed the name of a Bouchercon panel because of Susan Elia MacNeal. The panel, at Bouchercon 2013 in Albany, spotlighted crime fiction set during World War II and its aftermath conflicts, and I had called it “World War II and Sons.”

“What about daughters?” Susan asked, and I explained that the “sons” in this case were not people, but rather the Cold War and the Korean War, personified as male.  Susan accepted my explanation with good grace. But she had got me thinking about the books our panel would discuss, and I realized these were at least as much about people as they were about fighting. 

When I welcomed the audience, I told them the panel was now called “World War II and Its Offspring” because the stories that Susan told, and those of her fellow panelist/authors James R. Benn, J. Robert Janes, John Lawton, and Martin Limón, were more about persons than about personification, and those persons were, of course, women as well as men.  

Sure, Benn’s Billy Boyle is an aide to Gen. Eisenhower, but he’s also a brash kid from South Boston thrust into a world far bigger than anything he had encountered before, and the passages where he realizes this are some of the most affecting in Benn's books. (MacNeal's Maggie Hope, though brilliant, college-educated, and heiress to an English home, is, like Billy, something of a fish out of water, and a more interesting character for it.)

I told the audience in my (brief) introduction that war was like a magnifying glass, multiplying the real or imagined significance of any action, including “ordinary’ murder, arson, and embezzlement. But it’s really more like a raindrop or a tear. It will magnify a scene, but the lightest touch to the surface on which it rests will set the lens vibrating and hopelessly distort the view.

Among the members of that wartime crime panel, that sense of unease, of the distortions and diffractions war works on the way people see the world and are themselves seen, is strongest in J. Robert Janes and Martin Limón. Janes pairs a German Gestapo and a French Sûreté inspector investigating crimes in occupied France during World War II. Limón’s novels and stories have two American G.I.s in South Korea looking into crimes that involve the U.S. military—two outsiders, that is, poised uneasily between two divided cultures. 

Amid a military hierarchy often more interested in protecting its own brass than in justice, amid a Korean culture sometimes mysterious to Limón's American investigator-protagonists, and always in the face of the looming military menace of North Korea, it is no wonder that the most "ordinary" crime acquires deep and menacing dimensions. And, though a disclaimer that prefaces Janes' Kohler and Sr. Cyr novels claims Janes merely inquires after the way "ordinary" crimes were solved in occupied France, his moral universe is the darkest of any noir I have ever read. Here, too, there are no "ordinary" crimes.

And how about this brilliant dissection of England's national character (and characters) in John Lawton's Second Violin?  Read the passage, then reflect that Lawton sets the scene in an English internment camp for aliens from enemy countries, notwithstanding that some had escaped the terror of what seemed about to happen in those very countries:

"`And I'm Rod Troy ... of Hampstead.'

"`It helps," said Drax, `and it will not detain us long, if we state for the record our city of origin. ... Arthur Kornfeld, of Vienna, keeps records for us. We all feel it helps to know where we all come from. To have something written down by us rather than by the British. Helps us not to ... not to lose touch. A matter of identity. No small matter you will agree.'

"Rod did agree. It was a matter of identity that had brought him here in the first place.

"`In that case,' he said, perfectly willing to play the game, "`I'm Rodyon Troy, also of Vienna. Indeed, I think you'll find more than a few of us are.'

"Drax stuck out both hands to shake one of Rod's, beaming at him as though he'd found a long-lost son. Behind him Rod heard Jacks plonk his gladstone bag on the table and say, `Billy Jacks, Stepney Green.'

"Kornfeld said, `It won't hurt, you know. And we're all in the same boat.'

"Billy shot a surly glance in Rod's direction, looked back at Kornfeld.

"`OK, OK, whatever `Ampstead says. Abel Jakobson, Danzig. Now, where's me bleedin' tea?'"

(Lawton's principal characters are English, but his novel Bluffing Mr. Churchill offers an entertaining version of the American innocent abroad, a young embassy staffer plunged into London in 1941, puzzled by Cockney rhyming slang and staggered by the sight of solitary houses left standing after German air raids.  Are stories about civilians in wartime particularly fascinating to we North Americans, the majority of whom have been mercifully free of such experiences in real life?)

The wars need not be long past. Some of my favorite crime fiction in recent years has come out of Northern Ireland, from authors grappling with the effects and after-effects of a kind of war – the sectarian Troubles – on daily lives.   See Anthony Quinn's Disappeared, for example, or Stuart Neville's Ghosts of Belfast.  I'll leave it to one such author to sum up the appeal of crime fiction set during wartime, of the terror, the exhilaration, and the sheer wonderment that something like ordinary life sometimes goes on amid hellish circumstances.

"I wanted to set a book in this claustrophobic atmosphere," writes Adrian McKinty in an afterword to his novel The Cold Cold Ground, "attempting to recapture the sense that civilization was breaking down to its basest levels. I also wanted to remember the craic, the music, the bombastic politicians, the apocalyptic street preachers, the sinister gunmen and a lost generation of kids for whom all of this was normal."


SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Reds and lovely readers, do you read historical fiction? Who are some of your favorite authors? Do you believe, as Peter does (and I do), that "war [is] like a magnifying glass, multiplying the real or imagined significance of any action, including “ordinary’ murder, arson, and embezzlement"?

Peter Rozovsky writes the Detectives Beyond Borders blog. His reviews and essays have appeared in Following the Detectives: Real Locations in Crime Fiction; The Cultural Detective; Nordic Noir: The Pocket Essential Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, Film & TV; Words Without Borders; the Philadelphia Inquirer; and elsewhere. Read Detectives Beyond Borders at http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/

The Tides of History

HANK:  Susan Orlean had a great tweet Saturday. She wrote something like: "can we just have a nice boring week, please?"

 I'm with ya, Susan. I woke up yesterday and thought I'd feel safe..instead, I felt sad. I walked into the Dunkin Donuts, saw all the regular t-shirted messy-haired normal people just..buying coffee! And I burst into tears. My husband thinks I've lost it.

Anyway.We've been talking all week about the intersection of fiction and reality, so how perfect it is that debut author Kay Kendall (she's fabulous!) is here today to explore that, too.

The Lure of Terrors Past—and Conquered

                           by Kay Kendall

My first experience of the lure of historic catastrophe happened at the movies when I was eight. On the screen a small town celebrated the return of victorious soldiers from World War I, I thought—How exciting it must’ve been to live during wartime. I longed for the drama, the glory. What did I know?

That memory flickers in my head while I watch events in Boston on my television screen. As I write this, the city is in lockdown and Watertown is the focus of the manhunt for a nineteen-year-old terrorist. 

Lives have been lost this week. Many people have been maimed. This terror has not yet been conquered. Perhaps there are more people involved, perhaps more unexploded IEDs lying about. This may be drama, but it is not entertainment. This is not fun.

But people clamor for fiction that features events like this. How do we explain being drawn to horror movies, spy stories, serial killers’ tales and the like? I think fiction of this sort shows how people can act in catastrophic times, overcome their fears and come out on top. When we read novels set during past wars, we can get scared but know how things turn out. The Nazis always lose, even if a few survive to plot another day.

I grew up when the Cold War was pretty hot. I moved rapidly from a severe case of Nancy Drew-itis to being mesmerized by John le Carré’s twisted spy stories. Much later, when I felt compelled to devise my own mysteries, it seemed natural to turn to my favorites as models. For a year I drowned myself in mysteries set during World Wars One and Two and the Cold War. 

Of all the major wars of last century, only the wars in Korea and Vietnam weren’t “taken,” weren’t overrun with thrillers. Vietnam offered a dangerous yet fairly empty niche that needed filling…and I concluded I’d do the filling.

Draft protests, draft dodgers and resisters are symbolic of that war, so much so it seems millions of young men fled to Canada. However, that exodus wasn’t huge, although it was the largest since colonists loyal to England moved north after the American Revolution. (Famous in Canada, that group is called United Empire Loyalists—I’d never heard of them.)

During the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, by law Canadian immigration officials couldn’t ask men entering the country about their draft status. Consequently accurate statistics aren’t available. Informed guesses range from 125,000 down to 50,000. Whatever the number, further estimates conclude that roughly half those who moved to Canada still remain. They settled into Canadian society, made families and careers. Some even entered Canadian politics and were elected to office.

For the half of draft resisters who left Canada eventually, it’s impossible to tell where they went. In 1974, President Ford offered clemency to Vietnam draft resisters and deserters. Only 27,000 of 350,000 eligible applied before the offer (mandating two years of government service) expired in 1975. Two years later President Carter pardoned those who dodged the war by not registering or fleeing the country. Stigma still attaches to the subject of draft evasion.

Desertion, however, is a more serious offence, and it created political furor, especially among American veterans of World War II and Korea. As late as 2005, a Vietnam era deserter was prosecuted by the Marine Corps.

In my debut novel, Desolation Row—An Austin Starr Mystery, one young woman gets swept along by the tides of history during the turbulent sixties. She’s a moderate—not an activist like “Hanoi” Jane Fonda or Angela Davis. My fictional Austin Starr, homesick Texas bride of a Vietnam War activist, must prove her husband didn’t murder a fellow draft resister in Canada, the black-sheep son of a U.S. Senator. When the Mounties are convinced David Starr is guilty and jail him, Austin must find the real killer herself or risk losing everything.

I enjoy writing about historical turmoil that lends itself to personal drama, intrigue and murder, I can control the world that I build on the page. That is comforting.  But now I must return to my television screen, to wait for the newscasters to tell me that the crisis has passed, the bad guys are conquered. Waiting for comfort to come, even if it is only temporary, only until the next horror fills my screen.

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HANK: Kay (who apparently has...a rabbit??) will drop in to answer questions and respond to comments, and she'll give away a copy of DESOLATION ROW (Stairway Press, Seattle) to a lucky commenter.

And we'll announce all this week's winners later today!

*************

 Learn more about Kay and her book at www.kaykendallauthor.com, on Facebook  <www.facebook.com/KayKendallAuthor>, on Twitter @kaylee_kendall, and at LinkedIn  <http://www.linkedin.com/in/kaykendallmysteries>.  

WAR STORIES

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: We try not to be too political here,so let's not argue wars or where which troops are fighting which other troops.

But on Memorial Day, how can we not think about it? It crossed my mind to talk about war movies, but then--I thought about my father, at age 18 or so, being sent from high school in Indiana overseas to fight in World War Two. You have to know my Dad is the most thoughtful, artistic, tolerant, poetic, gentle person you could ever met. A musician. A writer. I simply cannot picture him with a weapon, a member of the army infantry fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and taken prisoner and marched barefoot through the snow and put in a Nazi prison camp. But that's what happened.
He got a purple heart. My little dad.

If I've told you this story, forgive me. But on Memorial Day, the goal is to remember. So it's important to tell and re-tell and make sure the memories aren't lost.

A few years ago, Dad and his wife Juliet (now both retired from the foreign service) rented a house, as usual, in western Massachusetts (near Tanglewood) for part of the summer. Jonathan and I went to visit for awhile. And in the library of the house they rented, Dad found a tattered and worn book of poetry, one of those paperback Untermeyer anthologies.

He pulled it out of the shelf, and tears came to his eyes.

"What's wrong?" I asked.
"This is the same edition I carried with me throughout the war," he said. (He NEVER talks about the war. Won't.)
"You carried a book of poetry in the war?" I was trying to figure that out.
"Yes," he said. "To remind myself there is beauty in the world."


So. War stories. Was anyone in your family in the war? Any war? How did that change them--or you?  If not--do you watch war movies? Why?

JAN BROGAN   Wow, Hank. That is a beautiful story. And being a WWII buff, who - mostly because of my husband - has seen every bit of footage on WWII - I am unbelievably impressed. I even wrote my sixth grade report on the Battle of the Bulge, and seen over and over the footage of the army making their way through France to the battle and thought what must it have been like, sleeping in the snow and waking up to do battle?


HANK: I know. I think about it all the time.

JAN: Anyway, both my parents were in WWII. My father an Army captain, my mother a lieutenant in the Army Nurse Corps. My mother took care of the men returning from the Pacific with TB and other infectious diseases.  Because she didn't talk about her service at all, I didn't realize how important it was to her until she was about to die. Then as she divvied up her charitable contributions it all had to go the veterans. I keep her dog tags in my jewelry box and consider it her finest piece of jewelry.

RHYS BOWEN: My dad was in World War II, in the desert fighting Rommel. He fought at El Alamein, but from what he told us, he actually enjoyed some things about it--the camaraderie of men together. He was a great athlete and played cricket for his batallion. He also picked up a lot of Arabic and years later he and my mother went on holiday to Tunisia and the hotel staff were amazed he could speak to them. They got wonderful service.

My brother was in a very different sort of war. In the RAF he was sent to Aden, South Yemen. Very like Iraq today. They'd go out on patrol and a sniper would kill the man in front of him. Not good for the nerves. Both he and my dad are gentle people. My brother is about to be ordained an Anglican priest!

War is so stupid. As the song says "When will they ever learn?"

DEBORAH CROMBIE: What lovely stories, Jan and Hank. And Rhys, there always seemed something slightly glamorous about the British campaign in North Africa--maybe it was the movies...

My father was in his mid-thirties when the US entered WWII, with a business and a toddler (my older brother) so wasn't called up. And he was such a gentle man--I think the experience would have destroyed him if he'd survived.

HANK: Debs, there's a line for a book...
    
DEBS: I had two uncles who served in the Navy. One was stationed in New Zealand for at least part of the war, and could never afterwards bear the smell of lamb. Neither of them ever talked about their wars.

I've been fascinated since I was a child (Anglophile that I am) by the British experiences in WWI and WWII, particularly as they affected the British at home. One of my books centers around children who were evacuated from London during the Blitz, another around a Jewish couple who come to London as refugees from Nazi Germany.

LUCY BURDETTE: I hate war and I won't watch war movies and I cannot imagine psychologically surviving the horror of any of it. But I make myself watch the honor roll of soldiers that the PBS Newshour runs at the end of their program every week--so I don't forget that the deaths we continue to hear about are real people with real families.

All that said, my father was also a WWII veteran. (That's him, above, in Wales.) We have paperwork that documents how he went down to the recruiting station in New Jersey and signed up. But then his mother (a VERY strong personality), marched him back down to rescind his application. He signed up again the following year (1943?) and served in the Army corps of engineers in England and France. He was a kindhearted peace-loving guy too, but I have the impression that this was one of the most powerful experiences of his life. He always felt connected to his fellow soldiers--they had yearly reunions until they got too old to travel. And one of them hobbled up to visit him in the nursing facility just months before he died (in January.) When he sat down to hand write his memoirs, most of the vignettes were about the war--so much for our perspective that we took top honors! We haven't had time to sort through all that stuff, but I look forward to trying to understand how the war affected him.


HALLIE EPHRON: These are wonderful stories. My dad never served -- I think it was because he'd had rheumatic fever as a kid, or maybe it was flat feet. I wish he was around to ask. My husband's father worked in a Providence shipyard for his service, and came away with no fond memories of Providence and a lifelong aversion to cold.

ROSEMARY HARRIS: My father was 19 and spent the war in Alaska (probably watching for Russians like you-know-who.)He never talked too much about those years. He was on Adak in the Aleutians. Funnily enough I've since learned that Earlene Fowler's father was there as was Dashiell Hammett who wrote a newsletter for the men. There's a website devoted to the men and women who spent the war there.

As it happens, an elderly relative just passed away and one of the things that came to me in a box filled with old snapshots and letters were my father's dogtags. That's a Saint Theresa medal.  

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Lucy, I am a member of "one of those families" you mentioned. My father, Lt. Melvin Spencer, served during a different conflict - the Cold War. He was an Air Force pilot, assigned to a Strategic Air Command bomber wing at Plattsburgh AFB when he met and married my mother, who was a coed at the State University there.


Tensions between the USSR and the United States were at a peak in the early 60's, and the USAF was at the front line of defense. Bombers stood fueled and ready on the flight line apron round the clock, with crews rotating in and out of specially connected staging areas so that the enormous planes could be airborne and on their way to Russia within a matter of minutes. The day I was born my father was in "the bullpen." His replacement pilot arrived in time for him to get to the base hospital, but he was still in full fight gear the first time he held his baby girl.

The crews trained constantly over the huge, sparsely populated reaches of the Adirondack mountains, making practice bombing runs. About six months after I was born, my father suited up and left for a pre-dawn training flight. He never returned. One of the B-48's systems - radio? Electrical? - malfunctioned. Flying in the dark, in a snowstorm, the four-man crew never realized they were below altitude. The remains of the ship were found strewn across the face of Mount Wright, the second highest peak in the Adirondacks. This is the memorial placed at the crash site.

I think it's enormously important to be aware to the cost of war to those who pay the ultimate price. But it's also important to remember that for every name on the casualty list, there are a score of others whose lives will never be the same - parents and siblings, husbands or wives, children and friends.



HANK: Julia. I am speechless. And So grateful to know you all.  So what about you, Reds? War stories? This is the day to tell them...and to say thank you.