Home
Swastika (Penguin $24)
Jay Clarke, an attorney in more than 100 murder cases, has co-written a series of gruesome 'psycho-thrillers' under the pseudonym Michael Slade. Commencing
with Headhunter in 1984, these novels frequently feature members of the Special X Section hunting for serial killers. In his latest novel, Swastika (Penguin $24), Clarke hunts through the annals-and factories-of World War II history to celebrate his father's war record and expose a Pentagon cover-up.
Jay Clarke, aka Michael Slade, can trace his origins as a writer to his fascination with EC Comics in the mid-1950s-and the encouragement of bookseller Bill Duthie. "I was fascinated by the criminal mind,"; he says. "First I drew comics, and than I wrote a book, 13 Tombs, when I was thirteen. I typed it out in signatures and stitched them together like the guts of a book. From age ten I had haunted Duthie Books, so I showed my work to Bill Duthie and left it with him to read. Imagine how wowed I was when he gave it back to me a week later, bound in hardcover, with the title and my name in gilt on the spine. 'Now you're published in a limited edition of one,' he said. 'One day, I want to see your books sold in my store.'";
Born in Lethbridge in 1947, Jay Clarke specializes as a lawyer in cases for the criminally insane. Most of his recent novels are co-written with his daughter Rebecca Clarke, who studied literature and history at UBC. Their collaboration for Bed of Nails (Penguin 2003) marks a return to the landscape of Slade's second novel, Ghoul, selected by the Horror Writers Association as one of the 40 top horror novels of all time and named one of the best novels by the A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (Simon & Schuster, 1997) along with Silence of the Lambs and Psycho. In Bed of Nails, a local crazy called The Ripper-who believes he's Jack the Ripper-plots revenge on Inspector Zinc Chandler. A car chase with guns blazing in Vancouver and a World Horror Convention in Seattle lead the Mountie to a cannibal island climax in the South Pacific, where Survivor is the game, and Chandler is an unwilling contestant. Clarke is willing to consider his fascination with horror could be somewhat linked with the disappearance of his father, a Trans-Canada Airlines pilot, whose flight from Vancouver to Calgary in 1956 crashed into a mountain near Chilliwack during a storm, killing all 62 people aboard. The plane went missing on December 9, 1956 and wasn't found until May. "What you do is you plumb your life,"; he told the Georgia Straight's Steve Newton in 2003, "and you come up with whatever the scariest things are. Now, I don't know, maybe your parents lost you in the woods. Maybe Uncle Charlie took you out and sexually assaulted you behind the woodpile. Maybe you drowned and had a near-death experience. It will be different for every single person, but there'll be something in your life which you have to carry with you, and you'll carry [it] with you 'til the grave.";
Michael Slade's eleventh thriller Swastika is a fast-paced, RCMP procedural that was directly inspired by the WWII archives of Jay Clarke's father, Jack "Johnny"; Clarke, an artist who volunteered for the RAF in September of 1940. He flew 47 combat missions against the Third Reich and participated in the Battle of El Alamein. Jay Clarke connects his father's war record (which he says he found behind a false wall in his mother's linen closet in 2003) to events in Swastika, a far-reaching thriller in which a delusional killer named The Aryan arrives on the West Coast and heads to Barkerville in search of Hitler's gold.
"What is it about the Cariboo that appeals to the Germanic mind?"; Slade writes. "Are the mountains evocative of the Bavarian Alps? Are the thickets reminiscent of how the Black Forest used to feel? Is it the sense of Lebensraum in its wide-open spaces, the yearning for elbow room that drove the Nazis to invade Russia? Whatever it is, German accents are everywhere in the Cariboo today, and that made the Aryan just one among many.";
As for using Swastika to link the German-born 'American' scientist Wernher von Braun to Hitler's war crimes involving slave labour, Jay Clarke claims, "Von Braun's war record was 'inconvenient' for the Pentagon's post-war missile plans. So, to subvert the Nazi restrictions in Project Paperclip, he was slapped with more whitewash than Tom Sawyer and his dupes put on that fence.
By the time I was a kid in the mid-1950s, you could sit on the floor wearing your Davy Crockett coonskin cap and see von Braun on Disney's TV
show. His design for the rocket ship in Tomorrowland was based on his V-2. By the time he died an American 'hero' in 1977, he'd been given a medal by President Ford... "During the Red Scare years after the war, von Braun became essential to America winning the arms race. So the Pentagon brought its own iron curtain down between Nordhausen-the overflow camp-and the Dora Mittelbau V-2 factory tunnels, less than five miles to the north. Dora was written out of history, and the cover-up persists today."; 0-14-305325-6
[BCBW 2006]
with Headhunter in 1984, these novels frequently feature members of the Special X Section hunting for serial killers. In his latest novel, Swastika (Penguin $24), Clarke hunts through the annals-and factories-of World War II history to celebrate his father's war record and expose a Pentagon cover-up.
Jay Clarke, aka Michael Slade, can trace his origins as a writer to his fascination with EC Comics in the mid-1950s-and the encouragement of bookseller Bill Duthie. "I was fascinated by the criminal mind,"; he says. "First I drew comics, and than I wrote a book, 13 Tombs, when I was thirteen. I typed it out in signatures and stitched them together like the guts of a book. From age ten I had haunted Duthie Books, so I showed my work to Bill Duthie and left it with him to read. Imagine how wowed I was when he gave it back to me a week later, bound in hardcover, with the title and my name in gilt on the spine. 'Now you're published in a limited edition of one,' he said. 'One day, I want to see your books sold in my store.'";
Born in Lethbridge in 1947, Jay Clarke specializes as a lawyer in cases for the criminally insane. Most of his recent novels are co-written with his daughter Rebecca Clarke, who studied literature and history at UBC. Their collaboration for Bed of Nails (Penguin 2003) marks a return to the landscape of Slade's second novel, Ghoul, selected by the Horror Writers Association as one of the 40 top horror novels of all time and named one of the best novels by the A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (Simon & Schuster, 1997) along with Silence of the Lambs and Psycho. In Bed of Nails, a local crazy called The Ripper-who believes he's Jack the Ripper-plots revenge on Inspector Zinc Chandler. A car chase with guns blazing in Vancouver and a World Horror Convention in Seattle lead the Mountie to a cannibal island climax in the South Pacific, where Survivor is the game, and Chandler is an unwilling contestant. Clarke is willing to consider his fascination with horror could be somewhat linked with the disappearance of his father, a Trans-Canada Airlines pilot, whose flight from Vancouver to Calgary in 1956 crashed into a mountain near Chilliwack during a storm, killing all 62 people aboard. The plane went missing on December 9, 1956 and wasn't found until May. "What you do is you plumb your life,"; he told the Georgia Straight's Steve Newton in 2003, "and you come up with whatever the scariest things are. Now, I don't know, maybe your parents lost you in the woods. Maybe Uncle Charlie took you out and sexually assaulted you behind the woodpile. Maybe you drowned and had a near-death experience. It will be different for every single person, but there'll be something in your life which you have to carry with you, and you'll carry [it] with you 'til the grave.";
Michael Slade's eleventh thriller Swastika is a fast-paced, RCMP procedural that was directly inspired by the WWII archives of Jay Clarke's father, Jack "Johnny"; Clarke, an artist who volunteered for the RAF in September of 1940. He flew 47 combat missions against the Third Reich and participated in the Battle of El Alamein. Jay Clarke connects his father's war record (which he says he found behind a false wall in his mother's linen closet in 2003) to events in Swastika, a far-reaching thriller in which a delusional killer named The Aryan arrives on the West Coast and heads to Barkerville in search of Hitler's gold.
"What is it about the Cariboo that appeals to the Germanic mind?"; Slade writes. "Are the mountains evocative of the Bavarian Alps? Are the thickets reminiscent of how the Black Forest used to feel? Is it the sense of Lebensraum in its wide-open spaces, the yearning for elbow room that drove the Nazis to invade Russia? Whatever it is, German accents are everywhere in the Cariboo today, and that made the Aryan just one among many.";
As for using Swastika to link the German-born 'American' scientist Wernher von Braun to Hitler's war crimes involving slave labour, Jay Clarke claims, "Von Braun's war record was 'inconvenient' for the Pentagon's post-war missile plans. So, to subvert the Nazi restrictions in Project Paperclip, he was slapped with more whitewash than Tom Sawyer and his dupes put on that fence.
By the time I was a kid in the mid-1950s, you could sit on the floor wearing your Davy Crockett coonskin cap and see von Braun on Disney's TV
show. His design for the rocket ship in Tomorrowland was based on his V-2. By the time he died an American 'hero' in 1977, he'd been given a medal by President Ford... "During the Red Scare years after the war, von Braun became essential to America winning the arms race. So the Pentagon brought its own iron curtain down between Nordhausen-the overflow camp-and the Dora Mittelbau V-2 factory tunnels, less than five miles to the north. Dora was written out of history, and the cover-up persists today."; 0-14-305325-6
[BCBW 2006]
Submitted on December 20, 2005 in By David.
