A Viennese Fanny Hill

I just sent in book four in the Viennese Mysteries to my editor in London and began thinking about one of the main characters in this series installment, the famous Viennese courtesan, Josephine Mutzenbacher.

Well, perhaps famous is a bit too strong. This mythic prostitute was introduced to Viennese readers in the 1906 novel, Josefine Mutzenbacher – Die Lebensgeschichte Einer Wienerischen Dirne, Von Ihr Selbst Erzählt (Josephine Mutzenbacher – The Life Story of a Viennese Whore, as Told by Herself). This first-person pseudo-memoir was written–the experts finally concur–by Siegmund Salzmann, better known by his pen name of Felix Salten, and, if known at all to readers outside the German-speaking world, as the author of Bambi.

In the novel, Salten depicts a strong-spirited woman in her fifties–Pepi to her friends–looking back with candor and sometimes even humor on her sexual adventures.

Read Full Post »

The Annotated/Illustrated Viennese Mysteries

Thanks to my excellent friend, Tom Ovens, there are now accompanying annotations and illustrations for the third novel in my Viennese Mysteries series, The Silence.

So, if there are those of you out there who have been scratching their heads about where the action takes place in Vienna, there is a fine map that follows the intrepid Werthen and Gross on their investigations. Each historical reference is given a loving explication; sites in the novel now have illustrations, most of them from 1900, such as that above, of the Votivkirche. Why is it called that? Check out the accompanying annotation to find out.

Best of all, there is nothing to buy. Simply get out your Severn House edition of the novel, and follow page by page and line by line the plentiful illustrations and annotations that Tom–a fellow Viennophile from way back–has made available on the amazing Web site, Book Drum.  Then follow the clickables in the blue menu bar at the top. “Bookmarks” contains the annotations/illustrations. But there are also reviews posted, as well as a map, summary, and glossary, among other addenda.

Vielen dank, Tom.

Read Full Post »

Gotta Go

The uncles are all dead. They were a hearty lot, the Paulsons. Lived into their nineties most of them, as did their sister, my mom. The last of them died recently and it got me thinking about my favorite, Uncle Harry, who passed on several years ago.

I lost my own dad when I was five. I probably know him best from family stories; sometimes I don’t know if my memories are of the stories told about him or are actually memories of him. My favorite story/memory is of us both sick, me in one bedroom and him across the hallway in another. My mom set up a series of mirrors opposite our beds reflecting off a common mirror in the hallway so that we could look at one another. My dad had these wonderful big ears. I remember him waving at me one morning, his ears seeming to hover around his head like a lopsided halo.

He died the next day.

Read Full Post »

A Happy-Ending Publishing Tale Reprised

Over the years I have had a number of requests to re-issue my first thriller, Time of The Wolf. It is still one of my favorites novels, and I am currently reprising its protagonist, Radok, in a couple of other loosely related novels that will form a triptych of postwar and early Cold War Europe. Today it goes on sale as a Kindle for just $2.99 with super new cover art from Peter Ratcliffe.

This book had a charmed life. It began as a dream of a cop descending a massive flight of stone steps outside a ministry of some sort. It was obvious in the dream it was a ministry and somewhere in Central Europe, and by the look of the fedoras and double-breasted suits, it was mid-century or earlier. The policeman, as he is bouncing down the stairs, thinks, “Just a death in death’s time. What does it matter?”

Well, it turned out it mattered a whole lot. I spent the next three years chasing that dream. I was fortunate enough to get early efforts of the manuscript to one of the all-time great agents, Al Zuckerman (Ken Follett was among dozens of other writers Al helped groom), who liked what he saw, but gave me an entirely new way to look at the story. He promised to take another look at it once I had revised. A year later, I sent in the revision. Fortunately, Al still remembered me. Three days later I had a two-book contract and money in the bank that would finance the writing of the second book.

Read Full Post »

Wash Your Damn Hands!: A Tale of Deception and Birth

Ignaz Semmelweis

I am a great fan of Ignaz Semmelweis. I met him when researching my book on Hitler and his time in Vienna. I found the story compelling. Here was a physician who saw the obvious–not the easiest thing to do. Faced with mortality rates of 10 to 35% for women giving birth in the clinics of Vienna in the mid nineteenth century, he looked for reasons rather than excuses. These women died of what was called puerperal fever following childbirth. In fact, the Vienna General Hospital’s obstetric clinic had three times the mortality rate of the midwife’s ward.

Semmelweis, something of an outsider to Vienna at the time as a Hungarian practicing in Vienna, looked outside of the box. What was the difference here? Well, number one, many of the physicians working in the obstetric wards began their days performing autopsies and dissections in the morgue in the basement of the General Hospital. They were quite literally digging their hands into the viscera of dead bodies teaming with millions of bacteria. But of course at this time the germ theory had not yet been advanced. Bacteria was a word that awaited another century. But using simple empirical evidence, Semmelweis thought that perhaps there was a connection between those doctors dipping their hands into the open cavities of dead people, wiping them off on their soiled white jackets, and then proceeding to assist in the birth of babies, and the subsequent death of the mothers. He proposed a simple experiment: before proceeding to work on healthy individuals, doctors should wash their hands in a solution of lime and chlorine.

The mortality rate in birthing wards dropped dramatically to below 1%.

Read Full Post »

The “Place of Place” in the Viennese Mysteries of J. Sydney Jones

The Silence, the third novel in my Viennese Mysteries series, continues to earn kudos from reviewers. Library Journal, in a starred review, just called it an “intricately plotted, gracefully written, and totally immersive read,” while Kirkus Reviews, in its Februrary 1, 2012, edition, noted: “Jones’ measured, stately prose is perfectly in tune with his period setting and his hero’s intense intellectual curiosity. … His intricate plot unfolds with suspense and style.” My publishers have just contracted for the fourth in the series, due out next year.

Sorry for the horn-tooting, but to celebrate, I post here some of the unused portions of an extensive interview I did with Big Thrill contributor and author Gary Kriss:

Your novels can be seen as “place paradigms.” Can you explain the difference, if any, between setting and place? Further, could you explain the “place of place” in novels and, particularly, in thriller novels.

Well, the classic distinction is that setting is bigger than mere place or location; in addition,  it includes time in its broadest and narrowest senses, and even the weather. My Vienna novels are certainly heavily dependent on setting. It’s not just Vienna that is at the center of things, but that amazing, bubbling, schizophrenic place (at once revolutionary and stodgy) that is Vienna 1900. And the “place of place” or of setting in my fiction–absolutely central. From years of living in the city and from further years of researching the turn of the twentieth century in Vienna, I attempt a bit of time travel in each of the novels. I am in the time and place. I surround myself with visuals of Vienna 1900, listen to its music while I write, read the words of fiction and nonfiction writers of the time, keep a timeline of historical happenings handy. I personally like thrillers where the spirit of place is at work, as with Alan Furst. But the best of Le Carre depends on his pitch-perfect dialogue and very fallible characters. Lots of ways to skin that cat.

Read Full Post »

Annus Mirabilis in a Mutable World

For those of you who may have missed this when it was posted at The Rap Sheet, I reprise here the “Story behind the Story” of my new novel, THE SILENCE, a “splendid third whodunit featuring attorney Karl Werthen and criminologist Hanns Gross,” according to Publishers Weekly. The novel was also picked by Kirkus Reviews in pre-pub for its “10 Thrillers to Watch for This Fall” list. Herewith, some of the backstory to the genesis of this work, third in the Viennese Mysteries series.

I turned twenty-one 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.

Read Full Post »

A “Splendid” Silence

The third installment in my Viennese Mysteries series, The Silence, will be out December 1, and Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review, noting that “Jones vividly evokes 1900 Vienna under the leadership of its notorious anti-Semitic mayor, Karl Lueger, in his splendid third whodunit featuring attorney Karl Werthen and criminologist Hanns Gross.” Kirkus Reviews earlier included it in its “10 Thrillers to Watch for This Fall” list. I also provide some background to the inspiration for this novel in a “Story behind the Story” entry at the Rap Sheet.

To celebrate the pub date, I am posting the first chapter here. Enjoy!

Read Full Post »

A Memoir of Cold War Vienna

Fans of this blog know that I occasionally post remembrances of Vienna and Europe during the final decades of the Cold War. These have always gotten a good response–good enough that I have gathered some of these together (plus a long short story) for a memoir now available as an Amazon Kindle.

Here is the blue-eyed refugee from the Biafran War, Ubhani, the man in the tower of the title, seeking asylum in the Austrian capital; the Hungarian patriot who pays his own special tribute to the 1956 uprising; the nondescript state police agent commissioned to watch foreigners in neutral Austria to ensure they did not ruffle the feathers of the Soviets; the editor of a prestigious Viennese publishing house none too eager to do business with a brash young Ami.

Travel back to Czechoslovakia just months after the Soviet’s brutal suppression of Prague Spring in’68; to guard towers along the waist-deep waters of a lake on the Austro-Hungarian border; to a cozy armchair at the British Council Library; to an all-purpose Tabak Trafik: to life in a Cretan cave; or to the final voyage of the SS France.

An added bonus is the short story, “Body Blows,” which introduces Sam Kramer, the foreign correspondent protagonist from my new series of novels set in Europe following the fall of the Wall.

Cover art is by a talented graphic artist, Peter Ratcliffe.

And hey, at $4.99, what’s not to like?

Enjoy!

Read Full Post »

“Bassena” Culture and the Aesthetics of Infirmity

Some facts and figures.  For many of these I must thank Tony Judt, a gentleman and scholar who is sorely missed. His Postwar is an incredibly readable overview of Europe from 1945 to the early years of the new millennium.

I have mentioned elsewhere that Vienna in the 1960s was, in the words of my poet-friend George Vance, arrested in the Moose Lodge stage of development. Some numbers: Car ownership was low at the time: Great Britain had only about 2,300 cars in 1951; Spain just 89,000; and in France only one in twelve households had a car. But between 1950 and 1980, car ownership doubled each decade.  The advent of the Volkswagen Beetle, the Renault 4CV,the Fiat 500 and 600, and the Citroen 2CV transformed Europe from a continent on public transport to one in the private car looking for the next rest stop.

Read Full Post »