Bridge of Spies - film review

Bridge of Spies is a 2015 Steven Spielberg film, starring Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance, with a script co-authored by the Coen brothers. With a pedigree like that, I expected something special, and I'm glad to say that I wasn't disappointed. This is quite a long film, but it's so watchable from start to finish that the time zipped by. It's not always like that with long films, but Spielberg is a master craftsman.

The story is based, quite closely, on real life events. It shows my ignorance of much American history that I wasn't aware of the Powers-Abel case, though I am familiar with its British equivalent, the Greville Wynne-Gordon Lonsdale case. Inevitably, some aspects of the story are rendered more dramatically than the way in which they occurred in real life, but I gather that the essentials of the story are captured fairly faithfully.

The action takes place during the Cold War, in the late 50s. Rylance plays Abel a tight-lipped Russian agent (in fact, Abel was born in Benwell, in Newcastle, and educated in Whitley Bay) who is caught and charged with espionage. Hanks plays Jim Donovan an insurance lawyer who is, rather oddly, brought in to defend him. I'm not sure that the insurance lawyers I know would relish conducting high profile criminal advocacy, but that's another story. The judge is appallingly biased (I would like to think that the script exaggerates this - his behaviour is utterly crass) and Abel is convicted; he is not, however, sentenced to death, but is imprisoned instead.

Powers, a pilot on a spying mission, falls into Russian hands, and the CIA persuade Donovan to broker an exchange of spies. Matters get complicated when a young American student is arrested in East Berlin, and Donovan resolves to try to free him as well. It was rather poignant, watching the Berlin Wall being built, and seeing soldiers shooting at people trying to escape. It took me back to an unforgettable trip to West Berlin in 1975. I stayed in a flat right next to the wall with Ute Wehmeyer and her family, and sometimes heard shots being fired. It was truly chilling and quite unforgettable.

Thankfully there was a happy ending to the story of Berlin's artificial division, and the experience of walking freely through the Brandenburg Gate when I returned to the city in more recent times was really memorable. But does the film have a happy ending? You'll have to watch it to find out...

The Craft of Writing - Where Do You Find Your Ideas?

One of the questions writers are asked most often is: "Where do you find your ideas?" In fact, I gave this title to a short story I wrote years ago, about a not very successful novelist who conducts a bookshop event. A member of his small audience asks the question, with alarming results. I got the idea for that story from a real life literary event, as it happens.

There's no easy answer to the question, because story ideas are all around us, all the time. You just have to spot them - or more often, tease them out, if they are hiding. As a teenager at school, hoping that one day I'd become a writer of crime fiction, I worried that I wouldn't be able to come up with a plot idea strong enough to sustain a full-length novel. It wasn't until much later that I realised that it doesn't matter if you don't have the whole concept of your novel clear from the outset. The key is to have an interesting starting point - a setting, perhaps, or a type of person, or an event or incident - that sparks your imagination and gets you going. Then you can ask yourself: "What if?"- always a good technique for a teller of tales.

My idea for "Acknowledgments", the story that won the CWA Margery Allingham Prize last month, came along after I read a couple of books which had rather lengthy and (in my opinion) rather rambling and tedious acknowledgments to the authors' countless acquaintances. I thought it might be possible to create a story out of such material. The spark for "The Bookbinder's Apprentice", which won the CWA Short Story Dagger, came when I looked in the window of a bookbinder's shop in Venice. A couple of days after my recent visit to the North East, I was asked to write a story for an anthology featuring a bookshop. I decided that an imaginary lonely second hand bookshop in Hartlepool, a town which I'd just visited, might be a suitable background. And I mentioned on this blog the other day that, during my recent trip to Berlin, thoughts about the reunification of Germany led me to an idea for a story about a reunion in the city between a couple who have not seen each other for many years.

The very idea of meeting someone again after not having seen them for many years absolutely fascinates me. It is at the heart of the seventh and latest Lake District Mystery (which I'd be writing right now if I hadn't been lured away by the temptation of doing this blog post!) And at the week-end, a very enjoyable experience gave me a premise for another possible story. For the first time in 40 years, my school had a reunion. The school (once a boys' grammar school, now a mixed sixth form college, Sir John Deane's) has changed out of all recognition, although the core of the old building has, happily, been preserved. Reassembling for lunch in the old main hall was a very nostalgic experience. And it was fascinating to meet again a group of men whom I'd not seen for four decades. I was pleased to hear many interesting stories of what they have been up to, and as amused as ever to be asked by someone- yes! - "do you write under your own name?" - although it was poignant to pause and reflect on two or three friends who have died in the intervening years. One of these deaths I'd had no knowledge of previously.

A number of chaps were still instantly recognisable, but that was certainly not always the case. And as I struggled to recognise one or two people, the thought crossed my mind - what if someone came back to such a reunion having assumed a false identity? There could be a story there, couldn't there? Or what if some long-buried grudge was rekindled at such an occasion? Or what if a crime committed forty years ago came to light because of a casual remark dropped at a reunion? Ideas are everywhere, you see. It's really a matter of using one's imagination to create something fresh, different and worthwhile out of them.

Reunion and Berlin

I'm just back from a week in Berlin which was memorable for many different reasons. It's a wonderful city, rich in character and history, and with a very bright future as one of the world's great capitals. Yet it's also a place that has witnessed very dark days. This was my first time back there since the mid-70s when, as a student, I stayed with the Wehymeyers, a pleasant family who lived in an apartment in West Berlin (as it was then) right next to the Berlin Wall. That was another unforgettable week. One ineradicable memory was sitting down to dinner, which was then interrupted by the sound of rifle shots. East German guards, it turned out, were shooting at someone who was trying to escape over the Wall to the West, and to freedom. It was a common occurrence, and the desperation of those people who were willing to risk death or lengthy imprisonment made a deep and lasting impression on me. So did the "live for the day" mentality of the young West Berliners I got to know. There was a real sense of a society on the edge, relatively affluent, yet frightened by the ever-present menace just next door and totally unsure about what the future might hold..

Ever since the Wall came down, I've wanted to go back, and after twenty-five years, I've had the chance to see what has happened in the quarter-century since the brutal regime of the East was overthrown. Capitalism has triumphed, for sure, but it's not as simple as that. There's an engagingly anarchic feel about the East Side Gallery, for instance, where a long stretch of the Wall has been turned into a massive open air art installation.

 
Thinking about the issues raised by Germany's past, and by reunification, has inspired me to start work on a story, "Reunion in Berlin", which involves a crime, perhaps more than one, and yet is more of a mainstream story than specifically a mystery. Time will tell how it turns out, but there's no denying that Berlin offers plenty of inspiration for creativity. I found it unexpectedly poignant, walking among the crowds who pass all the time beneath the Brandenburg Gate and down Unter den Linden. The last time I visited Berlin, that was impossible I went on a pilgrimage with Ute Wehmeyer and her friends to see the Gate, but it was just on the wrong side of the dividing line between West and East. Alexanderplatz, now an extremely busy central hub with a fascinating world clock and the nearby TV tower, which offers wonderful views of the city, was cut off from the West. The large station there was a "ghost station" as far as the West Berliners were concerned.

Berlin has, of course, inspired some marvellous fiction, not least some of Christopher Isherwood's books, as well as, in our genre, Len Deighton's classic Funeral in Berlin, Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin (which I'm just about to start) and Philip Kerr's Berlin Noir trilogy. The story I'm planning to write will try to capture some of the qualities of this city that have helped it to survive and, almost magically, to flourish. Visits to the DDR Museum and the Checkpoint Charlie Museum provided moving reminders of the suffering that took place during the Cold War, while the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is striking and unforgettable.

There are far more sights to see in Berlin than one can possibly visit in a week - though I did my best! - but plenty of those I went to will linger in the memory, as will some of the places outside the city that I managed to fit in (more about these tomorrow.) It's an unexpectedly green city, with one of the world's finest botanical gardens, despite the vast amount of construction that is taking place and which is likely to make it an even more irresistible destination. I'm so glad to have got back there at last. And on a personal note, it was a great joy to have a Berlin-based guide, a future journalist by the name of Catherine Edwards. She is 21 tomorrow - happy birthday, and thank you!