A Hero of France by Alan Furst

(26. - 1315.) A Hero of France by Alan Furst - In March of 1941 Mathieu, almost 40, is in a network transporting downed English pilots and air crews through France to Spain. It is dangerous. It is the start of the French Resistance. Mathieu felt he had to do something to oppose the Germans arrogantly dominating France. 

Members of the Resistance use their Resistance names when talking to each other. Through the book they have only first names.

Furst is a master of evoking the spirit of the era.

Paris, the city of lights, is now dark during the Occupation. Vehicles and buses are not running. There is a curfew. It is a silent city through the night. Birds singing can be heard through the city. Parisians can star gaze from their apartments.

In a time of constant shortages a grand present is a “big wedge of some kind of Brie” brought from a farm.

Documents dominate life in wartime. You cannot travel without the proper documents. Creating a physical disguise for an airman is straightforward. Creating credible documents requires a sympathetic member of officialdom or a skilled forger.

The Resistance needs a constant flow of money to finance escape networks.

Mathieu receives money from Max de Lyon, a Polish Jew, who is running a club. His patrons in the Occupation are the German military, colloborationists and the Parisian underworld. They have the money for clubbing.

Mathieu is aided by Chantal, an elegant woman of the upper bourgeoisie. 

Annemarie, a member of an aristocratic family, is recruited by Chantal to join the cell. She is a beautiful young woman.

It is a delicate process travelling in Occupied France with someone who cannot speak without betraying he is English. It becomes simpler to travel in Vichy (Unoccupied) France.

Mathieu encounters Klara Zeller at a restaurant. They had been young lovers. She was an ardent Communist from a well-to-do family. They meet. He ends the assignation when she tries to recruit him for the Communist cause.

Even at the beginning the Resistance is complicated by the separation of Communist and non-Communist groups.

Furst explores an issue seldom addressed in my reading involving the French Resistance. How much should they trust British intelligence? How much direction should they accept from Britain?

Mathieu has an innate suspicion of an upper class Englishman, Edouard, sent to meet with him.

Running an escape line is expensive and money is limited in France. British intelligence has lots of money.

While I would have thought the modest number of English airmen being returned to Britain by the Resistance too few to draw Nazi concern, they were very concerned. Bombing Germany had infuriated Hitler prompting all Nazi ministries to publicly intensify the hunt for British airmen in France.

Senior Inspector, Otto Broehn, of the Hamburg police is “asked” by the Foreign Ministry to work with the German military police, the Feldgendarmie:

Operating against resistance in occupied countries they were known as the Heldenklauer, hero-snatchers but that was better than working with the Gestapo.

Speaking French he is sent to France to pursue heroes.

He will be diligent unlike the French police who capture the airmen and couriers who have the misfortune to be revealed at checkpoints but make only perfunctory inquiries to identify networks.

Every organization is at greater risk from turncoats than from investigators searching for them. While Mathieu’s network began with people he knew its expansion means he must trust people he does not know well. Recruitment is necessary but the Resistance lacks resources to vet potential members especially when the approach is made by the aspiring Resistant. As the network has expanded so has the risk of a traitor.

There is great drama on a personal scale in the book. Furst has a knack for rendering characters with a hidden aspect to them. 

The constant tension in the book is excruciating. The stress of being a member of a Resistance escape line cell was unrelenting.

Furst is so talented at causing anxiety in the reader on whether the heroes will survive. He had me racing through the final pages to find out what happened.

**** 

Furst, Alan - (2002) - Kingdom of Shadows; (2004) - The Polish Officer; (2010) - Spies in the Balkans; (2012) - Dark Voyage; (2013) - Red Gold (1999); (2013) - Alan Furst's Quiet Heroes; (2014) - Mission to Paris; (2017) -Midnight in Europe

On Writing - A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (Part II)

(25. - 1314.) - On Writing - A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (Part II) - In my last post I started my review of On Writing. This post completes the review.

Writing his first novel, Carrie, King was unhappy with the first few pages and threw them in the wastebasket. His wife, Tabby, resurrected them and encouraged him to keep writing. He realized a “writer’s original perception of a character may be as erroneous as the reader’s” and “stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea”.

Life changed when the paperback rights to Carrie sold for $400,000. (He received half.)

King has an addictive personality - smoking, alcohol, cocaine - until given an ultimatum by his wife. He realized that the “idea creative endeavour and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time”. Reading and writing appear to have become his dominant addictions.

He tells of the basics, learning grammar and style. 

I was more interested when he recommended a daily reading / writing program of “four to six hours, every day”. To King you cannot be a writer unless you are an avid reader. 

When young people ask me about being a lawyer I ask them if they are prepared to spend 8 hours a day reading. If they flinch or hesitate or look away I say if you do not enjoy reading all day every day it is best to find another profession.

King writes every morning, holidays included, stopping when he has written 2,000 words. He recommends writing in a room where you shut the door. He directs the writer to avoid distractions though what is a distraction is flexible. He writes while listening to “hard rock” music.

For new writers he suggests 1,000 words a day with one day off a week.

On the creative process he states:

The situation comes first. The characters - always flat and unfeatured, to begin with - come next. Once these things are fixed in my mind, I begin to narrate. I often have an idea of what the outcome may be, but I have never demanded of a set of characters that they do things my way. On the contrary, I want them to do things their way.

He thinks:

The most interesting situations can usually be expressed as a What-if question

He highlights the importance of description which he describes as a learned skill. I have spent 51 years in a law office describing events in cases and 48 years describing sports events, principally football games. I find the amount of description needed is a matter of feel for me. If it feels right it is probably a good description.

He assesses, rather brutally, the academic industry of creative writing - lectures, workshops, seminars and classes.

The last section of the book is about his recovery and return to writing after a horrific accident in which he was struck by a van. I found the section moving.

I am not sure why he described On Writing as a short book when it is 288 pages in length.

I was struck by how often he cursed and swore as he wrote about writing. It felt discordant for the other two books I have read about writing by P.D. James and Gail Bowen had nary a swear nor a curse. I know it was not affection. I expect it reflects his everyday language.

I have never read any of King’s fiction. I have avoided reading him as I do not read horror.  I did enjoy and learn from On Writing. King is a skilled writer on writing. I will refer back to his principles and be more conscious of unnecessary words.

****

King, Steven - (2026) - On Writing - A Memoir of the Craft - Part I 

On Writing - A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (Part I)

On Writing - A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (Part I) - In showing how he became a writer King tells stories of his youth. He was imagining at 2. I have only vague memories until I was in Grade One. The episodes of his earliest years are vivid especially on getting his ear drum repeatedly pierced. I do not have any dramatic early memories. 

He recounts that at 6, he missed so much of Grade One because of illness that he was held back. While ill he did read “approximately six tons of comic books”. I was an equally avid reader at 6 but my access to comic books was limited to what I could read at the Red & White General Store in Meskanaw while my Mom was shopping for groceries. 

I think a key difference between us was that King started writing stories as a child with the encouragement of his mother who paid him a quarter for each of four stories. They were “about four magic animals who rode around in an old car, helping out little kids”. I did not create stories at 6. Even as a child King heard in his head the voices of characters.

King, as with myself, was of the last generation to start to read before television was in the home.

By the time he was 12 he submitted a science fiction story to a magazine. I was most impressed that he typed it on a Royal typewriter he was given at 11. I was well into my teens before we had a typewriter and I could never do more than hunt and peck until I was in university.

He illustrates the point that “good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere” by how his first original story on counterfeiting coupon stamps came from his mother musing about how many more stamps she needed for a lamp and showing him that her tongue was green from licking many many stamps.

He got his first of years of rejection slips for the “Happy Stamps” story but kept writing and submitting. 

I had no literary interests as a teenager but continued to read and occasionally wrote down what I had learned about countries. I was fascinated by geography. King does not talk about reading encyclopedias for fun. I loved encyclopedias.

He was a movie aficionado, especially horror movies. Living on a farm I had rare access to a movie theatre.

What was clear to me was King’s imagination as a child, teenager and adult was never at rest with regard to fictional stories. My imagination focused on geography and history, imagining places and events far from the farm.

In high school he wrote a horror story plagiarized from a movie. It was a best seller among his classmates but resulted in confiscation by the school administration and return of sales. What he remembered best was the feeling of shame when he was asked why he wanted to write such “junk” when he had talent. He says every writer has had someone make a comparable comment to them.

From a small town newspaper editor for whom he was writing stories on spors he learned the essence of editing:

“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you re-write your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

From a university workshop group which included his wife-to-be, Tabitha who is a poet, he confirmed his “belief that good writing can be simultaneously intoxicating and idea-driven”.

Bright Shining as the Sun by John Farrow

(30. - 1319.) Bright Shining as the Sun by John Farrow - An articulate well-spoken career criminal confuses police. I would be equally surprised. They are few and far between in my experience.

Douglas Michael (he insists on the full names to distinguish himself) Sykes, is wounded in the thigh, in a biker bank - an apartment for counting money - with three other people dead is being charged with murder. He says he is the fourth victim. Sykes insists on talking to one man, Emile Cinq-Mars, a retired Montreal police officer recovering from a bullet wound. 

Sykes explains why he will not trust a former partner of Cinq-Mars:

“I’ve been found guilty by association in my life when that was dead wrong. I understand it: People had no way to decide so they went by association. You want me to find you worthy by association. Like the judgement of those who put me away, that could be wrong.”

Sykes requests police protection fearing he will be killed in a Montreal hospital.

Frederick “Mittens” Gregoire, another aging career criminal, is clinging to his leadership of a biker gang while serving a life sentence. It was his bank that was hit. He gives a bi-lingual order - Ghost Sykes tout de suite.

Lest “Mittens” be thought of as an unlikely nickname for a mobster, the real life bikers of Quebec have often used unexpected nicknames. A ruthless leader was Maurice “Mom” Boucher. He may have been an inspiration for Farrow. As with “Mittens”, “Mom” had sons and a daughter involved in crime, continued to direct his biker chapter from prison and survived assassination attempts in jail. 

Organized crime in Quebec has become more complex as in the rest of North America. Where Armand Gamache in Louise Penny’s Three Pines series takes on the traditional Italian mafia, the Montreal police in Bright Shining as the Sun are dealing with the Hell’s Angels. 

The challenge for the killer, “Raccoon”, contracted to ghost Sykes is the police officer outside Sykes room. Because of the direction in the order for swiftness there is little time for preparation.

Raccoon is clever and cold blooded.

The resulting police reaction is brutal. I hope that I am correct that Montreal police of the 21st Century in real life do not beat suspects in interrogation.

For the opening 100 pages Sykes is the lead character. Cinq-Mars barely appears.

He is slowly recovering in hospital from the combined effects of being shot and getting a blood infection. His mind is clear.

The unusual duo of Sykes and Cinq-Mars, both recovering from gunshot wounds in the present, met 40 years ago. Cinq-Mars gave him a break partly because of his age. Another factor was Sykes’ intellect. At 15, this teenager who grew up in a working class Montreal neighbourhood, was reading “Hemingway, Camus, Sartre, Dos Passos”.

At their current meeting Sykes, a greater realist than many criminals, explains his motivation to talk to Cinq-Mars:

We say: I can do five years standing on my head with my head in a bucket. Touch the ceiling with my toes. Entertain myself walking that way, walking on the ceiling. We say those things horsing around, figuring life out ….. But there’s a cutoff. Comes in about eight years. I’ve done the calculations. Nobody in their right mind gets into double digits …. Wherever you leave off from, 10 years later nothing exists …. That’s how the honest wretchedness in life passes you by when you pull steady time.

Sykes is facing far more than ten years.

As I noted above, an eloquent criminal is unusual. Intelligent conversation between police and criminals is equally uncommon in crime fiction. Cinq-Mars and Sykes engage in a battle of the minds. For Cinq-Mars to learn what has happened decades before and in recent days he must determine the motivations behind secrecy and honour.

Intelligent conversation between Cinq-Mars and his wife, Sandy, was less of a surprise. She understands aspects of the psyche of Cinqu-Mars better than himself.

In Sykes, Farrow has created a fascinating villain. He has  the intelligence to achieve greatness. Instead, his life was spent in the lower echelons of crime. Cinq-Mars pursues the question with Sykes that was in my mind. Why did he not use his fine mind to lead a productive life? The answer was sad and believable.

Farrow keeps the plot moving quickly. His dialogue is impressive. While written in English Farrow effectively conveys that French is the dominant language of Quebec.

The ending was breathtaking. It is dramatic without relying on a heavy dose of violence. It is credible. It is satisfying as well as brilliant. It blindsided me.

I regret I had not pursued the Cinq-Mars series sooner. I will be reading more of the bright French Canadian detective and his “garguantan” nose. 

****

Farrow, John (pseudonym for Trevor Ferguson) - The Storm Murders