The Hindenburg Murders - By Max Allan Collins Page 0,75
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