Hitler and his chief propagandist, Josef Goebbels, knew that nothing unites a people like a common enemy. They systematically began blaming German Jews (along with German Gypsies, an even smaller percentage of the population) for all the country’s post WWI economic woes.

One after another the rights of German Jews were stripped away. They were forbidden to work in the Civil Service and then in a variety of other professions. They were denied the right to vote. They were forbidden to marry non-Jews. Soon they would be forbidden to send their children to state schools. Jews, the Nazis said, should go to Palestine. But the British, who were overseeing Palestine under a League of Nations mandate, refused to allow more Jews in for fear of upsetting the Arab population of the always explosive Middle-East.

Soon bands of black- and brown-shirted thugs – member of the paramilitary Gestapo and SA (storm troopers) – roamed the streets and attacked anyone suspected of being a Jew, while the civilian police and pretty much everyone else stood by and watched and did nothing.

Large numbers of German Jews tried to emigrate. They quickly discovered no one wanted them. As the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann put it: “The world seemed to be divided into two parts—those places where the Jews could not live and those where they could not enter.”

In August 1938 Jews with Polish sounding names were told they had to “return” to Poland. That country, however, refused them enterance. One night in October these so-called Polish Jews were rounded up, told they could take one suitcase of belongings, and trucked to the well-guarded Polish border and left in the cold and the rain. And there they stayed, without shelter or any sort of provisions. One woman managed to send a postcard to her seventeen-year-old son in Paris. “We haven’t a penny. Could you send us something?”

The boy bought a gun and went to the German embassy and asked to see an official. He was shown into the office of one of the German diplomats and proceeded to shoot him three times in the stomach. The young assassin made no attempt to escape the French police. “May God forgive me … I must protest so that the whole world hears…”

Three days later the diplomat died of his wounds. Goebbels declared: “…the Führer has decided that… demonstrations should not be prepared or organized by the party, but insofar as they erupt spontaneously, they are not to be hampered.”

That night, November 9th 1938, thousands of men in civilian clothes – most were Gestapo or SA – took to the streets armed with clubs and axes. They broke the windows of every Jewish-owned business, ransacked Jewish homes, and destroyed and burned nearly two hundred synagogues. Some 30,000 Jewish men and boys were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Some were beaten to death while their families were forced to watch. There were a number of suicides. All the shattered glass caused the riots to be called Kristallnacht (Crystal Night).

In BRISTOL HOUSE a character called Maggie Harris, modeled on the mother of an old friend brought to England from Germany thanks to the Kindertransport, tells of watching out her bedroom window while the medieval synagogue of her town is set afire, and how soon after a Gentile friend came and took her into hiding. In my novel she never sees her parents again. In real life that story was repeated many hundreds – nay thousands – of times. On Kristallnacht what the world would come to know as the Holocaust had begun.

Five days after that terrible night the British parliament approved a rescue mission for German Jewish children. It was officially called the Refugee Children Movement. It was soon called the Kindertransport. Over a period of nine months desperate parents sent 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children, ranging in age from infancy to seventeen, to safety in Britain. The program ended on September 1, 1939 when the Nazis invaded Poland and England declared war on Germany. By that time the Kindertransport had rescued Jewish children from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. America in that same period made no such rescue attempt for children or adults, neither did it increase the availability of visas. Congress was dominated by men (there were no women in either the House or the Senate in those days) who were convinced it was imperative that the United States not involve itself in “foreign wars.”

Many of these posts are based on various historical elements in BRISTOL HOUSE.

In an entry called ARMAGEDDON, I wrote about the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. http://tinyurl.com/d7d5uor In another I discussed the idea of “home” and how this novel began in the real building for which it’s named. http://teriharman.com/ One blog was about Britain’s wonderful KINDERTRANSPORT, which operated for a little more than a year right before WWII and saved the lives of over 10,000 German-Jewish children. (Maggie Harris, an important character in my novel, was one of them.) You can read that here http://cherylsbooknook.blogspot.com/

There’s a blog about how in the thirteenth century Jews were expelled from England in the clothes they stood up in, and every thing they owned was confiscated by the crown. You’ll find that at http://www.2readornot2read.com/

A blog on the various ways you could be put to death in the London of Henry VIII can be found here. http://www.hf-connection.com/

At http://mauriceonbooks.wordpress.com/ there’s a blog about Wild Bill Donovan and the WWII founding of the CIA. Yes, that also figures in BRISTOL HOUSE. And if you’ve ever wondered about that picture of London we all have in our heads, Big Ben and those marvelous buildings standing beside the Thames, you’ll want to visit http://www.giraffedays.com/

And there’s yet another blog at http://tinyurl.com/csx4zwp where I talk about the difference between fantasy and speculation, which is what I intend BRISTOL HOUSE to be.

There are more: One’s on BLETCHLEY the fabulous code-breaking site that pretty much won WWII for the Allies. (There are three major codes in my story!) Another on monks and monasticism. BRISTOL HOUSE is set in both contemporary London and London in Tudor times. The Tudor section is the story of Dom Justin, a monk of the London Charterhouse. Justin folds his hands in prayer and hides his face in the shadow of his cowl, pretending holiness, while all the time secretly doing the bidding of the all-powerful Thomas Cromwell, lest he be disemboweled at Tyburn, or burnt alive at Smithfield. Guest blogs about that as well.

Still other blogs are about writing itself, how the heroine of the contemporary story, Annie Kendall an architectural historian, was born in my head with all her emotional baggage. So I could never have written her as anything other than a recovering alcoholic trying to get past the grief of having lost custody of her son and at least attempt to get her career back after she’d drowned it in a vodka bottle. Which is what takes her from Brooklyn to London…

How does that happen, that characters come the way real-life infants do, with their personalities intact and the writer, like the parents, can only whittle around the edges? I guest blogged about the creative process with my friend Susan Spann, author and attorney at http://www.susanspann.com/, and my friend author-illustrator Kris Waldherr http://tinyurl.com/boak5wh. And on the blog of another friend, the wonderful Susanne Dunlap, who writes both adult and YA historical fiction, we talked about the challenges and pleasures of historical fiction in all its guises. www.susannedunlap.com.

At the end of most of the blogs you’ll find the list of the others participating in this round-robin of stuff you never knew you wanted to know! (But c’mon, I’ll bet you do now…) And there are book giveaways at many of them. So please join the fun.

And a last word: As I finish this I’m packing to set off on tour. Hope to see you. (You can find my schedule here on my home page and on my author page at www.Facebook.com/BeverlySwerling)

Because the film is high profile and nominated for a number of awards, there have been any number of people prepared to take aim at its claim to be based on a true story. The guts of the dispute are: The group of six were hidden in the homes of two separate Canadian officials rather than one. The Iranian housekeeper who in the film keeps their secret was a composite character and they didn’t really perceive any threat from the local help. They didn’t do a location run, deciding it would be too dangerous. They were neither interrogated nor almost stopped at the airport, but in fact walked through the security checks and boarded with no difficulty. There are other quibbles, but those are the main ones.

As a writer of historical fiction who takes enormous pains to be accurate, I look at this and say, bravo, Ben Affleck and co. You did a great job. At no point does Chris Terrio’s script (written with the real Tony Mendez, the CIA operative who led them out) distort reality in a way that gives a false impression of what actually happened.

The emotional roller coaster endured by those whom the Canadians called their Houseguests is absolutely accurate; how could it be otherwise? And no way there must not have at least been some concern about the Iranians with whom they were in daily contact. (Making the salute to the composite character’s ultimate courage – and that of the Canadians – entirely accurate and emotionally honest.) As for what happened during the escape: no one could have known how it would play out when they began that early morning ride to the airport. Argo tells it as it may have been, leaving in place the fact that they got away; and, as the Houseguest’s themselves tell us, the moment of exquisite relief when the Swissair stewards announced they had cleared Iranian airspace and alcohol could be served. (Apparently the round ordered by Mendez was bloody Mary’s rather than Champagne, but hey we’re talking Hollywood.)

I have more than a passing interest in this argument about fact and fiction. In the Tudor section of my new novel BRISTOL HOUSE I write about a group of separatist Christians who consider themselves the keepers of true Catholicism, and the official Church led from Rome to be imposters. Such claimants have been around since at least the third century. I made up the True Obedience of Avignon, the group in my story, and I have them infiltrate the very real order of hermit monks known as Carthusians. Not true, obviously, but it could have been. More important, I’ve worked hard to be accurate about the life of the monks – saints and sinners – and their London monastery known as the Charterhouse.

Thomas Cromwell plays a big part in my story, and I have less sympathy for him than Hilary Mantel does in her novels. I paint Cromwell in black and white terms and save my shades of gray for the two characters I created out of whole cloth: Dom Justin the monk and Giacomo the Lombard, a jeweler, also known as the Jew of Holborn. That two novelists looking at the same historical facts come up with different interpretations of why things happened as they did is not just okay, it’s what fiction is all about. It’s what makes it “true” rather than factual.

In the contemporary sections of BRISTOL HOUSE (the story goes back and forth between the two eras) I made up Annie my heroine, and Geoff the TV pundit who is drawn into her mystery. But the world they inhabit, the politics, the London streets, the museums and their collections, that’s all real. And those secret tunnels and their incredible origins, absolutely real.

As for whether the monk and the jeweler could speak their truths loud enough for us to hear… you’ll have to decide for yourself. Personally, I have no doubt whatever.

What enrages me is not this entrepreneurial individual of little integrity. I’m seeing red over the writers who think it’s okay to poison the well by destroying reader trust in this manner.

Look, in terms of how the world works, writing and reading books is a minority occupation.

I don’t know what percentage of the billions of people on the planet can write and read, but I know most are too busy surviving to be able to do so. If you add the further refinement of reading fiction, and throw in that such reading is for pleasure as well as possible enlightenment, you narrow the audience to a pretty small slice of available humans.

I’ve spent my entire professional life fighting for a share of those few readers, trying to create things that are worthy, that offer both substance and delight. (And wearing my mentoring hat, helping others do the same.)

Right now I have a new novel to be published in April 2013. Here’s an abbreviated history of what has gone into that:

I spent four years creating an original manuscript I call Bristol House.

An agent spent months working with me to get it into what she felt was a version she could recommend to editors.

In March of 2011 Viking Penguin agreed to publish it.

Two different highly placed/experienced editors (three if you count one who wasn’t a good fit) spent the next year working with me on making perfect the story and the telling. (I have published many novels before this one – believe me, getting it right is never easy.)

After that the ms was copy-edited by another experienced professional. Her job was to make sure there were no errors of fact or spelling or punctuation.

Then I proofed her work and a proofreader did the same, and created page proofs.

Then I proofed the page proofs.

I am yet engaged with the book designer as we work through issues of fonts and print styles, and the challenges of a map as well as a schematic drawing. Her job is to be both a creative artist and an organizer of technical realities. She’s spent years learning how to do that.

As for the cover… Don’t get me started. The publisher and the art department and I are on the fourth attempt to get that right.

(Incidentally, my agent remains engaged as well. She’s asked to weigh in on 99% of these discussions and decisions.)

Pretty soon we’ll start talking about Advance Reader Copies and other issues of marketing. I’m relying on the advice of still more professionals for that.

In a few months readers and reviewers will finally begin to have their say. What happens if they don’t like what I’ve written and so many others have worked so hard on? Game over. We lose.

Now you’re telling me some people think it’s acceptable not simply to compete but to do the dirty in the process? It’s fair to destroy readers’ trust by jury tampering? Because, after all, “that’s business.”

If doping gets athletes disqualified, and falsifying medical or legal credentials gets you a jail term, how can you – the writer paying to deceive readers – think this is okay?

What got me blogging this time is the notion of editing, and how it’s related to the e-book bestsellers lists now showing up regularly in the major papers. That topic comes up all the time when novelists – fiction dominates the e-book scene – discuss indie publishing, i.e. going it alone and maybe giving up a substantial advance to do so.

The items that make the checklist, the things the publisher normally does for the ms that the indie writer will have to do for herself, are editing, cover art, marketing, and of course distribution. Well, the argument goes, distribution is what the e-book removes from the equation. That really is easy now. Marketing, on the other hand, demands very hard work, but publishers have never satisfied 99% of their authors in this area. Self-marketing is an author responsibility whether the book is traditionally published or an indie. And, the argument goes, I can hire all the rest. If I’m willing to spend a few bucks backing my own career, I’ll get the same top class professionals who work for the legacy publishers.

That’s probably true for the cover. In the matter of editing I submit it is not. I’m convinced you cannot get the same results even if you’re willing to pay a top line-editor the going rate – which will certainly be in the mid to high four figures. Maybe more. (You can get first-class copy editing for considerably less, but that comes later in the process and it’s not what I’m talking about.) The reason is that there’s a very real difference when you’re the one writing the check.

Brilliant editing – and if you’re a writer worth anything you pray for nothing less – involves tension and abrasion and maneuvering. It flows from the fact that in a subtle way you and the editor are on different teams. In some measure your role becomes protecting your vision of the novel; your way of interpreting these characters you’ve created and the things that happen to them. Your story. Your plot. The editor’s job is to push back, to insist that you make it clearer, write it bigger, eliminate superfluous scenes – maybe characters – and add those that the reader must have if the whole thing is going to make sense. It’s the editor’s job to push you to the edge of a cliff, and make you brave enough to jump off.

A process of that nature inevitably brings a writer to the point of wanting to write STET in big red letters on every page. The time will come when that’s exactly what you have to do. But if the editor works not for you but for your publisher, and probably a good chunk of your advance depends on the two of you agreeing that the ms is as good as it’s going to be, you will think long and hard before putting your foot down. That, I submit, is not being abjectly beholden to the almighty dollar. It’s going through the crucible of the creative process; aware always that the editor can identify the problems, but only the writer can fix them. At the end the pair of you will have created something infinitely better than the original – even though it was probably your fifth or sixth draft, and good enough to attract the publisher in the first place.

Good – sometimes great – editing, I submit, is why those e-book bestseller lists are so overwhelmingly dominated by the digital version of books traditionally published rather than indies.

*For those who may not know, Maxwell Perkins was the publishing legend who edited the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. A. Scott Berg’s wonderful Max Perkins, Editor of Genius is must reading for any novelist. It is happily available in e-book format as well as paperback.

Just checked the Amazon customer reviews for City of Promise, the published-last-week and last-for-the-moment of the NYC books I’ve spent over a decade doing for Simon & Schuster. Terrific reviews and I am enormously grateful. Especially to a very savvy lady who gave the book five stars, has insightful comments to make about the characters, promises to read everything I write, and finishes up by commenting that she seriously disagrees with my politics.

Wow! Not because she disagrees. Half the country disagrees with the other half. I will go to the mat fighting for her right to disagree and I’d like to think she’d do the same. The comment was a stunner because nowhere in City of Promise is there a single word about contemporary politics or my view of same.

But on my Facebook profile my politics sticks out a mile. I started that page years ago on the urging of I think my daughter-in-law. A way to keep up with family and friends… It never occurred to me that in our brave new world professional and personal are all mixed up. Which I guess makes me pretty foolish.

I’m happy to be disabused and I love you “insatiable reader.” Not just because you say great things about my books – though I’m really, really happy about that – but because like me, you care about our politics. And we’re all better off when that’s true. Thank you.

Next stop, London. Will try and blog from there…

I am by nature and by nurture very careful (read obsessive) about the facts in my historical fiction. I check and double check. Indeed, there’s no excuse not to these days when you can access so much material without even getting up from the desk and walking over to a bookcase.

Then there’s the process. This novel like all the others in the series was worked on by a line editor at Simon and Schuster, then sent back to me. I read it again and sent it back. Then it was read by a copy editor (in this case, two – long story, just accept it) and came back once more. I read it again. It got sent to a proofreader (the world’s greatest I know because I’ve worked with her before). And came back to me yet again. I had, in other words, three bites of the cherry, right? Trust me, it’s right.

So how come there can be a foolish and amateurish mistake on page 286 of City of Promise? To wit: “The gold,” Zac said, “is in Fort Knox.”

Never mind the context. Only thing that matters is that it’s 1873. And as the aforementioned Clarence Allen, informs me, Fort Knox was not called that until 1918 and there was no gold there until 1937.

How did I miss it? (And it was my error, not that of anyone else.) Because it’s always the things you are absolutely sure of that catch you out. I’ve heard/said/believed “all the gold in Fort Knox” my entire life. Never occurred to me to doubt that was as true for my characters as for me.

But all is not lost. In his e-mail telling me about this bit of simple historical fact Clarence Allen also tells me he loved the book, loves them all, and can’t wait to read more of what I write.

I am sooooo grateful. I love you Clarence Allen, and I promise we’ll fix it as soon as we have a new edition.

Hard cover and e-book edition coming simultaneously. And let me admit here what I am maybe not supposed to say: I love my Kindle! So much so that I have finally decided to put some of my earlier books (written as Beverly S. Martin or Beverly Byrne) in electronic format and make them available for a very modest price. Four of my own personal favorites to start with: Women’s Rites, A Matter of Time, Juffie Kane, and Mollie Pride. Reversing what has become the traditional process and getting books from paper to digital format turns out to be a challenge (read huge pain), but we’re winning. Hope to have them up by mid August. I’ll keep you posted.

First, thank you for coming. I am constantly moved, awed, humbled, and a lot of other things by the readers who visit this site and e-mail to say my books give them pleasure. I try to answer every one, but it seems reasonable to presume others come to the site and maybe click on this blog (where until today they found nothing new in years!) and never e-mail. So I’m taking the opportunity to say thank you to each of you. I’m deeply grateful. And I’m happy to at last manage to share some news.

The last of the City series from Simon & Schuster will be out this summer. What had been City of Gold is now City of Promise because the marketing department thought we were confusing you with all these G’s. (City of Glory, City of God…)

City of Promise takes place in the period immediately after the Civil War (though there’s a prologue in 1863) and ends in 1883 when the city we know was peeking over the horizon.

This is the story of how people found housing in New York if they couldn’t afford a millionaire’s mansion, and weren’t so destitute they needed to live in a rookery, the vile barracks-like containers of misery and filth where the poor were piled together like rats. For the folks in the middle, those neither enormously rich nor penniless, until the late 1860s the only choice was a boarding house. Accountants and clerks and middle managers – the ordinary folk like most of us – had to cram their entire families into one or two bedrooms, and eat boarding house food at a common table.

The answer, of course, was the apartment house, first known as French Flats. How housing for everyman developed in Manhattan, alongside such luxury as splendid Park Avenue buildings with penthouses, is what City of Promise is all about. (Cue Selling New York, now such a hit on HGTV.) It’s also about the first telephones and early electricity… and the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, which changed everything and occurs just before the book ends.

All this is the background for the story of Joshua Turner – who returns from the war with only one leg, but will become the Donald Trump of the gilded age, and the irresistible Mollie Brannigan, whose upbringing in a whore house teaches her more than she wants to know about men, but also makes her Josh’s perfect wife. I promise lots of wonderful characters: pickpockets and pawnbrokers and seamstresses, and the Macy’s clerks who wore uniforms and worked an eighteen hour day and slept on the counters between shifts – and were forbidden to talk… Plus suspense and intrigue, and a plot with lots of ins and outs to keep you guessing.

City of Promise can be pre-ordered on Amazon now and it will be in your bookstores in July. We’ll also have a new video trailer of the book on the home page of this site shortly. And the cover of the book up even before that.

Do send an e-mail if you want to be on the mailing list to get a heads-up before publication – and possibly a sneak preview. Beverly@BeverlySwerling.com

Last word – I promise to blog again soon with more big news. Watch this space!