by Noel Hynd
Hitler, Cochrane postulated further, had asked his Japanese allies to refrain from attacking Pearl Harbor until England could be defeated. When the R.A.F. and British Navy refused to buckle, Japan attacked anyway, but not until February 21, 1942, as opposed to the previous December 7. A Sunday morning, naturally. America entered the war. It ended by January of 1946. By that time, Thomas Dewey was the President of the United States, having assumed office when an overweight, chain-smoking Willkie suffered his fatal heart attack in 1944.
"The United Nations happened anyway, as did the atomic bomb," Dr. Cochrane theorized. "These, like the war, were events set in motion, more than the actions of a single man. Harry Truman never left the United States Senate and MacArthur never became President because of his dispute with President Dewey over Korea in 1951. Eisenhower became President the next year—running as a Democrat, he defeated Senator Taft—and the McCarthy era happened anyway. Again, events were set in motion. American history always drifts toward the center course, no matter who the personalities involved."
Dr. Cochrane then wrapped up. He told the old joke that had made its rounds of the Harvard Faculty Club since the 1970s: A woman falls into a coma in 1954 and comes out of it in 1980. "How is Senator Taft?" she asks. "Senator Taft is dead," she is told. "How is Senator McCarthy?" she next asks. "Senator McCarthy died," she is told. "Well, then," she inquires at last, "how is President Eisenhower?" "President Eisenhower is dead," she is informed. To this she finally reacts in horror. "Oh, no!" she cries. "That means Nixon is President!"
The class erupted in laughter. Bill Cochrane, at the spot of his yearly triumph, closed his notebook, held a hand aloft, and waved. The class stood appreciatively and applauded, as was the custom on the last day of lectures.
Some started to file toward the exits. Others stayed in place and applauded for several minutes. Bill Cochrane stepped away from the lectern, slightly embarrassed by the outpouring of approval, and his wife Laura came to him. He tried to wave a final time to the class, to dismiss them and send them on to their next sessions.
And gradually the applause did begin to die. But Bill Cochrane was distracted again, because he caught something in Laura's eyes, something he had seen so many times over the decades, some things he had seen so long ago: pride, strength, integrity, and tenacity. All the qualities he had fallen in love with within this woman, in addition to the woman herself: all the things that had made a successful marriage endure forty-three years.
The applause was distant and then neither of them heard it at all. They were somewhere else, remembering.
"You absolute ham," she said to him. "You should have been an actor."
"I was, you know," he teased her. "Many years ago. In Provincetown, Massachusetts. The great Eugene O'Neill used to come see us."
"Of course, dear," she said. "And I was a spy."
They both laughed. He took Laura's hand and they walked toward the exit at the right of the lectern. He gave the class a final wave and did in fact savor the moment, as she had always accused him.
"Next year," he said aloud. "That's it until next year."
Then they were out the door together. There would always be, Bill and Laura Cochrane believed, a next year. And for another twelve years there was ---- until both of them, in the last decade of the Twentieth Century, passed away quietly within months of each other.
And in their passing, they disappeared into the history that they had helped write.
END
FDR: The Unfinished Portrait, Artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff, April 12, 1945
Reprinted by Permission
Author’s Note to the Reader:
Thanks for taking the time to read Flowers From Berlin. I hope you enjoyed it. I can be reached at [email protected] or on Facebook. (How many people could be named ‘Noel Hynd’? Just search my name.) Feel free to say hello or share your thoughts about the books or even pose a question. I enjoy contact with readers and attempt to respond to everything.
A note or two on Flowers From Berlin: I wrote the original manuscript in 1986-7 under contract with The Dial Press. While I was concluding the book, Dial was merged into Doubleday and eventually Doubleday became part of other conglomerates. The original editor was so happy over this turn of events that he quit. Then, over the course of a six week edit, there were four different editors, cumulatively reporting to about twelve different bosses. None of them ever edited the manuscript. They just passed it along and eventually threw it back to me. I recall that there was also a copy editor, similarly overworked and under duress.
Hence, many goofs, small and less small, slipped into the original text. A horrible cover was created and out went the book to stores. Eventually, however, Kensington Publishing picked up the book as a paperback and, by their accounts, had 735,000 copies in print, the vast number of which sold. The cover price was $4.50, not much more than the price I’ve assigned here for Kindle, approximately thirty years later. Who says authors have no sense of geometry?
In any case, fixing the little goofs and quirks that survived the original --- for lack of a better word ---- “editing” was the main challenge here. There have also been issues with a scanned manuscript (originally written on a typewriter!) being incorporated into various versions of MS Word. The manuscript has gone through four edits and revisions between December of 2010 and January of 2018. I’m still finding a few. They’re like fleas.
Historically, I’ve tried to make the factual background of 1937-1939 as accurate as possible. I’ve invaded my late parents’ world and used places in New York, Washington, Pennsylvania, England and Germany that they were familiar with and told me about. My father was a magazine editor in New York at the time and my mother was from New Jersey. My father, Alan Hynd, would later have a wartime (1943) best seller titled Passport To Treason, concerning ---- you guessed it! ---- German espionage and sabotage in the United States in the years leading up to World War Two.
There was no Siegfried, of course, and no Thomas Cochrane. This is a work of fiction. But to some degree, there were many Siegfrieds and many Thomas Cochranes. This book, quirks, flaws and all, is my special and highly respectful note of thanks to what has been justifiably called “the greatest generation” of Americans, the men and women who stood up to the extremes of fascism and later communism in the middle of the Twentieth Century.
That’s why the book is structured as a memory, a recollection. We are all in their debt. And we should never forget.
Thanks for reading.
Noel Hynd
March 2018
If you enjoyed Flowers From Berlin, may our editors suggest Firebird, Noel Hynd’s first new espionage novel since 2013, available in the spring of 2018.
FIREBIRD
By Noel Hynd
It is 1968, one of the most tumultuous years of the 20th Century. Frank Cooper, a former star investigative reporter now writes obituaries for a popular New York City tabloid. He hears the confession of a dying man named Leonard Rudawski, a former American diplomat, who bitterly questions the fate of Pavel Lukashenko, a would-be Soviet defector in Paris in 1965 who promised to expose the espionage secret of a generation if he could get to the West. But the defector, code named “Firebird,” vanished. Or did he? Cooper teams with Lauren Richie, a young NY/Latina reporter from the same tabloid. They prowl into the dying man’s confession. Soon they are onto the story of their lifetimes, reviving a dangerous once-cold trail of back channel/back alley CIA and KGB intrigue and tradeoffs, all of which factor into the 3-way racially tinged American election of that year: Nixon vs. Humphry vs. the segregationist George Wallace. Murder, espionage, romance, betrayal and conspiracy intertwine. Readers will meet dozens of memorable “real life” characters: reporters, diplomats, call girls, spy masters, politicians and assassins. The story is tough, large (400-plus pages), and historically precise. It straddles the decades from World War Two to 2018, even throwing a cynical light on Russian-American relations of today.
https://www.amazon.com/d
p/B07BHXCWPG
Also, Truman’s Spy
It is early 1950, the midpoint of the Twentieth Century. Joe McCarthy is cranking up his demagoguery and Joseph Stalin has intensified the cold war. In Washington, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI is fighting a turf war with the newly founded Central Intelligence Agency. Harry Truman is in the White House, trying to keep a lid on domestic and foreign politics, but the crises never stop. It should be a time of peace and prosperity in America, but it is anything but.
FBI agent Thomas Buchanan is assigned to investigate the father of a former fiancée, Ann Garrett, who dumped Buchanan while he was away to World War Two. And suddenly Buchanan finds himself on a worldwide search for both an active Soviet spy and the only woman he ever loved. In the process, he crosses paths with Hoover, Truman, Soviet moles and assassins, an opium kingpin from China, and a brigade of lowlife from the American film community.
Truman’s Spy is a classic cold war story of espionage and betrayal, love and regret, patriots and traitors. This is the revised and updated edition of Noel Hynd’s follow-up to Flowers From Berlin. The story is big, a sprawling intricate tale of espionage, from post-war Rome and Moscow to New York, Philadelphia and Hollywood, filled with the characters, mores and attitudes of the day. And at its heart: the most crucial military secret of the decade.
"Noel Hynd knows the ins and outs of Washington's agencies, public and private." -
Publishers Weekly
"A notch above the Ludums and Clancys of the world....." – Booklist
http://a.co/2F1SDGD
Also from Noel Hynd, available now, a stunning work of historical crime fiction: Ashes From A Burning Corpse.
On a hot night in the Bahamas in 1943, someone murdered Sir Harry Oakes, one of the richest men in the world. There were four wounds to his skull. His corpse had been abused, covered ritualistically with feathers and set on fire. The murder was horrific by anyone’s standards.
A few evenings later, the phone rang in the home of Alan Hynd, America’s highest paid true crime reporter. {Source: NY Times, 1951} The Oakes case would send the writer to Nassau to cover a homicide that was littered with a cast of international characters and which, in its cover-up, became unique in the annals of true crime.
Ashes From A Burning Corpse is the novelized story of that writer’s coverage of the case and how it changed his life. The author is Noel Hynd, the veteran espionage novelist, who has created this story from his father’s writings and private recollections.
http://a.co/5BHANZV
Now, looking for a new author with a sharp, intense, highly original thriller? Here you go! Oscar Mike by Paul Hale.
Check yourself in traffic. Put down your smart phones. Ignore your texts. Line up for the turning lane like everyone else, and signal before you merge. There's a killer on the road. And on his streets, nothing matters more than manners.
Robbery-Homicide detective, Zarah Wheeler -- honorable, upright, distinguished, and dedicated -- is always up for a challenge. But when a road-raging serial killer called the “Street Sweeper” makes his presence known, Detective Wheeler gets a little more than she bargained for.
It starts with the bullet-riddled corpse of a woman, found inside a wrecked car at the bottom of a roadside embankment—along with a note to police promising punishment, by death, to all L.A. motorists who exhibit rudeness or fail to follow the rules of the road.
The killer is skilled, and displays military tradecraft that leaves the LAPD little to go on. But after a chance encounter touches off a violent shootout, an ace reporter with an ax to grind cashes in on live TV. Zarah’s career prospects become dicey, and the case suddenly becomes much more personal.
http://a.co/9TMOTzs
And if you like great World War Two era fiction….
War, Spies And Bobby Sox
By Libby Fischer Hellmann
As World War II rages across Europe and the Pacific, its impact ripples through communities in the heartland of America. A farm girl is locked in a dangerous love triangle with two German soldiers held in an Illinois POW camp … Another German, a war refugee, is forced to risk her life spying on the developing Manhattan Project in Chicago … And espionage surrounds the disappearance of an actress from the thriving Jewish community of Chicago’s Lawndale. In this trio of tales, acclaimed thriller author Libby Fischer Hellmann beautifully depicts the tumultuous effect of war on the home front and illustrates how the action, terror, and tragedy of World War II was not confined to the front line.
Three outstanding stories.
WS&B won the IPPY Silver Medal in the War/Military Category in 2017. IPPY is the Independent Publisher Book Awards.
WS&B was a finalist for the 2017 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year award (Indie Fiction)
http://a.co/jbiZaxD
And finally, a great suggestion in historical literary fiction….
Death Waltz in Vienna by Thomas Ochiltree
Death Waltz in Vienna is a brilliant and memorable tale of romance, honor and suspense, set in the capital of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire in the years prior to World War I.
Army captain Ernst von Falkenburg has just one week to clear himself of charges of treason that will otherwise cost him his life. In that week, a romance blooms with a beautiful woman who not merely provides him with indispensable assistance – at the risk of her life – but who shows him for the first time that he is capable of love.
The action moves across a brilliant panorama of early 20th century Vienna, taking the reader through elegant salons and low dives, Vienna’s most fashionable brothel and the imperial palace, and climaxes in a duel to the death and an epilogue set in Vienna’s Central Cemetery.
This is a remarkable first novel by Thomas Ochiltree, a former American diplomat, who is now emerging as a major historical novelist.
http://a.co/dkzKnwK
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Red Cat Tales LLC PUBLISHING
Los Ángeles, California
Noel Hynd is the author of more than a dozen highly successful spy novels, including Flowers From Berlin and Truman’s Spy. He has been published by Doubleday, Dial, Tor, Kensington, Pinnacle and HarperCollins, among others. Previous foreign rights have been sold worldwide, including Japan, UK, Spain, Holland, Germany and France. He has close to 2000 reader reviews on Amazon.