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Valley of Seven Castles, a Luxembourg Thriller

Fascinating Background Info, including my discovery: Alfred Hitchcock's Final Secret.

01. Welcome to my Paris-to-Luxembourg Thriller.

02. A Modern Progressive Thriller.

03. Thrillerology Historical Sketch (to 1900)

04. Thrillerology Historical Sketch (since 1900)

05. Bombshell Revelation for Thriller Lovers

06. The Final Secret of Alfred Hitchcock

07. Gender Equality & Plot Structures A Century After Buchan

2. A Modern Progressive Thriller

Thriller As Novel of Ideas. Many thrillers (by definition, suspenseful novels jacked up to lightning speed and relentlessly crackling tension) very nicely (when they are done right) follow the curve of good-versus-evil in a stark, unreflective manner. The hero, who most likely is made interesting by his (or her) flaws, fights evil in the form of gangsters, enemy spies, or even alien invaders. It's all a bit one-dimensional, in a starkly bipolar world (dark/light); the author's ability to manipulate moral shades of gray (ambiguity) will determine how strong or weak. Think, for example, James M. Cain with his classic 1930s noir. Yeah, that works.

A fewer number of thrillers are clearly more philosophical on the grand (political, social) spectrum. I mention a few authors (Wells, London, Huxley, et al. below). I could add plenty of others: John Dos Passos' sprawling, delicious USA Trilogy, Ayn Rand's paranoid, thoughtful Anthem, Ursula K. LeGuin's thoughtful SF novels… and we'd quickly run out of room here. On this page, I'll discuss primarily a few thrillers of political ideas. Mine is a progressive thriller, meaning human rights for all. I could easily digress into a long book here, but we don't have room or time as I strive to really tell you the literary antecedents and background of this particular novel (Valley of Seven Castles, a Luxembourg Thriller).

NOTE: while reworking this Thrillerology in 2020 (Vision Year) for Caffeine Books, it occurred to me that much of what I say also applies to my prophetic 1990s warning-thriller CON2: The Generals of October; about which I'll offer more info soon. Suffice it to say for now, while the most immediate thriller film influence on my Luxembourg Thriller was 2002's The Bourne Identity (Franka Potente and Matt Damon, based on a 1980 Robert Ludlum thriller); the most significant of several thriller movies influencing CON2: The Generals of October was the 1960s Seven Days in May, based on a bestselling novel (Knebel & Bailey); and remade later starring Forrest Whitaker. Deserving of note is that the Seven Days in May screenplay was written by Rod Serling (of Twilight Zone fame; a good atmospheric match for a dark political thriller).

And, not to outdo myself, I should evoke my SF novel in the Empire of Time series: Orwell in Orbit 2084. It's a framed story moving as follows: contemporary San Diego; then a million years upstream briefly for secret agent instructions; then back to 2084 for his mission; ending with a rousing finale back home in contemporary San Diego. Our 21st Century police detective is kidnapped by odd ducks from a futuristic UFO while on a DEA stake-out in the desert near San Diego. He is whisked to a far-future city on the brink of cosmic disaster (disintegration of the Cosmopause due to a recent Time War). He becomes one of many secret agents sent back in time (in his case, to 2084) to observe the past and maybe delicately tweak a fact or two, without disturbing the course of history, but buying the upstream city another minute or an hour of survival. I think the core of that novel, in which the agent moves through an Orwellian future in 2084 to save a political dissident family, is on a par with the most stark and philosophical thriller work. Compare Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville

Bottom Line: Either/Or. When it comes to the Novel of Ideas, a writer can either expound her or his ideas in a dry, nonfictional academic thesis, or that author can work as a novelist and tell a rousing good story. I always opt for the latter. That's confusing for some readers, who expect either an emotionally rousing story (think Erich Segal's 1970s Love Story, one of my favorites) or a scary drama (think Mary Shelley's first-told 1816 Frankenstein).

Valley of Seven Castles: Both. As you will learn in the further pages of this Thrillerology, the romantic and suspenseful (pacing) inspirations for this novel included The Bourne Identity, both as the 1980 Robert Ludlum novel and the 2002 popular movie with Matt Damon and Franka Potente. On the other hand, the philosophical underpinnings include those mentioned below, and more. I've mentioned my other political thriller, CON2: The Generals of October, and for that one, as I began writing in the early 1990s, I was acutely conscious of Seven Days in May. Here is Wikipedia's summary of that novel and movie: "Seven Days in May is a 1964 American political thriller film about a military-political cabal's planned takeover of the United States government in reaction to the president's negotiation of a disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. The picture was directed by John Frankenheimer; starring Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Fredric March, and Ava Gardner; with the screenplay written by Rod Serling based on the novel of the same name by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, published in September 1962." When I wrote CON2: The Generals of October, I was also conscious of suspense-thriller movies I liked (e.g., The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor). With Valley of Seven Castles, I was conscious of the 2002 Bourne film…but, as I'll describe, there is an astounding historical and literary rootball hiding under the earth in this flowering bush.

I fancied that I was writing the first modern Progressive Thriller in Valley of Seven Castles. Readers should know that the novel is set slightly in the future (same thing with CON2: The Generals of October) in case they feel puzzled while moving through its darker passages. The setting of Valley of Seven Castles is a Europe (and a World) of tomorrow, where global corporations and zillionaires are making national governments obsolete. Whatever progress the West (outside the U.S. corporate feudalism) has achieved is in danger as the oligarchs begin to take over, as they are doing in this novel.

This novel is, at heart, a romp across Europe (in suspenseful thriller mode) but it's as much a U.S. as a European story. It's a story for the world. And  of course it celebrates the beautiful history, culture, and landscape of my other country, Luxembourg. As I move through this Thrillerology, explaining the literary and technical background of the story (plot structure, antecedents, etc.), it is important to begin by identifying the progressive urgency underlying the fast pacing and romantic struggle of Rick and Hannah.

The two young heroes, on the run for their lives and on a mission of great importance, are a U.S. pair from California. Before they meet in Paris, each is brought to Europe for separate, desperate reasons that underline the philosophical basis of my novel. They are Hannah Smith and Rick Buchan, both 25. Each is separately trapped by yet further immediate, stark circumstances in Europe and, as in any good love story, they join forces to bring the McGuffin (Alfred Hitchcock's pet name for "what is the story about?") to Luxemburgish Professor Hilaire Sander in a small Luxemburgish town near Echternach. So the characters are both European and U.S., united in a common struggle. A few more asides shed light on the underlying ideas of the novel before we move on to the wonders invoked by John Buchan (1915), Alfred Hitchcock (1935), Robert Ludlum (1980), and (oh yes) Alfred Hitchcocks Final Secret (1959).

If you are more interested in pure thrillerology as opposed to (progressive, humanistic, Mattew 7:12, Leviticus 19:18 sorts of) philosophical underpinnings, you may want to skip to the next page. If you are interested in what moved me to write this thriller in 2013-14, continue reading here before moving to the next page.

A political novel, if it honors the best practices of fiction writing, cannot become a dry, expository thesis. That is why, to the blank looks and misapprehension of many eyebrow exercisers, I wrote my other political thriller as I did: CON2: The Generals of October (written in the 1990s). In that novel, as in this one, I felt that a few salient facts would speak for themselves. No need for a long narrative in any scholarly or nonfictional form (with footnotes yet!), or I would have simply written an academic paper. I opted for a rousing entertainment instead, wearing my novelist hat and whooping astride my fiction bronco. I always write a powerful love story that takes our hero and heroine through powerful episodes of stress and suspense (called plot or story) before it all ends with Happy Ever After (HEA). That's why I have done in these two novels. CON2 tells the story of David Gordon and Victoria 'Tory' Breen, who young U.S. Army officers in a near-future Washington, D.C. mobilized for a Second Constitutiona Convention. I use Article V of the U.S. Constitution as the springboard to tell a story about what would happen if the thing we must never do (CON2) comes to pass. Hint: a coup d'etat by the Generals of October, hijacking a crippled nation that is in the throes of a crisis worse than the Civil War (and yes, there are tanks and shooting in the nation's capital). Past readers have told me that, in the age of Newt and Mitch and their accomplices, we are closer than ever to such a nightmare scenario. In both these thrillers, I opted to tell a rousing (at its core romantic) story that coincidentally illustrates a political or philosophical idea. That said, we can look at each of the great thriller writers of the past, and analyze where they stood along a spectrum from zero to total philosophical content. And yes, Nobel Laureate William Golding (Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors, The Spire) stands on that distant shore, waving his arm to be included. And who are those other gray shadows beside him? I'll stop there.

I wrote this novel primarily with the entertaining story in mind, while President Barack Obama was still blessedly in office. Much has changed (for the worse). This is a European story, a universal story, but also a U.S. story. In my novel, I am mindful of past political novelists (there have been many, including H. G. Wells in his 1895 The Time Machine, Jack London in his 1908 The Iron Heel, Aldous Huxley in his 1930 Brave New World, George Orwell in his 1948-written 1984, and more. One of my criticisms of the modern political thriller is that, too often, it is a sort of shoot-em-up Western (where the white invaders are always right) to Cold War settings without any deeper reflection. Granted, the Cold War was my preoccupation as a young U.S. Army soldier in Europe, and that Wall and barbed wire and those Warsaw Pact tanks and missiles looked pretty ominous; and I admit having been a fan of thrillers from Leslie Charteris to Eric Ambler to Helen MacInnes to Ian Fleming and John Le Carré and beyond, in varying shades of philosophical context. So it could be argued that there are maybe two larger schools of general thriller writing: one the bland, politically (right-wing) correct sort of neo-Calvinist super-hero of swords and bullets who is inerrantly right in a dark world; the other being a dark thriller (like those mentioned above, by Wells and London and Huxley et al.) that relates a social and philosophical theory as well. In this novel, I will enroll myself among the latter group.

We try to avoid specifics, to not become mired in exposition and lectures, except for the major plot element involving Hannah regarding corporate health care denial in the U.S. (laughingly called 'health insurance'). Our USA is a nation where "at least 45,000 citizens" are Murdered every year because of health care denial. I'm sure at least twice as many have their lives shortened or are maimed due to the same sorts of corporate political interference where professional medical decisions would be appropriate. Withoutuse of the M-word, it's documented in a landmark 2009 Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, and Cambridge MA Health Services study) that has been ignored because it doesn't fit our ongoing corporate-feudal propaganda. Millions of families have been bankrupted over the years, because the corporations steal over $1,000,000,000,000 (that's *trillion*) every year from our economy while robbing and killing vast numbers of citizens. Economic statistics for U.S. GDP bear that out. Those citizens have not been informed that their fate in life doesn't have to be this dark. We don't need to reinvent the wheel; the case is proven in every other industrialized, modern nation around the world where they all have universal health care as a fundamental human right. That is a compelling personal issue for me, and I put my passion into framing the character of Hannah Smith around the lack of humane health care in the USA.

My core position is for moderation, cooperation, tolerance—and a revolution at the ballot box in keeping with the spirit of the U.S. Constitution. It's time to take our world back from the sixty-three billionaires who own more than half of the world's wealth. Already, much of the U.S. has been outsourced with the help of corporate-republican political actors in all three branches of U.S. government—executive, legislative, and judicial. Similar stealthy destruction has been wreaked across other Western nations in a world increasingly run by political tyrants working hand in hand with demagogues and those religio-corporate tyrants who use simple people’s faith to deliver those devastating, suicidal votes for their worst enemies (e.g., Dump, Putin, Assad, and a growing number of other corrupt sociopaths and murderers increasingly taking total chargo of the world on behalf of their billionaire pimps).

My premise in developing Valley of Seven Castles has been that the action themes of previous thriller generations served well to entertain readers in the previous century. The Cold War is over, World War II is ancient history, and the evil government is a canard of the corporate-owned press to support crimes like preventing U.S. citizens from having universal health care while stealing up to a trillion dollars a year from the U.S. GDP; trashing the union movement through false propaganda; and denying climate change while the earth and its creatures undergo a manmade extinction. Drill, Baby, Drill is the only mandate in narcissistic, infantile oligarch brains that live in the moment, have no social responsibility or connection to other humans or animals, and do not plan ahead (a key component of the malformed brain in sociopaths). In 2020, laughingly the Vision Year, it seems that this is the norm for too many major world governments. Only a few humane, democratic leaders remain at present, most prominent among them France's Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Angela Merkel (and they are also under pressure from Nazi-like, populist mobs manipulated by corporate oligarchs). Welcome back to the feudal ages at best. It was to counter these neo-Feudal overlords and their propaganda press and populist, goose-stepping mobs that I wrote my thrillers, never knowing how rapidly that train is roaring into our station these days.

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