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Intelligent, seamless and satisfyingly complex with a whiff of Le Carré
– Patrick Malahide
A Place of Strangers
By Geoffrey Seed
ISBN: 978-0956368614
198 pages £9.99
Published October 22, 2009
The back cover
Author’s notes
Reviews
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Back cover
A TV journalist is invited to his ageing stepfamily’s beautiful but decaying country house for one last Christmas. Beyond the gates, terrorist bombs and industrial unrest threaten the government of Margaret Thatcher. This political chaos mirrors the unravelling lives of those within - a retired British diplomat and his once glamorous wife, each burdened by past sins, suppressed guilt and approaching death. Their step-son’s idealised picture of them is revealed as a sham. He uncovers a tantalising Russian doll of a story, secrets locked in secrets in a conspiracy of murder and revenge across Europe and North America, all rooted in history’s greatest crime – the Holocaust.
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Creative writing
By Geoffrey Seed
 Those that can, write the copy… Those that can’t, write a novel about it.
So it was with A Place of Strangers, a work of fiction forced on me after chasing shadows on the most tantalising of tip-offs.
It began over supper with a retired diplomat who’d done past favours for Israeli intelligence. He said a contact once told him how he’d hunted down several old Nazis in the 1950s and ‘arranged’ what appeared to be suicides or accidental deaths.
I swear I heard the northern Daily Mail’s late, great, night news editor, Jimmy Lewthwaite, whispering in my freelance ear: ‘Good story if true, old man. Copy in basket by four o’clock.’
The diplomat introduced me to a second individual he believed could help. We met at his house – a Georgian mansion, all wisteria and Wilton, set in chocolate box English countryside.
Its urbane millionaire owner sat beneath oil paintings of race horses, smiling over steepled fingers as I pitched. Yes, he knew the first man. Yes, there may just be a grain of truth in what I’d heard. No, he couldn’t – or wouldn’t – confirm anything else. But stay for dinner anyway.
No matter how many overseas journeys I later made or ex-spooks, Holocaust survivors or Nazi relatives I talked to, no legally viable corroboration came my way.
I did, of course, interview the diplomat’s original source. He hadn’t long to live but seriously ill though he was, he had no need of a confessor. There was still a fearsome toughness within him, as with all the partisans I encountered who’d escaped the ghettoes to fight with the Red Army against the hated Nazis.
Some information he offered up seemed at odds with the historical record. This shook my confidence though I couldn’t ever be sure that it wasn’t his deliberate dissembling. If what he’d admitted to the diplomat was true, this frail but flint-hard man had got away with murder. He wasn’t about to roll over for me.
However, when we talked about one particular ‘suicide’, his remarks took on slightly more detail and were delivered with such quiet intensity it was tempting to think he might actually have been present when it took place.
Then he clammed up, saying ‘You’ll not draw me inch by inch into telling you anything I couldn’t have made up.’ There was never the remotest chance of him going on camera for me or being quoted in a newspaper piece.
Some acts of revenge were carried out by Jewish survivors immediately after the war and I made a small contribution to a documentary about this. But frustratingly, I’d not had the wit to dig out what might have been an even more telling piece of secret history and those who allegedly knew about it have since gone to their graves.
So I’ve compromised – top-spun my research, stitched it into other bits of whimsy from a journeyman’s life to make it a love story and called it literary fiction. But, no… I will not be naming any of the real people I met along the way.
Sorry.
A Place of Strangers by Geoffrey Seed is published by Revel Barker and available from amazon and Waterstones and all the usual sources at £9.99, or possibly less.
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Reviews
A Place of Strangers is a stylish and beautifully written upmarket thriller about a TV journalist who discovers his diplomat step-parents have lied about his early life – and have even darker secrets to hide.
The more he investigates, the more deceit he uncovers. It is a hard-edged but tender story of love and loss, betrayal and revenge, all rooted in history’s greatest crime – the Holocaust.
Engrossing and interlinked narratives weave seamlessly across five decades as the damaged lives of vividly drawn and subtlely nuanced characters emerge in a Russian doll of a tale in which each mystery holds yet another.
The mood created is one of introspection and foreboding for the journalist knows the truth he seeks to unearth can only destroy those who’ve loved him most.
The plot drives between time and place, compellingly evoked in language that is both rich but spare and powerfully portrays the author’s extraordinary depth of feeling towards the terrible history that is the real and harrowing backdrop to the novel.
It is told with an assured and seasoned researcher’s eye for detail and human frailty, is thoughtful yet exciting and unputdownable while carrying genuine emotional punch.
If ever there was a calling card from a new writer of intelligent psychological thrillers, then A Place of Strangers is it.
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