In 1989, tens of thousands of protesters tore down the Berlin Wall. But as The New York Times points out, the irony is that in 2013 people are protesting because they want the Wall to stay up--or at least one stretch of it. The East Side Gallery is the...
When I was writing my novel The Puzzle People, I came across a photo of the Church of Reconciliation as it was being blown up in 1985 (shown on the left). But what caught my eye in the photo was the cross on the church steeple flying off in mid-air. So I described the...
Okay, so the Berlin Wall in my living room doesn't quite match the real Wall's dimensions. But it comes close. The last generation of the Wall before it came down on November 9, 1989, stood about 12 feet tall, which is a bit too much for my living room. My replica of...
BBC Radio 4 ran a compelling show last Friday about The Stasi Jigsaw Puzzle--the shredded documents that form the core of my novel, The Puzzle People. As the Berlin Wall was coming down so dramatically in 1989, East German secret police, the Stasi, began shredding...
One of the highlights of 2011 was the One Book, One Community program in Canton, Ohio, which adopted The Disappearing Man as its featured book. The Canton Repository newspaper continues its support with a nice article about my Berlin mystery, The Puzzle People. Check...
In my novel, The Puzzle People, I place one of my main characters, Stefan Hansel, at a pivotal point in the history of the Cold War. I place Stefan at the Bornholmer Strasse border crossing in East Berlin on the evening of November 9, 1989. The following YouTube video...
Why Is Brezhnev Kissing Honecker on The Berlin Wall? It's called "The Kiss"Â or "The Kiss of Death."Â And it is perhaps the most famous image that appears in Berlin's East Side Gallery--a nearly mile-long mile stretch of the Berlin Wall. What's left of the Wall,...
The Puzzle People and the Trouble with Trabis The votes are in, and East Germany's Trabant has been named the 9th worst car of all time, according to Edmunds.com. Much of my new novel, The Puzzle People, takes place in East Berlin during the Cold War, so the Trabant...
Solving a 600-Million-Piece Puzzle My new novel, The Puzzle People, hasn't quite hit the shelves yet. But it has hit the webosphere and is now available for download on Kindle, Nook, IBook, and other electronic formats. But exactly who were the Puzzle People? My novel...
A Bureaucrat's Mistake Led to the Fall of the Berlin Wall In a country loaded with bureaucrats, it seems oddly fitting that a bureaucratic blunder would lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall. To set the scene, the year was 1989, and the Soviet empire was unraveling. In...