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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 5, No. 34 |
 RON MILLER chats with the bestselling author of 'The Bone Collector' and the new thriller 'Garden of Beasts' |
 JEFFERY DEAVER Photo by Marion Ettlinger |
back to 1936 Germany
By RON MILLER
of TheColumnists.com
In his new novel "Garden of Beasts" (Simon & Schuster, $24.95), bestselling author Jeffery Deaver takes a bold new step after so many contemporary thrillers--he takes us back to Berlin, circa 1936, for a roller coaster ride through the domain of the king of beasts--Adolf Hitler.
His "hero," Paul Schumann, is another in that new breed of unsavory protagonists--a professional mob hitman from New York City--who's offered a pardon for his long string of murders if he'll just do one neat little job for a secret U.S. government organization--go over to Germany and knock off the architect of Hitler's rearmament plans, preferably in a public place where everybody will take notice.
Of course, the deal isn't quite as "neat" as it may seem. The minute he lands in Germany, disguised as an American sportswriter travelling with the U.S. Olympic team, Schumann realizes Nazi Germany is no picnic grounds. There are armed men everywhere, making sure the Berlin Olympics give the world a good impression of Hitler's regime, and hordes of Storm Troopers, Gestapo and regular police detectives, eager to protect all Nazi officials and immediately pounce on anyone who threatens them.
What's more, Schumann quickly does the wrong thing by doing the right thing: He whops the crap out of several Storm Troopers he finds trashing a Jewish bookstore and beating up the elderly propietor and his wife. That makes him a hunted man before he even begins to hunt down his own prey.
As Deaver pointed out at a book-signing last week in Bellingham, WA, it's just a part of his master plan to set up a situation where everything starts moving faster and faster while "I do everything I can to scare the daylights out of you."
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is a rousing roller coaster ride through Nazi Germany before World War II. |
Deaver has some pretty good credentials in that department. His enormous bestseller "The Bone Collector" about Lincoln Rhyme, a paralyzed detective, and Amelia Sachs, his female "leg man," tracking down a vicious serial killer, is one of the scariest books I've ever read. (The 1999 movie starring Denzel Washington as Rhyme and Angelina Jolie as Sachs wasn't too shabby in the fright department, either!) His four additional novels featuring those characters have all been scary reads, too, and he's currently finishing up their next thriller.
There are elements of "Garden of Beasts" that echo other popular thrillers, starting with Geoffrey Household's classic "Rogue Male" in which a big game hunter is sent out to assassinate Hitler, fails and has to escape through war-torn Europe. I was also reminded of the series of thrillers by Martin Cruz Smith, starting with "Gorky Park," about a Russian detective tracking down killers during the repressive Soviet regime. There's such a character in "Garden of Beasts"--the determined German police detective, Inspector Kohl, whose dogged pursuit of Schumann is a wonder to behold.
But Deaver isn't borrowing here. He's just going over some familiar ground, plowing it up in his own unique style. His technique, says Deaver, is to plan a surprise ending--then shock you a few more times in quick succession. He certainly does it well in "Garden of Beasts," leaving you out of breath and quivering by the finale.
Deaver acknowledges his "hero" wouldn't look too comfortable in a white hat, but he reasons that it takes somebody pretty dark to engage the overwhelmingly dark forces Hitler had assembled in Nazi Germany. Though the world at large didn't know in 1936 what Hitler had planned for the Jews, Schumann sees plenty of cruel and even savage behavior toward Jews as he makes his way through Germany. Even though he himself has killed many people, he justifies it by reasoning that he only kills killers. What he sees the Nazis doing literally disgusts him.
As I started to read "Garden of Beasts," I wondered how Deaver could have put together all the information he'd need to re-create this time effectively for readers. He not only has to describe what Berlin and its suburbs were like 68 years ago, but he also has to explain the Nazi power structure in detail before World War II and give us a credible account of the Olympic Games of 1936. (He uses many real-life characters, including American track star Jesse Owens, in his plot.)
Deaver explained that his stories usually unfold over a concentrated period of 24-48 hours in order to focus the suspense. It also narrows down the specific time he has to research when doing a historical novel like this one. Still, "Garden of Beasts" became a much greater challenge than most of his books. Normally, he says he spends about eight months carefully outlining the plot--his outlines run to 90-95 pages--and doing the research, then another two months doing the first draft of the book.
"For this one, I spent an extra year on research," he said.
The period is rendered very credibly. I saw no glaring errors, even in his references to the contemporary pop culture of 1936 America and Germany.
Deaver plots so carefully because he firmly believes, "There can be no loose ends. Everything must be resolved."
Though he says his writing was inspired by, of all people, Mickey Spillane, I suspect that's a bit of wry humor. He lists John LeCarre among his favorite authors--and that's a clue as to why his books are so meticulously plotted and researched.
Deaver is a tall, thin man with a receding hairline and, if the mood strikes him, can strike a rather spooky pose for photographers. That's all part of his overall act, I assume, because the real man is witty, charming and possessed of a grand sense of humor.
While he admits to enjoying putting his characters into "moral dilemmas," Deaver makes no literary pretensions about his books. He says, "I don't care for stylish, literary novels with no story." He has positioned himself in the marketplace as a commercial author--and succeeded quite well. He likes the idea that "The Bone Collector" became a popular movie and says he'd like to see other films made from his books, but he couldn't be coaxed into talking about his take on how the movie treated his book.
"I didn't have anything to do with it," he said.
For all that, "Garden of Beasts" does have a solid core of literary merit. Both Schumann and Inspector Kohl face serious moral dilemmas because of their roles within warped societies--Schumann's being the mob underworld, Kohl's the Nazi dictatorship in Germany--and there's lots of meat along with the potatoes in Deaver's latest serving of thrills.
Deaver has an interesting interpretation of what book publishers want today--"They want something entirely new that's been successful in the past," he jokes--it's clear he has established a winning formula with readers, yet isn't afraid to step out in new directions, as he surely does with "Garden of Beasts." I'm confident he's going to be rolling along profitably for quite some time to come.
©2004 by Ron Miller.
The Ron Miller caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The photo
by Marion Ettlinger and the book cover illustration are courtesty
of Simon & Schuster.
Ron Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently teaches classes in mystery and related topics at Whatcom Community College and Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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