Intensive care
James Benn’s new Billy Boyle mystery deals with emotional, physical costs of war
Regarding the written histories of World War II: William Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” is 1,280 pages long. Cornelius Ryan managed to capture “The Longest Day” in 352 pages. Winston Churchill knocked out his “The Second World War” over six volumes and thousands of pages.
By comparison, Billy Boyle’s similarly highly regarded chronicling of the conflict isn’t yet finished. The ongoing saga — at 15 volumes, 4,400 pages and counting — continues with the publication last week of “The Red Horse.” The book focuses on life (and death) at the Saint Albans Convalescent Hospital for Allied military personnel, located in the English countryside, circa 1944 just after the Liberation of Paris. It’s a highly focused story detailing what might be called a side-effect operation of warfare not widely known or written about — and, as usual, Boyle is right in the middle of everything.
It’s worth pointing out that Boyle is a fictional character, and this is the latest in a series of popular mysteries created by Essex-based novelist James R. Benn.
In the books, Boyle is a U.S. Army detective who, along with his best friend and Polish compatriot Lieutenant “Kaz” Kazimierz, works for the 12th Army Group’s Special Investigations outfit. Together, they’ve traveled extensively across the atlas of the war, solving crimes in a variety of scenarios offering a panoply of glimpses into the conflict that have exposed to readers all manners of military strategy, real-life settings and historical people as well as vividly drawn original characters.
Benn celebrates the publication of “The Red Horse” Thursday as the latest guest on “Read of THE DAY,” a book club sponsored by The Day in partnership with Bank Square Books. For safety during the coronavirus, the event takes place virtually. One bonus aspect of the event is that Peter Berkrot, the actor who reads the Boyle audiobooks, is scheduled to appear and read a passage. Berkrot had a small role as a kid in the cast of “Caddyshack,” which recently observed its 40th anniversary.
“The Red Horse” deals with the immediate aftermath of Benn’s previous book, “When Hell Struck Twelve,” when Boyle and Kaz, during the liberation of Paris, were each seriously disabled. Boyle, fueled by amphetamines in a desperate
rush to thwart a traitor, suffers from physical and emotional exhaustion. Kaz has had a heart attack. Both are sent to St. Albans for recovery, and Kaz’s situation involves the possibility of a controversial new cardiac procedure. But despite the legitimate recuperative mission of the hospital, it’s also true that it’s a prison of sorts — designed to keep certain of the inmates from talking too much out in the world.
Before Kaz’s surgery can take place, a patient at St. Albans commits what seems to be suicide by jumping from the facility’s clock tower. Or was he murdered? Despite Billy’s status as a patient, he’s unofficially asked to investigate by Major Charles Cosgrove of His Majesty’s Foreign Office, who arrives at St. Albans with another of Billy’s trusted pals, Big Mike. In addition, they have distressing news. Diana Seaton, the love of Billy’s life and an OSE espionage agent, has been taken to Ravensbrück, the Nazi concentration camp for women. But she’s not the only one. It turns out Kaz’s youngest sister, Anjelica, who has long been missing, has been captured and is also on the prisoner list for the infamous camp.
It is essential that Billy gets out of St. Albans as quickly as possible. But in rapid succession, two more people at the facility are murdered. At the site of each killing is found a small red horse — apparently a symbolic reference to the famous prehistoric “Uffington horse” carved into a chalk hillside in the west of England not far from the hospital.
Suddenly, Billy is overwhelmed with cases and, at least in the eyes of some of the St. Albans patients and personnel, is a suspect.
As always, Benn’s research into this largely forgotten — or even unknown — aspect of the war is comprehensive and evocatively detailed. And the real-time damage done to all the characters, who are now almost five years into the conflict, establishes the sort of emotional connection and tension for readers that adds to Benn’s virtuosity with the mystery template.
But part of what keeps the series fresh is that, throughout the 15 books, Benn is always learning.
“When I started the series, I thought I knew a lot about World War II,” he says by phone from the condo he shares in Essex with his wife, Deborah Mandel. “What I in fact knew didn’t scratch the surface. And then you run across something like a hospital like St. Alban — which I actually made up with no historical context whatsoever in a stand-alone novel called ‘On Desperate Ground.’
“I wanted to revisit that idea for ‘The Red Horse’ and found out the (British Secret Operations Executive espionage/reconnaissance/sabotage outfit) actually DID have a place like this. It was called the Number 6 Special Workshop School, and it was a place where they sent agents who knew too much and couldn’t be trusted.
“They were told they were being sent for additional training. It was on an island off Scotland, and it had a lot of good food and liquor and just enough training to keep the illusion going. Some of them figured it out, of course. Either way, they were kept till the end of the war and then released.”
Once Benn realized such a place existed, he looked further into it and discovered a novel called “The Cooler” by George Markstein, which in turn inspired the popular ‘60s television show “The Prisoner” starring Patrick McGoohan.
“It was a great book and a great TV series, then I learned other writers had used that setting as well, so I had to figure out a different element,” Benn says. “So I came up with the medical and psychological angles.”
The result of his efforts makes for an intriguingly different tone and rhythm to the narrative. The setting and heavy British atmosphere — the walled-in setting has an almost classic “locked room” sense of suffocation — and throughout is a fond echo of Agatha Christie or Alfred Hitchcock. It was intentional.
“This is one of the challenges of writing a series,” he says. “People who are fans want every book to be different — and also exactly the same as before.” He laughs.
“They know what they want the characters to do, but they also want some new stuff. After the intensity of the last two books, I had to get out of the action, so to speak, and St. Albans provided the perfect scenario.”
Such a stylistic transition is something Benn enjoys, and something he has by definition had to do with some frequency given the breadth and scope of Billy’s and Kaz’s adventures.
“A lot of my homework and research is focused on finding that next setting,” Benn says. “It’s fun on one hand, but I’m also terrified that I’ll be a quarter-way through a manuscript and the story will peter out. So I’m always looking for that historical nugget that can be sustained.”
As the noose of tension tightens within — and outside — St. Albans, it’s worth remembering that Kaz and Billy are not at peak physical and emotional health. Benn’s adroit balancing of the cumulative damage the war has taken on each is poignant and affectionate, but also harshly realistic.
“Modulating the tone and setting of each book is really important,” Benn says, “but it’s just as important that the characters maintain their qualities and relationships as best they can. There’s a great cost to all the violence they’ve seen and experienced. One of my pet peeves about some thrillers or mysteries is that the hero suffers no aftereffects. It’s just on to the next book.”
One of the most interesting and important characters in the series is Diane. As an accomplished spy with her own assignments, she’s often incognito and Billy is left to hope and pray she’s all right. That, in “The Red Horse,” she’s been sent to Ravensbrück is devastating to him.
For Benn, her occasional presence is the books is tricky. “I’m careful to tease with the on- and offstage appearances,” he says, “but is there ever going to be a resolution? She represents something to Billy, something that keeps him somewhat stable. But would the reality of them ultimately ending up together be boring?”
For now, Benn is comfortable moving forward and has in fact finished the 16th book. It’s called “The Road of Bones” and is set in the Soviet Union in Siberia. If it seems as though the writer is constantly busy, well, he says he has a little help.
“By now, these characters can almost put themselves on the page. They already have their quirks and their relationships. Sometimes, a lot of my job is just to set them down in the world and let them interact with each other.”