Calgary Herald

Anonymous author of The Kingfisher Secret

I’m having trouble understand­ing what is true and what is not and where journalism begins and ends these days when you have so many people pretending to be people they aren’t.

- ERIC VOLMERS

The Kingfisher Secret Anonymous Penguin Random House Canada

Not long after introducin­g himself as “the author of The Kingfisher Secret,” the man on the other end of the line offers an apology.

No apology is necessary. It’s just that an obvious place to start in an interview with “Anonymous” is to tell him how unusual this situation is. In fact, in my many years of covering books for Postmedia, I tell him, I’ve never interviewe­d an author who has not revealed his identity before.

“Sorry about that,” he says. He sounds genuine. But as a former journalist himself — one of the few tidbits of info that has been revealed about him — the author probably knows that the cloak-and-dagger aspects of this interview fit nicely with the cloakand-dagger aspects of the book and offer a nice journalist­ic hook.

The Kingfisher Secret is a fastpaced thriller based on the intriguing premise that Ivana Trump was a Russian spy who helped the KGB meticulous­ly orchestrat­e her husband’s baffling ascent to the White House.

It’s fiction and the names have been changed. Trump becomes Anthony Craig, a narcissist­ic and delusional billionair­e automaker whose business smarts, and smarts in general, are nowhere near as sharp as he thinks they are.

As with the real Trump, he marries a woman he believes is a Czech model and former Olympic athlete with a mysterious past. In the book, Elena Craig is revealed to be a “Kingfisher,” a Russian spy tasked with seducing and marrying wealthy men the KGB can manipulate. Craig falls into her trap and, as the novel begins years later, is poised to become the next president of the United States.

Still, while secret identities and murky pasts are a major part of the plot, the author rejects the notion that his own anonymity is simply a tantalizin­g marketing tool for his publisher. The official line is that “his identity is being kept secret in order to protect the source of the ideas that inspired this novel.” The Washington Post’s book critic, however, called this reasoning a “Trump-worthy fib” and suggested the anonymity was being used only to create “a ripple of interest in an anemic thriller.”

“To be honest, a better marketing tool is an author going on tour and being on TV and the radio and showing up at book festivals and meeting readers,” the author says. “I think this is harder.”

So here’s the story: About a year ago, the author met a Czech businessma­n at a dinner. The man said his wife was a fan of the author’s books before telling him he “had an idea for a story” that was based in truth. He told the author there was a spy in the White House and “someone owns the president.”

“We’ve seen that online since then but this was new to me last November and I wanted to know what he meant by that,” the author says.

“So we agreed to meet and he said ‘I think this would make a good story. Not non-fiction, I think it would make a good novel using this as a jumping-off point. But you can’t use my name. In fact, because we were just at that dinner, everyone is going to see that we know each other, so make up a different name.’ That was the original idea, to publish it under a different name.”

The businessma­n revealed he had once worked in intelligen­ce and outlined the basis for the plot of The Kingfisher Secret, specifical­ly rumours that the woman born Ivana Zelnickova was a honey pot operative who had spent most of her adult life as a Russian agent.

“He did not want to be known as someone who is talking about this,” the author says. “Maybe for no good reason, maybe for good reason. I can’t say. I don’t have his experience­s. But since I agreed to do that, I never did divulge my name or his.”

Interestin­gly, at the time of this interview, the Guardian had just begun publishing stories by Luke Harding that investigat­e Ivana’s family ties to the Czech secret police.

In fact, as time went on, the author was taken by how plausible his Czech businessma­n’s story seemed to be. Still, when asked if he bought the story wholesale, the author’s answer is a bit cryptic.

“As you read it, you were probably asking yourself the same questions I asked myself writing it,” he says. “The neat thing is, what’s been going on with the Mueller investigat­ion has made what I would have felt impossible seem possible, just because we are living in a very strange times.

“I’m having trouble understand­ing what is true and what is not and where journalism begins and ends these days when you have so many people pretending to be people they aren’t. Someone is a spy and someone isn’t a spy. This is fake news and this isn’t fake news. It’s a weird time. I don’t see the usual filter mechanisms that I once did through journalism.”

Beyond these questions of what’s real and what isn’t, what we’re left with is a political thriller that is at once entertaini­ng, frightenin­g and thought-provoking. The author does seem to follow the biographic­al broad strokes of Donald and Ivana Trump’s public life in the novel.

But the main character is Grace Elliott, a sad-sack 40-something tabloid journalist and U.S. expat living in Montreal. She thinks she has uncovered a story that will finally turn her into the investigat­ive journalist she has always wanted to be.

She has found a porn star willing to reveal an affair with Craig.

Much to her shock, the U.S. rightwing publisher of her tabloid kills the story and sends her instead to Europe for a fluff piece about Elena Craig, who Elliott already knows because she ghostwrite­s an advice column for the mysterious businesswo­man. Eventually, she starts investigat­ing Elena’s past, discoverin­g many of the same mysterious gaps that define Ivana Trump’s backstory.

Soon, Elliott is targeted by a campaign of terror as she makes her way through Europe. There are murders, torture, Russian thugs, romance, betrayal and car chases, all of which unfold in short, easyto-read chapters that keep the momentum at an impressive pace.

The novel takes place in preelectio­n 2016 but also reveals the history of Elena and her long, often torturous tenure as a kept woman forced to work for the KGB during the Cold War.

One of the most impressive aspects of the book is the empathy the author creates for Grace and Elena, who are both trapped in lives they didn’t plan.

And, yes, much of The Kingfisher Secret was based on real research the author did, finding that the gaps and contradict­ions in Ivana’s official story, for instance, were sufficient­ly suspicious.

“If you want to, you can have lots of fun and go down a rabbit hole with the book, which I found fun as I was writing it,” he says. “It’s a work of fiction. It’s made up. But, like other spy stories, I want it to have a cracked mirror on reality.”

Still, while the author hopes the novel is both exciting as a work of fiction and thought-provoking as a plausible what-if scenario, he suspects not everyone in his country is ready to be entertaine­d by this particular story.

“I think it asks the kind of questions we ought to be asking,” he says. “I think it’s a book about human beings.

“On the other side, I think there are a lot of people who will feel that they’re not ready to have fun yet. You have fun reading this book. It’s an entertainm­ent. I think there’s a bit of pearl-clutching from time to time, that we’re not ready to have fun about this. We can’t talk about this being a fiction yet because we’re living through a very bad time for some people.”

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 ?? MARTY LEDERHANDL­ER/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ?? What if Ivana Trump had been a Russian spy who helped the KGB orchestrat­e her husband’s ascent to the U.S. presidency? A new work of fiction by an anonymous writer takes that idea and runs with it. (All the names have been changed, of course.)
MARTY LEDERHANDL­ER/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS What if Ivana Trump had been a Russian spy who helped the KGB orchestrat­e her husband’s ascent to the U.S. presidency? A new work of fiction by an anonymous writer takes that idea and runs with it. (All the names have been changed, of course.)
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