Kansas and the perils of creative indecision

Kansas was one of my favorite bands while growing up. But this was always something of a minority viewpoint. Sadly, Kansas is a band that never reached its full potential.

Kansas, like the Canadian rock trio Rush, always had an intellectual, progressive streak. Kansas always wanted to make rock music “something more”.

Here’s an example: the band’s debut, self-titled album contains a song called “Journey from Mariabronn.”

What the heck is Mariabronn, you ask? That’s a reference to German-Swiss author Herman Hesse’s 1930 novel, Narcissus and Goldmund.

Highbrow, yes. But a little too highbrow for popular music. Even in the artistically indulgent 1970s. How many 16-year-olds—either then or now—are conversant in mid-twentieth-century German classic literature?

Kansas basically had two commercially successful albums: Leftoverture (1976) and Point of Know Return (1977).

View on Amazon
View on Amazon

Leftoverture contains the spiritual rock anthem “Carry On Wayward Son”. This song brought the band mainstream success. This is also the Kansas song that non-devotees are most likely to recognize.

On Point of Know Return you’ll find “Dust in the Wind”, another Kansas song that still gets a fair amount of airplay.

That was about it, as far as commercial success went for Kansas. Although the band soldiered on for years (a version of Kansas continues as a going concern today), the group was fading out by the mid-1980s.

Kansas’s songs are well-thought-out, often to the point of being abstruse. In short, most of the group’s music isn’t immediately accessible to the casual listener. And that’s a fatal flaw in rock music, where the competition is fierce, and audience attention spans are notoriously short.

Kansas was also riven by an internal philosophical dispute. Founding member and chief songwriter Kerry Livegren became a born-again Christian in 1979. He often infused Kansas’s lyrics with quasi-Christian themes. These were seldom preachy or bombastic, but their spiritual import was hard to miss.

The other members of the band weren’t on board with this new direction. Many of Kansas’s albums during the 1980s (Drastic Measures (1983), comes to mind here) contain songs that aren’t really enough of one thing or another. It wasn’t explicitly Christian music, but it wasn’t mainstream rock—or even progressive rock—either.

The last Kansas album I bought was Power (1986). Kerry Livegren had left the band by this time, and the remaining members cobbled together an album that was imitative of the commercial rock music that was popular at that time.

Power contained a few worthwhile songs. But by this time Kansas had simply become too unpredictable as a musical entity—even for fans like myself.

View on Amazon

Kansas had a good run in the 1970s, but the band ultimately floundered because its members couldn’t agree on what the band was supposed to represent musically and artistically.

Kansas was never going to be Foreigner or Journey, let alone a Led Zeppelin. All the group’s movements in those mainstream directions were awkward stumbles.

Christian rock was a thing in the 1980s and beyond. (The Christian rock group Stryper, founded in 1983, still has a fan base.) But Kansas never fully cultivated that market, because at least half of the band’s members were uncomfortable with the “Christian rock” label.

So Kansas was ultimately a lot of half-hearted missteps in many competing directions. But not enough of any one thing.

What’s the lesson here? Creator, know thyself. That advice applies not only to rock bands, but to anyone trying to stand out in a marketplace filled with “me-too” offerings.

-ET

The ideology behind ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”

The other day, a reader asked me what I thought of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005).

Yes, I read the book; and I saw the 2011 movie starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara.

Despite the name, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is mostly the story of a polyamorous middle-age journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, who tracks down Nazis with the occasional help of Lisbeth Salander, the eponymous young lady with the dragon tattoo.

Blomkvist is a stand-in for the novel’s author. Stieg Larsson (1954-2004) was a left-of-center Swedish journalist. Larsson flirted with the radical leftist movements of the 1960s at a very young age. He declared himself a Marxist at the age of 14.

To his credit, Larsson later disavowed outright Marxism. He longed, though, to wage a righteous battle against European Nazism. Never mind that most authentic European Nazis were in nursing homes and graveyards by the time he reached full adulthood.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo suggests a preoccupation with rightwing conspiracies. Not that there’s much of a risk in Larsson’s native land. Sweden, on the contrary, is one of the most “woke” countries on earth. The Swedes pioneered the use of the self-consciously “gender neutral” pronoun half a decade before such absurdities reached the English-speaking world.

There are also the cartoonish, over-the-top depictions of misogyny in the book and the movie. The original title of the novel was, Män som hatar kvinnor (“Men Who Hate Women”).

Was Larsson kidding? No, he wasn’t. Even in Sweden, though, there was enough common sense in commercial publishing to avoid saddling a book with an ideological title like that.

If you read the book and/or watched the movie, you’ll find that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is fantasy fulfillment for its author. Mikael Blomkvist saves Lisbeth Sanders from the bad guys. He doesn’t really want to sleep with his much younger heroine. (According to the book, Blomkvist has always preferred middle-age women to “young girls” in their twenties.) But the twenty-something Salander comes on to him. So how can he say no?

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, even though I saw it for what it was: fantasy fulfillment for a politically left-leaning journalist who had entered midlife crisis territory.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is not a bad novel, despite it’s flaws. By all means read and enjoy it. Just don’t take it literally; and realize that the book’s author, Stieg Larsson, had multiple axes to grind when he sat down at the keyboard.

-ET

**View THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO on Amazon (quick link)**

A visit to historic Madison, Indiana

Today I scratched another town off my Indiana bucket list: Madison, located in the southernmost portion of the Hoosier State, along the Ohio River in Jefferson County.

Madison is located less than two hours from the east side of Cincinnati, so the drive was not arduous. I went with my dad, who is a native Hoosier from southern Indiana. He had many anecdotes about how much the area had changed since the 1960s. Since I was not born until 1968 myself, I will have to take his word for it.

The charm of Madison, though, is that much of the town’s original 19th century architecture has been preserved. Throughout Madison’s central historic district, you’ll find baroque Victorian mansions and narrow brick row houses that will make you think you’ve just dropped back into the 1800s.

The firehouse was built before the Civil War.

And speaking of the Civil War, there is a Civil War monument near the courthouse that includes a cannonball that was fired into Vicksburg, Mississippi by Union troops in 1863.

While there are many of the usual chain restaurants in the strip outside (and above) the town, Madison residents seem to be doing their best to preserve and patronize locally own businesses.

I didn’t see a Starbucks, but I did see an independently owned coffee shop with a healthy crowd inside, for example. I also saw an independently owned shoe store on Main Street, as well as a musical instruments store. Amazon hasn’t killed all independent retail, it seems.

Overall, Madison is a pleasant enough town, but I’m not sure if I could live there. It’s at least an hour’s drive from any of the surrounding major cities (Cincinnati, Louisville, Indianapolis). I’m a product of urban sprawl, I suppose, and I’m rather dependent on the amenities that such sprawl provides. There was not much urban sprawl in Madison.

Once again, though, a nice place place to visit. As always, I hope you enjoy the photos.

-ET

And finally, if you’re in the mood to read some fiction set in Indiana, I’ll take this opportunity to point you toward my crime novel, VENETIAN SPRINGS, and my historical supernatural fiction series, THE ROCKLAND HORROR. Both of these stories are set in (slightly altered) versions of southern Indiana.

The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps

The period between the two world wars was the golden age of the pulp fiction magazines. This was a time before television, or (of course) the Internet. Entertainment options were limited. (Heck, they barely had radio in those days.) Many people therefore turned to magazines that specialized in quickly written and fast-paced stories of romance, western adventure, crime, science fiction, or horror.

What happened to pulp fiction? The pulp magazines weren’t the victims of television, as is commonly thought. They were the casualties, rather, of the cheaply printed paperback. Modern paperback books were first introduced in 1935, but they really caught on during and shortly after World War II. The paperback completely changed the publishing and bookselling landscape, much as Amazon would about sixty years later.

Some of the original pulp content is still with us, of course. Horror fans who adore H.P. Lovecraft may not know that favorites like “At the Mountains of Madness”, “Dagon” —and most other Lovecraft stories—were originally published in Weird Tales, a pulp magazine founded in 1922. (Note: Weird Tales technically still exists, though its format has undergone some modifications; the magazine has a site on the Internet.)

I’ve read and reread Lovecraft’s oeuvre  as much as I care to. So when I was recently in a mood to do some reading off the beaten path, I decided to indulge in a bit of vintage pulp crime fiction.

Or actually, quite a lot of vintage pulp crime fiction. The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps contains forty-seven stories and two complete novels. Writers represented in this collection include well-known names like Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) and Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961). There are also plenty of stories by writers who are long forgotten.

Why read pulp fiction? Well, you probably already watch pulp television.

I’m a longtime fan of pulp TV, in fact. During the 1980s, I regularly tuned in to action television shows like The A-Team, Knight Rider, Airwolf, and the original MacGyver. These shows were all escapist television, with plots that roared out of the gate like a 1981 DeLorean or a 1987 Toyota Supra.

My favorite was The A-Team. An episode of The A-Team kept you on the edge of your seat. Each episode ended with a blazing gunfight, in which no one was usually killed or seriously injured. The A-Team made absolutely no attempt to provide any sort of messaging on social, political, or philosophical issues. The other aforementioned 80s-era pulp TV shows were done in a similar vein.

Most of these shows did not age well. For nostalgia’s sake, I recently tuned in to a few old episodes of The A-Team and the original MacGyver. In the MacGyver episode, the eponymous hero found himself in the Soviet Union, where everyone conveniently spoke English. The Russians even spoke English with each other. I managed to sit through about twenty minutes of this. Life is too short.

The same might be said of the stories in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps. You can detect the literary and storytelling skills at work; but you can also tell that you’re reading fiction produced in a different era, when expectations were very different. My 1980s pulp TV shows did not have to compete with Netflix. The writers whose work is collected in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps did not have to compete with Michael Connelly or Lee Child.

The stories in The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps are interesting as artifacts of the pulp era, in the same way that a Ford Model T is an interesting artifact of automobile technology in the 1920s. But as entertainment for present-day audiences? Keep in mind that some of these stories are more than eighty years old. You had might as well ask me if I would like to use a Model T for my daily commuting needs.

I suspect that this massive tome (more than one thousand pages in print) is so massive for a reason. The editors knew that the phrase “your mileage may vary” would be very applicable here.

What about their usefulness for writers? Those of us who write fiction are always thinking of a story in market analysis terms, after all. 

I wouldn’t recommend that any twenty-first century writer try to imitate the style of these stories, exactly. At least a quarter of these tales contain plot holes that you could drive a Model T through; and almost all of them contain hackneyed dialogue. (“He’s on the square!” “The place looked swell.”)

And oh, the eyebrows that will be raised among the finger-wagging social justice crowd. While these stories aren’t intentionally sexist, they are the product of a different time, when ideas about men and women were different. They overflow with gendered terminology that would make any writer the target of an online pitchfork mob today (“honey,” “doll”, “sugar”, “dame”, etc.).

The female characters in these crime stories are mostly props. But then, so are most of the men. These stories are all about plot, plot, plot.

And that is where this book may be instructive for writers who have found themselves too immersed in navel-gazing literary fiction. The writer who suspects he is spending too much time on flowery descriptions and internal monologue may learn something valuable here: how to get to the point, or to the plot. The pulp-era writers were certainly good at that, despite their other shortcomings.

-ET

**View ‘The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps: The Best Crime Stories from the Pulps During Their Golden Age–The ’20s, ’30s & ’40s’ on Amazon**

 

Unoriginal place names in Indiana

A few more pics from my recent trip to Columbus, Indiana.

Once again, I enjoyed my time in this city to the south of Indianapolis, and I like Indiana in general.

My only problem with the Hoosier State is that Indiana is absolutely unoriginal when it comes to place names.

Columbus, to cite the most pertinent example, is the name of the state capital of neighboring Ohio.

Other geographic plagiarisms in Indiana include Milan, Versailles, Nashville, and Edinburgh.

There is even a Cincinnati, Indiana. For those of you not from the Midwest, Cincinnati is a city in Ohio, on the Ohio-Indiana border.

-ET

While almost slipping into the Flatrock

I made a trip to Columbus, Indiana last week. Columbus is a nice town to the south of Indianapolis.

Indiana is seldom exciting, but it’s a friendly place with some captivating scenery (by Midwestern standards, at least). And there is some very nice scenery, indeed, in Columbus.

Below is the Robert N. Stewart Bridge, on 2nd street. I took the photo below from the bank of the Flatrock River.

And here’s a view of the Flatrock River itself, facing away from the bridge.

I almost slipped on the concrete boat ramp while taking these shots, which would have placed me in the Flatrock River, and not just beside it. So I hope you enjoy the photos.

-ET

Challenger disaster +37 years

I was a senior in high school on January 28, 1986. The explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger occurred that day at 11:39 a.m., EST.

The explosion took place just 73 seconds into the shuttle’s flight, and killed all seven crew members. Among the dead was Christa McAuliffe, a Massachusetts teacher who had been a guest astronaut.

That year I had a part-time job in my school’s cafeteria. I was operating a soda machine in the lunch line when the students began filing in, talking about what had happened. This was one of those national tragedies that was announced in classrooms, rather like the assassination of JFK, when my parents were in high school.

The Reagan Administration had been hoping to revive interest in the U.S. space program, as well as to inject some life into math and science education. (Even then, there were concerns that American students were falling behind their global counterparts in math and science.) The presence of teacher Christa McAuliffe on the mission was a key part of that effort. McAuliffe’s inclusion would have been a good idea, perhaps, if not for what happened.

I’m not going to exaggerate, and say that the Challenger disaster depressed me for a month, or anything like that. I was sorry for the loss of life, of course. But in 1986 I was a self-absorbed teenager, and this was a faraway event.

The disaster did have a sobering effect on me, though. At my present age (I’ll let you do the math), I am acutely aware that life is fragile, and that bad things happen to good people. I wasn’t as aware of this in 1986.

The Challenger crash dominated the news for weeks afterward. A case can be made that Christa McAullife received a lion’s share of the media attention. This was probably inevitable, given that she was a civilian volunteer and a teacher. McAuliffe was about the same age as my mother, I remember noting.

The investigations and Congressional hearings surrounding the disaster lasted for several years. In 2004, President George W. Bush conferred posthumous Congressional Space Medals of Honor on all the Challenger crew members. 

On the night of the disaster, President Reagan delivered this televised speech to the country. One of his more moving oratory moments, in my opinion.

A sad moment for the country, and one that I still remember, almost four decades later.

-ET

A right (and wrong) reader for every book

I’m slogging my way through Holiday in Death, by J.D. Robb. I purchased the audiobook for this title at a steep discount on Chirp.

I now know that J.D. Robb is a pen name for Nora Roberts. I wish I had known this in advance, as Nora Roberts has never pleased me in the past.

View it on Amazon

I know: blasphemy to some of you. Nora Roberts is, after all, a bestselling author who has delighted millions of readers over the years. I don’t dispute that.

But she’s also a writer of various flavors of romance, and every book she writes tends to be at least one-half romance novel.

Holiday in Death is no exception. It’s ostensibly a police procedural set in the near future (2058). Like other Nora Roberts titles, the premise of this one intrigued me, but I was underwhelmed by the execution.

Why? Maybe it’s because I’m a heterosexual male. I can only read so many paragraphs about the “beauty” of a male character before I gag, or at least grow bored, and start wanting to skip ahead. But female romance readers eat those details up.

Holiday in Death, sure enough, has all the characteristics of a romance novel. There is more sex than shooting, and the female detectives in the book spend as much time checking out hot guys as they do investigating the serial murderer who is the villain of the story.

The novel’s protagonist is NYPD Lieutenant Eve Dallas. She’s tough and snarky, and I’m fine with that. But far too much space is devoted to her storybook relationship with her unlikely husband, the Irishman named Roarke.

And here we descend into full-blown romance novel territory. Like most romance novel male characters, Roarke is less a human male than a personification of female fantasy. He’s tall, broad-shouldered, and (of course) he’s a self-made business mogul.

Roarke is tanned and well-muscled. (Despite being married and running a business empire, he still finds time to spend hours each day in the gym, one supposes.) And—of course, once again—he has long, Fabio-like hair. (Male pattern baldness does not exist in the universe of women’s romance fiction.)

Holiday in Death presently has a 4.7-star average on Amazon, with 3,885 ratings. Most of Roberts’ books have high ratings. Nora Roberts is not only a bestseller, but a multi-decade bestseller. Her first novel, Irish Thoroughbred, was published in 1981, more than forty years ago. I was barely in junior high then.

My intention here is not to knock Nora Roberts (once again, Nora Roberts is doing just fine.) My objective, rather, is to illustrate a point that many reader-reviewers (and many review-hungry indie writers) often overlook: a reader can simply be a mismatch for a basically good book.

Holiday in Death is a good match for many readers (most of whom are devotees of romance fiction, one imagines). Otherwise, it would not have so many 5-star reviews.

But Holiday in Death is a bad match for a mystery/police procedural reader who is a fan of Michael Connelly, C.J. Box, and John Sandford.

The book is probably a bad match for any heterosexual male. I was definitely ready to quit when I heard the paragraph about how the gorgeous, long-haired Roarke “emptied himself” into Eve Dallas at the climax of some acrobatic lovemaking. Sorry, but I don’t need to read about other dudes ejaculating. And if I did want that much detail about the sex act, I’d go to Pornhub.

For reader-reviewers, the lesson here is: don’t pan a book simply because it doesn’t match your tastes. (I won’t be rating or reviewing Holiday in Death on Amazon or Goodreads, as this is such a clear case of book-reader mismatch.)

For authors, the lesson is: don’t market your book to everyone. Your book is almost certainly not for everyone. Few books, after all, are for everyone. Not even books written by the esteemed Nora Roberts.

-ET

**View Nora Roberts’s novels on Amazon**

JFK, Marlene Dietrich, and the problem of the aging Lothario

Eleanor Herman’s Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House, is well worth reading both for its historical content, as well as its human interest angle.

In this book, you’ll learn about the honey trap in which Alexander Hamilton was ensnared in 1797. Women and sex, it turns out, were among Hamilton’s principal weaknesses.

There are the requisite chapters about Warren G. Harding and the Nan Britton affair. Also Eisenhower’s unconsummated sexual liaisons with his wartime driver, Kay Summersby. (Apparently, Ike was impotent by the time he became involved with the much younger, statuesque Summersby.)

Needless to say, the chapter on John F. Kennedy is among the most lurid. There are the expected entries about Marilyn Monroe, and the two White House secretaries nicknamed Fiddle and Faddle. But there are also some surprises.

According to this book, JFK was into partner-swapping mini-orgies involving other men, too (Note: not with any male-male contact, though). And of course, threesomes with two women. (What man isn’t, after all?)

JFK

While most of JFK’s conquests were on the younger side, not all of them were. When German actress Marlene Dietrich visited the White House shortly before JFK’s death, Kennedy decided that he had to have her, too.

Dietrich, born in 1901, was sixteen years older than Kennedy. She was then already in her sixties. Dietrich quickly decided, though, that she would not turn down a chance to romp with America’s youthful, charismatic commander-in-chief.

But there was one caveat: “I was an old woman by then,” she later recounted, “and damn if I was going to be on top.”

Dietrich also reported that the encounter did not last long. JFK was fast out of the gate. That assessment conformed to other reports about our 35th president.

Marlene Dietrich

Speaking of age: JFK died at 46, when he was still in his prime. He is frozen in amber as a youngish, good-looking man.

For as long as he lived, JFK was largely attractive to women. But even during his lifetime, he showed signs of what would now be called predatory behavior. He often manipulated women into sex, and occasionally plied them with alcohol and drugs.

And speaking of age again: Some of his partners were far too young for a grown man in a position of power, even by the standards of that era.

What if JFK had not been martyred at the age of 46? What if he had served out a presumable second term and died of old age? A normal lifespan would have placed Kennedy’s death sometime in the 1990s or the early years of the twentieth century. (He would have turned 100 in 2017.)

We can assume that at a certain point—probably not far into the 1970s— the women would no longer have been quite so willing, and JFK would have met with more resistance. For JFK, sex was more than a mere biological drive. He was clearly compulsive about his conquests, and regarded sex as an extension of his power.

It is therefore not difficult to imagine JFK, had he lived, being embroiled in a sordid late-life sexual harassment scandal, not unlike those that befell both Trump and Biden. (Joe Biden was accused of sexual harassment, too, both by Senate staffer Tara Reade, and seven other women. But the mainstream media chose not to dwell on these accusations. Make of that what you will.)

Like many Americans who are too young to remember JFK in office (he died five years before I was born), I grew up thinking of Kennedy as a mythic figure. I attended Catholic schools, and a portrait of JFK hung in at least two of my K-12 classrooms, right beside portraits of the Pope and several of the saints.

But keep in mind: had he not been martyred in 1963, JFK would have been just another former president in his golden years.

I might also note that Donald Trump had no shortage of willing female partners in his 30s and 40s. In those days, Trump was not a controversial septuagenarian politician, but a glamorous tabloid billionaire. Many women wanted to be with him.

Time and age are the enemies of sex appeal. The difference between a celebrated ladies’ man and a reviled lecher is often a matter of a few years and a few wrong presumptions. Just ask Donald Trump.

-ET

View it on Amazon: Sex with Presidents: The Ins and Outs of Love and Lust in the White House

The Rockland Horror 5: coming soon!

The Rockland Horror 5 is presently in production. The fifth book will mark the end of the historical arc of the series. The series will continue in modern times (post-1985) with a spinoff series.

If you’re new to The Rockland Horror series, start here. If you’ve read the first four books already, you can preorder Book 5 here.

View ‘The Rockland Horror’ series on Amazon!

German rocket scientists, Nazi-era anti-smoking campaigns, and history’s interesting ironies

The Nazis were evil; they weren’t always stupid. In some scientific endeavors, Nazi Germany actually surpassed the Allied Powers. 

For example, one of the first things the Americans did, upon conquering Germany, was to scoop up a rocket scientist named Wernher von Braun. During World War II, Braun was a chief developer of the V-2 rocket program. (He was also a member of the Nazi Party and the SS.)

But after the war, the US faced new enemies. The American government brought Braun to the United States, where he worked on American rocket programs, with both scientific and military applications. Wernher von Braun had a hand in the Apollo spacecraft that would eventually lead to eight crewed lunar missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Wernher von Braun, former Nazi scientist, with President Kennedy at Redstone Arsenal, 1963

That may not come as too much of a surprise to many readers. After all, most people know that Nazi Germany had some advanced weaponry. But did you know that Nazi scientists also raised the alarm over cigarette smoking long before anyone else did?

This historical curiosity provided a scene in Book Four of The Cairo Deception. 

View THE CAIRO DECEPTION on Amazon

In Book Four of The Cairo Deception, Rudolf Schenk tells Jack McCallum that the Nazi government had identified cigarette smoking as a major health concern: a cause of heart disease, lung disease, and cancer. Jack  is skeptical; but on this matter, at least, Schenk is actually telling the truth. 

The German medical community actively discouraged cigarette smoking decades before those of other countries, including the United States. Adolf Hitler (as noted in Book Four of this series) was personally opposed to cigarette smoking. Hitler was a teetotaler, too. 

Smoking was never quite outlawed in Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, official propaganda discouraged smoking among German citizens and servicemen alike. 

In this regard, Nazi Germany was ahead of its time, and in a good way. This must be kept in perspective, obviously. Nazi Germany’s prescience regarding the harmful effects of cigarette smoking was overshadowed many times over, by all of the evil that that government committed—both in Germany and elsewhere.

Nazi-era anti-smoking ad

The Cairo Deception 4: ‘Showdown in Cairo’

View it on Amazon

This book is now available on Amazon! Below are the first two chapters. In this opening scene, Betty Lehmann has a run-in with her old nemesis, FBI Special Agent Paul Gellar:

Chapter One

Betty Lehmann stood on a crowded passenger ship dock in Brooklyn, New York, on the western shoreline of New York Harbor. She looked up at the tall, wide prow of the RMS Scotlander. 

It was a balmy day in September of 1938. The city of New York was sweltering under a late-season heat wave, but there was a pleasant breeze here, so close to the Atlantic. 

Betty, moreover, could feel herself tingling with excitement, for the journey that was about to begin. Within the hour, Betty would board the Scotlander, which was bound for the Egyptian port of Alexandria.

This trip would be different from her recent one to Germany. Whereas the trip to Germany had been like official tourism in the name of the German-American Bund, this trip to Egypt would involve hands-on training. 

And yes, probably a real-life test or two.

This had been a year of tests. A full year had passed since Betty had pushed Barry Rosenberg from the precipice at Lover’s Ridge. She had survived that trial by fire, dodging the inquiries of both the Dutch Falls police, and then the FBI.

Perhaps those trials had, ironically, made her more prepared for the challenges that lay ahead.

She had known that the purpose of her recent trip to Germany was twofold. On one hand, the trip gave her an opportunity to see the Fatherland. But it also gave officials who oversaw the Reich’s Operation Pastorius a chance to evaluate her. 

She had even been given the honor of meeting Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most powerful men in Germany. 

How many ordinary people, she wondered, got to meet Heydrich? It had been the opportunity of a lifetime!

And the men in Berlin must have been impressed with her—at least to a degree. Otherwise, they would not have approved her participation in an actual Gestapo operation. 

Of course, Rudolf Schenk would be primarily responsible for tracking down the perfidious traitors in Cairo. She would be only a trainee and an observer. But it was an opportunity and an honor, nevertheless. 

The only downside was that Frank would be accompanying her to Egypt. She recalled how he had behaved in Berlin. Frank had jealously hovered over her the entire time. Frank had not learned of her fling with Colonel Volker’s young adjutant, Karl Richter; but he had suspected.

She was now twenty years old, and she did not intend to answer to her older brother about her personal life. Frank acted not like a brother, anyway, but more like a jealous beau. 

This realization made her skin crawl, and she pushed it away. Hopefully Frank wouldn’t be too much of a wet blanket while they were in Egypt. She was anxious to learn everything she could from this Rudolf Schenk. If Frank became jealous of Schenk, too, he might ruin everything. 

***

But at least Frank wasn’t here with her now, this minute. He had just excused himself to go into the station building for the shipping line. Probably he needed to use the restroom. Betty hadn’t asked. She was simply glad to be free of his overbearing presence for a few minutes.  

Betty noticed a man looking at her from some distance away, amid the crowd waiting to board the RMS Scotlander. 

The man looked vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t place him. Probably he reminded her of someone she knew back in Dutch Falls. 

This was New York City, she reminded herself. She didn’t know anyone here. No one at all. 

Perhaps the man merely found her attractive. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all, that a strange man had noticed her.

So as not to encourage him, she tilted her head upward, and then looked away.

***

Horst had been almost as excited to see Betty off as Betty was herself. Her father had been the architect of this trip, after all, and of her previous trip to Germany. Horst was the leader of the German-American Bund in Dutch Falls. From Horst Betty had acquired not only her drive and discipline, but also her love for Germany and the Führer. 

Not everyone in Dutch Falls had been anxious to see her go, however. Her younger sister, Heidi, would miss her. 

And then there was Patrick.

Patrick O’Dell had made one final, impassioned plea, practically begging her to stay in Pennsylvania. She had, at least, managed to allay his suspicions about her role in the death of Barry Rosenberg. But convincing him to forget about her was another thing. 

Patrick O’Dell had been a pleasant enough diversion by Pennsylvania standards. But while in Germany, she had seen and recognized the kind of man she wanted. She wanted a man like Ensign Karl Richter, the young Wehrmacht adjutant with whom she’d had an affair while in Berlin. 

If only Patrick O’Dell would just forget about her.

***

The man she had noticed a few minutes ago—the one who had seemed to notice her—was now walking directly toward her at a brisk pace.

Suddenly he did look familiar. Very familiar.

“Betty Lehmann,” he said. “Remember me?”

It took Betty only a few seconds to place the man, now that he was standing practically face-to-face with her. 

This was the FBI agent who had shown up in Dutch Falls the previous winter, leveling accusations at her father, and also at her. 

His name was—

“Special Agent Paul Gellar,” he said. “Just in case you’ve forgotten.”

Betty attempted to reply, but found herself tongue-tied.

Chapter Two

Horst had warned her that they might not be completely finished with the FBI agent. Gellar might show up again, and try to trip one of them up.

The way to handle him, her father had said, was with cool-headed deliberation. Be civil; do not provoke him. But say as little as possible. Don’t allow him to rattle you, or goad you into saying something that you would regret later. 

“Good afternoon, Agent Gellar,” Betty said, recovering herself now. “How nice of you to come and see me off. You must have a lot of time on your hands at the Bureau, if you have time for this.”

“Let’s just say that you’re a priority, Miss Lehmann.”

Betty felt a little chill run through her. She didn’t want to be a priority for the FBI.

But of course Gellar would say something like that. He wanted to disorient her, to make her incriminate herself.

With some difficulty, she forced herself to remember Horst’s instructions. 

“Am I? You flatter me, Agent Gellar. Still, it’s reassuring to know that the FBI makes time to see citizens off when they take ocean voyages. Too bad you didn’t show up earlier. You could have helped me with my luggage.” 

“Cut the crap, Miss Lehmann. You’re about as innocent as a fox leaving the henhouse with blood on its muzzle.”

Betty rolled her eyes at Gellar. “And you’re about as good at metaphor as well, a third-rate FBI agent. What is this about?”

It occurred to Betty that she was no longer following her father’s instructions to the letter. She wasn’t being entirely civil; nor was she saying as little as possible. She was actively sparring with Agent Gellar, in fact.

“I know you were lying,” Gellar said. “I know that you had some role in Barry Rosenberg’s death, in him falling off that cliff. I don’t know if you pushed him yourself, or if you lured him there, and someone else did the dirty work. Either way, though, I know you had a part in it.”

“You have a very vivid imagination, Agent Gellar.”

“How do you sleep at night, Miss Lehmann?”

“Usually in a negligee, Agent Gellar. But sometimes we German American women sleep in the nude. Put that in your report.”

She was pleased to see the color rise in his cheeks. She had just made an FBI agent blush. 

“You think you’re clever, don’t you?” he asked, regaining himself.

“Have a pleasant day, Agent Gellar. Unless you have grounds to arrest me, I think we’re done with this conversation.”

“For now, maybe,” he said. “But we’re not done for good. And we won’t be, until you’re behind bars.” Gellar tipped his hat. “Have a pleasant voyage, Miss Lehmann. Anchors away!”

With that Gellar turned on his heels, started whistling to himself, and walked away. 

The man still had nothing on her. Otherwise, she reminded herself, he would have arrested her. Especially when she was preparing to embark on a trip abroad. This entire encounter had been nothing but yet another attempt to rattle her.

But he hadn’t succeeded.

***

Frank showed up at almost the exact same moment that Gellar receded into the crowd.

“Who was that?” Frank asked.

“That was Agent Gellar. The FBI agent.”

Frank had had no real interaction with Special Agent Paul Gellar. But he had heard about him. Horst, moreover, had warned Frank not to allow himself to be provoked.  

“What was he doing here?” 

“Just fishing for information, Frank.”

“About Papa?”

Neither Horst nor Betty had ever told Frank the truth about what had happened to Barry Rosenberg. He had no need to know about it. Nor did either of them completely trust his discretion.

“About Papa,” Betty answered. “About the Bund. About everything. You know how they are. They cast a wide net, and look for anything they can use. Anyway, come on: It’s almost time for us to board.”

View it on Amazon

Childhood memories, and writing about World War II

My grandfather in the Atlantic Ocean, 1943

World War II has been on my mind and in my fiction a lot of late. 

I’m presently finishing up the last book in The Cairo Deception, my WWII-era suspense/drama series. The most recent installment in The Rockland Horror, my historical horror series, takes place in 1945. The plot of The Rockland Horror 4 is intimately bound to the events of World War II.

To be clear about the title of this post: no, I do not have firsthand childhood memories of World War II. I was born in 1968, twenty-three years after the war ended. By the time I became aware of names like Pearl Harbor, Hitler, and Hirohito, the war was at least thirty years in the past.

My grandfather, however (pictured above) was a WWII combat veteran. He served in the Atlantic in the US Navy. His experiences were roughly similar to those depicted in the 2020 Tom Hanks movie, Greyhound.

From a very young age, I was captivated by history. And what better way to learn about history, than by listening to the stories of a relative who actually took part in it?

My grandfather regaled me with his accounts of Egypt, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Syria. He also told me stories about fighting the German U-boats and Messerschmidts. 

My grandfather was, in many ways, my first “action hero”. His experiences, though, were very common among men of that generation, who have been called (for good reason) the Greatest Generation.

I don’t remember a thing about World War II. But some of my fondest childhood memories involve listening, with rapt attention, while my grandfather told me about it. He has been gone for decades now, but I still miss him, and I miss his stories. He gave me an enduring interest in World War II, and it isn’t surprising that the war should show up in some of my stories.