Cara Black---Night Flight to Paris

DEBORAH CROMBIE: It is always such a treat for us to have Cara Black visit on Jungle Red--we fight over who gets to host her! And I'm thrilled to see Kate Rees, Cara's WWII sharpshooter heroine from THREE HOURS IN PARIS, back in her new novel, NIGHT FLIGHT TO PARIS. Just the title gives me goosebumps! Here's Cara to take us on a little virtual adventure!

 

—— Bonjour Reds,

    Thanks for inviting me, Debs. It’s great to visit all you Jungle Reds again. In my story, NIGHT FLIGHT TO PARIS, I explore friendships, especially between women. Who can you rely on and who can you trust when you’re not supposed to trust anyone. And during wartime when your life depends on it?

    Kate Rees, an Oregonian born on a backwoods ranch during the Depression, was raised using a rifle to protect the ranch and hunt game. We’ve met her in the preceding book, THREE HOURS IN PARIS. She’s got a bit of Annie Oakley in her and descends from frontier women. So Kate, now a young widow with sharpshooting skills, finds herself stranded in WW2 Britain. When the British intelligence service discovers this - what better skill to use against the enemy, the Germans, and avenge her family?

    I love research. For me it involves visiting the Spy Museum in Washington, DC to see historical spy gadgets, consulting the French archives and collections of the Imperial War museum in London. And going to Paris! The best part of my job! Debs, I think you might agree with there about going to research in London, right?

    Walking the ground of these cities and places is research for me - it’s about capturing the play of light, the nuances and being in actual places where history/the war happened. To feel the past on a cobbled street in Paris, sites of the Blitz. Visiting Churchill’s war rooms in London was like walking into another time. I could almost touch history at the battle sites and memorials in North Africa. So the challenge is while I visit the places I write about in NIGHT FLIGHT TO PARIS: crawled in the tunnels and Catacombs under Paris, toured the Hotel Lutetia in Paris where the German Abwehr - military intelligence - was headquartered - and walked the Cairo streets, I didn’t go there in 1942. I wish I could time travel. Any writer faces this challenge writing historical fiction and we - at least I do - draw on shared universal experiences. Do my best to evoke another time and place bringing in sensory details.

    I got stranded once in Cairo - robbed in the train station which left me broke. Long story but with a surprisingly happy ending and a good Egyptian friend I have to this day. However, this sense of being stranded in a foreign country where I couldn’t speak the language or even read streets signs brought me to where Kate Rees, my protagonist might be. Her fear. The alienation and otherness she would feel, the myriad difficulties she’d encounter with no one she could trust. Her senses on overload from a place exotic and foreign to her as it was to me.

    My eyes were opened reading the accounts, memoirs and archived letters of young women who worked in the WW2 British Signals division. Amazing heroic stuff and so little known. Only now are various intelligence documents being de-classified and available for research. After eighty years! Many records were ‘lost’ and destroyed so we’ll never know. I consulted files about the listening devices recording captured German POW’s and high ranking military. At one point the POW’s - elite German military - were held in the Tower of London - it was bugged to hear what they were saying. You can’t make this stuff up!   

 

    I grew up watching old WW2 documentaries - black and white ones and Victory at Sea - since they were always on and I later found out members of my family had served. My mother’s cousin  - my second cousin had served in Italy and rarely spoke of it. But the more I learned after he passed, made me curious about this theatre of war. And what I never saw in the documentaries was women’s role in the war. Women were behind the scenes but very much a strategical component.

    Researching woman’s roles during that time I discovered the Russian army had a unit of female sharpshooters/snipers who plagued the German army. Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a battle-tested and highly decorated lieutenant in the Red Army’s 25th Rifle Division, visited the US at Eleanor Roosevelt’s invitation in 1942 and toured the White House.

It surprised me when I did research that the US didn’t follow suit. But women then weren’t allowed in combat. Also, female sharpshooters weren’t allowed in the Olympics until 1970’s games in Mexico City. What an underutilised resource!

      I like secrets. We all have them. Hidden lives intrigue me. Hiding in plain sight. Espionage involves facades shown to the world and different on the inside.  What better place or time for this than with the high stakes in WW2? Kate’s descended from pioneer women, grew up on an Oregon ranch with five brothers and developed grit, resilience and is driven after losing her family. It’s tough to know what I can throw at her next but the war’s not over :)

Wishing you happy reading! Cara

www.carablack.com

It is once again up to American markswoman Kate Rees to take the shot that just might win—or lose—World War II, in the followup to national bestseller Three Hours in Paris.

Three missions. Two cities. One shot to win the war.

October 1942: it’s been two years since Kate Rees was sent to Paris on a British Secret Service mission to assassinate Hitler. Since then, she has left spycraft behind to take a training job as a sharpshooting instructor in the Scottish Highlands. But her quiet life is violently disrupted when Colonel Stepney, her former handler, drags her back into the fray for a risky three-pronged mission in Paris.

Each task is more dangerous than the next: Deliver a package of forbidden biological material. Assassinate a high-ranking German operative whose knowledge of invasion plans could turn the tide of the war against the Allies. Rescue a British agent who once saved Kate’s life—and get out.

Kate will encounter sheiks and spies, poets and partisans, as she races to keep up with the constantly shifting nature of her assignment, showing every ounce of her Oregonian grit in the process.

 Cara Black is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 20 books in the Private Investigator Aimée Leduc series, and two World War II-set novels featuring American markswoman Kate Rees. Cara has received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, a Washington Post Book World Book of the Year citation, the Médaille de la Ville de Paris—the Paris City Medal, which is awarded in recognition of contribution to international culture—and invitations to be the Guest of Honor at conferences such as the Paris Polar Crime Festival and Left Coast Crime. 

DEBS: I love that we're learning what an important role women played in WWII, and it's always such a pleasure to visit Paris with Cara, no matter the time period. She'll be dropping by today to say bon jour and to answer all your questions!

READERS, what's your favorite fictional WWII setting?