CREATING KITTY – PART 1

A Name, an Idea, the Connections...

How does an author go about creating a completely fictional character who is supposed to be experiencing the events of a historically accurate time-period? My inspiration for Kitty Larsson began only with her name. My inspiration for Kitty Larsson began only with her name, but it was enough to get me researching. What I discovered were numerous women in history who could help form Kitty and the journey I was prepared to send her on. Over the next months, this blog series, will be sharing the stories of some of those women.

My first step was to look for American women who were in Vienna before, during and after the Anschluss. I found Muriel Gardiner, who was originally from Chicago, Illinois.

This midwestern connection was not something I initially planned when I eventually placed Kitty in my hometown of the Twin Cities in Minnesota. I. made that choice after learning about a US Senator who died in a plane crash under mysterious circumstances and with a connection to the Nazis (a thread I did not later use, but it certainly sent me on a path of investigating Roosevelt’s administration and the state of US politics a lot more closely for my book).

If you’re curious about this scandal in our US government during the Nazi era, listen to Rachel Maddow’s amazing podcast series called Ultra.

Connecting the dots...

As an author fascinated by resistance work, I also knew that Kitty would be involved in working against the Nazis, so I had to put her in a position of power. Muriel Gardiner had status, came from a wealthy background, and was married to Austrian Joseph Buttinger, the leader of the Austrian Revolutionary Socialists. This gave Muriel (and Kitty) access to her resistance activities.

Under the code name “Mary”, Muriel smuggled money and procured documents for her friends, who wanted to flee Austria. The scene in The American Wife, where Kitty smuggles money to Berlin in a box of chocolates is based on Muriel’s anecdotes. In the movie Julia with Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, historians have speculated that the anti-Nazi activist in the movie is based on Muriel Gardiner. In one scene, Jane Fonda takes a hat box with money secreted away inside and meant for the anti-Nazi resistance.

Muriel Gardiner also hid fugitives in a cottage outside of Vienna, which inspired the Vienna Woods cottage in the trilogy and became an important “playground” for her resistance activities. In The American Wife, Kitty is involved in a fledgling group that eventually builds ties to the real-life O5 resistance cell, which led me to Austrian women who’d worked to undermine the Nazi regime. A lot of paths began to criss-cross and just like the connect-the-dots activity, I was beginning to see all the pictures, or scenes, for Kitty’s story.

From resistance work to spying... history led me there

What I had not intended in the beginning was to write a spy novel. But when I read an article about the American consulate in Vienna, and discovered the Cassia Spy Ring, I was being led into even more fascinating history than I had ever imagined. I suddenly had a massive hook on which to hang Kitty Larsson’s story. And it was a completely fresh angle.

It was then clear that there would be a second book, and I knew that Kitty would end up working for the British SOE, the Special Operations Executives. She had to be, because America was not yet involved in the war and the OSS (nowadays, the CIA) had not yet been established. But its history had already caught my eye and I knew I’d be using those seeds to plant a rich plot for Kitty. By then, I’d read up on a number of amazing women, including American Virginia Hall who appears as Guinevere in An American Wife in Paris and prods Kitty into joining the F-Section. But that is for next time!