SPY STUFF IN MY BOOKS

Gothic Novels–Dark, Supernatural, and Plenty of Spies

When I write books, usually there are Gothic elements in them, even if they are not primarily Gothic novels. One of those elements is spy stuff. All the old Gothics have spy stuff in them…and it is to those earliest examples I have returned in my own writing while keeping the new eNovels thoroughly modern.

updated cover of A Deadly Provenance, set in southern Germany

With that in mind, one look at current news will show you how current and thoroughly modern spying is just now. There’s the 69-year-old political exile Nikolai Glushkov as an example, the Russian found dead in London on a not-too-distant Monday night. His demise was said by the British police to be a murder–a compression to the neck. And Nikolai had been very open in telling people he was on a Kremlin hit list. Glushkov had been a close associate of Boris Berezovsky who was a Russian oligarch and prominent Putin critic. Boris was found dead on the bathroom floor of his ex-wife’s house in Ascot, southeast England back in 2013. After the death of his friend, Glushkov claimed to be on this hit list that far back, and named another victim, Alexander Litvinenko who had been killed in 2006 with polonium poison.

When we did our mission work in Europe and traveled behind the Iron Curtain, we knew a man, a very young man named Sergei Kourdakov who escaped a Russian trawler and swam to political safety. We first met him in the U.S. at church services. He was on a circuit telling everyone his story and his conversion–no one would believe his freedom would only last a few years. While his early death looked accidental, no one of us who knew him believed it was anything but murder–a hit from the then-KGB who operated freely all over the world.

In my novel Veiled in White,

Set in Estonia with a North Carolina heroine.

the spy element was part of the inherent fabric of Estonia, its setting. Near St. Petersburg (in the USSR), the small country of Estonia was occupied by the Russians and has always been a target of spies, so the story of the North Carolinian artist who became an art student there and whose American outspokenness got her in trouble on the issue of spies is very accurate and believable.

The spy element is alive and well in the novel A Deadly Provenance. In this case it is connected to the former Nazi network with entanglements into the present and emerging one. Its tentacles reached back into the earlier movement in the USA where a movement of the same Nazi element was born, as well. So when you read about these things in the novel, you can know just how serious, treacherous, and deadly those forces were. There is a love story along with the spy one which brings in a redemptive element.

American innocents spied on in The Czech Republic

Yuletide Folly has no spy feature in it per se, but Stormclyffe, Weep! has Irish spy stories in it, and Czech Point recreates the spy scene rather accurately that we ourselves encountered in our tourist trips into the Communist East Bloc.

The spy element of nations is similar to the spying done by secret societies rampant in

Stone of Her Destiny, from Cape Fear to Kintyre, and provides the impetus to a plot to infiltrate and commandeer the Christian Church. Spying is what secret societies do, and a group or nation only has to value the rewards of doing the lurking, stalking, listening, and recording to set aside the funds to do it, and the game is on.

I watched NBC’s live broadcast of the Russian Ambassador to the UK’s talk on Syria and the latest chemical event, and can only say, how can people not acknowledge the many faces worn by the many interacting countries? If only simplicity and innocence were possible…but then, we would have no books.

On to romance with a mission.