Kim Hays--Switzerland's Secret Aristocrats

DEBORAH CROMBIE: First up today, a REDS ALERT! The winners of Ellen Crosby's BLOW UP are Karen in Ohio and Bibliophile. Email Ellen at ellen.crosby@gmail.com with your details!

And, now, on to today's guest, Kim N. Hays, the author of one of last year's break-out debuts, PESTICIDE, set in Bern and featuring Swiss detectives Giuliana Linder and Renzo Donatelli. The second installment in Kim's police procedural series, SONS AND BROTHERS is out now! I raved about the first book and am now in the midst of SONS AND BROTHERS and loving this one, too. The characters are complex and empathetic, and the Swiss cultural details like the one Kim is sharing today are fascinating. Welcome, Kim!

Switzerland’s Secret Aristocrats

It’s confession time: I have a weakness for aristocrats.

My politics lean left, and I grew up with Democrat-voting parents descended from struggling immigrants. I believe in equality and despise snobbery. But strange things happen to you when you read countless fairytales about princesses and have an anglophile librarian mother who tells you tales of English kings and queens and introduces you to Lord Peter Wimsey books. My teenage passion (never outgrown) for Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances only made matters worse.  

Now I live in Switzerland, home of the original castle of the Hapsburgs, a dynasty founded a thousand years ago that ruled great chunks of Europe for centuries. I’m finally surrounded by dukes, countesses, and barons, right?

Well, no. Back in the days of that eleventh-century Hapsburg castle, there were titled nobles galore, including Berthold, fifth Duke of Zähringen, who set off from his castle near the German city of Freiburg to conquer a good part of what was then Burgundy, including my home city of Bern in 1191. But you can’t have nobles without a king or queen to bestow titles on their favorites, and after the confederated cantons that became Switzerland liberated themselves from their Hapsburg overlords, they didn’t want a monarchy. So today there are no titled families pulling the strings in various Swiss cities and cantons.

Notice that word “titled.” In fact, the Swiss cities are home to an untitled elite who wield the influence of an aristocracy. These men and women, whose families were dominant for centuries in their regions of origin, carry names that are instantly recognizable today to anyone who lives where their ancestors once held authority. Members of the Escher family in Zürich, for example, or the Burkhardts in Basel, the Sulzers in Winterthur, Patrys in Geneva, or von Graffenrieds in Bern: many of these men and women are active in the government, economy, social welfare, and cultural life of their cities and cantons. And quite a few of them are very rich. Some even own castles. But none of them uses a title.

Perhaps because Bern was once the largest city-state north of the Alps, its collection of untitled aristocrats is the best known in Switzerland. The organization they’ve founded together is Bern’s Burgergemeinde, or community of burghers, which owns enormous quantities of land and hundreds of buildings in and around the city and spends a great deal of money keeping the city’s museums and symphony going. Newcomers to the city have been buying themselves into this elite circle for decades. Still, the original and most important burghers of Bern have ancestors who were running the city in the Middle Ages, during the years when the trade guilds were the most important institutions in all the Swiss cities.

Today’s Bernese aristocrats still belong to guilds, since most of their forefathers began as the city’s bakers, tanners, carpenters, and stoneworkers. These early tradesmen and merchants rose to become first guild masters and then members of the city council. Eventually, a core of them declared themselves patricians and became a ruling elite, until Napoleon conquered Switzerland and overthrew them. But their family names—and their influence—didn’t disappear.

Some of the sons of these great families made their living as mercenary captains.  Switzerland may be neutral today, but for over eight hundred years its young men sought their fortune as killers-for-hire. Starting in the sixteenth century, professional soldiers from wealthy Bernese families would recruit whole companies of poor peasants and laborers seeking wealth and adventure (or maybe just a job) and lead them off to fight for foreign rulers in European wars. The Pope’s Swiss Guard is a relic of the time when one in ten Swiss men was fighting for a foreign power. As a result of these services to European royalty, a few of the mercenary officers from patrician families were given aristocratic titles that could be passed on to their children. But these are never used in Switzerland.

I once got up my courage to ask my delightful OB/GYN, whose father was then the president of Bern’s community of burghers, if he had a title. He told me that when he went to a medical congress in, say, France, he could sign the hotel register as Baron. “But I’d never do that, of course,” he assured me earnestly.

How could I write mysteries set in Bern and not include these Bernese aristocrats in my stories? For Pesticide, the first book in the Polizei Bern series, I created Frau von Oberburg, a very old but lively member of the community of burghers who lives in an apartment on Junkergasse, a real street in Bern that by its very name (a Junker is a Prussian aristocrat) is a good place to house a member of the gentry.

Now, in my second Polizei Bern book, Sons and Brothers, I’ve actually killed a Bern burgher. My newest aristocrat is named Johann Karl Gurtner and is from the Emmental region of Canton Bern, where he grew up in a small castle that is the property of his mother’s family, the von Eichwils. He is a well-respected surgeon and works hard in his family’s traditional trade guild as a charitable volunteer. 

But if you want to know who killed him, you’ll have to read the book!

Am I the only one with a secret passion for lords and ladies? Does anyone else share this un-American fascination with aristocrats?

DEBS: I think question is so appropriate, with the coronation of King Charles III coming up this weekend!  I grew up loving Georgette Heyer, too, and of course my first detective love was Lord Peter Wimsey, so I guess I was indoctrinated early. What about you, REDs and readers?

Sons and Brothers, the second police procedural in Kim Hays’s Polizei Bern series, was published on April 18 by Seventh Street Books. In it, a cardiac surgeon in his seventies is attacked and drowned in Bern’s Aare River. The district attorney suspects the victim’s estranged son Markus, but Bern police detectives Linder and Donatelli have other ideas about the crime. In her endorsement of the book, Julia Spencer-Fleming says, “Giuliana Linder and Renzo Donatelli are compassionate, conflicted, and utterly compelling. Sons and Brothers is a must-read.”

Kim Hays is a dual Swiss/US citizen who lives in Bern with her Swiss husband. The first book in her Polizei Bern series, Pesticide, was shortlisted for a Debut Dagger Award by the Crime Writers Association. Deborah Crombie called it “a stand-out debut for 2022.” For more information about Kim and Switzerland, see www.kimhaysbern.com.

 

Pesticide--Kim Hays

DEBORAH CROMBIE: One of the most fun things we get to do here on Jungle Red is to introduce debut authors. I was lucky enough to read Kim Hays' novel, PESTICIDE, pre-pub--here's what I had to say about it!

“Kim Hays brings a sparkling new voice to police procedurals, giving us engaging and realistically drawn detectives who struggle to balance their personal lives with the demands of a gripping investigation. Set against the fascinating backdrop of modern Switzerland, Pesticide will delight crime fiction fans--a standout debut for 2022!” —Deborah Crombie, New York Times-bestselling author of the award-winning Duncan Kincaid/Gemma James novels 

And how cool is it that PESTICIDE was shortlisted for the 2020 Debut Dagger award by the Crime Writers’ Association!!

It's also a very special treat to host Kim today as she's a regular JRW commenter!

Here's Kim to tell us more about the challenges of writing from a cross-cultural perspective. Welcome and congratulations, Kim!

Conveying Swissness

Kim Hays

Last year I read a five-minute excerpt from one of my mysteries at a writing workshop for English-language authors living in Switzerland.  By coincidence, I was the only American—everyone else was British, and we’d never met before. The fictional scene I shared was a confrontation between two young Swiss men at a dance club: description, dialogue, action. When I finished, after a few polite mumbles, someone in the audience announced, “It just doesn’t work.” “No, it doesn’t,” someone else agreed. “But why?” There was a moment of silence, and then the first speaker said, “I know what it is. It sounds too American.”

Now, if I’d had one of my Swiss say, “He really threw me a curve ball,” or “You’re way out in left field, buddy,” I’d have understood the criticism. Putting baseball slang into the mouths of Swiss is truly odd. But since I hadn’t done anything like that, I couldn’t grasp why my audience was so upset—until I realized what the problem must be. To my listeners, British English wasn’t “British”—it was neutral, so it was what Swiss characters had to speak to be acceptable. My English, being American, called attention to itself, so it sounded bizarre.

This is just a small pitfall among the many traps waiting for authors who, like me, write novels about people who speak a language and inhabit a culture different from their own. I speak Swiss-German, I have Swiss citizenship along with American, and I’ve lived in Bern, the city where Pesticide takes place, for thirty-three years; my husband is a Swiss-German, and so are most of my friends. But I didn’t grow up here. So now and then, I find myself having to think hard about how to convey the Swissness of my characters to my American readers. (My British ones clearly raise different problems, but Pesticide is about to be published in the US, not the UK, so I don’t have to cross that bridge yet.)

Swissness is a familiar concept to me. Before I started writing novels, I worked fifteen years as a cross-cultural trainer for an international relocation company. My job was to provide a cultural orientation to non-Swiss employees who’d moved to Switzerland to work for multinational companies like Kraft Foods or Johnson & Johnson. Whether my clients were Columbians, Danes, or Indians, I spenT one or two days with them and their spouses, sharing advice about living, working, and raising a family comfortably among the Swiss.

Because of this background in cross-cultural work, I had no trouble coming up with generalizations about the Bernese when I decided to write a book set in Bern. I’m aware that most Swiss-Germans truly are exceptionally punctual; that they rarely take a stand on anything controversial right away, because they need to consider all the possible consequences and get everything right the first time; that they are often uncomfortable with conflict; that they are very egalitarian but still formal (at least by US standards) with people they don’t know well. Something else I have always respected is how the Swiss cherish the magnificence of their landscapes—they never take Switzerland’s natural beauty for granted.

But generalizations aren’t enough. The trick to portraying appealing Swiss in a novel written for Americans is to give the characters a certain amount of Swissness but not enough to keep them from being interesting and distinctive individuals. This is easier said than done, and, whereas I believe I’ve managed it, it’s my readers who’ll get to decide whether I’ve succeeded. If I have, it’s probably with the help of one character in particular: Renzo Donatelli.

Renzo is what we call a Secondo—someone perhaps born and certainly raised in Switzerland but with parents who emigrated here as adults. The word originally referred only to Italians (Switzerland’s biggest immigrant group in the 1960s and 1970s), but now it’s used for anyone in that second generation of immigrants. Secondos are assimilated. Most are bilingual, many are double citizens, and quite a few, like Renzo in my Polizei Bern series, marry Swiss spouses and feel at home with Swiss colleagues. But every once in a while, they see a friend do something that strikes them as so quintessentially Swiss and so completely not what they themselves would do that they have to laugh or roll their eyes, even if it’s only afterwards, in private.

So in Pesticide, I use Renzo as a foil to convey the attitude and behavior of a typical Swiss-German man. Most of them don’t consider it second nature to be carefully turned out and fashionably dressed; nor do they flirt good-naturedly with any woman who gives them the slightest signal of interest. Swiss-German men are also unlikely to feel so attached to their parents and siblings that they see their families often, not dutifully but with pleasure. Renzo, by contrast, does all these things.

In other words, by presenting one character who embodies a number of typical Italian values, I’m better able to highlight what makes another character Swiss-German—without having to hammer anything about Swissness into my readers’ heads.

So what about you, fellow writers? What goes through your minds while you’re creating non-American characters (something Rhys and Debs do all the time)? And you, readers? Do any examples occur to you of fictional characters who appear to represent another culture particularly well? Or badly? (They don’t have to be foreign—think of Jim Chee in Tony Hillerman’s books.)

DEBS:  This was so interesting to me. I've deliberately never used a non-British character as a foil for my British characters, although I did have a Texan play a very minor part once. Of course, the British tend to be quite culturally self-reflective, so it's not that unusual for a Brit to think about the idiosyncrasies of the British. I think what Kim has done with her Renzo is brilliant!

Kim Hays lives in Bern with her Swiss husband, but she grew up in San Juan, Vancouver, and Stockholm as well as in the States. She’s worked at a variety of jobs, including forewoman in a truck-engine factory, freelance journalist, and lecturer in sociology. Pesticide is the first mystery in her Polizei Bern series; it was shortlisted for the 2020 Debut Dagger award by the Crime Writers’ Association. You can learn more about Kim, Bern, and Pesticide at www.kimhaysbern.com.  

Here's more about PESTICIDE:

After a rave in medieval Bern morphs into a brutal riot, a young man is found beaten to death with a policeman’s club. Twenty miles away, an organic farmer turns up dead on his land, drenched in pesticide. Assigned to these two different cases, Swiss homicide detective Giuliana Linder and fellow cop Renzo Donatelli uncover unexpected connections between the two corpses; soon they’re looking for a killer together while dealing with their attraction to one another.

DEBS: REDS and readers, Kim will be here to chat throughout the day! Kim will also be signing books in person at the Mysterious Book Shop in New York City on April 19th!