James Benn and "Gateway Mysteries"

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: I've been honored to introduce

many wonderful authors, but must confess — I'm a huge fan of James Benn and his Billy Boyle series from way back. I remember reading the first novel, Billy Boyle: A World War II Mystery, in 2007 — and being absolutely bowled over. A World War II mystery — told in such a fresh and exciting way. (It was what I wanted to do — but with a female protagonist. Jim and I have joked that someday we should write a Billy Boyle/Maggie Hope crossover story.)

Jim is now on his ninth Billy Boyle mystery, and in my humble opinion, they just keep getting better and better. Here's a brief description of his newest, due out in September:

THE REST IS SILENCE (September 2014) is the ninth Billy

Boyle mystery. As preparations for D-Day continue, Billy and Kaz are sent to southwest England to investigate the discovery of a body washed up on a beach in a restricted training area. As the case proceeds, Billy comes face to face with the cost of war for the English people. After five long years with their nation on the front lines, the wounded and maimed in body and soul are returning home. In the midst of all this, an American training exercise goes horribly wrong as German E-boats intercept a convoy headed for the beach at Slapton Sands. Nearly a thousand men are killed in the Channel waters, but Billy and Kaz are tasked to find ten of them; BIGOTs, those who know the secrets of D-Day.

And here, without further ado, is Jim, talking about his "gateway mystery" — the one that sparked his interest in the genre.

JAMES BENN: How did we all end up here?

No, not here in the cosmos, but at a site dedicated to crime fiction. We all had to start somewhere, picking up a mystery novel for the first time, getting hooked, finding a cultural home base, and gathering online to celebrate our communal interests. 

Mysteries weren’t my first genre. In high school I was all about science fiction. Isaac Asimov and the Foundation Trilogy. After college the appeal of sci-fi faded, and I began to read mainly non-fiction.

                  

In 1974 I was working at the University of Denver Library, as a para-professional cataloger in the serials department, taking library science graduate courses at night. For some unknown reason, the university subscribed to a wide variety of British tabloid newspapers. Hardly research materials.

                  

Until the Lord Lucan murder case.

I don’t recall seeing the case reported in the American press, but when the tabloids came in to the library, the front pages were lit up with it. Dark-haired, tall, and good-looking, Lord Lucan was an aristocrat and a gambler. He gave up the banking profession in 1960 when he won 26,000 pounds gambling over the course of two days. That earned him the nickname “Lucky” Lucan and left him with the mistaken impression he could do it again and again.

He couldn't.

Separated from his wife—and with her in possession of the family

home in London—he evidently came up with a scheme to kill her and gain custody of the home and his children. His career as a murderer was about as rewarding as his gambling life. On Thursday, November 7, 1974, Lucan broke into his wife’s house and waited for her in the kitchen, armed with a length of pipe. He’d unscrewed the light bulb to better hide in the darkness when she came down for her evening cuppa.

Unfortunately for Sandra Rivett, the live-in nanny who usually

took Thursday nights off, she stayed home that night. A young girl, about the same height as Lady Lucan, offered to make tea for her that fateful night.

She died in the darkened kitchen, her head smashed in.

In the dark, Lucky Lucan worked feverishly to stuff her body into a mail sack (still thinking it was Lady Lucan), planning to dump it at sea and report his wife missing. He was interrupted by Veronica Lucan, who’d come down

stairs to check on Sandra. He attacked her, wounding her severely, but not before she grabbed his balls and rendered him hors de combat.

Of course, this all didn’t come out at first. The initial reports were short on details and full of the claims Lucan made—in letters written while on the run—about finding a strange man attacking his wife and sending him packing.

He claimed that the circumstantial evidence would be used to discredit him, and promptly disappeared.

There are a number of websites giving facts and touting different theories. For the basics, visit Wikipedia.

There is a pro-Lucan website, dedicated to his innocence here.

And Lady Lucan’s own site, striking a quite different tone here.

The Lucan family of aristocrats had at least one other infamous

Earl. Lord Lucan’s great-great-grandfather, the Third Earl of Lucan, earned his dubious place in history a hundred and twenty years earlier in the Crimea. He was the officer who ordered the ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade, which resulted in the deaths of more than 600 men at Balaclava.

A decidedly unlucky Lucan.

Whatever the truth of Lucky Lucan’s guilt or innocence, this case and the British tabloid press whetted my appetite for more. As coincidence would have it, Masterpiece Theatre was showing the first Lord Peter Wimsey mystery, starring Ian Carmichael, at the same time. I watched it.

I was hooked. I devoured all the Dorothy L. Sayers mysteries and went looking for more. For me, it all started with Lucky Lucan.

So, Jungle Reds, how did you come to the world of crime fiction? 

Readers, what was your gateway mystery?

                 

At DEATH'S DOOR: James Benn, WW II, intrigue in Vatican City

HALLIE EPHRON: I've been following James R. Benn's gritty thrillers featuring Billy Boyle (Billy's Irish and his uncle is Dwight D. Eisenhower) and set in World War II. His seventh in the series, Death's Door, tells a story of war and intrigue, dramatic conflict set within the neutral Vatican City - which was within Nazi-occupied Rome.

Welcome to Jungle Red, Jim! I just love the cover, and it has that period feel of all the covers in the series

JAMES R. BENN: This statue by Bernini was the inspiration for a rendevous between Billy and a German Abwehr agent, as shown on the cover of the book. This statue represents the Nile River, with a cloth drawn against the figures face to symbolize the unknown source of the Nile. I thought it the perfect place for secret agents to meet. A lot of deep research went into this, sitting in the Piazza, sipping wine. Tough work.

HALLIE: You poor guy. Trip to Rome schlepping your computer. Sipping coffee on the piazza. But seriously, it would have been quite a challenge for Billy inside those walls. How did you manage it?

JIM: Several years ago my publisher asked for a list of future book ideas. I’m not good at thinking that far ahead, so I jotted down a few thoughts and hoped they wouldn’t ask too many questions.

One idea was ‘Billy Boyle in the Vatican,’ and they kept asked when I was going to do that one. So I had to come up with something, but it wasn’t easy to get Billy there. In the timeline of the books, Rome is still under German occupation.

Looking around for a way in, I learned that the actor Sterling Hayden was an OSS agent in Italy during WWII, smuggling arms across the Adriatic to the Yugoslavian Partisans. Hayden used a fishing boat to evade German patrols, so I had Billy hitch a ride. Sterling Hayden almost stole the show. He was a real-life adventurer, his movie career probably the least important thing in his life.

I hope to see him again in a future novel; I’m even more committed to that idea now that I’ve learned he lived here in Lyme, Connecticut, not two miles from my house.

HALLIE: Karma!

Is there a real "Death's Door" entrance to St. Peter's?


JIM:  Yes! The leftmost door at the front of the Basilica is actually called the Door of Death, since it’s used only for funerals. It was too good to pass up.

So I have an American monsignor with political connections back home found murdered at the foot of Death’s Door, which was also an important location since in the 1940’s, the front of the Basilica marked the end of the Italian police jurisdiction. The location of the body then becomes very important in terms of who has responsibility for the investigation; the Vatican gendarmes or the Italian fascist police.


HALLIE: What was it like within the walls of the Vatican City during WWII?

JIM:  It must have been surreal. Vatican City is only 110 acres, and held only a few hundred residents, all older men and a few nuns. As neutral territory, it became a haven for escaped Allied POWs, Italian anti-fascists, German deserters, Jews and anyone on the run from the Gestapo. Plus, as more and more nations declared war on the Axis, families from closed embassies came to the Vatican for asylum.

So very quickly, there were hundreds of people in hiding within the walls. Many of those were smuggled out and hidden throughout Rome, but the families from the South American embassies must have been a trial for clergy used to the peace and quiet of the Vatican gardens. The women and children made quite a racket.


There were so many escaped POWs entering Vatican territory after the fall of Mussolini that the Pope ordered the Swiss Guard to turn them away. But many of them were sympathetic to the soldiers on the run, and helped to hide them. I got the impression of a pressure-cooker atmosphere, with competing factions spying on each other constantly. Add it a severe shortage of food and coal for heating, and you have a desperate and volatile mix.

HALLIE: Sounds like THE perfect setting for a thriller

Your story involves issues regarding the Holocaust and what the Pope knew about it and what actions he perhaps should have taken. How did that play into the plot?


JIM: I came into the story with the assumption that Pope Pius XII did nothing, and was at least complicit by silence. I learned the truth is much more complex. He was in a no-win situation, surrounded by fascist Italy and then a brutal German occupation. He felt that only by a strict neutrality could he forestall a German take-over, which could have been done in about ten minutes.

One single fact stands out for me. Just this year, on July 1, 2012, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel revised their assessment of Pius’ role, softening their previous criticisms, and acknowledging a number of secret rescue activities. I am always fascinated by the long reach of history, and that seven decades after World War II we are still learning new things about the moral challenges people faced.


HALLIE: You have several real-life characters, including the actor Sterling Hayden. What did he bring to the story?

JIM: An incredible vitality. His deep baritone voice kept echoing in my head as I wrote his scenes, and I had some trouble moving him off-stage. Billy nearly sailed off to Yugoslavia with him, and someday he just might.

Another real-life character was Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, an Irish priest who master-minded the smuggling of hundreds of people on the run from the Gestapo in and out of the Vatican. He was a larger-than-life guy, adept at disguises and escaping Gestapo assassins. Hundreds owe their lives to him. At the beginning of the war, he was very anti-British (like Billy) having lost family members to the Black and Tans during the Irish Civil War. But he overcame that once he saw what the Nazis were capable of, and worked closely with British POWs and the British ambassador to the Vatican.

HALLIE: Another real figure was Pietro Koch. He comes across as a violent psychopath. Is that an accurate representation?

JIM: Pietro Koch was an Austrian-Italian fascist with a taste for sadism. He enjoyed listening to the opera as he tortured his victims, often in the company of his Italian movie star lover, Maria Denis. He was called the most feared man in Rome, where he led a group called Banda Koch, made up of the worst of the fascist police and Nazis.

He was so violent and unpredictable that when he fled north after the fall of Rome, Mussolini himself ordered him arrested. That tells you something. After the war he was executed for his crimes. Ironically, in his photograph he looks almost gentle, with soulful dark eyes. You couldn’t make this guy up.

HALLIE: So, World War II buffs: Jim will be dropping by all day to take your comments and questions. Please, join the discussion!