Smeared Type

Because most fiction is based on fact, I believe most readers like the factual part to be accurate.  I know I do.  Nothing is more irritating than reading a description of a location or an historical fact that you know is wrong.  For my espionage thriller, “BEAR ANY BURDEN,” I tried to do the necessary research to make sure that my facts are right, however, always with the knowledge that I am writing a work of fiction.  With the advent of the internet and in particular Google, research has become a lot simpler than it used to be.

In my novel, I had immigrants arriving in Dundee, Scotland in 1892.  I was easily able to access information on Dundee in that period including maps of the street layout, active industries in the area, and even comments on traffic congestion from horse-drawn buses.  I also had one of my characters living in Sydney, Australia in the 1950s and was again able to access similar information.  It is amazing what one can find on Google.  Since another of my main characters was a world renowned nuclear physicist from Poland, and the action takes place in the 1980s during the height of the cold war, I did my research and found a wealth of information on nuclear physicists, their work, and the scientific body called the Polish Academy of Sciences.  Without getting too technical, I was able to include many of these facets into my fiction.

When it came to writing about London, England, I had no difficulty since I am from there and was living there during part of the time period covered by my novel.  However, writing about Krakow and Tarnow in Poland was another matter.  In addition to the research that I was able to access, I decided that I would feel more comfortable getting a feel of those cities if I went there.  So last summer my son and I made the trip.  Krakow is a beautiful city with great historical significance, magnificent colorful buildings, churches, and the largest market square in Europe.  Tarnow, some 45 km from Krakow, was a smaller version.  A former walled city unharmed during WWII, with a pretty market square colorful houses with Venetian style balconies in some cases, all of which were painted in lovely pastel colors.  The center of the town was very pedestrian friendly, and I had no difficulty in identifying street names which I was using in my book and making the necessary adjustments when I realized the distances were not quite what I had expected.

I believe blending fact with fiction always make a novel more interesting.  What do you think?

An individual’s life experiences often influence their character, personality, and behavior.  Traumas in a person’s life, at any age, can often have a much deeper impact.  This is even more significant, when the trauma relates to war time experiences.

In “BEAR ANY BURDEN,” my Cold War Espionage Thriller set in Poland at the height of the Cold War in the 1980’s, I have tried to show how the traumas of World War II affected the personality and behavior of the three main characters.

Sir Alex Campbell had grown up knowing of his grandparent’s emigration to Scotland from Poland to get away from the Pogroms, persecution, and poverty.  In April 1945 at the age of nineteen as an officer in the British Intelligence Corps Army, he was at the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp and saw for himself the horrors of the brutal Nazi death camps.  A few weeks later while interrogating a captured German officer, he was attacked and wounded and then watched the officer, a Nazi fanatic, commit suicide before his eyes.

These traumatic events stayed with him over four decades, regularly causing him to wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, as he relived those experiences.

Anna Kaluza was born in a Russian labor camp in 1940.  The daughter of an aristocratic landowning family, she never knew her father, who joined his regiment as the Germans were invading Poland at the start of the Second World War and was never seen again.  Her mother, Maria, was forced off her estate by the Germans and, pregnant with Anna, fled east with her brother, Jan, eventually ending up in Russian-occupied Poland.

Anna grew up with a deep affection for her brother, three years her senior, who was her hero and role model.  When she blossomed into a beautiful young woman, she found she was not attracted to her brother’s friends, but sought the company of much older men.

Despite warnings from her close friends, she threw herself into a wild love affair, which eventually led to marriage, but which unfortunately, her husband could not sustain.  Three years later, they divorced.

Naturally, she was wary of getting involved in similar relationships, but realized she could use her beauty and charms, to her personal benefit when need arose, ideally suited to the challenges and excitement of the British Secret Service.

Eric Keller was a teenager when the Nazis marched into his hometown of Tarnow in September 1939.  Over the next three years, he lived through the ever-increasing brutal occupation – murder, mass killings, persecution, starvation, death and living in perpetual fear.  When he escaped from Tarnow and joined the Resistance in the surrounding forest, he became adept at silently killing Germans with weapons, knives, or even his bear hands.

These three characters were thrown together as part of a British Secret Service plan to help Professor Eric Keller defect from Poland.  They were, however, inexorably tied together through their wartime traumas, which shaped and dramatically influenced their characters and personalities.

Ellis M. Goodman, author of Bear Any Burden: www.bearanyburden.com

Creating an exciting end to a novel, seems to be a regular question from my interviewers.

Fashion and changing perceptions over time, have influenced the endings of many novels.

Romantic novels – where boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back again, love blooms, and they live happily ever after – still have a large audience.  These stories are of course variations of the theme.  In Shakespeare, we see many a boy meeting a girl, who may or may not be disguised as another boy, and through much intrigue, parental disapproval, and devious friendships, we could see the girl at the end of the story appearing to die from an overdose, and the boy committing suicide, desperate and distraught.

I believe that a more modern approach has been to ask the audience to think.  This means that many of today’s plays, movies, and books do not have neat, tidy endings.  To some audiences, this can be infuriating.  However, others enjoy the experience of putting their own interpretation and ending to a story.

In my novel, “BEAR ANY BURDEN,” I have gone for the more modern approach.  While circulating my manuscript to many literary agents and receiving many rejections, I realized that some adjustments to my story needed to be made.  One particularly well-established New York literary agent called the ending of my manuscript “serendipitous.”   Only a literary agent would use such a delightful word.

I did however give further thought to my ending, trying to decide whether I should have all the pieces of the jigsaw fall into place or not.

Accordingly, the end of my book now leaves many questions unanswered.  Some say this should lead to a sequel.  Maybe so.  But the objective is to make the audience think and not to have a “cheesy” ending in which all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place.

Do you agree?

Ellis M. Goodman, author of Bear Any Burden: www.bearanyburden.com

My recent interviewers asked me about my description of death and its implications.

Have you every thought what your feelings would be if you found yourself in a life and death situation and saw somebody shot to death before your eyes?

Would you freeze and be transfixed to the spot?  Would the whole scene flash before your eyes?  Or would you see this horror as if in slow motion?  What does it feel like to lift up a lifeless body?  What does it feel like to see a human being’s life ebbing away, with blood oozing from a wound?

In “BEAR ANY BURDEN,” I tried to imagine these feelings as these traumatic events unfolded.

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“The officer, clearly surprised that Keller had spoken in Polish, turned his gun towards him.

Alex, looked on in horror.   His shoulder was throbbing.  Was it the cold or just tension?  He turned to Anna, thinking she would respond.  But then, Anna pulled out her pistol with silencer attached, from inside her overcoat, and shot the officer in the chest.  The shot made a “plop” noise.  He crumpled into the snow and didn’t move.  Blood from the wound started to stain the snow.  Alex was completely transfixed. Christ, he thought.  What the hell’s going on!”

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In my story, both Alex Campbell and Erik Keller finally move to block the other soldier from shooting Anna.  Keller jumped on the back of the soldier, wrapped his hands around his neck and twisted violently, breaking the soldier’s neck, as he fell in the snow.  Alex’s attempt to grab the soldier’s rifle barrel fell short.  However, a shot went off and they turned in horror to see that the stray bullet had killed Mrs. Keller.

Life can hang in the balance of a few seconds often from the response or otherwise of persons involved or on the scene.  Innocents are often killed accidentally by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Reactions in these circumstances are always unpredictable.

Fortunately, I’ve never had death stare me in the face, nor have I ever seen somebody shot and killed before my very eyes.  It would be interesting to know how near to the truth is my description of these events.
Ellis M. Goodman, author of Bear Any Burden: www.bearanyburden.com

One of the more frequent questions I have been asked in recent interviews is about creating the characters for my novel.

I believe a great deal of good fiction is based on fact.  I have found that, when one is creating characters, you are drawing upon personal experiences, people you know, or have met.  Some made positive impressions.  Some negative.

For BEAR ANY BURDEN, I had a number of key characters, the two most important being Sir Alex Campbell and Anna Kaluza.  Sir Alex Campbell, Head of a Scottish International Drinks Company had served in the Army Intelligence Corps. as a nineteen-year old Lieutenant at the end of the Second World War.  For the next forty years, he carried out “little jobs” for the British Secret Intelligence Services, from time to time.  His character was based on a number of people that I knew and worked with over 38 years in the Beverage Alcohol Industry, particularly in my 20 years experience of the Scotch Whisky Industry, before I moved to the U.S.

When I first started out in business, the first employee that I hired was a secretary.  As a young bachelor, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that I had chosen a very pretty Polish girl with high cheek bones, bright blue eyes, and long blond hair.  She had an aristocratic bearing and posture, and walked like a ballet dancer.  Her English was far from perfect and her typing was awful, but then you can’t have everything!

I remember her telling me of her family history.  She came from a land-owning family whose estates were overrun by the Germans at the beginning of the Second World War.  Her father was in the Polish Army, and she never saw him again.  She fled with her mother and brother and walked for well over 150 kilometers, eventually finding themselves in Russian occupied Poland.  They were herded on to trains and shipped off to the Russian Steppes, where she spent the whole of the War in a labor camp on a collective farm.  Just before the end of the War, they were released and spent five days and nights on a freight train, arriving in Baghdad more dead than alive.  I remember her saying that, she was so weak after that journey, she couldn’t stand.  They were then shipped off to a British camp in Uganda, eventually making their way as new immigrants to Australia, where she finished her education and became an airline stewardess.  I was deeply moved by her story and always remembered the details.  Her story provided the basis of my character, Anna Kaluza.

Other characters in the Book are also based on people that I’ve met, done business with, or socialized with.  If one is observant, it is not too difficult to call on your knowledge – past and present – of the people you’ve associated with, to create the fictional characters in your novel.  Creating the characters whom you get to know as your novel develops, can be a very interesting and rewarding part of your writing experience.

Ellis M. Goodman, author of Bear Any Burden: www.bearanyburden.com

I have recently done some online interviews and responded to a number of questions, starting with what inspires somebody to write a novel?

Everyone believes they have a story to tell, and that there is the great American novel inside them, just waiting to be written and make the best seller list.

In my case, a cousin of mine in London had completed a Genealogical research into our family history, which he had published privately.  He had retired and decided he would spend a few months creating a Family Tree.  The few months eventually turned into five years, by which time he had traced 1500 members of our family through 42 branches, back to 1760, and had communicated with many of them around the world.  His research produced a comprehensive encyclopedia of information about the history of Tarnow, located 45 miles west of Krakow, when it was part of an independent Poland, part of the Austrian Hungarian Empire, and during occupations by the Russians and more recently in the mid-20th Century – the brutal Nazis.

As I read through this award-winning piece of Genealogical research, I started to formulate a story based upon our family experiences, coupled with my knowledge of the Beverage Alcohol Industry and some of the characters that one meets over a busy lifetime.

The result is BEAR ANY BURDEN – A Cold War Espionage Thriller set in Poland in 1983.  Sir Alex Campbell, head of an international drinks company is on a business trip to Poland, a country in the midst of political turmoil.  A new “Solidarity” movement is rising on the streets, and the Communist government is cracking down mercilessly.  Alex Campbell has an additional mission, a “little job” for the British Secret Intelligence Services.  He will deliver an airline bag containing money and passports to a British agent who is to help the world-renowned nuclear scientist, Dr. Erik Keller, escape across the Iron Curtain to the West.

Alex meets the beautiful Anna Kaluza, the British agent, whose life, like his and that of Erik Keller, had been impacted forever by their World War II experiences.

Alex agrees to help Anna complete her mission.

What begins as one of many routine “little jobs” Alex has done for the SIS, quickly turns into an increasingly dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, involving murder, bribery, and international politics.

I hope I created an interesting Espionage Thriller, which illustrates the lifetime impact of war-time traumas, and is also a family saga spanning 90 years of European History.

Ellis M. Goodman, author of Bear Any Burden: www.bearanyburden.com