J.C. Martin, Fighter Writer

I am pleased to have Dorothy James here today to promote the release of her crime novel, A Place to Die, set in the picturesque Austrian city of Vienna:

A Place to Die

Eleanor and Franz Fabian arrive from New York to spend Christmas with Franz’s mother in her sedate retirement home in the Vienna Woods. Their expectations are low: at best, boredom, at worst, run-of-the-mill family friction. But when the wealthy, charming Herr Graf is found dead in his apartment with an ugly head wound, the Fabians are thrust into a homicide investigation.

Some residents and staff have surprising connections to the dead man, but who would have wanted to kill him? Inspector Bchner tracks down the murderer against a backdrop of Viennese history from the Nazi years to the present day. Witty, suspenseful, lyrical, this is a literary whodunit that will keep you guessing till the last page. 

Purchase links

Paperback: Amazon US | Amazon UK | Barnes & Noble

E-book: Amazon US | Amazon UK | Barnes & Noble | iTunes

About the Author

Dorothy James was born in Wales and grew up in the South Wales Valleys. Writer, editor, and translator, she has published short stories as well as books and articles on German and Austrian literature. She has taught at universities in the U.S., England, and Germany, makes her home now in Brooklyn and often spends time in Vienna and Berlin.

She wrote A Place to Die in her attic apartment on the edge of the Vienna Woods. She has travelled far from Wales, but has not lost the Welsh love of playing with language; she writes poems for pleasure as does Chief Inspector Büchner, the whimsical Viennese detective who unravels the first mystery in this new series of novels.

Contact: Website | Blog | Facebook | Twitter

And now, please welcome Dorothy, who will be talking about the beautiful city that inspired her story — Vienna.

Vienna: The Place and the Past

by Dorothy James

I have often been asked how I researched the history of Vienna and the locations of my book, A Place to Die, perhaps because the novel is set in a foreign city, and one pictures the writer journeying there to find out facts, past and present, to make the novel come alive for people in another culture.  Not so in my case. The novel grew out of a long familiarity with the city.

I was a student in Vienna a decade after the Second World War. The Russians had left but the memory of the divided city remained, as did the memory of Nazi Vienna, though this was something that no one in those days wanted to talk about.  The older-generation characters in my novel, you will find, do not want to talk about it either, and yet it lurks in their past.

When I thought of writing a murder mystery, and set it in Vienna, this was not because I wanted to analyze the past of the city, Nazi or otherwise. I wanted rather to take a complete break from years of writing literary criticism. I wanted to escape the academic straitjacket and give my imagination free reign.  I thought of setting the mystery in a retirement home,  a closed society of people. A wonderful setting to investigate a murder, and to explore the dynamics of a micro-society.  I lived in a small apartment in Vienna at the time, on the edge of the Vienna Woods, so where would I set my novel but in Vienna?

The immediate location of the novel is the retirement home itself, the House in the Woods, an invention of my own.  My research for such a location lay again in my own life’s experiences.  In these times when life expectancy is on the rise, and more and more people are reaching the age of ninety, most of us have some thoughts on the problems of the old, where they should live and die. This is not a culture-specific issue, and while the past lives of my characters are rooted in up to ninety turbulent years of Viennese history, their present lives in their retirement home have much in common with their contemporaries the world over.

There is however a café in the House in the Woods where residents and visitors sit in the afternoons and drink coffee or wine and eat cake — this is perhaps very Viennese. And one day during the murder investigation two of the characters, one an American visitor, drive into the city of Vienna for coffee and cake in the Sacher café near the Opera. Such locations come out of my own life in Vienna. I love to sit in the Viennese cafés — I can do it for hours, listening to people talk, reading the newspapers,  writing — this is my favorite kind of on-location research.  It is surely at the heart of  A Place to Die, and its sequel, A Place to Live.

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Thank you, Dorothy! A Place to Die is now available in hardback, paperback and several e-book formats. To follow Dorothy on her book tour, check out the other blog stops HERE.

Tags: A Place to Die, Blog, Crime, Dorothy James, Tour, Tribute Books

This entry was posted by J.C. Martin on Thursday, February 23rd, 2012 at 8:03 AM and is filed under Blog Tour, Guest Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.