Bullet Points: Starts and Finishes Edition

• There are five nominees for this year’s Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Mystery/Thriller category:

-- The Long and Faraway Gone, by Lou Berney (Morrow)
-- The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove Press)
-- Bull Mountain, by Brian Panowich (Putnam)
-- The Whites, by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt (Henry Holt)
-- The Cartel, by Don Winslow (Knopf)

The fact that all of these contenders are of the distinctly male persuasion has irritated critic Sarah Weinman, who remarked on her Facebook page that “it is the only one of the 10 categories that does not include a woman … [and] it is entirely unrepresentative of the genre as it stands now …” She added: “[I]t is part of the larger systemic problem of men, for reasons that always strike me as baffling and incomprehensible, shying away from reading books by women, and valuing novels by men as somehow ‘worthier,’ when of course that is patently untrue.” Click here to see the full rundown of Times Book Prize contestants. The winners will be declared during the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Saturday, April 9.

• Already announced is the recipient of this year’s Innovator’s Award, which will also be presented during the Festival: it’s thriller mega-seller James Patterson.

• This weekend will fill Phoenix, Arizona, with crime and mystery readers, as the 2016 Left Coast Crime convention opens there tomorrow and runs through Sunday morning. If you’d like to attend that event but still haven’t registered, you can do so here.

• The death last Friday of 89-year-old Harper Lee, best known for having written the 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird, was pretty much a shock, even though her health was known to be fragile. However, it also goaded Criminal Element’s Adam Wagner to compose this piece in which he makes the case that Lee “could have very well become an author of crime fiction.” Learn more about Lee’s “reclusive” life here.

• Close on the heels of Lee’s passing was the death of Umberto Eco, the Italian author-philosopher probably best known by Rap Sheet readers for having penned the 1980 historical whodunit The Name of the Rose. Now comes word, via The Bookseller, that the Italian release date for Eco’s “final book”—a collection of magazine essays titled Pape Satan Aleppe: Chronicles of a Liquid Society—has been moved up from May to this coming Friday, February 26. No word yet on when an English translation of this collection might become available.

• As a boy, I loved this movie! It was the first and only film I recall going to see at a drive-in theater with my parents and brother.

• I missed spotting this news item earlier: California author J. Sydney Jones has let it be known through his blog that last year’s The Third Place, his sixth historical Viennese Mystery (due out in paperback this coming June), will be “the final volume in the series. It feels a bit odd saying good-bye to that world,” writes Jones, “and to those characters who have become so real for me, and I hope, for you, as well.” He notes, however, that “I am still publishing other standalone titles,” including a suspenser called The Edit, which he promises will be published by Mysterious Press later this year.

• Gee, I thought I was conversant in all the various subgenres of crime and thriller fiction, but the label “cli-fi,” short for “climate fiction,” caught me off-guard. It came my way in relation to a May 2016 release called Cold Blood, Hot Sea (Torrey House Press), by marine ecologist Charlene D’Avanzo. An e-mail pitch says this novel “pits ocean scientists over big energy corporations in a thrilling addition to the new wave of cli-fi hitting the shelves.”

• This sounds like a fitting tribute: “[Britain’s] National Literacy Trust (NLT) and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) have launched an award in memory of Ruth Rendell for champions of literacy,” reports The Bookseller. “The prize is for an author or writer who has worked towards raising literacy levels in the UK, either through their writing and books or through their advocacy and championing of the cause of literacy. Schools, charities, libraries, booksellers and individuals can nominate candidates via the NLT website by the 31st May.”

• Classic Mysteries’ Les Blatt brings the “terrible news” that Boulder, Colorado-based independent publisher Rue Morgue Press “has gone out of business.” Adds Blatt: “Tom Schantz and his late wife, Enid, were pioneers in republishing some of the great—and often little-known—classic authors and their works, long before many of today’s smaller presses got into the business. RMP was responsible for republishing several of the finest John Dickson Carr mysteries, but they also specialized in other first-rate, if often obscure, mysteries. RMP introduced me to Dorothy Bowers, Glyn Carr, Clyde B. Clason, Gladys Mitchell, Craig Rice, Kelley Roos, Margaret Scherf and many more authors of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and beyond. Each book had a brief, literate and entertaining introduction written by Tom and Enid which provided information about the author and his/her works. The Rue Morgue Press books remain centerpieces of my classic mystery collection. I’ll miss them.” Me, too.

• Beneath the Stains of Time writer TomCat explains that Rue Morgue’s “output was severely cut back after Enid Schantz passed away [in 2011] and completely stopped a year or two ago. Now the entire website has disappeared.” Meanwhile, the anonymous blogger at The Invisible Event delivers this “open love letter” to the publisher.

• And this sad news comes from In Reference to Murder:

Five Star is dropping its mystery line to focus on the Western and Frontier Fiction lines. Since 2000, the imprint has published exclusively first-edition books, many of which went on to earn starred reviews, Edgar Award and Anthony Award nominations, and land on bestseller lists. Apparently, Five Star will be honoring its already-signed contracts for books in the pipeline.

• Having enjoyed the first (2014) series of Happy Valley, the award-winning British TV crime drama starring Sarah Lancashire, I was pleased to see Criminal Element mention that Series 2, which is already being shown in the UK, will become available on Netflix in the States on March 16. Wikipedia says there are six episodes to come. That officially ranks as the happiest news so far today.

• Series 3 of Endeavour, the ITV period drama inspired by Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse novels, hasn’t even had an American showing yet, but a fourth series has already been commissioned.

• I was surprised to see the 2014 “stoner crime comedy” Inherent Vice on CinemaNerdz’s list of the “20 Best Detective Movies of All Time,” but the rest of them—especially the top five—were predictable.

• Two DVD releases to anticipate: May 24 will bring the debut of Lou Grant: The Complete First Season, finally introducing what I hope will be a whole new crowd of future fans to that frequently excellent 1977-1982 newspaper drama, starring Ed Asner as city editor of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune; and The Untouchables: The Compete Series is slated to go on sale May 10.

• Would you sign up for this ocean voyage?

• And don’t forget that voting is still open to anyone who would like to nominate authors for the British Crime Writers’ Association’s 2016 Dagger in the Library award. This commendation will be given “not for an individual book but for an author’s entire body of work.” Polls close on March 1, so get your ballots in now!

In Tune with Vintage Vienna

Images from Vienna, 1900, with music by Johann Strauss II.

In case you haven’t noticed it yet, the first part of my recent interview with historical novelist J. Sydney Jones was posted this morning on the Kirkus Reviews Web site. This is of course timed to correspond with the release of Jones’ fourth and latest Karl Werthen “Viennese Mystery,” The Keeper of Hands (Severn House), the plot of which its publisher describes this way:

Vienna, 1901. With the police seemingly indifferent to the murder of a 19-year-old prostitute known as Mitzi, brothel-keeper Frau Mutzenbacher turns to lawyer Karl Werthen to find out what happened and bring her killer to justice. Yet the more he discovers about the mysterious Mitzi, with her secret past and impressive roster of clients, the more questions Werthen’s investigation throws up.

At the same time, Werthen undertakes a second commission: to find out who viciously assaulted playwright Arthur Schnitzler. Schnitzler believes his latest controversial play might have been the motive for the attack--but is there more to it than that?

As he navigates the highs and lows of Viennese society in dogged pursuit of the truth, Werthen finds himself drawn into a conspiracy of espionage and affairs of state.

That’s a pretty simplistic breakdown of what is actually a rather complicated and propulsive yarn involving important officials with secrets to hide, competing espionage agencies, and a killer practiced in the diabolical art of shutting people up for good. Viennese lawyer/private eye Werthen, last seen in The Silence (2012), tackles all of the questions and dangers involved here with the assistance of his increasingly resourceful spouse, Berthe Meisner, and real-life criminologist Doktor Hanns Gross. Jones’ careful pacing, attention to historical detail, and self-assured prose make The Keeper of Hands--like the previous entries in this series--well worth the time it takes to read.

As is so often the case with my author interviews for Kirkus, I gleaned considerably more material from Syd Jones than I had any hope of fitting into today’s column. The 64-year-old author--who grew up in a “little beach town” on the Oregon coast but now resides in the Santa Cruz, California, area with his wife and young son, Evan--responded at satisfying length to my numerous questions about his past, his writing career, and his reading preferences. Rather than file away what I couldn’t fit into Kirkus, never to be seen by the reading public, I am posting the greater part of our exchange below.

J. Kingston Pierce: When and why did you first visit Vienna, and what were your earliest impressions of that city?

J. Sydney Jones: I initially went to Vienna as a junior in college in 1968. I had planned on attending the University of Stirling in Scotland as an occasional student. But those were the years of the Vietnam War and the draft and student deferments; my draft board did not go along with the non-graduating status I would have in Scotland, so I looked around for a school abroad that did not have a language requirement. I’d studied German at university, but had no real desire to go to school full time in that language. A junior-year-abroad program in Vienna fit the bill--and it turned out to be a terrific fit all around, quite by accident. Some of my best friends are from those days. That year in Vienna changed my life.

JKP: For how many years did you later live in Vienna?

JSJ: I went back to Vienna following graduation, newly married, and stayed there on and off throughout the 1970s and most of the ’80s. This was the high point of the Cold War and a good time to be in the spy center of Vienna and also a good time to be away from the U.S., if the fashions say anything of the times. I had already determined as a student to become a writer; Vienna became my Paris, my school of life.

JKP: One of your previous, non-fiction books, Hitler in Vienna, 1907-1913: Clues to the Future (2002), looked at Austrian-born Adolf Hitler’s experiences in the imperial capital. What did you learn about Hitler and Vienna by focusing your research this way?

JSJ: Hitler in Vienna was indeed a labor of love. It took five years of research and writing. I had initially intended the book to be a popular narrative history of Vienna 1900 and its amazing renaissance: think Freud, Mahler, Schoenberg, Klimt, Schiele, Loos, Otto Wagner, Wittgenstein--the list goes on and on of those who helped to shape the modern sensibility. At that time (mid-1970s), New York publishers were most definitely not interested in Vienna 1900; now it has become a cottage industry. Publishers were, however, interested in Hitler, so I paired the two--“a tale of genius versus malignancy” as a melodramatic blurb. Hitler scratched out a living of sorts in those years painting pictures that would be sold to frame shops. It was the frame that was of interest, not the picture, much like you might buy a small frame today with a photo already in it just for advertisement sake. Hitler worked mostly for Jewish frame dealers when he wasn’t living rough on the streets, a failed wannabe artist who was gaga for opera, especially the works of Wagner.

I used the eyes of an outsider to research that book and it was ultimately published in German first. The Hitler angle took my rose-colored glasses off vis-à-vis Vienna: not all schlagobers and waltzes. Anti-Semitism was a deep and ugly vein in the landscape of Central Europe, and Vienna was no exception. An early pre-Nazi National Socialist Party had its start in turn-of-the-century Austria.

JKP: The shorthand version of your biography is that you produced several non-fiction books about Vienna, and then began writing your current series of Viennese Mysteries. But in fact, you penned two standalone historical thrillers before delivering your first Viennese Mystery, The Empty Mirror (2009). What were those novels about, and how did they prepare you to compose the Karl Werthen novels?

JSJ: I wrote two thrillers for NAL back in the early 1990s. The first, Time of the Wolf, is available now as a Kindle (with a wonderful cover by the talented Peter Ratcliffe). It should have been titled In Death’s Time, as it came from a dream I had about this person--obviously a police inspector--coming down an immense flight of marble stairs and thinking to himself: “Only one more death in death’s time. Who will care?” The novel has a Gorky Park sort of feel to it, featuring a Viennese police inspector in 1942 who uncovers documents proving that the Final Solution is being carried out. He resolves to get the secret out to the Allies, but his mission is compromised and soon the SD, German security services, is on his tail. Publishers Weekly called this novel an “exciting intellectual game of cat and mouse ... [that] offers driving tension from beginning to end.” The book is a bit edgy vis-à-vis sex and violence. It remains one of my favorites.

The other thriller, The Hero Game, is set in Ireland during World War II. Its premise is that the Nazis mount a secret mission to Ireland to foment a second uprising, which will distract the Brits just at the time of a planned German invasion of Old Blighty. It also has my biggest howler--I have the Irish leader, a good Catholic, attending mass in a Protestant church. Those thrillers were my education in pacing and writing action scenes, both of which have come in handy in the Werthen books. They are also powerfully character-driven for thrillers.

JKP: What is it about the setting of Vienna in the diapered days of the 20th century that so attracts you as a novelist?

JSJ: I have to admit, it took me a good half-minute to figure out “diapered days”--nice.

I love the time, simple as that. I feel at home in that time. I have since first encountering it as a student. There is terrific resonance with our own times, there are fascinating personalities with quirks and dark sides. Lovely material. Plus, Vienna, when I first went there, was not so far removed from those times: the buildings, the feel of the society. All from another age.

JKP: And what can you accomplish as a novelist writing about Vienna in the late 18900s, early 1900s that would not be possible to do as the author of non-fiction works?

JSJ: It’s funny: I thought that writing this material as fiction would free me up from the obsessive constraints of getting every little historical nuance right. Wrong. I use actual historical characters in each book of the series, and I continue to feel an obligation to getting things right about them in the fictional format, as well. In Requiem in Vienna [2010], for example, featuring the composer Gustav Mahler, I had the appropriate volume of excellent Henry-Louis de la Grange Mahler bio (Vienna: The Years of Change) ever at my side to double-check for Mahler’s daily movements. It’s the same for all the books. If I have a real character speak, I want to know that this is a good facsimile of what they actually talked about.

I only every wanted to be a fiction author; I started with non-fiction as I figured that would be the easiest way to break into print. From travel articles to travel books to narrative non-fiction and then, voila, I could make the leap to fiction. It sort of worked that way, but it is not necessarily a recipe for success. But what the hell, I was young and definitely not a MFA grad--I had to figure these things out for myself. So there is no great moral purpose in my choosing to use this rich Vienna material in a fictional format rather than non-fiction. I am simply being selfish--this is the kind of book I want to write. Werthen and company are just plain fun.

JKP: Do you spend a lot of effort trying to immerse yourself in 1900-1901 Vienna while you’re writing the Werthen books? If so, what do you do to get yourself in the right mind space to recapture life in Vienna during that period?

JSJ: Actually, the Werthen books are planned to cover the era from 1898 to 1915. I am still in 1901 with the fifth book, the same year as The Keeper of Hands. But the books are planned to progress year by year, the characters aging with a sell-buy date. And yes, there is a great deal of immersion in the times. Besides reading tons of history for each book, and focusing on the particular real-life person from the time, I also do a daily bit of time travel via photos and newspapers. Bless the Internet. Time was, if you wanted to do any real research on Vienna 1900, you had to be in Vienna and go to the National Library and request actual newspapers one by one or visit their photo archive and present credentials to show that you deserved a look-see. Now that library has put such information online. I can browse several newspapers for the very day I am writing about over a century ago, see what was in the news, the weather, the social gossip. I can stroll down the street I am writing about in Vienna via the online photo archive. It is a wonderful resource.

Apropos this resource, one of my recurring minor characters in the series is Karl Kraus, of whom I lovingly referred to in one interview as “the intellectual pit bull of Vienna.” Kraus was a cultural critic, grammar policeman, and word maven of Vienna 1900. A frail-looking man, Kraus beavered away for over three decades, single-handedly publishing his magazine, Die Fackel (The Torch). In this journal he took on the hypocrisies of the day, stood up to the rich and the powerful when need be, fought crime and societal stupidity, and generally pissed off everybody. The ultimate aphorist, Kraus termed Vienna 1900 a “laboratory for world destruction.” And guess what, the entirety of his publication can also be found online.

JKP: How realistic is Werthen’s role as a lawyer/private investigator? Have you read about other people in Vienna at the time who engaged in comparable endeavors?

JSJ: Werthen is spun out of whole cloth, though a few months ago I did run across an obscure reference to a private investigator at the time working on Praterstrasse. I could find no further information, however. Werthen and his wife, Berthe, are at the heart of the books, and I do not want their creation to be limited by any real-life forebears.

JKP: Your new novel, The Keeper of Hands, follows a rather complicated plot course. It starts out as a whodunit, with a murdered young brothel employee, but soon expands into a work of intrigue about rival European intelligence agencies and the criminal consequences of seeking to cover up indiscretions among “important” people. What led you to concoct this tale, and how do you think it represents growth in your series?

JSJ: Actually, most of the books in the series follow this arc from mystery to thriller; from whodunit to stop-them-from-doing-it. The first in the series, The Empty Mirror, sets up this format: it begins with the death of an art model and the trail ultimately leads to the Hofburg [Palace] and the secrets involving the deaths of an archduke and an empress. Keeper is this format on steroids. I very much wanted to deal with the espionage agencies of the times and also to create a vile antagonist. I love vile antagonists. Herr Schmidt from Keeper will be making reappearances.

(Right) J. Sydney Jones

JKP: The plots of each of your Viennese Mysteries start with a cultural luminary or two from the city’s colorful past--future philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in The Silence, for instance, and composer Gustav Mahler in Requiem in Vienna, and authors Arthur Schnitzler and Bertha von Suttner in The Keeper of Hands. One real-life figure keeps coming back, though: Hanns Gross, the so-called father of criminology. How has Gross found a regular role in your series, when other authentic characters have not? Is it simply because he has an expertise in criminal analysis, or is there something else he contributes to your storytelling?

JSJ: Gross is one of the team, not merely an incidental player. ... He is ... instrumental in finding a sort of informal justice, as in The Silence. Gross’ ongoing role is part of the reason why the series is called the “Viennese Mysteries” and not the Werthen series. Besides, my private inquiries agent’s name is a strange one: Americans are going to be pronouncing it”wurthan” when it is actually “vairtun.”

JKP: Are there other authors currently penning mystery or thriller fiction who you think do a particularly good job of capturing their chosen historical time periods?

JSJ: Where do I start? Philip Kerr nails Germany before and after WWII. Jacqueline Winspear ditto for post-WWI England. Alan Furst, especially in his first novels, transports you to Central Europe and the Balkans in the 1930s. You want Shanghai and the People’s Republic of China in transformation during 1990s? Read Qiu Xiaolong. This list could go on with a number of excellent writers.

JKP: Is it true that, beyond composing your Viennese Mysteries, you’re also working on some new standalone thrillers? What can you tell us about those? And will we be seeing any of them in the near future?

JSJ: Glad you asked. My novel Ruin Value will be out this October from Mysterious Press/Open Road. It’s a suspense thriller set in Nuremberg just before and during the War Crimes Trials. It features an ex-OSS agent whose job it is to track down a serial killer (they were called multiple murderers at the time) in that city of ruins. He enlists a German, a former Kripo (criminal police) agent in the hunt. And there is also a well-connected American journalist who is out after the scoop of her life. I am very excited about this, working with [editor] Otto Penzler and with the excellent folks at Open Road. This is, to my mind, exactly what the e-book business needs--a house with proven editorial oversight and professional packaging and marketing.

JKP: In what ways do you still need to grow as a writer?

JSJ: I must confess to a very non-professional desire: at this stage of my career I am much more concerned about improving my backhand than I am my writing hand. Which is not to say that I do not still try to grow with each book--I think Keeper is the best of the series thus far--but such growth is on the macro scale, not the micro. I do not consciously atomize the writing process while I am at it. Some of that comes, of course, with revision. But when I sit down to work in the morning it’s all about the story and the characters and giving them room to live.

JKP: You’ve previously cited the works of Gerald Seymour and John le Carré as being particularly strong in their quality of dialogue. Is that the part of writing fiction you find most difficult?

JSJ: Let's put it this way: I think my sense of plotting and character development are my strong suits.

JKP: Whose books are you reading right now?

JSJ: On the non-fiction side is Daniel M. Vyleta’s Crime, Jews and News: Vienna 1895-1914; a re-reading of Edward Crankshaw’s superb The Fall of the House of Habsburg; and Maria Hornor Lansdale’s Vienna and the Viennese, a book published in 1902 and full of delicious slice-of-life apercus about Vienna 1900. For fiction there is William Boyd’s Ordinary Thunderstorms (Boyd is my favorite contemporary author: his Any Human Heart is at the top of all my lists--that guy can write) and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s These Happy Golden Years, which I am reading with my son at bedtime. I had never read the Wilder books before and I must confess to [their being] a guilty pleasure. Among all the other joys of having a child at my time of life is discovering all those books one should have read as a youth and did not.

JKP: Finally, when you first visited Vienna back in the late ’60s, you were intending to establish a career as an attorney, not as a wordsmith. Are you glad now that you gave up those aspirations to practice law, and became a man of letters instead?

JSJ: I have only partially given up those dreams. Remember that Werthen is a lawyer, the protagonist of my [never-published] mainstream Irish novel, Yanks in the Glen, was a lawyer, and, as you will discover, the protagonist of Ruin Value studied the law.

The Story Behind the Story: “The Silence,” by J. Sydney Jones

(Editor’s note: In this 28th installment of our “Story Behind the Story” series, we welcome back to The Rap Sheet Central California’s J. Sydney Jones, author of an acclaimed mystery series set in Vienna, Austria, at the turn of the last century. The titles in that series are The Empty Mirror, Requiem in Vienna, and The Silence, new in stores from Severn House. Jones also writes a lively blog called Scene of the Crime. His last piece for The Rap Sheet celebrated Barbara Tuchman’s “forgotten” 1958 book, The Zimmerman Telegram.)

I turned 21 on Easter Sunday in Rome, squeezed amongst the throngs of people gathered in St. Peter’s Square as the pope gave us all a plenary indulgence. I am not Catholic or Christian or even particularly religious, but the fact that the slim speck of white far away on a balcony over the enormous piazza erased all previous sin in my life was emblematic of that annus mirabilis in my life.

It was 1969 and I was on one of those junior-year-abroad junkets so popular with American college students--not in Rome (which I visited during an Easter vacation side trip), but in stodgy old Vienna. Other kids my age were off killing and being killed in Southeast Asia; I had a bad back and a high lottery number--4F and a lucky winner. My introduction to the world of belt and suspenders. I went to Vienna planning to become a lawyer; I left knowing I would be a writer. My introduction to the world of mutability.

Our school in Vienna was located in a gloomy-looking city palace belonging to the Kinsky clan. The aged princess occupied the top floors; we boisterous Americans could occasionally see her wizened, disapproving face peering out behind lace curtains. Affiliated with the University of Vienna, we had a wonderful and often bizarre assortment of professors to school us in European history (he played an applause track on a tape recorder at the beginning of every lecture), art appreciation (she wore clothes reminiscent of each art period she lectured on), drama (his thin albino shins dotted with the occasional black hair always showed at the bottoms of his too-short trousers), Russian literature (he spoke haltingly, spraying spittle on the front row as he shuffled about the creaking parquet, his conjoined hands doing finger push-ups), and philosophy. You may notice I offer no mincing thumbnail sketch of the last-named. He was my favorite. British, but not overbearingly so. Challenging, but never dismissive of the “callow” American students as others were. He taught Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Another part of my annus mirabilis.

That was the first class I ever had that made me think, made me analyze and read closely. That professor threw down the gauntlet of “the world is all that is the case,” and expected us not only to pick it up but also decipher it. I have been entranced with words--word sober rather than word drunk--ever since my gestalt at Wittgenstein’s plainspoken dictum: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.

Over the years I have read as much as I could about Wittgenstein, the ur-intellectual outsider, the child genius who built a model of a functioning sewing machine out of wood as a 10-year-old; the lonely brainiac forged in the fires of World War I, the eccentric who gave his wealth away, who whiled away afternoons at Cambridge watching cowboy films; the autodidact who wowed Keynes and Moore. I read Wittgenstein’s notebooks, Janik and Toulmin's Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Ray Monk’s bio, and Waugh’s House of Wittgenstein, among many others. I have loved tracing how Wittgenstein’s life intertwines with others in the fin de siècle world: attending the Linz Realschule with the young Adolf Hitler, coming of age in the city of Freud, Mahler, Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Schiele, Klimt, Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos, Viktor Adler, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and so many other seminal artists and thinkers of the 20th century--many of whom were guests in his parents’ drawing room. Six degrees of separation finds its crossroads in Vienna 1900.

I can’t say that it was a class on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus that made me become a writer, no more than it was simply the pope giving me a free pass on the rest of the my life. It was that and much more: being introduced to a world so greatly at variance with the one I had grown up in, one that could make heroes of artists and intellectuals rather than sports stars. And it was Vienna itself. My first big city. Much of my published writing has dealt, directly or indirectly, with 1900-era Vienna, from my guides (Vienna Inside-Out and ViennaWalks) and my narrative history, Hitler in Vienna, 1907-1913, to my early thriller, Time of the Wolf, and now my historical series, all set in Vienna during the years just prior to World War I.

(Left) Ludwig Wittgenstein

With the third in that series, The Silence, out this month in the United States, I have finally come back to my early passion for Wittgenstein. The title, of course, is a tip of the hat to his famous maxim, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” My novels are set when Wittgenstein was still a boy--thus, in The Silence we are introduced to an adolescent Wittgenstein, the boy in short pants with a thirst for engineering. Though not central to the story, the young Wittgenstein informs the proceedings and ultimately influences my protagonist, the lawyer-investigator Karl Werthen, to take extraordinary action.

The House of Wittgenstein, on the other hand, very much informs this new tale, for it is the fact that the family’s oldest son, Hans, has gone missing, that initiates action in the novel. The Wittgensteins were fabulously wealthy and influential. The patriarch, Karl Wittgenstein, was often referred to as the Andrew Carnegie of Europe. Werthen muses about the family as he goes to a meeting to discuss the disappearance of Hans Wittgenstein with the father:

Werthen was well aware of the importance of Karl Wittgenstein. Born in 1847, the industrialist was, like Werthen, just two generations removed from the land and from his Jewish roots. His father had run a successful dry goods business and converted to Protestantism. Instead of following the family route into business, Karl Wittgenstein became a draughtsman and an engineer and went to work for the Teplitz steel-rolling mill in Bohemia. By a mixture of hard work, overweening ambition, and a willingness to take huge risks, Wittgenstein built an empire from this humble beginning. Five years after starting work as a lowly draughtsman for the Teplitz Rolling Mill, Wittgenstein was running that business. He sold train rails to the Russians during the Russo-Turkish War of 1878, making a huge war profit for his company, and staged another coup by gaining sole European rights to a revolutionary steel-manufacturing process. With these rights in hand, he leveraged other businesses, acquiring the Bohemian Mining Company and then the Prague Iron Company, creating a vertical monopoly in steel production in the Czech regions of the Austrian Empire. He repeated this success in the German regions with purchase of the Alpine Mining Company, and at the same time established the first rail cartel in Austria. It seemed to many that Wittgenstein had a finger in every economic pie in the empire, with seats on the boards of powerful corporations, including the Creditanstalt, the most powerful bank in the monarchy.

Then, in 1898, amid a firestorm of criticism over his shoddy treatment of workers, his monopolistic practices, and his attempts to artificially drive up the price of his steel stocks, Wittgenstein stepped down from the directorship. He became a patron of the arts, but knowledgeable observers knew that he still had a strong hand in the day-to-day operations of his far-flung industrial empire. His home at Alleegasse 16 had become one of the foremost salons in Vienna. Johannes Brahms premiered his late clarinet quintets here; Klimt and other members of the Secession first presented their work to the public in the immense rooms of that city palace. Through marriage, the Wittgensteins were connected with lawyers, doctors, industrialists, and ministers. Herr Wittgenstein could obtain a visa, an introduction to a general, medical advice, or an inside tip on investments with a simple telephone call.

The eight Wittgenstein offspring who survived childhood were all accomplished musicians; Ludwig and his brother Paul, the famous pianist who lost his right hand in World War I, were the youngest of the lot. A group of six older siblings led less than charmed lives, with three of the brothers committing suicide.

In The Silence, we meet the family as things are beginning to unravel; one brother has hopped it to New York while another contemplates a similar move in order to avoid being swallowed whole by the family business. A peculiarly Viennese story, then, as even young Ludwig, or Luki as he is called, is introduced to harsh realities of life. Not to give too much away, but it is Luki who, word-conscious even as a child (he did not start talking until the age of 4), provides Werthen with a valuable clue and who, as the investigation begins to wane, pleads for justice and persuades the investigator to carry on despite all odds.

In a sense, Luki performs for Werthen what Pope Paul VI did for me so long ago--absolved me of past sins (mostly of omission) and set me on a new path.

A pope’s inadvertent blessing and a philosophy class taken more by accident than design: these are part of the story behind the story of The Silence.

The Book You Have to Read: “The Zimmermann Telegram,” by Barbara Tuchman

(Editor’s note: This is the 92nd installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection comes from J. Sydney Jones, author of the acclaimed “Viennese Mystery” series (Requiem in Vienna and The Empty Mirror), set in Vienna at the turn of the last century. Jones also writes a lively blog called Scene of the Crime.)

“Make war together, make peace together.”

That was the crux of a telegram sent in January 1917 by Germany’s foreign minister, Arthur Zimmermann, to Mexico via the German ambassador in Washington, D.C. What Zimmerman offered was a chance for Mexico to reclaim its lost territories in the American Southwest, simply by allying with Germany in the event that the United States declared war against the Central Powers--hardly a remote possibility, as Germany was set to recommence its unrestricted submarine warfare in a matter of weeks.

In other words, Germany was telling Mexico, Join us, and you’ll get Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico back.

But the telegram never became the diplomatic coup it was intended to be; instead, it was turned into the crux of a real-life spy thriller that sounds like something from John Buchan, or better yet, John le Carré. And it is the subject of Barbara Tuchman’s 1958 bestseller, The Zimmermann Telegram.

I know--we are pushing the envelope here with a work of non-fiction, but trust me, this book not only reads like a thriller; it is also structured like one.

Like the best spy novels, Tuchman’s book is told from multiple points of view; it shifts location from London to Berlin to Washington to Mexico in a dizzying whirl of cross and double-cross, encoding and decoding lore, back-corridor negotiating and haggling; and it has a cast of high-profile, sometimes pompous, sometimes noble, sometimes risible characters that keeps the reader always guessing for motive and means.

“The first message of the morning watch plopped out of the pneumatic tube into the wire basket with no more premonitory rattle than usual,” writes Tuchman at the start of her book. A classic sort of in medias res opener that is familiar from all good, fast-paced thrillers. I remember reading that sentence as a college student in a freshman modern European history survey course, and it hooked me. It still does. It was the first time I encountered hard-driving narrative history that could equal the best of fiction for pace and action.

The “message” in question, so innocent-seeming at first, is, of course the intercepted telegram sent by Zimmermann. The pneumatic tube spitting out its staple products is located in the ultra-secret Room 40 at British Naval Intelligence, the center of cryptanalysis for the Brits and run by the legendary Admiral William Reginald “Blinker” Hall. The folks in Room 40 are quickly able to decipher the telegram, as they have broken the German code. Soon analysts, strategists, and politicians in England will know they have geo-political gold: the smoking-gun evidence of evil intentions by the Kaiser and his cronies that will force the reluctant and insular Americans into the bloody fray of the First World War, and thereby end the deadly trench-war stalemate in Europe. (Ironically, in the Second World War the British trotted out a similar scenario--fabricated this time--prior to Pearl Harbor. A suddenly discovered German map displayed Mexico and the United States checkerboarded into German administrative districts, or Gau. This formed the basis of William Boyd’s 2006 novel, Restless.)

But now, as all good thriller writers do, Tuchman ups the stakes. There are complications upon complications. The British cannot simply hand over the decoded message to President Woodrow Wilson. First, they are guilty of poaching the telegram from a supposedly secure cable that Washington has established with Berlin in hopes of keeping peace communications open. Second, they do not want to let the Germans know they have cracked their code, in which case it will be changed and future valuable information will be lost. The British want their cryptographic pie and to eat it, as well.

Even as a fix is found for these early complications--fabrication of a tale that the telegram (left) has been discovered via the telegraph office in Mexico--others arise. Will the telegram be discounted as a forgery, a nefarious British invention by American isolationists such as Senator Robert La Follette? Can pro-war Americans such as Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and former President Theodore Roosevelt be counted on to back its authenticity? What will the anti-war Wilson do if and when the telegram is put into his hands?

Author Tuchman lets us see each of these characters in turn, using a few brisk and memorable words to fix them in our minds, as she does with Admiral Hall upon our first meeting, dubbing him “a demonic Mr. Punch in uniform.”

Meanwhile, the tide seems to be turning in Europe; resumption of Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare could spell the end for the Allies, cut off from American aid. Can the telegram save the cause? Tuchman sets the clock ticking, and the reader feels the urgency, feels the anguished tug of war between competing agencies and governments, all after the American prize.

And then on April 2, 1917, the Allies won that prize, with the American declaration of war on Germany. Although many people blamed Germany’s torpedoing of civilian ships for Wilson’s agonized decision, Tuchman has gone behind the scenes to show us other reasons for U.S. involvement. Hers is a tale of conspiracy and deceit mixed with occasional splendid bravery that can serve as the model for any aspiring thriller writer.

Commenting on the importance of the incident, Tuchman notes in the last lines of her book: “In itself the Zimmermann telegram was only a pebble on the long road of history. But a pebble can kill a Goliath, and this one killed the American illusion that we could go about our business happily separate from other nations. In world affairs it was a German Minister’s minor plot. In the lives of the American people it was the end of innocence.”

A thriller with a message. Now, that is cause for celebration.

So how is it that a professional historian, a winner of two Pulitzer Prizes and the author of such best-selling and critically acclaimed works as The Guns of August, The Proud Tower, A Distant Mirror, The March of Folly, Practicing History, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China, was able to write such moving narrative history?

Well, because she was not a professional historian, not an academic. In a New York Times interview, Tuchman shared the secret of her success--she had never attended graduate school, content with a bachelor’s from Radcliffe: “It’s what saved me, I think. If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.”

Amen to that.