Mark T. Sullivan

I've chased my share of ghosts in my life as a writer. A serial killer. A corrupt and powerful judge. The innocent victims of addiction.  The last ghosts I caught. The killer got away.

            For a good long while there, I thought the General might too.

            The General was a high-ranking Nazi in Italy in the last two years of World War II. I first heard tell of him at a dinner party in Montana where I live.  The General, it turned out, had played a powerful part in the extraordinary life of an Italian boy becoming a young man.

            His name is Pino Lella. For fifty years Pino had kept the story of his life in the last two years of the war secret. But then he told some of it to an entrepreneur and social activist named Robert Dehlendorf, who told it to a guy named Larry Minkoff, who in turn, at that dinner party, told fragments of the story to me.

            But those fragments were enough for me to know that if they were true, they might form the spine of what could be the last great untold story of World War II.  Three months later, I landed in Milan. Pino met me, 80, tall, brawny and utterly charming and welcoming.  He spent thirty years teaching skiing in the U.S. and speaks beautiful English, and had the energy of a man half his age.

Over the next two weeks Pino and I crisscrossed northern Italy, visiting the scenes of his remarkable coming of age tale of courage, of selflessness, of romance, of grief, of heartbreak, and mysteries that haunt him to this day.

            Chief among these mysteries was the identity of the General. Pino did not and does not speak German. He communicated with the General in French. He claimed the man was the commander of the Organization Todt, the armaments and construction arm of the Nazi war machine.  

            He said he believed the General's name was "Kaufmann" or "Hoffman."

For the next three years after my visit to Italy, I worked to corroborate other aspects of Pino's amazing story, an epic tale that leaps from the fashion salons of Milan to a Catholic boy's school high in the Alps that served as a last way station for Jews wanting to escape the Nazis by climbing over the mountains into Switzerland in the winter of 1943-44. The boys were the guides. Pino was the original guide, responsible for saving dozens of refugees, Jewish and political.

            That enough would have been a fascinating book.

            But in April 1944, on the verge of being drafted, Pino was forced by his father and uncle to join the Organization Todt as a way of avoiding combat. Through serendipitous events, he became the driver for the General, and so became a spy inside the German High command in Italy, feeding his information through clandestine shortwave radios to the Allies listening in Switzerland.

            Along the way, Pino met and fell into a tragic love affair with the maid who worked for the General's mistress, and became caught up in events that led to the surrender of the Germans in Italy in May, 1945.

            Those events culminated with Pino being asked by an U.S. Army Major  to conduct one last escape from Italy, a suicide mission that seemed designed to save and protect certain high-ranking Nazi officers  at the very end of the war.

            It took me three years of research to find evidence to corroborate most of the story. Indeed, I had virtually all of it except the identity of the General and the reasons behind the escape mission at the war's end. I consulted historians. I went to the National Archives of the United States and read every piece of paper I could find about the Organization Todt, and about the Italian resistance and the short-wave radios they used to contact the Allies.

            But nowhere did I find mention of a General named Kaufmann or Hoffmann in the Organization Todt in Italy. I got to the point where I thought I was chasing a ghost that I might never see clearly.

            Finally, last month, I went to Germany and spent eight days in the Bundesarchves in Berlin and the military archives in Freiburg.  I discovered more and more mysteries, including documents that detailed a mass burning of top secret Organization Todt files in Milan in the last two weeks of the war.

            Again, nowhere in those files did we find the General, or even someone remotely like him.  The night before my last day of research, I was feeling glum. The translator I'd hired to help me was feeling glum.  The General was a ghost, perhaps lost to history.

            But then, around three in the morning, it hit me. Maybe the General did not work for the Organization Todt. Maybe he ran the Nazi agency that ran the Organization Todt.

            Following this line of reasoning, we found the General around eleven that morning.  We also found documents that hugely supported Pino's description of the General and the events in which he was involved in the last year of the war.  We also discovered why Pino thought his name was Kaufmann or Hoffman, though it was not. I got a picture of him and sent it to Pino. Over the weekend he confirmed that this was the General he drove for and helped escape.

            Sorry to be grinning, but I just caught a ghost!

Labels: Nazi General Italy Organization Todt Pino Lella

TRIPLE CROSS came out today after a week of great advance reviews!

The St. Louis Post Dispatch called the novel, "splendid," and said, "If you're watching your real-life stocks tank because of the real-life greed of some investment bankers and mortgage brokers, you'll take malicious pleasure in sitting down with "Triple Cross" for the fictional payback."

My hometown newspaper, The Bozeman Chronicle, called TRIPLE CROSS "a scathing indictment of corrupt politicians and Wall Street kings."

And Dianesbooks.com raved, "Wow! The best thriller of April 2009. Wow!"

Several people have asked me today what it's like for a new novel to come out. I've told them it's kind of a scatter-shot experience. It's still exciting to go into bookstores and see what you've worked on for years finally on the shelves. It's fun to hear from old fans and dear friends.

Good reviews are soul supporters. Bad reviews are a thorn I try to pull out of my backside as quickly as possible. If you dwell on them you never get a thing done, so I don't. Some people will never like what you do. It's part of the experience of being a writer. One trick is to focus on the fact that your fans are far more numerous than your detractors.

The other trick is to sit down on the day a book comes out and take some time out to write. It helps keep me grounded. A book gets published, but a writer writes. I try not to forget that. Ever.

Also, if you get the chance, take a look at this: www.thewashingtonwatch.com/montana/massacre

I haven't published a new novel in almost five years and I know some of my readers and fans have been asking why.

Some of the reasons were business related, painful and not worth getting into. But after the publication of Serpent's Kiss, I was burnt out for a while and spent a few months wandering around in the woods and along the rivers near my house in Montana, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. The answer after all that therapeutic navel gazing was that I wanted to continue to write. I realized that writing is one of my favorite things to do, and that got my butt back in the chair and my fingers on the keyboard.
Here's a brief account of the last five years.

I was still burnt on novels, so
I taught myself to write screenplays. I wrote three scripts the first year, and then I wrote a novel that I loved but nobody else liked. Then Serpent's Kiss became a huge bestseller in Germany and that gave me the ability to fly to Italy and research what I believe is the last great untold story of World War II.

I returned to the United States, and at the same time wrote the first drafts of both TRIPLE CROSS and the World War II screenplay called THE FORGOTTEN FRONT.

Then I wrote a novel under a pseudonym that my agent's trying to sell.

And

I'm about 90 percent through the writing of my new, new book, tentatively entitled THE 18th RULE.

Along the way I wrote twenty full length magazine articles, founded a business that offers eco-friendly alternatives to asphalt, and became president of a non-profit foundation dedicated to alpine ski racing.

In short, it's been a busy five years even if there hasn't been a lot to show for it on the bookshelves.

I learned a lot in five years and had a heck of a good time for the most part. I try to live every day like it's my last. I laugh a lot.

I go on adventures as often as possible. I spend most days writing down my dreams. I can look out the window of my office and see the Bridger Mountains cast in snow. I'm healthy.

I'm the proud dad of two great boys, and the loving husband of my wife of twenty-five years. I'm a lucky guy. I know it and I thank God for the blessings he's given me every day since I last published a novel.

With his help, I can assure you that it won't be five years until I publish another.

Labels: burnt out, Italy, novel, Triple Cross, World War II, writing

I've written nine novels, half a dozen screenplays, twenty short stories, hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, but never a blog. I'm a stickler for form, but this is a writing form that seems to have no form, from letter to shout out, from column to compendium. The point being that after reading hundreds of these things, you realize a blog can be virtually anything you want it to be. Which is cool and scary and creative and daunting.

So, what to blog about, on this, my initial foray?

How about limbo?

I'm not talking the dance. And I'm not talking the Catholic version, which I was introduced to via a disturbing illustration in my second grade catechism book -- a blue whirlpool with black human silhouettes being sucked into the void.

No, I'm talking that limbo between the time you finish a manuscript and when you hold the actual book in your hand. Prior to entering limbo, the manuscript is life consuming, six or seven hours a day, six days a week for a year or more. You spend all this time and you dream, you doodle, you draft, discover and redraft and dream again, until it feels whole to you and your editor.

You've given birth to something, but then, like some scene in Dickens, the baby disappears.

You get to see the baby now and then as it goes through copy editing, galleys and proofing. But it's no longer there every day. You're disconnected and cast into that limbo between writing and publishing, creativity and marketing.

I'm in that limbo right now with TRIPLE CROSS. It been done for almost a year. It comes out in mid-April, three months from now, and I've seen the cover, and read the blurbs other writers have graciously given me. But I've forgotten the experience of writing the novel because I'm so far into the next one, less than fifty pages to go until I have a first draft.

After nine novels, I find that that's the only way to fill the limbo between writing and publishing. I keep writing. I invent something new and it becomes entwined in my life and eventually dominates my thoughts until my editor says it's done; and I'm childless once again, spinning around in that blue whirlpool, looking at the silhouettes that have joined me in limbo, and trying to tell their stories.