William Dietrich

The Barbed Crown

bdietrich — Wed, 01 May 2013 16:46:32 +0000

Ethan, Astiza, and son Harry are back on May 7, in The Barbed Crown. That’s the publication date of my latest novel, by HarperCollins.

Astiza? Wasn’t she carried off in a hurricane in The Emerald Storm? Well, yes, but thanks to a bit of ingenuity, dubiously claimed by her husband…

She’s smart, beautiful, and popular with readers. You bet she’s coming back.

“I was smuggled to France on a moonless flood tide,” Ethan begins, “soaked from rain and spattered with the blood of a sailor beheaded by a cannonball.”

Our hero has become an English spy, bent on revenge against Napoleon, and in the company of a beautiful comtesse named Catherine Marceau. But a number of surprises await him onshore, not the least of which is his wife. And then things get really tangled.

The Barbed Crown is the sixth in the series of Ethan Gage adventures, taking place in 1804 and 1805. Historical events include Napoleon’s coronation as emperor, his attempt to invade England, and the decisive naval battle of Trafalgar in which Britain was triumphant but Admiral Nelson was killed.

Once more, Ethan is in the middle of it all.

For those new to the series, it begins with Napoleon’s Pyramids set during Bonaparte’s 1798 invasion of Egypt. Following, in order, are The Rosetta Key, The Dakota Cipher, The Barbary Pirates, and The Emerald Storm.

Readers can dip in at any point: Each can be read as a stand-alone novel. But together they trace the Napoleonic era and the evolution of Ethan Gage and his family.

The Barbed Crown is the best one yet, of course. This time the action is on both sides of the English Channel, including Napoleonic Paris, his army camp at Boulogne, British spy headquarters at Walmer Castle, and Nelson’s home at Merton.

Ethan Gage gets to all of them, and involves his family in a quest for a sacred relic and a hunt for a mysterious medieval machine. Some of this mission carries over into the next novel of the series, tentatively called The Three Emperors and scheduled for publication in 2014.

The Barbed Crown gives intimate views of Empire and Regency society, looks at the conflict from both sides, and traps Ethan and his comrades in peril and mystery. Napoleon is a central character, and Astiza, Ethan’s wife, plays an ever-more-central role.

Research included exploring Notre Dame, site of the coronation, the catacombs of Paris, and Nelson’s flagship Victory that is a museum in Portsmouth, England.

The latter was particularly useful for the novel’s climax at the Battle of Trafalgar, fought off the coast of Spain between the British fleet and the French and Spanish navies. I did a lot of interesting reading to try to get it right.

I also enjoyed enlisting four-year-old Horus, or Harry, in key parts of the adventures. It will be interesting to watch him grow up.

I’m making a number of presentations on the book. Check “Readings” on my blog for the latest.

Terrorism and Real Risk

bdietrich — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 15:58:50 +0000

Please be afraid.

Thriller, horror, and mystery writers depend on it. We also depend on you being afraid of the wrong things, because the risk of what we obsess about is vanishingly small compared to what we’ll probably die of.

This topic came to mind during the non-stop, frenetic news coverage and citywide shutdown of Boston after the Marathon bombings. Perfectly understandable, and I was as glued to the drama as anyone.

But as tragic as the event was, it occurred in a world where about 6,850 Americans die every day, according to the Center for Disease Control. The vast majority, of course, succumb to sickness.

Globally, the casualty rate is 153,000 a day, or 56 million dead a year, which is within the ballpark of death estimates for all of World War II.

And soldiers were shooting more than bullets in that war. I once read Europe actually gained population during the war years.

I co-taught a university course on risk analysis and was fascinated by the numbers. Even taking into account the slaughter of 9/11, you’re statistically about twice as likely to be slain by a bee sting as a terrorist.

Makes for a bad thriller, though.

Between 1997 and 2001, and including 9/11, 3,974 Americans were killed by terrorism and 3,147 by police. Let’s hope the police victims were all bad guys!

In the same period, accidental electrocution killed 5,171. But no one is shutting off the switch.

Americans kill themselves at nearly twice the rate they are murdered. The figures I had for 2004 were 32,439 suicides and 17,357 murders.

Accidents, murders, and suicide combined make up about 6 percent of deaths. The four biggest ways to increase your risk are, in order, obesity, poverty, smoking, and drinking. Which doesn’t do much for a taut plot.

The couple times I’ve ridden around with police, they seemed to spend most of their shift keeping drunk couples from killing each other. This anecdotal observation is borne out by 2009 statistics showing about half of American murders were the result of domestic arguments, not felony crimes like robberies or Mafia hits.

And yep, guns account for most murders, followed by hands and blunt instruments. The real cool stuff is vanishingly rare: seven poisonings, two by explosives, eight forced drownings, etc. Come on, murderers, show more imagination! We need it for our plots.

Our love affair with firearms is a $4 billion a year industry, with one gun (and one car) for almost every American. We have about 37 private guns for every soldier in the world. Really.

And yes, auto accidents killed 32,367 Americans in 2011. Dan Gardner, in his book ‘Risk,’ cited one study that calculated 1,595 additional auto deaths were caused after 9/11 by people electing to drive instead of fly.

Gardner also calculated that an American child was 26 times more likely to be killed in an auto accident than to be abducted by a stranger.

Our perception of risk is important because it affects our politics. The website Slate has been tracking American gun deaths since the Newtown massacre, and had a toll of 3,591 between Dec. 14 of 2012 and April 22 of this year. Yet the Senate couldn’t even pass background checks on gun sales – a measure polls show is favored by 80 to 90 percent of Americans – while politicians pushed to be on TV to thunder about the Boston bombers who killed three.

What does kill us? Half of us go from heart disease and cancer.

Why do we worry so much about remote threats – a terror attack – and so very little about eating the next donut? We’re probably hard-wired to worry about attack from prehistoric times.

Novelists also know we fear the unexpected, the unexplained, and the unfair, all of which describe a terrorist attack. It’s sudden, indiscriminate, and insane. All factors in pumping up many a plot.

But it isn’t as likely to kill you as choking, a hospital surgical mistake, or merely walking and being hit by a car.

Thank goodness. Let’s leave the worst stuff to fiction.

Writing Commandments

bdietrich — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 23:38:05 +0000

These aren’t engraved on stone tablets. But I often give some version of this list when speaking to aspiring writers. Writing is challenging intellectually, and challenging psychologically. It takes discipline and persistence. So for what it’s worth…

Good writing is clear thinking. Can you summarize what you think?

Tell the truth. Be honest in your writing.

Be curious. Always ask, ‘Why’?

Be observant and precise. Books can succeed or fail on detail.

Don’t wait to be invited to write. Do it. Push your way in.

Tailor your story for your audience. Who is that? Visualize them.

Don’t preach. Readers want a story, not a sermon.

Teach us. Become a good researcher.

Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.

10. Be concise. Short and simple is often better. When in doubt, cut it out.

11. Be a good employee of your publisher, not a butthead. Listen. Do what you promise.

12. Work hard. Everyone else is.

13. Define yourself and your genre.

14. Don’t expect overnight success. Develop your backlist and career.

15. Be you, not a half-baked imitation of another author.

16. Roll with it. You’re not in control, life isn’t fair, publishing is in tumult, shit happens, good happens, fate is the hunter, what goes around comes around, life is what happens when you’re making other plans.

17. Kicked in the teeth? Get up, dust your hands, write another.

18. Be proud of what you’re doing. Care.

19. Go from dreamy fantasy to specific goal to concrete book strategy to daily writing schedule.

20. Give yourself credit and lift a glass. Win or lose, it’s hard work.

Reality at the edge of the world

bdietrich — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:11:52 +0000

I live on the edge of the world.

My Pacific Northwest house faces the Salish Sea, an inland body of salt water that includes the San Juan Islands. It perches like a tree house on a steep hill, looking into the branches of conifers a hundred feet high or higher, with orange madrona trees woven through like thread.

The evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson would say my perch mimics that of my African prehistoric ancestors. We evolved in a savannah landscape where we looked for grassland predators and prey from the relative safety of clumps of trees. An urban apartment overlooking a park gives much the same sensation.

While far from utopian, my abode is fairly quiet, pretty, and bourgeois-comfortable. Until reality pokes in.

Which it does all the time. Having covered the Exxon Valdez oil spill as a journalist, I watch from my bedroom office window as a parade of oil tankers migrate in and out of the nearby refinery port here like balloons that might pop on the wrong rock. At least now they have tug escort and double hulls.

And I live a short distance outside the city of Anacortes, a refinery and boat-building town of about sixteen thousand with dreams of industrial might that go back a century. Anacortes is a curious combination of blue collar, professional, arts, and retiree, and perennially torn between the desire for “growth” (which has infinite definitions) and “sustainability” (ditto.) It’s a place that always wants to be what it was, but again that “was” ranges from mill town to Mayberry, depending on who’s doing the remembering.

This is a common story on our planet reeling from Future Shock, population growth, and technological addiction. Few of us are consistent in our desires.

Now America’s energy revolution is butting in.

Anacortes is on Fidalgo Island, connected to the mainland by two bridges and, increasingly important, a railroad. Trains were once infrequent but now, with almost no public notice or fanfare, the Tesoro Refinery on Fidalgo Island built new railroad sidings to allow 100-car tanker trains to bring oil from the newly burgeoning oil fields of North Dakota.

The refinery next door, Shell, wants to do the same thing.

Both actions are a response to Alaska oil exports falling three quarters from their one-time peak and the Dakotas needing to ship oil by rail while the proposed Keystone Pipeline to the Gulf of Mexico is battled. Events a thousand miles away result in choo-choos rattling into my reveries.

As gasoline consumption drops from fuel-efficient cars, the four refineries in northwest Washington are in a race to see which ones can remain competitive.

Then there are proposals to ship millions of tons of coal from Montana to nearby Cherry Point, again by rail. Mine it in Montana, rail it to Washington, ship it to China, burn it, and have the soot blow back. At a time scientists are speculating about ways to put carbon back in the ground, we can’t wait to dig it out. Crazy.

Anacortes’s mayor is pushing a plan to sell 5 million gallons of water a day to what would be (if built) the largest water bottling plant in the nation, shipped by rail to customers up to a thousand miles away. More tracks, more trains, more plastic, more fossil fuel burned, more waste, more global warming, less water.

And with the Great Recession receding, residential development is heating up. There are always land disputes, the most recent a permit to clearcut 40 acres adjacent to city parklands and a peregrine falcon nest and replace it with a subdivision.

So I can’t turn my back on the world as much as my house pretends. I respond by trying to play a constructive role in local conservation organizations. There’s also brewing debate about future civic visions, with the pro-industrial mayor of twenty years seeking yet another term but facing serious challengers for the first time. Should be a lively one.

This story plays out in a thousand communities across America. The future comes out best when smart and dedicated people stay engaged.

So pay attention. Participate. Worry. But not too much.

Two bald eagles just flew by. I think birds were created to deliver hope.

Thriller first lines

bdietrich — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:03:38 +0000

“The last camel collapsed at noon.” This first line, in Ken Follett’s classic The Key to Rebecca, made me want to read more. I try for the same in my own fiction: a sailor beheaded by a cannonball in the opening of the upcoming “The Barbed Crown.”

Here’s some openers I’ve collected from others, for a blog I also posted at Thillercentral.org.

“‘Where’s Papa going with that axe?’ said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.” No wonder I loved E..B. White’s Charlotte’s Web when my teacher read it in the third grade. It’s a thriller!

“It was a pleasure to burn,” is how Ray Bradbury started Fahrenheit 451.

“The screams had finally ceased.” James Rollins, The Judas Strain.

“I am a coward,” begins the narrator of Elizabeth Wein’s Code Name Verity.

Not every beginning has to be a zinger. While mystery writer Elmore Leonard advises never to start with the weather, legions of good bestsellers have done just that.

Grabbing the reader by the throat sure doesn’t hurt, though. Here’s Leonard in Freaky Deaky: “Chris Mankowski’s last day on the job, two in the afternoon, two hours to go, he got a call to dispose of a bomb.”

Or Dean Koontz, Dragon Tears: “Tuesday was a fine California day, full of sunshine and promise, until Harry Lyon had to shoot someone at lunch.”

In contrast, Dan Brown’s terrific The Da Vinci Code has a surprisingly sleepy first line: “Robert Langdon awoke slowly.”

Compare to Franz Kafka: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect.” Metamorphosis.

Another classic is George Orwell’s 1984: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”

Thriller writers love to tap our greatest dread, death. The first line of my own Ice Reich was, “The flying was bad. The corpse made it worse.”

Here’s Alice Sebold in The Lovely Bones: “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.”

“You never meant to kill him.”Harlan Coben, The Innocent.

“It is cold at 6:40 in the morning of a March day in Paris, and seems even colder when a man is about to be executed by a firing squad.” Frederick Forsyth, Day of the Jackal.

“Death is my beat,” starts Michael Connelly in The Poet.

“Coming back from the dead is not as easy as they make it seem in the movies.” Christa Faust, Money Shot.

Less dramatic, but utterly effective, is William Goldman’s Marathon Man: “Every time he drove through Yorkville, Rosenbaum got angry, just on general principles.”

There is elegance in the straight-forward. The most quoted Stephen King first line is from The Dark Tower: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” Wonderfully simple and evocative.

Or you can be more wordy: “Steever stood on the southbound local platform of the Lexington Avenue line at Fifty-ninth Street and chewed his gum with a gentle motion of his heavy jaws, like a soft-mouthed retriever schooled to hold game firmly but without bruising it.” John Godey, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three.

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own.” You just don’t top the classics, like War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

Stephenie Meyer hit the jackpot with Twilight by, hey, telling a good story. First line: “I’d never given much thought to how I would die – even though I’d had reason enough in the last few months – but even if I had, I would not have imagined it like this.”

Peter Benchley, in Jaws: “The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.”

The most derided first line in literature, thanks to Snoopy, is “It was a dark and stormy night,” by Victorian bestseller Edward Bulwer-Lytton, in Paul Clifford. I actually think the sentence works fine, and in fact the same line begins Madeleine L’Engle’s bestselling children’s classic, A Wrinkle in Time.

I’ve got a soft spot for Bulwer-Lytton, since I got an idea from his (admittedly) almost unreadable novel Vril for my own Blood of the Reich. His problem, I think, was not stopping with the part Snoopy kept typing in Peanuts. Here’s the rest of his opening: “…night; the rain fell in torrents – except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

Whew. Not exactly “Call me Ishmael,” the opening of Moby Dick. But we all know aspiring writers who start exactly Bulwer-Lytton’s way.

The best opening lines don’t just grab, they set the tone of the entire story. Here’s Deadwood, from Pete Dexter: “The boy shot Wild Bill’s horse at dusk, while Bill was off in the bushes to relieve himself.”

And as a journalist, I’d be remiss in not recounting one of the best first lines in journalism. It’s Miami crime writer Edna Buchanan’s account of a man shot by a security guard after pushing to the front of the line of a chicken stand: “Gary Robinson died hungry.”

The Writer’s Odds

bdietrich — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 17:59:56 +0000

Thriller author James Patterson made $94 million in 2012, according to Forbes. He’s one of 145,900 American “writers and authors” counted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a quarter of them part-time, two-thirds of them self-employed, and with median earnings of $55,420. (“Median” means half earned more than that, and half less, I believe.)

I looked this up for a couple talks I’m giving this week. People are often interested in a writer’s odds of success.

Pollsters report more than 80 percent of Americans would like to be author, and in 2011 statisticians counted 329,259 books published in the United States, and 2.2 million books published in the world. Google estimates 130 million books have been published in human history.

With electronic self-publishing, it’s become easier than ever to be “an author.” And harder than ever to get attention to your work.

Most successful authors have some combination of talent, persistence, and luck. The persistence stories are always encouraging. And daunting.

Mystery writer Janet Evanovich pulled in $33 million last year, but wrote for ten years before getting published. She labored first in the romance field before hitting it big with bounty hunter Stephanie Plum.

Stephen King’s first big novel, Carrie, was rejected 30 times. He tossed it in the wastebasket but his wife fished it out. He earned $39 million in 2012.

John Grisham’s first novel, A Time to Kill, was rejected 12 times, and he unsuccessfully tried to sell copies from the trunk of his car. He earned $26 million last year.

Judy Blume, who has sold 80 million books, got nothing but rejections for two straight years.

Steve Berry, 10 million books, collected 85 rejections over 12 years before breaking through.

Rex Pickett’s Sideways was rejected 16 times and received an advance of $5,000 before being picked up for a film.

J.K. Rowling, the first author billionaire, had Harry Potter rejected by a dozen British publishing houses and reportedly got into print, for a £1,500 advance, only after the eight-year-old daughter of a publisher pleaded for it.

Dan Brown’s three novels before The Da Vinci Code all had printings of less than 10,000 copies.

Other rejection counts: Gone With the Wind, 38 times, Dune, 20 times, A Wrinkle in Time, 29 times, Lord of the Flies, 20 times, Kon Tiki, 20 times, Watership Down, 17 times, Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, 18 times, Chicken Soup for the Soul, 33 times, James Joyce’s The Dubliners, 22 times, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, more than 100 times, MASH, 21 times.

C.S. Lewis got 800 rejections, and Western writer Louis L’Amour 200. Even The Diary of Anne Frank got numerous rejections.

I’ve been luckier, although my novel Hadrian’s Wall was ejected by just about everybody, including the house that eventually published it, HarperCollins. Different agent, different editor. You need the right person on the right day.

As instructive as all this is, the odds of any author making it big remain very long, rejected or not. Nielson Bookscan reported in 2004 that of 1.2 million books tracked, only 25,000 – barely more than 2 percent – sold more than 5,000 copies.

In 2006, Publisher’s Weekly said the average book sells less than 500 copies.

All you can do is write and try. And write and try. Most of the famous authors above did just that, for years and years.

Or, explore other kinds of writing. The government counts 58,500 reporters, with a median income of $36,000, 127,200 editors, median income of $51,470, 61,900 broadcast announcers, median $27,000, 320,000 public relations, $57,550, and 49,500 technical writers, $63,280.

And yes, half of them have that half-finished novel in their desk drawer. May the blessings of James Patterson be upon them.

And the Oscar goes to…Story

bdietrich — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 17:18:01 +0000

It’s Oscar weekend, and in the desperate journalistic hunt for meaning in self-promoting spectacles – the Academy Awards, the Superbowl, political conventions – best-picture nominees have been criticized for straying from the truth.

“Lincoln” has a Connecticut congressman (falsely) voting against the amendment to end slavery. (First Hurricane Sandy, then Snowstorm Nemo, and now this!) “Zero Dark Thirty” suggests torture works, when it apparently played no role in finding Osama Bin Laden. And “Argo” turns what all of us have experienced – a tedious airport departure – into an exciting one.

In other words, these historical fictions have fiction in them, mixing up timelines, creating composite characters, and injecting drama.

Oh dear. I do that, too.

How do historical novelists sleep at night? Well we’re trying to inform and entertain by telling a story, drawing people to subject matter that might otherwise seem dry or distant.

We also put a thematic spin on events by interpreting history.

Hollywood has been a master at this, rightly and wrongly, going all the way back to 1915’s “Birth of a Nation.” It was adopted from a novel called “The Clansman” which celebrated the KKK. The film prompted protests for its racism and, at the same time, a revival of the Klan.

A jillion films have injected drama and spin since, such as “Silkwood,” “Reds,” “Patton,” “Gone With the Wind,” “Braveheart,” and on and on.

What little we know about Spartacus was written by Romans. That hasn’t prevented novelists and screenwriters from making the Romans the heavies in every recreation. The 1951 novel and 1960 movie had a deliberate leftist spin.

One reason writers have a license to do so is that history itself is a story, as the name implies. In reading Napoleonic histories for my Ethan Gage series, I find French authors will make Bonaparte somewhat heroic, British ones will make him villainous, and Americans will come down somewhere between.

In doing non-fiction research for a history of the Columbia River, I was dismayed at how much eyewitness explorer and pioneer accounts of the same event or tribe could differ. I felt like a judge with conflicting testimony.

I live near a peak with the aboriginal name of Koma Kulshan, and looked up yesterday just what that might mean. Turns out it is a moniker that has been given half-a-dozen translations, was an amalgam made by white men from misunderstood native words, and apparently was never used by Indians at all.

Chief Seattle gave a famous speech lamenting the passing of his people in 1854. There is whatever he actually said, what Dr. Henry Smith said he said in an 1887 newspaper story from incomplete notes, an amended 1929 version that added a Christian sentiment at the end, and an environmental rewrite by screenwriter Ted Perry in 1971 that is the version most people have heard.

Historians pursue truth, but it can be elusive. How many versions of Henry VIII have we seen?

More important to novelists and screenwriters, history can be a vehicle for entertainment and insight through dramatic storytelling. Where to draw the line is an artist’s decision.

I try to adhere to real events, dates, and environments in my Ethan Gage series, and base his quests for relics on research. The fun is injecting adventure while trying to make the novels plausible and instructive. Having a fictional character play a role in real events strikes some readers as clever romp, and others as dumb transgression. So be it.

My take? No one would have noticed the Connecticut vote if a modern congressman from that state hadn’t brought it up. “Zero” did more good than harm in again promoting serious debate about the utility of torture. And “Argo” played into that nagging ‘will-I-catch-my-flight?’ anxiety we experience at every airport.

Good storytelling, Ben Affleck.

Napoleon and the Pope

bdietrich — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 16:59:16 +0000

Napoleon Bonaparte would be at home in today’s relatively irreligious age. A recent poll showed nearly 20 percent of Americans report no religion, up from 8 percent in 1990. In France the percentage declaring no religion is 48, in Britain 50. Even in Mexico, 20 percent report no religious affiliation.

Napoleon seized power in a military coup against a revolutionary government that began as officially atheistic, and which had booted out France’s dominating Catholic Church. Notre Dame was turned into a “Temple of Reason” with busts of Greek philosophers. Then it briefly became a food warehouse.

Church property was seized, churches temporarily closed up, and convents and monasteries emptied.

One of Bonaparte’s first acts as dictator was to reach agreement with the Church to welcome back Roman Catholicism, but under conditions that trimmed it of its old ownerships and powers.

It was political calculation. The revival of religion was as popular with many French commoners as the return of Orthodox religion was popular with some Russians after the collapse of communism.

But Bonaparte was no churchgoer and no true Catholic. He remarked once that perhaps the sun would be a logical object of worship. He had curiosity without faith. His last deathbed word was not about God, but “Josephine.”

When he invaded Egypt he tried to portray his revolutionary, atheistic French troops as potential friends of Islam. The Cairo Imams did not believe it for a moment.

The recently announced resignation of Pope Benedict XVI brings to mind the important role the Papacy has played throughout history.

Napoleon was a man of his times, and ours, in that he was not religious but intellectually curious about spirituality. He was superstitious. He believed in destiny and luck. By some accounts he had supernatural experiences in the Great Pyramid in Egypt and with a prophetic gnome called the Little Red Man. All this has found its way into my Ethan Gage series of historical novels.

Raised in Corsica, Napoleon had a penchant for making the sign of the cross at moments of stress or exasperation. But he was not a churchgoer, and regarded religion as a tool to control the masses, not an answer to life’s mysteries.

He also regarded Papal approval as necessary for his own legitimacy.

The plot of my upcoming novel “The Barbed Crown” revolves in part around Napoleon’s coronation as emperor on December 2, 1804, at Notre Dame in Paris. He astounded the world, and the invited Pope Pius VII, by crowning himself and his wife Josephine, an act of secular hubris.

It was also carefully calculated. Napoleon wanted religious legitimacy, but not religious obligation.

Pius wanted to reassert the Church’s role in post-revolutionary France but attended Napoleon’s coronation only with reluctance. He was being asked to endorse hereditary rule on the family of a military upstart.

Accordingly, it took months of negotiations to convince the Pope to make the long journey from Rome to Paris in late autumn. Napoleon and Pius contrived to meet “by accident” outside Paris while Bonaparte was hunting (an activity that bored him.) The chance meeting avoided either looking like a supplicant to the other, and they even choreographed their entry into a coach to confer. Both stepped inside the vehicle at exactly the same time.

Pius was a devout pontiff who lived a life of relative simplicity, for a Pope. He ignored the gifts Napoleon showered on him (although his entourage did not), and found the spectacularly jeweled papal crown that the French presented uncomfortable to wear. He was wisely skeptical of Napoleon’s motives.

But the church needed the state and the state needed the church. Josephine, who had wed Napoleon in a civil ceremony, had a religious ceremony the night before the coronation to legitimize her own crowning.

(This didn’t stop Napoleon from divorcing her a few years later when she could not produce a male heir.)

To see what role Ethan Gage played in Napoleon’s crowning, you have to read the novel. Suffice to say that Pius is taken by surprise in more ways than one.

Don’t believe me? If you study David’s famous painting of Napoleon’s coronation in the Louvre you can detect, in the crowd of onlookers, an equally surprised fellow who looks very much like Ethan Gage.

Napoleon and football

bdietrich — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 17:23:30 +0000

Napoleon Bonaparte wasn’t much of a couch potato, but he probably would have watched the Superbowl. Football is our sport closest to early 19^th Century warfare.

There was more clarity to conflict then than today’s terrorism-and-guerilla tactics. The Ravens and Forty-Niners will line up at scrimmage like the French and British at Waterloo. The goal line was the enemy’s capital. And generals could slug it out (the ground game) or try a campaign of maneuver (the passing game.)

Napoleon was a master of both. His first service was at the siege of Toulon, a kind of fourth-and-one head-butt that the invading British and royalists lost. In contrast, his first command as a general in Italy was all about speed and maneuver. He had the smaller team and made up for it by out-marching the Austrians.

I‘m no expert at football. For my Ethan Gage novels, however, I’ve picked up knowledge about Napoleonic warfare. Ethan has been at the Battle of the Pyramids, Siege of Acre, and Battle of Marengo, and for the upcoming “The Barbed Crown” (May) he winds up at the naval battle of Trafalgar.

Napoleon faced many of the same dilemmas as the modern football coach. Ninety percent of his work was before the game, training and supplying the army so it had the energy to fight. Sad-sack soldiers couldn’t reach the battlefield on time, and hungry ones didn’t fight very well. His army at Austerlitz was so good because it had logged “time at the gym,” in his case three years of training for an invasion of England that never happened.

He beat the Austrians and Russians in part because he could maneuver more quickly, could extend his supply lines, and could shoot faster and more accurately. He actually gave French troops target practice, a much-neglected exercise at a time when muskets were inaccurate.

He never claimed to be an innovator, but he devoured military history. At the end of his career, he remarked he knew all the essentials of military strategy at its beginning. Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest summed it up best: “Get there fastest with the mostest.”

Just as a football offense has runners, receivers, and blockers, and a football defense has multiple layers (linebackers) to stop an attack, Napoleonic warfare was a complex chess game of infantry, cavalry, and artillery. It was all about tradeoffs. Every general would like more cannon, for example, but each battery took dozens of horses for guns, ammunition, men, food, horse feed, and repairs.

Cavalry was great, but Napoleon could never get enough good horses, and a good horseman took years to train.

Just as football teams gravitate to either size or speed – and try to have some of both – Napoleon had to choose between line infantry and all the other formations that made their attacks and defenses effective.

Napoleonic warfare was as simple as football: line em up and bang away. And it was as complex as an encyclopedic playbook. Bonaparte was a master at getting the right unit in the right place to check the enemy and decide the battle. Here it might be an artillery barrage, there a cavalry charge, and on this one an infantry attack, just like plays in football.

Just as naval warships had to swing sideways to present their guns to the enemy, armies had to be adept at switching from columns – the best for marching ahead on roads or cross-country – to lines or squares, the best for presenting a maximum number of guns to blaze. Troops drilled endlessly to be able to do this in what was a literal “fog of war,” the incredible smoke of black powder firearms.

Then there were the trick plays. The Duke of Wellington was expert at shielding his troops out of sight below the brow of a hill and then springing them on an advancing enemy.

After losing his army in Russia, it was a desperate fourth quarter for Napoleon. He made some great plays but the Waterloo campaign was pretty much a Hail Mary pass. It came up just short.

The coach didn’t just get fired. He was exiled to St. Helena.

Good News for Holiday Cheer

bdietrich — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 20:28:09 +0000

When I worked as a journalist, I was a professional worrier. So are many academics, politicians, non-governmental “cause” groups, charities, lawyers, doctors, government officials, religious leaders, and Moms.

Americans tell each other things are bad so we’ll make them better.

Well, the world didn’t end Dec. 21. And this holiday season, let’s take cheer that our pessimistic system actually works. A lot of progress keeps being made, fiscal cliffs and guns notwithstanding.

Google terms like “good news trends” on the Internet and you’ll soon be humming Jingle Bells.

Violent crime and murders, for example, are down by half since 1991, despite the “if it bleeds it leads” credo of the evening news.

American life expectancy is up another two years since 2000, now averaging 78.5 for men and women combined.

Income taxes, as a percentage of the gross domestic product, are lower than in either the Eisenhower or Reagan Administrations. Our tax burden as a percentage of GDP is lower than 27 of 30 industrialized countries.

House fires are down 60 percent since 1972, and fire fatalities have been cut in half.

Farmland has shrunk slightly since 1982, but agricultural production is up 50 percent.

Traffic fatalities are at the lowest level since 1949. Aviation and railway accidents are down, too.

While the American economy has tripled in size in the last 40 years, our oil consumption is up only 1 percent.

Our rate of energy consumption, per capita, is half of what it was in 1973.

U.S. carbon emissions are lower than in 2005, and expected to stay that way for at least the next 15 years.

Air quality is generally better, with 18 of the 25 biggest cities posting the lowest smog readings since measurements began.

Teen alcohol and drug use is at its lowest level since 1975.

Teen pregnancy is at the lowest rate in 70 years.

Reported child sexual abuse has fallen 60 percent since 1992.

Divorce rates have fallen slightly.

So has the number of homeless, even during the recession, because of more public housing options.

Women’s pay is overall getting closer to parity with men, more women attend college than men, and 40 percent of working wives earn more than their husbands.

Depending on who’s counting, we’ve added up to 5 million jobs the last three years. True, that has yet to fully replace the jobs lost during the 2007-2009 plunge, but we’re staggering back.

Household debt is down sharply from 2008 as people pay off their cards and pay down their mortgages.

Because house prices and mortgage rates have plunged, the median U.S. house cost has fallen from $1,247 a month in 2006 to $889 now.

Terrorism incidents have fallen globally since 2005.

There has been a general decline in wars, and war casualties, since 1991. Global violence, per capita, may be at one of the lowest rates in human history.

As a professional worrier, I could find “yes, but” statistics to rebut all this optimism. But I do think that after all our hand wringing – or because of it – life is getting better, not worse.

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!