A Heidelberg Gap Preview Just for the hell of it, here’s a draft of Chapter 1 of my new Nick Temple File, The Heidelberg Gap. It will be the sixth title in the series. So far, so good. I passed 10,000 words yesterday, and feel like I’m hitting a productive stretch after some time away...Read More

Uncles My brother sent me the picture below this morning. It’s a picture of my father, the man on the far right, and his four brothers. It was taken in the late 1960s. As far as I know, it’s the last photograph of them all together as my Uncle Pete, the man seated in the...Read More

More of My Poetry Published by The Writers Club The Writers Club has published another poem of mine. This one, entitled “Resolve,” is a quick riff on conformity and adulthood, and it is below. This is the sixth poem of mine that they’ve published. I think it’s great that a platform like The Writers Club...Read More

A Cold War Podcast with Mark Valley and Jonathan Dyer Mark Valley, West Point Grad, Berlin veteran, actor, producer, writer, and all around good guy, has a podcast called The Live Drop. A while back he interviewed me. We talked about a wide range of matters including my time as a Russian Linguist in Berlin...Read More

A Poem Here and There A recent submission of mine to The Writers Club is their “Favorite Submission of The Week.” The poem, “Museum Piece,” was inspired by a walk along the South Carolina Coast one evening with my family, and my Uncle Tom, Aunt Anna, and my cousin Elizabeth. We passed a roped-off section...Read More

What’s the Point of Espionage in a Spy Novel? Espionage is conducted by nations to shape policy. Pretty simple. One country gathers information about another country, analyzes it, and then makes policy decisions based on the analysis of the information. The policy result is national in scope, although it is often not made public for...Read More

A Zoom Talk: How I Write a Spy Novel [Author’s note: These are the notes I used to give a 30-minute talk via Zoom to the McMinnville, Oregon Lions Club on 9/2/20. I was invited to give the talk by Sam Justice, a fellow soldier I first met at the Defense Language Institute in 1981....Read More

First Impressions of Berlin and the Cold War I was born in 1957, the year the Soviets launched Sputnik and the race to the moon began, a signal event in the Cold War. There are still a lot of us around for whom the defining geopolitical position of our early years was the Cold War....Read More

Landscapes, Poetry, and Superfluity in a Novel A maxim of jurisprudence enshrined in the California Civil Code is, “Superfluity does not vitiate.” What a beautiful sentence! Its meaning is its own abrupt precision. The rule it expresses is clear and unqualified; it sets an excellent standard for legal writing. I love that sentence. However, as...Read More

A Cold War March with Greek Communists The political season, while never far away, is officially upon us here in the U.S. with the opening of the Democratic Party’s national convention last night. The quadrennial event is virtual due to the ongoing covid-19 pandemic, so the usual camera shots and stories about convention floor antics...Read More