William Dietrich, author of the Barbary Pirates

Story Behind The Story

by bdietrich on June 26, 2011

“Blood of the Reich” is a thriller that evolved in the telling. It’s a comment not just on the Nazi past, but our own present, inspired by my own experiences.

Some novelists start with theme, others with character. I tend to start with plot - I want a good yarn, above all - and then learn more about who the characters are, and what they stand for, as I work on the book. For this newest one, that was particularly true. What made my characters tick?

Like many people I’ve long been fascinated by the evil of the Third Reich, and somewhat mystified. The usual explanation is that Germany was taken over by a band of hypnotic criminals, the Nazis, who put the country under their spell for 12 terrible years. With their annihilation, Germany became good again.

I’ve always felt this ‘Hitler made us do it’ explanation to be inadequate. What’s baffling to an American used to charming politicians is how uncharismatic the Nazi leadership seems in newsreels: unattractive, bombastic, and creepy. Hitler himself remains almost inexplicable (despite the effort of biographers), a terrifying fanatic who deliberately erased almost all traces of his past to make himself an icon. Yet the Nazis […]

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Advice from an agent

by bdietrich on June 21, 2011

Agent Jennifer Weltz of the Jean Naggar Literary Agency gave some good advice in a speech to the Historical Novel Society convention in San Diego June 18. For aspiring authors, here’s part of what she said, posted with Jennifer’s permission:

How do I get published you ask? How do I grow my readership in the challenging publishing landscape of today?

What do you do in your office all day??

First and foremost - I am a reader:

I read queries (I and each Agent in my office individually receive about 8000 a year – request chapters from about 10%- and request manuscripts from about 10% of the chapters)

In the past year I have taken on 5 new clients.

I also read my author’s new and revised and revised and revised manuscripts, outlines, proposals…

I read all of the sold titles from other agents in our office as I actively sell all of our books into the international market. This is largely fun reading for me as these are books sold by people with great taste and my job is to tell the world what I love about their books!

When I can squeeze it in, I also read for pure pleasure - books from people who are not my clients. I seem […]

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Historical Novel Society

I’ve just returned from speaking and listening at the annual meeting of the Historical Novel Society, held this year in San Diego. The American-British society is history-nerd heaven, and the keynote speaker was Cecilia Holland, who is still going strong in her 70s. Ohmigosh, I read her as a kid: she was an accomplished author at age 22! Some of us require a little more practice.

I read a scene from “The Barbary Pirates” for Friday Night Fight Scenes, enjoyed watching the Historical Costume Fashion Show - the two dozen gowns were dazzling - and just listened at Saturday Night Sex Scene Readings, which was all-female. Golly, the girls aren’t shy. It still has me blushing. Ladies, whew!

Every author has an interesting story. I was seated at a signing next to Denise Dietz, who turns out to be a near-neighbor (residing in Sydney, on Vancouver Island) and who also writes under the pen name Mary Ellen Dennis. It turns out she is the fifth wife of romance writer Victoria Gordon, who is actually Gordon Aalborg, an Australian who wrote a book with Denise, which led to marriage. They had a long-distance relationship with her in Colorado and him in Tasmania, and […]

“Green Fire” environmental book

I’ve led a double life, writing about Nazis, pirates, and Napoleonic generals in my fiction but drawing on my newspaper experience to teach environmental journalism. I just ended a five-year stint of such teaching at Huxley College of the Environment at Western Washington University, and my swan song was completing work on the just-published: “Green Fire: A History of Huxley College.”

This was an in-house book, of course, aimed at alumni and students, but it also turned out to be an ambitious and complicated project that I hope will be of wider interest to those involved with environmental education. From start to finish took three years and involved at least 20 different contributors.

The 185-page book has my narrative history of one of the first (arguably, the first) dedicated environmental colleges in the United States, which was controversial when founded and has been pioneering and experimental ever since.

It also has profiles of 40 Huxley alumni that provide environmentalists with 40 wide-ranging examples of how to lead one’s life. The grads have ranged from organic farmers and a zen monk to high-powered attorneys and environmental activists. They are saving the tiger, climbing mountains, reforming high school education, running an airport, cleaning up […]

Thor’s Hammer, Swastikas, and Me

While my resurrection of Thor’s Hammer in my Ethan Gage novel “The Dakota Cipher” was not quite as lucrative as the reported ohmigosh quarter-of-a-billion dollars the movie “Thor” took worldwide in its opening weekend, it is evidence of art sharing art.

Not only is Thor in both “The Dakota Cipher” and the unrelated movie, he turns up in a line from my upcoming novel “Blood of the Reich,” being released June 28. That’s because of the god’s identification with the swastika, a symbol omnipresent in human culture long before the Nazis came along.

The more I learn of history, the less it seems like a linear strand and more like a woven web.

Neither my books nor the Thor comic books that inspired the movie invented the Norse hero, of course. But all writers draw from the same global well. The god of thunder excited me as a boy, especially his mighty hammer Mjolnir. The weapon smote enemies with thunder and lightning before returning to Thor’s fist like a boomerang.

Better than a light saber, no?

In the movie, the god Thor finds himself in modern times. In my book, a very odd and powerful hammer is found by Ethan Gage in the wilderness of […]

Happy Earth Day!

It’s the 41st Earth Day and Good Friday to boot, which brings mixed feelings. It was Earth Day a year ago that the Deepwater Horizon oil platform sank after exploding earlier, unleashing the nation’s biggest oil spill. And Good Friday in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska, a disaster I covered as a Seattle Times reporter.

Hopefully, no spills this time! The sun is shining and the tulips are up in the Skagit Valley.

Long before my fiction writing career I had an interest in the environment, and this spring I’m wrapping up a five-year-long stint teaching environmental journalism at Huxley College at Western Washington University. Huxley was arguably the nation’s first dedicated environmental college, when it opened the same year as the first Earth Day, in 1970.

One of my duties at Huxley has been to advise a student magazine called The Planet; its website is http://planet.wwu.edu/. It’s entirely produced by undergraduates and right now we’re in the middle of reporting the spring issue, with the theme of “animals.” It’s inspiring and rejuvenating to work with creative young people.

Another project I’ve been involved in is writing and producing a book on the history of Huxley College called “Green Fire.” […]

Truth vs Embellishment

Here’s an idea: let’s make memoirs true and put the made-up stuff in fiction.

Ain’t gonna happen. Too much money in lying. And literary bigwigs think it’s sorta okay.

This grumpy assessment is prompted by “Three Cups of Deceit,” Jon Krakauer’s eviscerating take-down of Greg Mortenson’s “Three Cups of Tea,” and the 60 Minutes expose on the same book. We’ve yet to hear Mortenson’s full defense, if he has one, but it’s not looking good for a mega-best-seller who has garnered tens of millions of dollars for Pakistani and Afghan school building that may (at least in part) be ineffectual and fraudulent.

We’ve been here before. James Frey’s “Million Little Pieces,” a fraud. Margaret Seltzer’s fraudulent “Love and Consequences” about street-gang life she never experienced. Monique de Wael’s memoir of “Surviving With Wolves” during the Holocaust, which she didn’t do. Herman Rosenblat’s “Angel At the Fence,” who fabricated a story of his future wife tossing apples over the fence at him at a Nazi concentration camp.

All of us are suckers for stories too good to be true, be it Washington confessing to chopping down the cherry tree or Bernie Madoff promising investment returns no one else could match.

But in memoir writing in particular, […]

Paperback Writer

The paperback edition of The Barbary Pirates in all its iterations (large print, a foreign edition, etc.) is officially on sale and it’s always satisfying when that version comes out. While I cherish hardback books, many of my most memorable early reading experiences are paperbacks because pennies were precious. I’ve still got paperbacks of novels such as 1965′s Dune (95 cents) 1959′s A Canticle for Leibowitz (same price) 1961′s The Butterfly Revolution (75 cents) and 1971′s Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins (who lives about ten miles from me) for which I paid a whopping $1.50. Inflation marches on; the U.S. price for Barbary as a standard paperback is ten bucks. Here’s hoping that decades from now, someone will still have a tattered copy and consider it a bargain.

While the e-book is rapidly changing the entire publishing dynamic, most people are introduced to most authors through paperbacks; the first printing for Barbary is about three times the hardback printing. They were invented to make reading cheaper and more portable, which sounds a lot like the e-reader, doesn’t it? They also established a hierarchy of book stature including the “paperback only” title and the pulp, inspiring the Beatles’ tune Paperback Writer. And yep, one of […]

Ben Franklin, Ethan Gage, and Libya

It has been 70 years since the U.S. Congress declared war on anyone, and the United States presently finds itself in at least 3.2 wars: one in Iraq we’ve largely ceased hearing about, a grinding one in Afghanistan, an air campaign in Libya, and naval patrols against Somalian pirates.

Benjamin Franklin, the mentor of wayward Ethan Gage in my series of Napoleonic-era novels, would be skeptical.

I don’t know whether to feel prescient or some kind of conduit of bad luck. Ethan’s adventure The Barbary Pirates was published last year as the depredations of the Somali pirates were heating up. As it nears paperback publication the pirates popped into the news again with the murder of four American yacht cruisers, two of them from Seattle near my home.

In another case of life imitating art, or vice versa, the climax of the 1803 novel takes place in, you guessed it, Tripoli. The pirate state was ruled at that time by a mercurial megalomaniac named Yusef Karamanli who murdered his own brother, shot his mother, and imprisoned his in-laws to seize power. Sound familiar?

There’s been an odd echo of contemporary events throughout the Ethan Gage series. In the first, Napoleon’s Pyramids, the French general […]

Welcome to my revised website!

As a historical thriller writer, I’ve spent plenty of time in the past with Roman centurions, Attila the Hun, Ethan Gage and his patron/plague Napoleon Bonaparte, and most recently with SS Nazis on the eve of World War II. But even we time-travelers have to touch base in the 21st Century once in a while, this time with a redesigned website I intend to keep much more up to date.

I want to communicate more with readers, and have you communicate more with me. Gosh, the future! Not only am I old enough to remember telling a colleague, ‘I don’t get why you’d want to bother with something as slow and clumsy as the Internet,’ I remember (true story) lead type, linotype machines, and tickertape wires at my first newspaper. No wonder I put Benjamin Franklin’s homilies in my Ethan Gage books! I’ve probably got a quill pen and stone chisel in a back drawer, too.

Hey. I’ll try to blog with the best of them.

I’ve been busier than a barkeep on a regimental payday, as Ethan Gage might say. “The Barbary Pirates,” published in 2010, is scheduled for publication as a paperback on March 29. My next novel, “Blood of the […]

author of Barbary Pirates