ROLL THE CEDITS: THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

Roll the Credits is, in short form, the Second World War and liberation of Paris seen through the eyes of author/screenwriter Hector Lassiter.

But it's also a special novel in the Lassiter canon in a personal sense.

Long before Roll the Credits, there was the Lassiter entry Head Games. That novel was dedicated to the memory of my maternal grandfather, William Charles Sipe, Sr.

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ORDER HEAD GAMES: THE GRAPHIC NOVEL

In Head Games, I was trying to write the kind of fiction book my grandfather most loved to read—pulpy and fast, but with some gritty (and dark) heart.

My granddad had three sons, two of whom would serve in the military.

William C. Sipe Sr. and Jr.

The eldest, whose shared name promoted my grandfather to "Sr." status, saw action in Europe during the Second World War. He passed away a few years ago. One night, bumping around online, I found a little photo of Uncle Junior in Europe, in what appear to be happier times. This is the shot:

In a bar in Corvallis just before the 70th went to Fort Leonard Wood.
From left to right: J.D. Hollingsworth, William C. Sipe Jr,
Johnny Borowski and Johnny Kaufman.

He's the dark-haired guy in the dark jacket. I've spent a lot of time looking at that photo. I see some of my own features in that face...imagine how different my life was at that age from his.

Once—just once—I remember my grandfather talking about some war experiences shared with him by my Uncle Junior. It was graphic, pretty terrible to hear, even for a nine- or ten-year-old with already dark reading tastes. At the time, I thought maybe my grandfather was reciting this story from conversational memory.

Many years later, some of my grandparents' photos and letters were passed down to me. Among them, I found a letter my uncle had written his parents from over there. Its written in cursive, in pencil. I saw then that the one-off, dark story my grandfather shared with me sprang from this letter. Some excerpts:

May 28, 1945
Hanau, Germany

Dear Mother:
This is Monday. I'm ok, everything is allright here. I haven't received a letter from you for three days now. I hope this finds you all well. Tell the children hello from me.

They have relaxed the censorship regulations so now I can write more than I could before.

There's a lot that I would like to tell you but it would take a whole tablet. I can tell you the town that I have been in and the ones we have fought in. I'm glad that at the time I was in combat I couldn't tell you much because I would have worried you more than before.

When we left Fort Leonard Wood, we went to Camp Miles Standish near Boston. We were there from the 23 of Dec to the 8th of Jan. We reached port after nine days at sea. It was Marseille in Southern France. The harbor there was filled with sunken ships. The first night there we had an air raid it really gave us a thrill but it was nothing like the things that were to come.

In about two weeks, we started to the front to go into combat. We were all on edge not knowing what was to come. In about a week we had reached a position about two miles behind the front lines. We couldn't sleep at night because the big guns were firing continuous.

We were shoved into combat in about three more days. We started fighting in France...  I want to tell you what my job was before I go any further. I'm in a liaison section it works with the infantry. We live, sleep and eat with them on the front lines. We direct the artillery fire on the enemy, therefore we have to be on some high ground where we can see our troops and the enemy at the same time.

The most that I have ever been scared was one night when we were on Spicheren Heights, near Spicheren France. We were on the very front lines... We were sitting on top of this hill overlooking the Krauts. All at once they started a drive and we were caught flat-footed. They sent about 20 tiger tanks at us and about 300 men.

I was never so scared in my life. I was in a foxhill on top of a hill and didn't have a chance in the world of getting out. You have never seen or could imagine a sight like it. The shells were hitting the ground and the trees all around me. The tanks were about 300 yards from us and our anti tank guns were doing a pretty good job on the tanks but the Krauts kept on coming. The tanks came to about 100 yards of us and stopped, but the infantry kept right on coming. We were directing fire from the artillery on them and killing a lot but more kept coming. When they got too close for artillery fire all I could do was fight side by side with the infantry. They were within fifty feet of us before we opened up with our small arms.

They were dropping like flies but so were our men. Three of them came for the same foxhole I was in, shooting their rifles at me. I knew that I had to do something quick so I stick my head (out) and let go about 50 shots from my Tommy gun at them. Most of my shots hit them in the stomach and they died instantly. They were the first that I've ever killed and were the last. By that time our tanks had gotten up there and more infantry. We pushed them back to where they were before and the next day we drove on...

Sometimes I dreamed about those three men I killed. They were about 22 or 23.

I will close now. Write and don't worry. I'm in no danger now and I won't be unless I should go to Japan.

Love,
Bill

————

Update: I've since found a long, compelling, photo rich history of the 493rd Amored Field units' combat history that lays out the action that so affected my uncle. (P. 41 of this pdf.) It appears it happened on Feb. 22, 1945: "They closed in on our troops from four sides. The attack was sustained for 30 minutes..."—CM

————

When I was a kid, World War II wasn't all that long ago. Most of its surviving vets were still fairly vital men. This year they are in astonishingly short supply.

We particularly romanticize that conflict, of course. So many great love songs came out of it; they still grind out WWII movies.

To many minds, rightly or wrongly, that war constitutes the last just and "good" war.

In the course of writing Head Games, I included an article penned by poet Bud Fiske about Hector Lassiter's life—some pulpy bio/profile Fiske had penned for the long-defunct men's journal, True Magazine.

I built into Hector's backstory a kind of notorious World War II history lifted from the life of author Ernest Hemingway.

In effect, Hem went over to Europe as a war correspondent, but morphed into a guerilla leader who was among the first into Paris, precisely seven decades ago this year.

In writing Print the Legend, I again injected a little more about Hector and his picaresque, somewhat controversial World War II war correspondent comportment.

Flash forward a year or so. All of the original projected seven novels in the Hector Lassiter series were in at least first-draft form. Head Games was then freshly nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. Hector and I had some buzz.

An editor from St. Martins comes courting. John Schoenfelder reads all of the Lassiter drafts. We have this long evening telephone conversation in which he pitches me on writing yet another Lassiter. Its the Lassiter he really wants to publish, but doesn't yet exist.

The novel John envisions would encompass Hector's World War II adventures. (He had some other ideas, too, some involving Hector and the writing of Mein Kampf, a concept I could just never figure out a way to bring off...)

I went down some different alleys when I began to tackle that book.

I wanted to touch on pre-WWII German cinema's influence on film noir, the genre sometimes-screenwriter Hector Lassiter swam so deeply in.

My now sixteen-year-old eldest daughter was deeply engrossed by the Holocaust and Anne Frank at the time. More grist...

I was also reading some newly released materials related to Hemingway's WWII efforts, along with some books about the OSS and this strange special military ops branch...

Seems at some point, the Office of Strategic Services employed filmmakers, authors and other creative types to engage in black-ops and efforts at enemy misdirection. 

These guys recorded soundtracks to emit from empty forests that simulated nonexistent troop action. They painted canvases to fox aerial surveillance planes into "seeing" rows of planes and tanks.

They used authors like Hector to script fake radio chatter studded with bogus intelligence disguised as injudicious, informal banter.

All of this went into the stew, along with Mr. Schoenfelder's insistence that the whole brew come to a boiling point with a climax in what he termed, "the steaming jungles of Brazil."

There was so much to get into the pot—the turbulence of the Liberation of Paris, the reprisals against those Parisians who collaborated or consorted with the occupying German forces... The fallout for the Hemingways and Lassiters who bent the rules to help the great cause...

But then Roll the Credits went onto the back burner for a long time.

John and I edited Credits, had it in line for a 2011 release, but then John moved on to other publishing fields and I sensed his successor wasn't fully behind RTC, didn't connect with the novel's subject matter. 

I instead pitched her on a swap, and we ended up with One True Sentence closing out my St. Martin's contract run. (I did creep the antagonist from RTC into the opening pages of OTS, however.)

In the intervening years, verbal agreements were made to publish RTC elsewhere, and then they dissolved. Things fell apart; the center would not hold.

Enter Betimes Books: At last, on the 70th anniversary of the Liberation of Paris, Roll the Credits finally sees the light.

This is Hector's own private war from Lyon through Paris and on into the Liberation. From there it's back into Hollywood, just a few months after the events of Head Games.

And, for John, it's those steaming jungles of Brazil in all their sweaty, deadly glory.

Roll the Credits marks the first time since Head Games that Hector narrates his own story.

RTC is also the last of the big-page-count Lassiter novels. (You need some real room for a subject as big as WWII and the birth of film noir).

This one was written in the early months of 2009. Like Toros & Torsos, it came together very quickly in first draft.

The greater struggle was finding the right title for the book. For the longest time, the novel lived under the pulpy working title, Hector Lassiter vs. the Nazis.

In the end, I took inspiration from the title of a then recently-released song by Tom Russell that went to the heart of RTC's cinematic themes. 

Here's a music video of that tune, as well as the three book trailers prepared for Roll the Credits.

ONE TRUE SENTENCE: Paperback/eBook

FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND: Paperback/eBook

TOROS & TORSOS: Paperback/eBook

THE GREAT PRETENDER: Paperback/eBook

ROLL THE CREDITS: Paperback/eBook

THE RUNNING KIND: Paperback/eBook

HEAD GAMES: Paperback/eBook

PRINT THE LEGEND: Paperback/eBook/audio

DEATH IN THE FACE: Paperback/eBook

THREE CHORDS & THE TRUTH: Paperback/eBook

ONE TRUE SENTENCE: THE STORY BEHIND THE NOVEL

2017 Marks the 10th anniversary of Hector Lassiter's debut in HEAD GAMES, an Edgar & Anthony awards nominated novel and now available for pre-order as a graphic novel from First Second Books.

To mark the anniversary, we're taking occasional looks back at the ten novels in the Hector Lassiter series. First up, ONE TRUE SENTENCE, and an essay repackaged from its original appearance at The Rap Sheet Blog a few years ago.

Although my series centers on Twentieth Century crime novelist and screenwriter Hector Lassiter, as many critics and readers have noted, the novels sometimes seem nearly as much about Lassiter’s longtime friend, Ernest Hemingway.

In the first Lassiter installment, the largely 1957-set Head Games, Hem was a kind of off-camera presence. Yet Hemingway cast a long enough shadow in my debut that considerably more than one reader or critic mistakenly left Head Games believing Hemingway to have been an actual character in the book.

In Lassiter #2, the decades-spanning Toros & Torsos, Hemingway was Hector’s sidekick across years of the story’s action.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Last year brought Printthe Legend, a novel turning on the possibility that Hemingway’s death in the summer of 1961 might have been something other than the suicide history records. Hemingway loomed over Print as a kind of restless ghost, and, at key points, he was seen in flashback.

Now we come to One True Sentence. In a more traditionally structured series, this novel would be a series launcher. The novel is set during one week in Paris, in February 1924.

Paris. The 1920s. We all have firm and fixed notions about how it must have been. I’m wagering most of us have had those notions set for us by at least some of the writings of Ernest Hemingway.

AN EARLY VERSION OF THE COVER
FOR THE BETIMES BOOKS REISSUE
OF ONE TRUE SENTENCE

As OTS opens, Hector Lassiter and Ernest Hemingway are in their early twenties. They’ve had some short stories printed, but neither has yet published — hell, even completed drafting — a proper novel. It’s the youngest we’ll ever see Hector and Hem in the Lassiter series.

Already, the questions are coming my way again from early OTS interviewers and newcomers to the books: Why Hemingway?

Partly it’s because I intended the Lassiter series to be as much about key artistic movements — modernism, surrealism, post-modernism and so on — as about solving mysteries. Hemingway was a key figure who straddled or helped to define all those -isms.

Blame it, too, on young, overlapping reads of The Sun Also Rises and A Moveable Feast. Mostly the latter.

From biographies and letters, I see now how contrived or even disingenuous much of Hemingway’s posthumous memoir truly is. Doesn’t matter. I’m a trust-the-art, not-the-artist kind of guy. I was seduced, early and powerfully, by Hemingway’s portrayal of what it was like to be a young journalist and aspiring fiction writer in Paris in the 1920s; the place, Gertrude Stein famously said, “Where the Twentieth Century was.”

GERTRUDE STEIN

As a young journalist drafting novels in the evening and on weekends — albeit doing all that writing in Ohio — my life was changed by A Moveable Feast. I wanted to live that book. Hemingway became my master and kind of the literary equivalent of what Elvis represents to rockers — the goal and the cautionary example.

THE COVER OF THE ORIGINAL
ONE TRUE SENTENCE
HARDCOVER
FROM MINOTAUR BOOKS

Knowing I couldn’t really live Hem’s memoir, I promised myself to write my own Paris novel that I could live in — to put my own vision of the City of Lights on the page. The question was what would that novel be about? Who would anchor that book? Years passed.

Between January 2005 and December 2007, as a fiction writer, I had what Hemingway used to term “a belle époque.” I wrote most of the Lassiter series, a standalone scheduled to see print later this year and the nonfiction book, Rogue Males. The pages were piling up. Simultaneously, I was re-reading a lot of Hemingway. I came back to A Moveable Feast with a grown man’s eyes.

I wrote Toros & Torsos between Halloween and Christmas of 2006. On January 1, I began to write One True Sentence (then traveling under the working title of City of Lights). My own 1920s Paris novel was unfolding in my head even as I was in the early going of composing Toros.

From the jump, OTS was envisioned to be a noir turn on A Moveable Feast and a kind of post-modern dark comedy about the mystery genre itself.

As Dick Adler wrote in a January post here at the Rap Sheet (“Hem and Gert Talk Mysteries”), Gertrude Stein was an unabashed mystery fan. She called her favorite mystery writers her “mystifiers.” In an early meeting, Stein urged on a young Hemingway a copy of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ Jack the Ripper tale, The Lodger.

I envisioned a series of murders of literary magazine editors along both banks of the Seine — crimes that would hit a commercially unviable writer like Gertrude Stein where she lived. In desperation, Stein — fixed in the Nero Wolfe-like comfort of her favorite chair in her salon — gathers to her a collection of Paris-dwelling mystery writers to stop the killings.

The detectives in One True Sentence include an Agatha Christie-esque British writer of locked-room mysteries who has long been established as Hector’s bête noire. We meet a fetching American female mystery writer named Brinke Devlin who looks like Louise Brooks and writes like Craig Rice. 

LOUISE BROOKS, ACTRESS, AUTHOR

Representing the hard-boiled school, we have Hector (and, in his way, Hemingway). Bouncing up against this collection of unlikely amateur detectives is a Simenon-like French inspector.

As One True Sentence unfolds, we meet characters and witness events that will inform the early novels of Hector Lassiter and Ernest Hemingway. We’re a party to a secret history of events living between the lines of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. We’re afforded a glimpse of the portion of the iceberg lurking below the water line to put it in Hemingway’s own artistic terms.

For Hemingway, particularly, February 1924 was a kind of pivotal moment in time. Intimations of a tipping point being reached for the young writer were just being felt.

Hem was newly returned to Paris after a disastrous return to daily journalism in Toronto. He came back with one small press collection of his writings behind him, and another pending in the fall. He became a subeditor to Ford Madox Ford’s literary magazine, The Transatlantic — a plot point in OTS. Despite no novel to support it, Hem’s reputation as a fiction writer to watch was just beginning to spread.

ME, AT THE ENTRANCE TO
HEMINGWAY'S FIRST
PARIS APARTMENT,
IN THE LATIN QUARTER

All of those key literary and artistic figures who appear in A Moveable Feast were in Paris that winter — crowding in some last good food and wine before abandoning the city to an expected influx of tourists anticipating Paris’ role as host city to the Summer Olympic games.

And then there were the suicides.

Paris always had its share of men and women intent upon killing themselves. The always-suicide-preoccupied Hemingway even wrote an early, undistinguished poem about all that.

Yet as the winter of 1924 unfolded in a haze of snow and freezing rain, the suicide rate in Paris spiked, particularly in artistic circles.

Handwringing journalists and the like blamed the young artistic community for the spate of self-inflicted deaths (“Terror Sweeps Latin Quarter” one 1924 French headline read). All those deaths suggested to me the key plot point for OTS. They inspired a Dada-like artistic clique called “Nada” — a dark cult embracing murder and suicide.

THE FRENCH EDITION
OF
ONE TRUE SENTENCE

This, then, is the milieu of One True Sentence: A single week in Paris in all of its winter 1924 glory. Murder, sex and all those great writers and painters colliding, many of them treacherously bent upon screwing one another in something other than a carnal sense.

It’s Hector Lassiter and Ernest Hemingway at ground zero. It’s the key romance in Hector’s life with the woman who makes Hector, well, Hector.

It seems appropriate that Papa have the last word on the time and the place: 

“But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight."

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