Goodnight Vienna, Jane Thynne Interview.
Jane, many congratulations on Midnight in Vienna. What is it about the city that made you want to set much of the book there?
It’s impossible to think about twentieth century art, philosophy, psychology, or politics and not to think of Vienna. It an endlessly fascinating city which also became, in the early years of the twentieth century, a crucible of thought. Part of this, I think was down to coffee house culture. When the Turks of the Ottoman empire invaded Austria and nearly took Vienna, the legend goes that they left their sacks of coffee behind, fuelling the rise of the coffee house. Either way, the coffee house became a venue for figures such as Freud, Goethe, Beethoven, Lenin and Trotsky and a perfect place for the discussion and exchange of ideas.
Vienna is full of dichotomies. During the period of Red Vienna, it was at the forefront of social change, with big housing projects like the Karl Marx Hof providing revolutionary improvements in accommodation for the workers. Yet it was also the place where the constitution was suspended, and the right wing arose. During Nazi times, Austrian fascists were considered more extreme than other Nazis. And who can forget the most notorious Viennese resident, Adolf Hitler. Vienna was important to Hitler because he had gone there to make his fortunes as an artist and been rejected not once but twice by the Academy of Fine Arts in 1907 and 1908. During that time, he lived in poverty and it was said that resentment towards Vienna continued to burn in his heart. Thus, after the Anschluss, he headed straight for the city and made an address to the people from the balcony of the Hofburg. When his tanks entered Vienna he called it a War of Flowers, Blumenkrieg, because he had been expecting the Austrians to throw stones, and instead they threw roses.
Above all, it is the perfect setting for a spy novel. Geographically poised between East and West, the city has always been an important spy hub. Not only was Vienna the place where Kim Philby met his first wife, and became immersed in the ideas of communism, but it was the home of Arnold Deutsch who went on to control the Cambridge Five spy ring. And as anyone who has seen The Third Man will know, even after the war it continued to be an active playground for a host of shady characters.
Your heroine is Stella Fry. What sort of person is she?
As with so many protagonists of spy novels, Stella is an outsider. She is thirty, poor and clever. She comes from a modest background but studied languages at Oxford and took a job teaching English to a Jewish family in Vienna, until the Anschluss forced them to flee. At the start of the novel, she has just returned to Britain, broke and broken hearted, having left her fiancé in Austria. She answers an advertisement to type the manuscript of a famous detective novelist, Hubert Newman, and when he is found dead the next day, she is drawn into a complex mystery stretching from London to Vienna.
Espionage writing is very much part of the plot – what authors were people reading during this period?
Midnight in Vienna was partly inspired by today’s rise in cosy crime fiction, led by Richard Holmes and Richard Coles. I was struck by how this echoed the situation in 1938, when Golden Age detective fiction was at its apogee. The novels of Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey and Dorothy L Sayers were everywhere. I suspect this craze was propelled by the same factors; nervousness, anxiety about the future, and a desire for a safe world where justice is done, loose ends tied up and perpetrators are punished. It was fun to set a story around a cosy detective novelist who turned out to be not so cosy.
You write about the Red List, a security service list of names suspected to be communists during the 1930s. Do you have some sympathy for those who, in an era of appeasement, saw communism as the only bulwark against fascism?
One of the great challenges of historical fiction – and perhaps why we write it – is to think retrospectively. To genuinely understand the mindset of people in the past, given what they knew at the time. I think many Britons watching the rise of fascism on the continent felt instinctive sympathy with the opposing forces, and that instinct was exemplified by the people like Orwell who went to fight in Spain. It was only when, as we know from Orwell, they had a close acquaintance with communism, that they realised the horrors of that system. The plot of Midnight in Vienna centres around exactly that divide between people who drew back from communism and those who continued to serve the Soviet system in secret.
As the author of spy novels, what do you think it is that makes them so popular, and do they resonate during times of political malaise or crisis?
I would put the exponential rise in the espionage genre down to mounting anxiety and increased levels of surveillance. The fact that you can’t walk down Putney High Street without three hundred CCTV cameras watching you has a psychological impact. We feel constantly observed, and that in turn makes us hypervigilant, even subconsciously. Thus, we are drawn to the stories of those who try to evade observation or who masquerade behind a mask. But also, we happen to be living at a mind-boggling time for espionage – Mossad’s pager operation being just the latest example.
Your novel is set during this period in the 1930s when there is a sense of foreboding of what it is to come. Do you see similarities with today?
I’m hugely interested in the 1930s – I’ve written nine books set in that period – partly because it was a hinge time when people were obliged to make up their mind which path to follow and also because there was genuine uncertainty about the future. It could not be more like today, with a polarised politics, and, to put it mildly, serious apprehension about the threats to the west.
Which spy authors currently writing do you admire?
Charles Cumming, Mick Herron, Ben Macintyre, Roger Moorhouse, Joseph Kanon, Charlotte Philby, I.S.Berry – too many to list and apologies to any I’ve left out!
Your previous two books are alternate realities (under the pen name C.J.Carey), what was it like returning to ‘real life’?
I loved writing Widowland and Queen High, which were both set in an alternative England where the war was not fought, and Britain became a Nazi protectorate. It was amazing to take a ‘what if’ view of History and follow a counterfactual path. Actually, think that’s an exercise all historical novelists would benefit from. Because I was embarking on a different genre I adopted a pen name, C.J. Carey, but I rather wish I hadn’t! Ultimately, all our novels, no matter what genre, are expressing the same perceptions of the world. Anyway, it’s good to come out as oneself again.
What’s next?
The next in the series featuring Harry Fox and Stella Fry is called Appointment in Paris. It’s set in May 1940 – a very dramatic time when the invasion of western Europe led to the premiership of Winston Churchill. It’s set in two locations – a secret government facility in a place called Trent Park, and Paris on the eve of the invasion.
Jane Thynne is a bestselling writer and the author of Midnight in Vienna.
