AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL SLADE ABOUT SWASTIKA:

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Q: What was the inspiration for SWASTIKA?
A: On December 10, 1956, I awoke to news that my father’s plane was “missing” in the Cascade Mountains. He was a pilot with what is now Air Canada, and his DC-4 suffered engine failure in a vicious winter ice-and-lightning storm. The weather was so violent that harnessed crews in the search planes got yanked out of their seats, and one man was almost knocked out. Snow fell steadily for the next month. They didn’t find the wreckage until the May thaw.

Half a century later, my mom died in 2003. She was still in the house my parents had bought a year before my dad’s death. While cleaning it out for sale, I opened a false wall behind the linen closet, and there were my dad’s archives from WWII.

Flight Lieutenant Jack Clarke flew 47 combat missions against the Swastika, each detailed in his Pilot's Flying Log. He was an unlikely warrior: an artist trained on scholarship in England at the Southampton School of Art, who was working for Associated Screen News in Montreal. In September 1940, when the Battle of Britain had that country fighting for its life, he volunteered to fly with the RAF. During the desperate early years of the war – 1941 and 1942 – he flew a Halifax with Bomber Command. My dad was in on the destruction of the warship Gneisenau and attacks on U-boat pens in the Battle of the Atlantic, the Thousand Bomber Raids on Hitler’s Reich, and the Battle of El Alamein in North Africa, where Monty defeated the Desert Fox.

Because he died when I was nine, my memory of him is hazy. So – since we live in the age of the Internet – I Googled his war record to flesh out who he was from what he accomplished. If you click on the captions under his Flying Log missions posted on the main Swastika page, you can follow my journey. That’s how I came across the Pentagon’s cover-up of SS Major Wernher von Braun’s links to the horrific deaths of 20,000 prisoner-of-war slaves killed to build his V-2 rockets.

One night while I was sitting vigil over my comatose mom, I promised I would reunite her with the love of her life. So once the avalanche danger was over in the Cascades, I chartered a helicopter to fly me, my mom’s ashes, and a military bugler/piper up to my dad’s crash site on Mount Slesse at 8,000 feet. There, in an evergreen bowl with a 2,000-foot vertical slab of rock scarred fifty feet from the top by the impact of my dad’s plane, the bugler gave him the wartime honors he had earned. Then, as I scattered my mom’s ashes to the wind, the piper played “Amazing Grace” so that it echoed back as a pipe band from the surrounding peaks.

SWASTIKA grew out of that.

Q: You have strong thoughts on the U.S. Intelligence decision to smuggle Wernher von Braun out of Germany at the end of WWII. Why did that strike a nerve with you?
A: Ten thousand Canadian airmen were killed in the war. In the desperate years, the odds were 1-in-5 that a bomber crew would not return from an overnight raid. My dad repeatedly chanced his life in lumbering bombers, loaded with gas and high explosives, with no fighter cover, surrounded by flak from anti-aircraft guns and stalked by deadly Messerschmitt Night-fighters. Take a revolver with 5 chambers and 1 bullet. Spin the cylinder 47 times and trigger each spin at your temple. Those were the odds against him coming back alive.

After the Battle of El Alamein – the turning point in the war, for as Winston Churchill said, "Before Alamein we never had a victory. After Alamein we never had a defeat." – my dad moved from combat operations to training bomber crews with the group that raided von Braun’s V-2 rocket works at Peenemunde, setting back missile production by several months. That’s why the V-2 wasn’t ready to rain down on Eisenhower’s D-Day invaders. In that one raid, the group lost 20 percent of its crews. They died for something, and it wasn’t for lies.

Von Braun’s war record was “inconvenient” for the Pentagon’s post-war missile plans. So, to subvert the Nazi restrictions in Project Paperclip, he was slapped with more whitewash than Tom Sawyer and his dupes put on that fence. By the time I was a kid in the mid-1950s, you could sit on the floor wearing your Davy Crockett coonskin cap and see von Braun on Disney’s TV show. His design for the rocket ship in Tomorrowland was based on his V-2. By the time he died an American “hero” in 1977, he’d been given a medal by President Ford.

After the bombing of Peenemunde, von Braun's rockets were assembled in a factory called the Mittelwerk, made up of two tunnels cored through Kohnstein Mountain in western Germany. Of the 60,000 slaves who built them - all European prisoners of war - a third were either worked to death or executed by the SS. The concentration camp was called Dora Mittelbau. Less than five miles to the south was the town of Nordhausen, where worn-out slaves were left to starve to death. The first images the West saw of skeletal wretches liberated from the camps were LIFE magazine photos from Nordhausen.

During the Red Scare years after the war, von Braun became essential to America winning the arms race. So the Pentagon brought its own iron curtain down between Nordhausen and the Dora Mittelbau V-2 factory tunnels. Dora was written out of history, and is still ignored to this day. Ask someone, "What does Dora Mittelbau mean to you?" The likely answer will be, “Who’s she?”

Von Braun as Jekyll:


Von Braun as Hyde:


(Photos from www.v2rocket.com)


The “inconvenience” to the Pentagon:
http://www.time.com/time/columnist/jaroff/article/0,9565,220201,00.html



Q: The title and cover art are striking and unsettling. The Swastika pushes a lot of buttons. Did you have any problems with your publisher over the title during the publication process?
A: SWASTIKA is the one word that captures the theme of the novel. It’s a multiple entendre. The book’s about the Nazis. One of the modern-day psychos takes Swastika as his nom de guerre. The Swastika plays a role visually amid the print. And so on.

There is, of course, a verboten quality to the word, and depiction of the symbol. Penguin and Slade discussed the pros and cons of the title and the covers, and decided against self-censorship.



Q: How did you go from practicing criminal law to writing novels?
A: The writing came first. When I was a kid in the mid-1950s, I was given a two-foot-high stack of EC Comics – Tales from the Crypt, The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear - and the warp was in. From then on, I was fascinated by the criminal mind. First I drew comics, and then I wrote a book, 13 Tombs, when I was thirteen. I typed it out in signatures and stitched them together like the guts of a book. From age ten I had haunted Duthie Books, so I showed my work to Bill Duthie and left it with him to read. Imagine how wowed I was when he gave it back to me a week later, bound in hardcover, with the title and my name in gilt on the spine. “Now you’re published in a limited edition of one,” he said. “One day, I want to see your books sold in my store.”

Fascination with the criminal mind lured me into criminal law. My first murder trial involved a psychotic who beat his wife to a pulp with a baseball bat. He was found to be insane and sent to the mental hospital. I had a box of business cards I’d picked up from the printer, and while I was speaking to his psychiatrist, my client stole some of them. The next day, I got call after call from the psych wards, and before I knew it, I had cornered the market in insanity cases. I’ve acted in more than 100 murder trials, a third involving psychos.

During the recession of the early 1980s, they cut the legal aid budget by fifty percent. I suggested to my law partners that we fill the down time by jointly writing a thriller. Three authors necessitated a pen name, so “Michael Slade” was born. The mantra of publishing is, “Write about what you know.” By then, I had spent literally hundreds of hours in the company of insane killers, so my fascination with the criminal mind returned to print.

Headhunter was published by Penguin, as were my follow-up novels. And all eleven are sold in Duthie Books.



Q: Who do you consider your influences to be?
A: Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde and Bloch/Hitchcock’s Psycho are crucial. John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie, and Ellery Queen taught me how to trick the reader through a “Slade-of-hand.” Jack the Ripper, for mystery, and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Colin Wilson and Lovecraft.

Alice Cooper is the best showman I’ve ever seen onstage. And, of course, the 87th Precinct. If there were no Ed McBain, there’d be no Michael Slade.

Those influences fuse together in a Special X novel. I plot each as a bull’s eye, as a three ring circus. Whodunit at the center, to play a shell game with the reader. That gets wrapped in psychological horror. The outer ring is police procedure. From thirty years in the criminal courts, I have numerous contacts in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They provide all the forensic stuff and street manhunts for suspension of disbelief.



Q: How do you know when a whodunit is going to work? How do you test it out to make sure that you've played fair but kept your cards close enough to the vest that most readers will be surprised by the outcome?
A: In the Golden Age of the whodunit – the 1920s and 30s – the puzzle was everything. Slade has a team of test readers, called the Anvil Chorus because they hammer out the kinks, composed of professional problem solvers: cops, lawyers, and scientists. If the novel tricks them, it’s ready for print.









Q: Was it difficult to get into the heads of Hitler and his top level operatives in order to write from Nazi perspective?
A: The upper echelon of the Third Reich was rife with psychopaths. In the law, there’s an expression: Res ipsa loquitur, or “The thing itself speaks.” Adolf Hitler and his henchmen set out to conquer the world, and to wipe out Jews, gypsies, Slavs, and anyone else they viewed as Untermenschen – subhumans – to purify the Aryan race. Psychopaths have virtually no capacity to care what happens to others. They care only about themselves and what happens to them. They don’t connect emotions to external events.

Back to my criminal trials. Psychopaths are wary of cops and shrinks: the guys who are out to put them in jail or mess with their minds. But psychopaths know all about lawyer-client privilege. A lawyer can’t break the confidence of what he’s told, so a lawyer becomes a confessor for psychos to bare their souls. That experience taught me how psychopaths think, so all I had to do for SWASTIKA was dress my characters up in the uniform of Himmler’s Black Corps, with the Totenkopf – the skull-and-crossbones badge – on the cap, and set them loose in whatever predatory situations I’d uncovered from a lifetime of studying the primary sources left behind from that era of group madness.



Q: Was it hard to switch genres to a conspiracy thriller set half in Nazi Germany in 1945, and half in the Here and Now?
A: Surprisingly, SWASTIKA almost wrote itself. Before I entered law school, my undergrad studies had focused on World War II and the resulting Cold War. In 1967, it took me months to get the necessary visas to go behind the Iron Curtain, but that May, I left Vienna by train to travel through Communist Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union. I was in Moscow during the Six-Day War, when Russia supported the Arabs, America backed Israel, and the Pentagon’s nuclear missiles were aimed at me. Later, I crossed through Checkpoint Charlie to East Berlin, which was frozen in time as it was when Hitler blew in his brains.

So, out of all of that, my trip to Russia gave me Colonel Boris Vlasov, my crossing into East Berlin time-traveled me back to the war, my dad’s archives led me to the dirty secret behind the Roswell Incident, which inspired me to create Swastika and the Aryan, a pair of modern Nazi psychopaths, whose murders force the Pentagon to send in a team of hit men to keep their black world secret by taking out both the killers and the Mountie tracking them, who happens to have found a cache of war archives in his childhood home.

In short, writing SWASTIKA was catharsis.



Q: How true are the scenarios in SWASTIKA to what was actually going on during the final months of WWII in Germany?
A: For me, writing a novel is like a plane taking off. It roars for a good distance along a runway of solid, historically-accurate fact, and hopefully, when the flight of fancy lifts into the air, the passengers go on believing that something substantial is still holding them up. But every Slade book must be viewed as a parallel world. If you want non-fiction, read the sources of inspiration in the Author’s Note at the end of the novel. But as for the story itself, it’s merely a Doppelganger of all those things that really happened.





Q: What parts did you take liberties with? Why?
A: I take liberties with everything, for the good of the fantasy. Above all, SWASTIKA is a thriller plotted to shock and to entertain. Some liberties are more blatant than others. A heavy-duty, real-life monster in the Third Reich was SS General Hans Kammler. He was the Nazi engineer who increased the throughput of the gas chambers and ovens of Auschwitz to 60,000 a day, and by the end of the war, controlled all the Wonder Weapons in Hitler’s arsenal. In place of him, I created SS General Ernst Streicher and his Hitler Youth sons, because through them I extrapolate out what happened at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. SWASTIKA is akin to an impressionist painting. You see reality clearly, but when you look closely, you see that it’s not there.



Q: What was your inspiration for the technology you describe in this book, and does it have any basis in reality?
A: In the closing months of the war, Allied airmen reported seeing “foo fighters” over the Reich. If ever there were unidentified flying objects, those UFOs were them. I have a friend with a Ph.D. in science. His assessment on reading SWASTIKA: “As a scientist with a more than passing knowledge of quantum chemistry and such matters, I thought your science was not so outlandish as to disrupt my suspension of disbelief.”





Q: The pig farm subplot is reminiscent of HANNIBAL. Why?
A: Over a 20-year period, more than 60 women – most of them sex trade workers – went missing in Vancouver. One was a long-time client of mine. In 1994, Kim Rossmo - then a Vancouver police constable working on his Ph.D. in criminology - wrote me a letter about my "geographic profiling" of Jack the Ripper's crime scenes in RIPPER, Slade's fourth novel. For his thesis, Rossmo created Geographic Profiling, and was soon not only catapulted up to the rank of detective inspector, but had also become one of the world's supercops. His technique is now used by the RCMP, Scotland Yard, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and other international police forces. Kim and I met in the ViCLAS offices at RCMP headquarters, and he appeared as a real-life character in the Slade novels, BURNT BONES (1999) and DEATH'S DOOR (2001).

After Geographic Profiling, Rossmo developed a technique to surface stealth killers: serial killers who hide the fact they're preying on the unwary. When he applied what he had created to the puzzle of the Missing Women, statistical probability told him that a stealth predator was loose. Rossmo warned the Vancouver Police Department in 1998 that it should issue a public warning that a serial killer might be responsible for the Missing Women. Instead, the department stated publicly it did not believe a serial killer was behind the disappearances. When his contract wasn't renewed, Rossmo left Vancouver to work in Washington, D.C., where he was called in on the Beltway Sniper Case. Then in 2002, Vancouver awoke to news that Rossmo was right. An accused is now charged with dozens of murders, many of which post-date the Rossmo warning.


It is my opinion that Rossmo was the right person in the right place at the right time to assist that investigation. For the record, both the pig farm case and the pig scenes in HANNIBAL are reminiscent of Slade’s GHOUL, published in 1987. Rossmo returns as a character in SWASTIKA to showcase his stealth-predator-surfacing technique.

Q: What’s coming up next for you?
A: The Second World War was fought in two theaters: Europe/North Africa and the Pacific. My mom was a country girl who became a registered nurse. She jumped a train to Vancouver and arrived during the blackout/brownout, with a rapist on the loose. Her landlady gave her a baseball bat to walk several miles in nurse’s whites to her job on nightshift at the hospital. “Walk the white line down the center of the road,” she was told, “and if you hear footsteps approaching, swing like hell.” Then my mom got a job on the police boat as a nurse transporting mental patients down from the up-coast Native villages. She picked up a lot of stories about the Pacific War, and told them to me while she was dying. So the next book will be the other half of World War II: hell in the Pacific, with present-day psychos.

The above questions were posed by Rue Morgue magazine and the Hellnotes online newsletter. The images are by Sladists who haunt the Forum.