Embalming Evita

All the talk on the radio about embalming the remains of Hugo Chavez has brought to mind the amazing story I learned in researching Blood Tango,* about the aftermath of Evita’s demise.

As with the death of Chavez (and Chairman Mao and Lenin), something had to be done to keep Evita alive in the minds of the public.  The popularity of Argentina’s First Lady was the lynchpin of Juan Perón’s regime.  Even before she died at the age of only 33 in June of 1952, Perón was planning to preserve her remains.  As soon as her death looked imminent, Perón engaged Dr.  Pedro Ara to embalm her corpse.

Work began only a few hours after she died.   The plan, as with the other political icons, was to keep her body on permanent display in a grand monument---in this case,  a statue of a poor worker, larger than the Statue of Liberty.

The funeral (sans burial) turned into an astonishing outpouring of love and grief.  You can see a film of it here:  

While the monument was under construction, Evita was displayed in her former office—where she had received the poor and worked to grant their wishes.  Her corpse stayed there for two years.

But then the plans began to crumble.  In 1955, a military coup overthrew Perón, who hastily fled to Spain.  The new rulers took great pains to erase the memory of Perón and especially Evita—who was still beloved by millions of the working class.  The new rulers banned all pictures of her.  It was against the law to speak her name, even in the privacy of one’s home.  Her body was stored in a garage for a while (I guess as much as the generals detested Evita, they did not have the nerve to desecrate her remains.)  And then the corpse disappeared.  For sixteen years.

In 1971, it was found in a crypt in Milan interred under the name María Maggi.  Evita was then brought to Spain and remained there with Juan and his third wife, Isabel, on their dining room table!  (No novelist would get away with making this stuff up!)

Then, in 1973, Perón returned from exile and became President again.  When he died in office a year later, Isabel took his place.  She finally put Evita to rest in the Duarte family tomb in La Recoleta Cemetery.  (Duarte was Evita’s maiden name, sort of.  But that’s a story for a different post.)

I have visited Evita’s mausoleum two times, fifteen years apart.  On both occasions, while no one much was looking at the nearby tombs of some of Argentina’s most illustrious dead, there was a crowd in front of Evita’s resting place.  In history and myth, the once and future Evita lives on.

Memorial wreath at the door if Evita's tomb.

Annamaria Alfieri

*Blood Tango, a mystery set in Buenos Aires in October of 1945 launches this coming June 25!

A Role Model for Crime Writers… The Real ARGO Guy!

One man stands out in the shadow world of spy trade. Antonio Joseph Mendez.

Tony led two lives. A gentle, soft-spoken guy, a born artist, now retired and doing his painting in the Maryland Blue Ridge Mountains, he became THE master of disguise.

You may know of him now as the real life engineer of the escape of six fellow Americans from Tehran in 1980.

Partly because of the Oscars, America has been gaga over the word ARGO in 2013. It all began with a modest, talented man born in 1940 in Eureka, an old mining town in the Diamond Mountains of central Nevada.

Quiet. Gentle. But things are seldom what they seem…

Tony worked the night shift at Martin Marietta as an artist/illustrator. This job led him to the Technical Services Division of the CIA. And the rest is history!

At the CIA he was known as the undisputed master of disguises, who was both magician and psychologist. History knows him as the engineer of the masterful escape in 1980 of six brave American citizens from Tehran via Swissair Flight 363, a DC-8 named " ARGAU".

In 1979 Tony had been named Chief of Authentication for the Graphics and Authentication Division of the Office of Technical Services. He was responsible for disguise, false documentation and counterintelligence forensic examination of questioned (possibly forged) documents and materials. Where his friends saw him as a soft-spoken, nondescript bureaucrat, the top guns at Langley HQ saw him as their master of disguise, an "undisputed genius who could create and entirely new ID for anybody, anywhere, anytime."

He was a magician with the analytical insight of a shrink. Bob Gates, the former head of CIA, said of him," He was one of the most imaginative and courageous unsung heroes..." A former chair of the CIA Publications Review Board said of him, "Tom Clancy would be hard-pressed to envision what Tony Mendez has done…"

In his own words, Tony wrote, "I served as professional intelligence officer, creating and deploying many of the most innovative techniques of the espionage trade…. Those who know me best will realize that I would never knowingly betray a trust or reveal a secret that would jeopardize a comrade, a source, or my country's interests."

I became interested in the story of Tony Mendez 13 years ago, never thinking he would be the hero of an Oscar film award today! He was one of many "creative problem solvers", one of my heroes, whose careers inspired me to try my hand at spy novels.

I read all I could find on Tony, and recently I found a little niche for this guy in my WIP, as a close friend of POTUS, the President of the United States, who finds the White House upstairs too confining, and asks his old pal, Tony Mendez, to create a disguise for him to get outside the walls of the big house occasionally, to breathe fresh air and go among the real people! (Ah, the glorious liberties fiction gives the crime writer, provided you play fair!)

After decades of imaginative jobs, Tony was assigned the job that brought him into the 2013 spotlight, the chaos of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, triggered by the Islamist fundamentalist Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers.

The valued Iranian agent named "Raptor" was key to a rescue situation of American diplomats that years later would be the topic of worldwide cinema with our friend Tony as the mastermind of the historic rescue.

The name of the venture was to be ARGO, a contraction of " Ah, go f*** yourself!" We'll never know the real story, I feel, but Tony gives us a good yarn that will keep us intrigued for many decades.

My own feeling about this charming, gifted man, is that with so much bubbling in the world's cauldron, it is quite possible he'll be called back for duty. The world could use his gifts once more!!!

Thelma Straw

Bitter, Sour, Cynical, but Having Perhaps Some Redeeming Qualities

Photo by Mary Crain

I was invited to speak at a meeting last Monday of the book group at the New Jersey State Library Talking Book and Braille Center. Or, no, make that the active voice: Karen Carson, the charming Broadcast and Volunteer Coordinator and a writer herself, invited me to speak. She wanted to discuss The Jersey Monkey, my (unknown to her) despised stepchild, the last book in the Nick Magaracz series, which came out from St. Martin's Press in 1992.

I wasn't going to say, "Whatever for? I hate that book," because fame is a good thing, right? Exposure is a good thing. It was very decent of them to invite me to their meeting at all. The librarians went to the trouble of recording the whole book on tape, so that the book club members could experience it. I personally had not cracked that book in twenty years, mostly for fear of encountering the earlier Kate, that bitter, shriveled cynic. The Jersey Monkey is a bitter little book.

So we met, some on speakerphone, some sitting around the table, turning their smiling faces toward me like flowers. They found the book to be full of unexpected twists. They were surprised that one of the doctors in the pharmaceutical house had put herself through school by stripping. In the old hippie days I knew more than one woman who was putting herself through school by stripping. I didn't tell them that, because they were finding lots of things to like about my hated book, and I didn't want to interrupt them.

They liked the ending, the dailiness of it, Nick's relationship with his wife. They liked the picture of old Trenton. That book is a historical now, you know that? It has people in it who remember the Monkey House.

The corporate executives in my fictional pharmaceutical company were getting all set to move a teratogenic drug to third world countries, because they could make money doing this and Africans wouldn't have the power to sue the company when the birth defects began to show up. The blind readers found this horrifying and scarcely credible. They still trust the rich and powerful to be human beings who care what happens to other human beings. Beautiful souls. I could weep.

They liked my book. They gave my book back to me, so that I don't feel bad about it anymore. Soon I'll put up digital copies on Kindle and Nook. Anyone who wants a bitter, shriveled view of Trenton and Princeton in the early nineties will be able to see it for $2.99.

Kate Gallison

WHO Done It? And WHY?

Writers who track John Douglas, the FBI's legendary "mindhunter," recognize those words from his own writing.

This former chief of the FBI's Investigative Support Unit is revered by many crime writers as THE pioneer of modern behavioral profiling of violent criminals.

In a crime novel the negative force must be strong enough to wage a good fight with the good guy.

The legendary editor Ruth Cavin told us often that you can fix plots, but your characters have to hold their own.

After the first time I heard John Douglas speak at MWA-NY, I became fixated by his ideas. I read all his books – Mindhunter, Unabomber, Journey Into Darkness, Obsession, The Anatomy of Motive, Sexual Homicide, The Cases That Haunt Us, including his own fiction, Broken Wings and Man Down.

He explained that the law enforcement community moved from sole reliance on the "Bible" – the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – into the CCM, the Crime Classification Manual that Douglas, with his colleagues Ann W. Burgess, Allen G. Burgess and Robert K. Ressler, developed. A catalog of crime behavior that showed investigators not only that X type behavior was a form of mental illness, but how dangerous it might be!

Douglas and his associates developed a method of profiling criminals that has been the foundation of many criminology professionals, not only at the FBI Behavioral Science Investigative Support Units, but to police departments and prosecutors worldwide.

As a profiler and interviewer of countless notorious criminals, Douglas' landmark studies have guided numerous crime writers.

John Edward Douglas was born in Brooklyn and served in the U.S. Air Force. Well-educated, with a doctorate, he served at FBI as a SWAT Team sniper, a hostage negotiator and taught hostage negotiation and applied crimnal psychology at Quantico.

As a consultant worldwide, he was the model for Jack Crawford in Thomas Harris' novels Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, as well as consultant for the films.

Countless crime writers have learned from John Douglas about the inner working of personalities whose main goals in life are to kill and to hurt.

To manipulate, dominate and control.

Few of us have walked into danger freely as Douglas has, "through an open yard where violent prisoners roamed freely, a scene that reminded me of Dante's Inferno. Where the most violent criminals might try to kill us for the prestige for having murdered an FBI agent."

Douglas believes that most violent offenders came from dysfunctional backgrounds. That most psychopaths "seemed so charming, so ordinary." That behavior reflects personality. That many violent criminals are "ego driven." That behavior is consistent. Even in its inconsistency, it's consistent.

That criminals find "overwhelming emotional satisfaction in manipulating, dominating, controlling and exerting life-or-death power over another person."

That "with the exception of a very few truly insane (and generally delusional) individuals, these people choose to do what they do."

Douglas is a valid guide for any writer who wants to dig deeper into the motives of his/her villains.

In his own words, he gives one path a writer might want to try: "As I had so many times before, I put myself into the mind of the killer." (Journey Into Darkness, p. 15.)

We crime writers can also remember the words of Raymond Chandler for our heroes… "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid." (The Simple Act of Murder)

Thelma Straw

Digging Up the Ancestors

1885: Dedicating the Rebecca Nurse Memorial

I got a call from a previously unknown second cousin on the Gallison side the other day requesting information about my dad's forebears. I couldn't help her very much. I have a lot more information about my mother's side of the family than my father's side, because they paid attention to that stuff. I'm sure I told you about Rebecca Nurse, my 9th great-grandmother, who was dragged out of her sickbed and convicted of being a witch on the say-so of those wretched little girls. Rebecca Nurse had many children, and they all had many children, and so there are a lot of us descended from her. But Rebecca Nurse is neither here nor there a far as the Gallisons go. No relation. Anyway nobody seems to know who the Gallisons really were.

My dad, who never let the truth stand in the way of a good story, used to tell us they were descended from the inventor of the Guillotine. We all knew that was a bald-faced lie. But the other family traditions–that I had a great-great grandmother named Marie LaChance, that the earliest known Gallison was named David–even that he was named Gallison–these were all false as well. I discovered the true facts by signing up for Ancestry.com for an international membership in order to access the Canadian census records, spurred on by the questions my newfound cousin raised. None of that crowd called themselves Gallison until they crossed the border into Maine and settled in Vanceboro.

In the old country, which is to say Canada, they called themselves Galishan, and told the census taker they were Welsh, even though my grandfather was christened with a French name. That is, I guess he was christened. They also told the Canadian census taker they were Baptists, but I feel their hearts weren't in it; I think they were "Home Baptists." There was no Marie LaChance. Thomas Alexander Galishan's father was called William, not David. In Vanceboro they told the census taker they all came from Ireland. I'm beginning to suspect they were crypto-French, maybe going clear back to the days when the British were deporting all the French people in Acadia to the swamps of Louisiana. Hey, I could have been a Cajun, if my forebears weren't so good at hiding out.

Or not. Fact is, the Galishans are lost in the mists of history, at least for now. It doesn't help that they were perfectly willing to tell tall tales to the census takers.

But the ancestors on the other side, the ones who settled Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, are well known and have been closely examined by scholars, genealogists, and descendants who wanted to get into the Sons and Daughters of the Revolution. Next week I'll tell you some of the things I found out about them. Their lives were much harder than mine, poor things, and a good half of them were barking mad. Bordens. Yes. I am a blood relative of Lizzie.

Kate Gallison