A GAME OF LIES: REBECCA CANTRELL

Rebecca Cantrell's outstanding debut novel A Trace of Smoke, featuring her feisty crime reporter Hannah Vogel, won the Bruce Alexander Memorial Award for best historical mystery. Hannah Vogel returned in the second book A Night of Long Knives desperately searching for her adopted son Anton, as Hitler in an orgy of killing settles old scores with those around him.

The voice of the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron de Coubertin, boomed out of the loudspeakers. My French had improved since the move to Switzerland, so I did not need to wait for the translation:

" The important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning, but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering, but fighting well."

In the third book in this superb series A Game of Lies Hannah returns to Berlin for the 1936 Olympics posing as a Swiss reporter Adelheid Zinsli and lover of SS officer Lars Lang. Hannah has been collecting Nazi secrets from Lang and smuggling them back to Switzerland and sending them on to London.

Hannah arranges to meet her mentor, Peter Weill, at the Olympic Stadium, but he dies in front of her.

"There is a certain package that she can't deliver. But you can."

Hannah will risk her life as she contacts old friends some of whom may in fact be new enemies as she attempts to find that package. He relationship with Boris has broken down over her repeated dangerous trips to Nazi Germany, and all she has is her beloved Anton living safely in Switzerland, and the fabricated relationship with Lars Lang. Is Lang genuinely anti-Nazi? What work does he do for the SS that leaves him seeking solace in the bottle?

A Game of Lies is a meticulously researched historical thriller written in the first person present tense which brings high tension and immediacy to the narrative. Author Rebecca Cantrell blends real life characters such a Berlin socialite Bella Fromm into her fictional story. And I really liked the way she has added some glimpses of young Anton and his life at school in Switzerland.

Exactly the honor code to which Anton subscribed, as did his hero, Winnetou the Apache brave from Karl May's books.

[Among the admirers of Karl May's best sellers were Albert Einstein and Adolf Hitler]

The story is a thriller but also raises some emotional questions for Hannah Vogel especially when she visits her old friends, Fritz and Bettina.

Now she spoke so casually of sending them off to be indoctrinated. Would I have become so inured to the Nazis that I would have sent Anton marching off in a brown uniform so easily had we stayed?

A Game of Lies does something some books fail to do, it successfully conveys the atmosphere of fear prevailing in Nazi Germany. It also relates, amidst the thrilling spy story with its twists and turns, the background story of an Olympics that is thankfully remembered more for Jesse Owens four gold medals than the Nazi propaganda.

I can highly recommend the Hannah Vogel series, and A Game of Lies is a worthy addition.

Award winning author Rebecca Cantrell majored in German, Creative Writing and History at the Freie Universitaet of Berlin, and Carnegie Mellon University. She lives in Hawaii with her husband and son.

My review of A Trace of Smoke

My review of A Night of Long Knives with links to my four part interview with the author.

Rebecca's website

A NIGHT OF LONG KNIVES: REBECCA CANTRELL

Rebecca Cantrell's first novel A Trace of Smoke, which featured Berlin crime reporter Hannah Vogel, won great reviews as well as the Bruce Alexander Memorial Award for best historical mystery.

My review of A Trace of Smoke.

Some other reviews of A Trace of Smoke.

My interview with Rebecca: part one, part two, part three, part four.

Hannah Vogel's next adventure A Night of Long Knives is set in the summer of 1934 three years after the events related in A Trace of Smoke.

Hannah is asked to write about a zeppelin journey from South America to Switzerland. She had vowed never to set foot in Germany as long as the Nazis were in power, but Ernst Rohm, leader of the SA [Brownshirts], her dead brother's former lover, has the zeppelin diverted.

Hannah and Anton are kidnapped and separated by Rohm's agents. He claims Anton, Hannah's foster son, is his child and wants to use him and a bogus forced marriage to Hannah to protect himself from paragraph 175 of the German penal code.

Rohm's open homosexuality is being used by his enemies in an attempt to destroy his considerable power.

But before the marriage can take place Rohm, suspected by Hitler of high treason, and thousands of his brownshirt storm troopers, are murdered in the purge known as the Night of the Long Knives.

Hannah evades capture and travels to Berlin in a desperate quest to find Anton before the SS eliminate him, because of his supposed connection with Rohm.

Rebecca Cantrell has written another exciting thriller and with Hannah Vogel's sometimes frenetic first person narrative she gives the reader a feeling of what it must have been like to be in Germany during those terrible years. She has cleverly blended her fictional story in with real life events and real life characters, such as British journalist Sefton Delmer, while cleverly imparting snippets of information that add to the atmosphere.

"Do you know where that church is?"

Only a Bavarian would ask that question. The neo-Gothic Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was a Berlin landmark near the zoo, home to weddings of the rich and famous, including Marlene Dietrich.

A Night of Long Knives might be just considered just another adventure story, albeit with a very attractive heroine, but perhaps we should see beyond the simple thriller to some of the subject matter.

Political figures still hide their sexuality, even in our modern liberal society, and in recent years dictators still eliminate their former associates, relatives and closest friends.

In June 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives Hitler, Goering, Himmler and the SS had murdered Ernst Rohm, Hitler's oldest friend, Gregor Strasser, father of Hitler's godchildren, Kurt von Schleicher, former Chancellor of Germany, and his wife, and numerous other high ranking officials including associates of Franz von Papen, Hitler's vice-Chancellor.

Old scores, and perceived slights, were settled in an orgy of blood letting, and yet the Olympic Games were allowed to take place in Berlin a mere two years later.

I am looking forward to the next installment of the adventures of Hannah, which will be set in 1936 during those Berlin Olympics.

More reviews of A Night of Long Knives

A TRACE OF SMOKE

It is 1931 in Berlin and Hannah Vogel, a hardened crime reporter, who writes for the Berliner Tageblatt under the pseudonym Peter Weill, is shocked to see her brother Ernst's photograph posted in the Hall of the Unnamed Dead at the Alexanderplatz police headquarters. 

Ernst, a cross dressing lounge singer at a gay nightclub, had been murdered and thrown in the river. Despite the danger Hannah begins to delve into the lives of her brother's friends, powerful lawyer Rudolphe von Reiche and young Nazi Wilhelm Lehmann. At the court while reporting on a rape case she meets the handsome banker Boris Krause, who has more than one motive for wanting to begin a relationship. 

Then her search is complicated by the arrival on her doorstep, late at night, of the endearing five year old child Anton, a "brave" devotee of the cowboy and Indian novels of Karl May, who claims his father is Ernst and calls her "Mother". 

Hannah in her investigations into Ernst's murder and Anton's parentage unearths a scandal that could effect the future of the Nazi party and puts her and Anton's lives at risk. 

Rebecca Cantrell's first novel A Trace of Smoke is narrated by Hannah Vogel and that gives the story an immediacy and sense of tension and danger that grabs you from the very  first page. In Philip Kerr's books the presence of the wise cracking "Marlowe style" detective Bernie Gunther sometimes seems incongruous, but Hannah Vogel fits right in to an accurately depicted decadent Berlin. 

The geography, attitudes and corrupt feel of the city is described in meticulous and fascinating detail. The characters and action are related with such feeling that you imagine you are there outside Wertheim's department store surrounded by chanting SA Brownshirt thugs, or in the El Dorado bar, or boating on Lake Wannsee. It is engrossing and absorbing but not always comfortable feeling.  

The enormous losses in manpower in the Great War, the devastating inflation of 1923 and the poverty and class divisions are all factors in the growing darkness about to envelop Germany. But Hannah is among those good people who hope the final journey into madness can be prevented.

I am not the only reviewer who thinks this is an outstanding book see here. 

A Trace of Smoke is thrilling historical crime writing that entertains, educates, excites, and provides us with a real heroine as well as stimulating thought about whether we have learned the lessons of history. 

I can't wait to read the sequel entitled A Night of Long Knives which is due out in 2010.

Rebecca Cantrell majored in German, creative writing and history at the Freie Universitat of Berlin and Carnegie Mellon University and now lives in Hawaii.

[photo of El Dorado from 

http://eldoradoberlin.de/show/index.php?site=geschichte ]

WIN A GAME OF LIES BY REBECCA CANTRELL

Those kind folks at Tor/Forge on Fifth Avenue, New York have given me an extra ARC of A Game of Lies by Rebecca Cantrell, which gives you the opportunity to win a copy before the publication date on July 5, 2011.

This is the much anticipated third book in the prize winning Hannah Vogel series.

You can read all about Rebecca Cantrell, her comprehensive research, and this series at Rebecca's website here.

The first book A Trace Of Smoke was set in 1931 Berlin and won the Sue Federer, McAvity and Bruce Alexander Memorial Award for best historical mystery.

The second A Night of Long Knives was set during the June 1934 purge of the SA Brownshirts and was also nominated for the Bruce Alexander last year.[won by The Mapping of Love and Death by Jacqueline Winspear].

A Game of Lies returns Hannah Vogel to Germany as a spy, undercover as a reporter attending the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

My reviews of A Trace of Smoke and A Night of Long Knives [with links to my interview with Rebecca].

As I really enjoyed the first two books and love the brave, feisty heroine, Hannah Vogel, I am really looking forward to reading A Game of Lies and posting a review next month.

How to win a copy. Answer the following questions e-mailing your answers by 21 May to thbear08@googlemail.com.

1] Which country boycotted the 1936 Berlin Olympics and organized their own games? What prevented those games starting?

2] Who was the high jumper prevented from competing in the Berlin Olympics although she held the German record, and had won the British high jump championship?

Good luck.

REBECCA CANTRELL INTERVIEWED FINAL PART: "STRICT WARRIOR CODE"

11] If SMOKE is made into a movie who would you suggest to play the parts of Hannah and Boris?

For Hannah, I like Carice van Houten (from Black Book), Naomi Watts (from The Painted Veil and King Kong), or Jodie Foster. I see Sebastian Koch, also from Black Book and The Lives of Others as Boris.

12] Many historical novels seem awkward because the dialogue seems too modern. In contrast the dialogue in SMOKE is very evocative of the era did you do anything special to achieve this accuracy?

I'm glad you liked the dialogue, thank you! I read many diaries written during the time the book was set to hear the voices and the language. I also read newspapers from the time to see what people were interested in, what jokes they thought were funny, what fashions they were wearing, etc.

If I couldn't get a line correct, I sometimes translated it into German and back into English. Painstaking, but effective. I am very meticulous with my dialogue and do numerous rewrites to make sure that each character's voice is distinctive.

13] The symbolism of the handkerchiefs of various kinds where did that idea come from?

Thank you for noticing! You are the first person to comment on it.

In the original version, I had sections written in Ernst Vogel's voice. I warned the reader that these sections were coming by having someone pull out one of his red silk handkerchiefs. Later, when I took these sections out, I liked the idea of pulling the reader visually back to him with the symbol of the handkerchief, because a character is touching something he touched. I can't say more without a spoiler.

The other handkerchiefs were chosen as character details, for example, Rudolf's lace trimmed handkerchief barely keeping the blood off his hands. 

14] Do you think that using a real historical figure like Ernst rohm was important to the story? Hannah seems even to express admiration for Rohm at one point.

Using a real figure adds a sense of verisimilitude to the book. I've received comments like "A gay man could not have climbed so high in the Nazi hierarchy". Yet, that one did.

I don't think Hannah admires Ernst Rohm, but she respects him. 

He was a very powerful, very dangerous man. Unlike many of the other Nazis, however, he also followed a strict warrior code. While the code itself might not have always been laudable, at least it was predictable, so I think she knew that she could trust him to keep his word and to behave in a predictable manner under certain circumstances. 

15] The good news is that there will be another Hannah Vogel book out in 2010 and from the title A Night of Long Knives I am assuming Ernst Rohm will be back, but will the "brave" Anton and handsome Boris feature again?

Thank you! I am quite happy that Hannah's getting at least one more book.

Ernst Rohm will be back, although anyone who knows the history knows it won't end well for him. Other characters from the first book will reappear as well, including Anton and Boris. 1934 was a much darker time, so even the characters that do reappear are changed.

I've also added more historical characters to the second book: Theodor Eicke (creator of the concentration camp system), Bella Fromm (Jewish aristocrat and journalist who helped others to flee), Sefton Delmer (British newsman and spy), and Hitler himself appears in a few scenes.

Thanks again Rebecca. Good luck with the book [which is published in May] it certainly deserves to be a great success.

Thank you for your insightful questions, and your kind words. My fingers are crossed(or, as they say in German, I'm pushing on my thumbs). 

I will be running a competition to win a signed copy of A Trace of Smoke next month.

The first three parts of this interview can be read here, here, and here; the review of A Trace of Smoke is here.  

NIGHTS OF LONG KNIVES

The day the UK 2010 election was called by PM Gordon Brown I received a postal package from the USA. It was an ARC of the second book in Rebecca Cantrell's Hannah Vogel series entitled A Night of Long Knives.

I was totally enthralled by the first book in the series A Trace of Smoke set in 1931 Berlin before the Nazi takeover.

"The geography, attitudes and corrupt feel of the city is described in meticulous and fascinating detail.....It is engrossing and absorbing but not always comfortable feeling...an outstanding book.

You can read the full review of A Trace of Smoke here.

Having been among the first to praise the book, I was very pleased to learn that Rebecca won the Bruce Alexander Memorial Historical Mystery Award for a mystery set before 1950. The award was given at the Left Coast Crime Convention in Los Angeles on 13 March, 2010.

A Night of Long Knives is set in 1934, a time of great turmoil in Nazi Germany. From the cover blurb: Journalist Hannah Vogel has vowed never again to set foot in Germany while the Nazis are still in power.....Hannah is asked to write about a zeppelin journey from South America to Switzerland-but Switzerland turns out to be too close.

This sounds intriguingly good and I will be reading and posting a review of A Night of Long Knives some time before the publication date on 22 June.

But before that after 6 May UK election day we will probably see some metaphorical long knives out among the politicians in the UK.

CASTING COUCH: CARICE VAN HOUTEN IS HANNAH VOGEL

How important is it to have a clear image of the main protagonist in a crime fiction book? 

When the book or series is filmed or goes on television if the star does not fit your mental image does it ruin the next books in the series for you? 

Do actors, television and film producers have an obligation to get as close as possible to the author's character? 

Lauren [in a comment] said that she thought in text and did not imagine the scenery or image of the characters. [Apologies if I have misquoted] I think in pictures and develop an image of what I think the character is like. For instance I found it impossible to watch John Hannah as Rebus, as he was almost the anti-Rebus as far as I was concerned. 

Maxine of Petrona mentioned in our Friend Feed discussion group that although Kenneth Branagh acted well in the recent BBC Henning Mankell trilogy he was not the Wallander of the books.  

I have discussed this previously with regard to David Suchet going the extra mile to be the Hercule Poirot of the Agatha Christie book and the idiosyncratic casting of Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander here and here.

When Rebecca Cantrell suggested Carice van Houten and Sebastian Koch as her Hannah Vogel and Boris if  A Trace of Smoke was ever filmed I was very pleased because they fitted exactly my mental image of the characters especially Ms van Houten. 

Next week you will have a chance to win a signed copy of A Trace of Smoke .   

REBECCA CANTRELL INTERVIEWED:"FASCINATING TIME TO SET A NOVEL"

4] Do you have a favourite book or books that you would like to have written?

I don't have a favourite book. For me that's like having a favourite dessert. I like whatever I am eating or reading this minute most of all. Lately I've been reading about the golem, so I'm enjoying The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon and The Golem by Elie Wiesel (and the children's The Golem by David Wisnieski, with vivid paper-cut illustrations).

On a non-golem note, I recently finished Restless  by William Boyd and loved it too. It's a mother-daughter spy thriller set in the 1930s and the 1960s.

5] How did you become fluent in German and what inspired you to write about a woman crime reporter in Germany during and after the Nazi takeover?

I was an exchange student in Berlin in the mid-1980s (now those of you who can do math know how old I am). I was there for two years of high school and a year of college. I've kept it up by speaking a bit and reading a good deal more in German, especially once I started researching A Trace of Smoke.

The story started with Ernst Vogel, the murder victim. At first Hannah was male policeman, but after 50 pages the character felt too distant from Ernst. Once I had read about the death photos in the Hall of the Unnamed Dead in Joseph Roth's What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933, I knew the investigator would be someone who saw his photo there and the first person by was a crime reporter, and his sister, Hannah Vogel. Hannah would not let her brother's death go unsolved, so I was able to tell the story from her perspective as a sarcastic, insightful woman, an unlikely sleuth and reporter determined to save  a German boy [Anton] and a German people.

It turned out to be quite a fortunate decision, as I've since read many wonderful novels set in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s with male policemen as sleuths, from Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series to Jonathan Rabb's Nikolai Hoffner, and Jeffrey Deaver's standalone Garden of Beasts.

As for the time period, the late 1920s and early 1930s in Berlin was a time of intellectual and social freedom mixed with grinding poverty and violent protests. Berlin was a center for modern art, cinema, writing, and music. And yet within a few years it would all be gone: the artists fled, in camps, or in hiding. 

Just like that an incredibly vibrant part of a modern European city vanished to be replaced by the horror of the Nazis. 

How could such a transition NOT be a fascinating time to set a novel?

6] For SMOKE you obviously did a lot of meticulous research, did you do all this during the writing process or before you started the book?

I started researching the era back in high school when I walked into a building at the Dachau Concentration Camp and saw a fading pink triangle tacked on the wall. I wanted to know more about the people who had worn them. I researched the topic more when I wrote my college history thesis.

That gave me some historical background, but for A Trace of Smoke I still needed to do a great deal more research. I read many diaries from the era, such as those of Count Henry Kessler, Bella Fromm, Viktor Klemperer, William Shirer and Ernst Rohm himself. Plus various scholarly tomes and a bound collection of Berlin Illustrierte Zeitung newspapers from 1931.

I was very fortunate in that Berlin was a center of filmmaking in 1931, so I could watch films shot on the very streets that Hannah walked, including M,  Blue Angel, Berlin: Symphony of a City, Emil and the Detectives, and The Testament of Dr Mabuse.

And my most important research was walking around Berlin in the 1980s, smelling the city, tripping on the cobblestones, and watching the brown coal smoke settle on the snow.

Rebecca's website can be viewed here.

[to be continued with more from this interview soon]  

REBECCA CANTRELL INTERVIEWED: "THE FLYING DEER CHARACTER"

This is the third post from my interview with Rebecca Cantrell. I decided to post the entire interview, rather than edit it, because I thought her debut novel A Trace of Smoke was outstanding, and also I found the answers to my questions very interesting; they showed what an incredible amount of thought and effort had gone into the creation of the novel. I hope you agree.

7] How much of your task as an author do you think is to entertain and how much to educate?

I set out to tell Hannah and Ernst's stories in such a way that the reader would be transported there, able to see what they saw and hear what they heard. By recreating the visceral experience of their lives, I hope to entertain the reader and let him or her form their own opinion. 

A novel is not a textbook, but it was very important to me to be as historically accurate as possible. I was very conscious of the amount of historical burden that the characters, and Berlin, had to carry. I constantly struggled with how much information was enough to give a sense of each place and each moment in time without overwhelming the reader.

8] Is the fictional heroine of SMOKE crime reporter Hannah Vogel based on a real person modern or historical?

Not really, although I do have a school friend in Berlin who is every bit as sarcastic and tough as Hannah.

9] Anton, the 5 -year old "Indian brave", is a charming creation is he based on a real child or a fictional character?

Anton too is fictional, but I borrowed his manner of speech from the Flying Deer character in Kastner's Emil and the Detectives. While I was writing A Trace of Smoke, I also spent a great deal of time with some very charming five -year-old boys. Anton is a smart and savvy little boy, but he is still five and doesn't quite have the same boundaries between reality and fantasy that Hannah does, which makes for some interesting interactions.

10] You managed to deal with fairly controversial subjects [gay clubs, male cross-dressing and homosexuality] in a very matter of fact way. Did you find this difficult?

Weimar Berlin was a time of tolerance and openness and Hannah is a matter of fact person, so there was no other way to deal with those issues in the book. I had a gay host brother when I lived in Berlin, and I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for many years. I still have friends in the gay community there. Those are simply parts of their life experiences.

It was much more difficult reading about the impending Nazi takeover and taking a roll call of the vibrant and brilliant people who would soon be dead.

11] Many regarded Berlin during the Weimar Republic as a decadent city and the subsequent backlash possibly helped the Nazis grab power. Do you think our very liberal society combined with the recent economic downturn will produce some kind of fascist backlash?

I certainly hope not. The United States, at least, has tended to lean left in times of economic turmoil voting in Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression and Barack Obama now.

It's also worth pointing out that the current economic downturn is nowhere near as severe as the one suffered by Germany after World War I. Not only was their economy failing, but they also had to deal with the huge loss of life in the First World war, the influenza and starvation shortly afterward, complete collapse of the currency, massive war reparations, and millions of unemployed young men who saw no hope for their future.

As decadent as Berlin was, National Socialism evolved in and always had as its greatest supporters in the more conservative Southern Germany. People can start looking for others to blame in any kind or stressful situation, or hope that a return to "traditional values" (whether or not those values ever existed) will solve all their problems. Let's hope that does not happen now.

[to be continued] 

TO WIN A BOOK: A SIGNED COPY OF A TRACE OF SMOKE

It is a rather pleasant feeling when you discover that a book that you have given a very good review is also appreciated by others.

I rated Rebecca Cantrell's A Trace of Smoke as one of the best historical novels I have ever read. It has a charismatic cast of characters and an attractive protagonist in Hannah Vogel, and you can go here to see that some big name reviewers agree with me; and if you go here and scroll down you can read both my interview with Rebecca and my review of the book. 

To win such a good book signed by the author the question will have to be a little testing.

I was a Professor at Harvard University and died in Norwich, Vermont. 

I had a earlier more important job and my three successors in that position served time in prison, were murdered, and committed suicide. 

Who am I ? 

Please send your answers to thbear08@googlemail.com. 

Correct answers will go into a draw which will be made on 31 March.