The Hindenburg Murders (28 page)

It was said Pruss was in far worse shape than Lehmann, but that the despondent
Reederei
director had simply lost the will to live.

Thirteen passengers were listed as dead, twenty-two crew members. Charteris noted with wry interest that Eric Knoecher’s name was included on the former list, and Willy Sheef’s on the latter.

Charteris never regretted his decision to keep what he knew to himself: the American commission blamed a hydrogen leak ignited by a spark of static electricity as the most probable cause of the explosion; and the German inquiry decided essentially the same thing, calling the terrible event “an act of God.”

Sabotage never was seriously discussed in either tribunal, as America wished to avoid an international incident on her own shores, and Germany did not wish to acknowledge itself vulnerable to sabotage by a resistance movement within its
own borders—a resistance movement its government claimed did not exist, at that.

Still and all, there were interesting scraps of testimony and evidence.

Such as a number of witnesses who felt they had heard a gunshot prior to the first explosion. A mechanic, Richard Kollmer, said he “heard the ‘pop’ of the firing of a gun, a small gun or rifle.” Chicago stockyards magnate Morris, who had been in the writing lounge, also said he’d heard “a report, not loud,” of a weapon.

Even Dr. Hugo Eckener, the father of the
Hindenburg,
had originally stated his belief that his airship was a victim of sabotage, saying, “Only the firing of a burning bullet into the gasbags from a distance would have accomplished it.” But by the time of the official German inquiry, Eckener had changed his tune to the familiar gas-leak-and-spark scenario.

As the latter explanation settled uneasily into history, Charteris began to think his mystery writer’s mind had imagined it all—at least until he read about two neglected items of evidence found in the wreckage, given no serious consideration by either panel of inquiry:

A solid black chunk of residue identified by the New York City Police bomb squad as the residue of a dry-cell battery.

And a charred Luger—one shot discharged.

A TIP OF THE HALO

T
HIS NOVEL IS A FOLLOW-UP
of sorts to my previous historical mystery,
The Titanic Murders,
in which Jacques Futrelle—an esteemed detective-story writer of his day, and an actual passenger on the great doomed ship—solves two murders prior to a certain incident involving an iceberg.

So the most obvious question a reader might pose is: Was Leslie Charteris, creator of the Saint, actually a passenger on the
Hindenburg?
The answer is a resounding, absolute
yes
… sort of. As is indicated in this tale, Charteris (and his then-wife Pauline) were well-publicized passengers aboard the airship’s maiden voyage; but history does not record his presence on the
Hindenburg
’s final run.

Every good mystery needs a detective, however, and—in the tradition of Futrelle’s role in
The Titanic Murders
—I seized upon Charteris’s
Hindenburg
connection and ran. Just as I was a childhood reader of Futrelle’s “Thinking Machine” tales, so was I an avid fan of Charteris and his Saint—the Saint was my first big enthusiasm as a reader of mysteries, and I was expelled from my fourth-grade class at Grant School in Muscatine, Iowa, for having in my little desk
The Saint and the Sizzling Saboteur,
an Avon paperback with a wonderfully racy, rather sadomasochistic
cover. Numerous references in this novel to that particular Saint tale can be found by the keen-eyed Charteris fan, and of course my tongue-in-cheek chapter titles are firmly in the fashion of what Charteris referred to as his “Immortal Works.”

The literate yet adventurous and even hard-boiled detective fiction of Leslie Charteris was my introduction to a world of writers that included Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Mickey Spillane, and—for better or worse—set me on my life’s path. Any writer of mystery fiction might look with envy at the gloriously successful career of this sophisticated, fascinating man, who saw the Saint reach radio, television, the comics page, and the silver screen; few doubt that without the Saint, there would have been no James Bond (and TV’s “Saint” Roger Moore, of course, graduated to Bondage). At the time of his death in 1993, at age eighty-five, in Windsor, England, Leslie Charteris saw his Robin Hood sleuth again heading to the screen for a big-budget production (and he would certainly have been as displeased with the final result as he was with Hollywood’s previous efforts).

With the exception of Charteris’s fanciful role, however, I have attempted herein to stay consistent with known facts about the
Hindenburg
and her final voyage, though the books and articles on this subject are often inconsistent, particularly on smaller points, and the various experts disagree on all sorts of matters, trivial and profound. When research was contradictory, I made the choice most beneficial to the telling of this tale. Any blame for historical inaccuracies is my own, reflecting, I hope, the limitations of this conflicting source material.

Three nonfiction books were the cornerstones of my research. A. A. Hoehling’s pioneering
Who Destroyed the Hindenburg?
(1962) first identified Eric Spehl as the probable
saboteur; his book is a detailed, fascinating account of the trip and was extremely helpful to me. Hoehling’s research was substantiated and somewhat expanded upon in Michael Macdonald Mooney’s first-rate
The Hindenburg
(1972); though it covers similar ground, Mooney’s book adds other details and perspectives, and was particularly rewarding in background information regarding passengers who became characters in this novel. A lavish coffee-table-style volume in the manner of their book on the
Titanic, Hindenburg: An Illustrated History
(1994) by writer Rick Archbold and illustrator Ken Marschall covers the golden age of the airship in general, and is less detailed about the
Hindenburg
’s final flight than the Hoehling and Mooney volumes; but its overview of the Zeppelin Company—and wonderful photos, paintings, and diagrams, some of them elaborate foldouts—put it on the short list of volumes vital to my research. My sincere thanks to all of these gentlemen.

With an exception that will be noted, the characters in this novel are real and appear with their true names; the conflicts with Nazi Germany suffered by the subjects on Eric Knoecher’s list are grounded in reality. There is no reason, however, to think that the real Eric Knoecher was a Nazi agent, that he was in fact anything but an innocent importer who died tragically on the
Hindenburg.
History records little else about him, or about Willy Scheef, who certainly did not attack Leslie Charteris in the night, since of course Leslie Charteris wasn’t actually aboard the ship. These two were chosen from among the otherwise anonymous deceased because of the melodramatic felicity of their names and for purposes of verisimilitude. No disrespect is intended, and the characters wearing these real names in this novel should be viewed as entirely fictionalized. And—despite
their real names and basis in history—these are all characters in a novel, fictionalized and doing the author’s bidding.

Hilda Friederich has a basis in reality, though I am not privy to her real name: both Hoehling and Mooney cite her as Spehl’s likely coconspirator, and both use pseudonyms. She was not aboard the flight, rather back home in Frankfurt, expectantly and continually checking in with the Zeppelin Company office on news of the flight.

The notion that Colonel Oberst “Fritz” Erdmann may have been party to the sabotage is suggested in the 1975 film version of Mooney’s book, and Hoehling and Mooney both note Erdmann’s strange, gloomy mood, with the latter indicating at least some discontent on Erdmann’s part toward the Nazi regime; but the theory that his wife may have smuggled aboard the explosive device—in their well-documented last-second good-bye aboard the airship—is to my knowledge new to this book. I do not offer this as anything more than a theory that at least loosely fits the facts and possibilities.

Two books on the life and career of Leslie Charteris were enormously constructive:
The Saint and Leslie Charteris: A Biography
(1972) by W.O.G. Lofts and Derek Adley; and
The Saint: A Complete History in Print, Radio, Film and Television
by my friend Burl Barer, who is also the latest author to continue chronicling the Saint’s adventures, including his first-rate novelization of the recent Val Kilmer–starring film. Also consulted was
The Saint
(1989) by Tony Mechele and Dick Fiddy, which focuses on the Roger Moore television series but does include material on the Saint’s creator, as well.

Fans of the Saint and Charteris should run, not walk, to go online at
www.saint.org
, the phenomenally colorful, detailed Web site run by Dan Bodenheimer. Dan was incredibly generous
with his time and knowledge, providing a copy of the long-out-of-print Lofts/Adley book mentioned above, sending photocopies of rare articles from obscure British and American fanzines, sharing personal anecdotes about Charteris, and pointing me to another remarkable Saint expert, Ian Dickerson. The benevolent Mr. Dickerson provided photos of Charteris and information he’s gathered for a biography of Leslie Charteris, in progress.

Ian also shared a complete set of “A Letter from the Saint,” a weekly letter written to fans by Charteris that ran from April 1946 through February 1947; this material—sixty-thousand-plus words of it—gave me a rather personal, inside look at the author’s mind-set and lifestyle, and created much of the basis for his characterization in these pages—numerous throwaway lines in this novel, and stretches of interior monologue, are derived in part from this vital, vintage material. Should I ever be lucky enough to have fans as dedicated as Dan and Ian, I would be blessed indeed (haven’t quite shaken this British thing yet—sorry).

A good deal of inspiration for the appearance and panache of Charteris-as-detective came from the May 1941 issue of
Life
magazine, which featured a six-page photo-illustrated mystery story by Charteris (celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the genre) in which the author portrayed his own character. Charteris posed as the Saint in monocle, mustache, and dapper apparel including tuxedos and sporty ensembles. Those images seldom strayed from my mind as I wrote this tale. Also productive in this vein was “Meet the Saint,” a chapter from
Meet the Detective
(1935), edited by Cecil Madden, provided by Dan Bodenheimer.

Numerous standard references, such as
Contemporary Authors
and
Twentieth Century Authors,
were consulted in
regard to Charteris and his career. Specific reference books used include
British Mystery Writers 1920-1939
(1989) edited by Bernard Benstock and Thomas F. Staley, and
Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection
(1976) by my friends Otto Penzler and the late Chris Steinbrunner.

My fact-based novels about fictional 1930s/’40s era Chicago private detective Nathan Heller have required extensive research not unlike what was required of this project. I called upon my Heller research assistants, George Hagenauer and Lynn Myers, to help me in my attempt to re-create the final voyage of the great ill-fated airship. They both dug out numerous articles from sometimes obscure sources, and without them this journey would not have been possible.

Among these articles were “The Last Trip of the
Hindenburg
” by Leonhard Adelt (
Reader’s Digest,
November 1937) and “I Was on the
Hindenburg
” (
Harper’s Magazine,
November 1937) by Margaret G. Mather. Obviously, these two articles were essential to this book. Leonhard Adelt, incidentally, survived the
Hindenburg
only to die in the firebombing of Dresden; his wife, Gertrude (sometimes spelled Gertrud), survived Dresden and her articulate, vivid remembrances of the airship and its crash have been among the most important resources for
Hindenburg
researchers.

Another helpful article (one of George Hagenauer’s finds) was “Aboard the Airship Hindenburg” (
Wisconsin Magazine of History,
Winter 1965–1966) by Louis P. Lochner, actually excerpts from Lochner’s diary of the maiden flight to the States, the same one Charteris was on. Also of interest were “What Really Downed the
Hindenburg
” (
Popular Science,
November 1997) by Mariette DiChristina, which reveals the little known fact of the flammability of the “doping” material that coated
the airship; and “The First Airship Flight Around the World” by Dr. Hugo Eckener (
The National Geographic Magazine,
June 1930). On the Web (at
www.airships.net
) I discovered a detailed travel brochure from the
Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei
company that included many details about life on the airship.