The First Lie I Ever Told You
This week I'm publishing my first novel under the pen name Thomas Glock, so nobody ever mistakes a crime I invented for one that really happened.
A man lies dead in a room made of glass, bolted from the inside.
No wound on him. No door forced, no window broken, no way in and no way out. The only thing out of place is his pocket watch, turned back one hour to cover the time of the lie.
His name is John Watson. Yes, that Watson.
He has come to Geneva in the summer of 1925 to help the nations of the world outlaw poison gas. He dies breathing the very thing those nations gathered to ban.
The meeting really happened. The murder did not.
I made it up. The bolted room, the turned-back watch, the gas, the dead man on the floor. I sat at my desk and invented a murder, which is the one thing I have spent nearly forty years refusing to do.
That is what I wanted to explain today.
All those years writing true crime were bulit on one a promise. When I attach my name to a story about a murder, it happened.
The blood is too real. The families are real, and a good many of them read what I write. I have sat at their kitchen tables. I have drunk their coffee and run out of things to say.
I refuse to borrow their grief for something I dreamed up on a Tuesday afternoon. So, to avoid confusion, I’m releasing any novel I write under another name, a pseudonym.
Thomas Glock.
See that name on a cover, and you are reading fiction. You can enjoy every turn of the page without once asking which part is true, because none of it is. See HL Arledge on the cover, then it happened, and I can show you the file.
Think of Thomas Glock as a label on a pill bottle, keeping you from taking the wrong drug by mistake.
A man who spends his life asking frightened witnesses to tell the truth must to be careful before deciding to write lies for a living.
Here is why the separation matters to me.
I have had readers swear to my face that a real case I covered had to be invented, that it was simply too strange to have happened. I have watched good people repeat the plot of a novel as if it came off the front page. The line between the made-up crime and the real one is thinner than it ought to be. In true crime, a blurred line hurts people.
When an invented murder gets told with all the confidence of a real one, the real one loses a little of its weight. I will not do that to the dead I have sworn to avenge.
My novel is called The Palais Protocol, and this week, I’m giving away Kindle copies of the book FREE.
My novel is a historical thriller with a mystery spin. I recently shared a Sherlock Holmes pastiche I’d written in the 80s. This is not that. It is not written in the style of Conan Doyle, but in a modern thriller style.
The historic thriller takes place in Geneva, June 1925.
The League of Nations has gathered at a disarmament conference to promise, one more time, that they will never gas one another again. An evil baron intends to make liars of them all.
The conference is real, by the way. That June the delegates signed the Geneva Protocol, and the ban on poison gas they put their names to still stands today a century later. I staged my invented murder at a real event.
The heart-breaking murder of John Watson, it turns out, was only a rehearsal for a much larger crime.
Baron Anton von Reuth plans to gas the closing gala and pin the slaughter on a rival nation. Out of that panic he intends to start World War II.
He carries diplomatic papers and is backed by cartel money. He has the one thing no honest man in that room can claim. Immunity. No court on earth may touch him.
Four aging strangers take up what no one else will dare. Sherlock Holmes, who came to Geneva to bury a friend and stayed to hunt the man who killed him. Arsène Lupin, the gentleman thief, who has already robbed half the delegations in the building.
Father Brown, who reads a guilty soul the way others read a train timetable. And Charlie Chan, a Honolulu police sergeant three thousand miles outside his jurisdiction and never once out of his depth.
Four detectives, each the invention of a different author in a different country, shut in their separate books for a hundred years. I’ve always wanted to sit them at one table.
Every one of them belongs to a century that has already ended. The man they’re up against has a future, and papers that lift him above the law. The detectives have one night to strip his immunity before the world goes back to the gas. The seventeenth of June.
I owe you a confession about this writing.
I set out to make a pure entertainment, a fair-play locked room where every clue sits in plain view and a sharp reader can beat the detectives to the answer.
Somewhere in the drafting I looked up and saw what I had actually written. A powerful man the law cannot reach, and the people who refuse to let that stand. I guess there is truly a thin line between fact and fiction.
The Palais Protocol is out now on Amazon in ebook and paperback as well as at Barnes and Noble and in hardback within a month.
For you, my loyal readers and supporters, I’ve made the Kindle version FREE to readers through August 1st, hoping some of you might enjoy the book and submit an Amazon review for me.
Look for Thomas Glock on the spine, first of the Savant Society Thrillers, so there will be more coming. If you read Dan Brown, Robert Harris, Alan Furst, or Philip Kerr, I believe you will feel at home in that glass room in Geneva.
Next week, Bayou Justice comes home to Louisiana, and to a case where the dead were real and somebody out there still knows something.
The name on that article will be mine.