From Wartime Secrets to Mystery Novels: The Journey Behind The Navigator’s Daughter

Hi all. Today is a guest post by author Nancy Cole Silverman. Nancy spent 25 years in Newstalk radio, and finally retired to pursue writing fiction. Her crime-focused novels have attracted readers across America, and her short stories have been featured in numerous anthologies. Nancy is the author of the Carol Childs and Misty Dawn Mysteries (Henry Press), as well as the Kat Lawson Mysteries (Level Best Books). Take it away, Nancy!

Hi, and thank you, Jeri, for letting me host your blog this week. My name is Nancy Cole Silverman, and I write the Kat Lawson Mysteries. I started this series five years ago, inspired by my father’s experiences during World War II. Dad was a Navigator/Bombardier on a B-24 when he was shot down over Hungary and declared MIA. Spoiler alert: Dad came home unscathed.

          As a young girl growing up, I didn’t know much about my father’s story. Back then, men who came home from war didn’t talk about what they had experienced or seen. The little I knew was mostly my dad’s cleaned-up version—stories about the camaraderie he shared with his men and the jokes they played on each other. It wasn’t until 1995—fifty years after the war—that I realized I was about to become part of that story.

A letter arrived in my parents’ mailbox from the Department of Defense. A Hungarian man had found my father’s plane, which had crashed and burned out in an open field. An amateur photographer interested in history, he took pictures of the plane, including its tail number, and sent a copy to the DOD. Did they know what had happened to the crew? Were they still alive? Could he contact them?

Amazingly, the DOD had records of both the flight and the crew and sent the man’s letter to my dad. This marked the start of a pen pal relationship that lasted several years. My father’s new Hungarian friend was a small boy during the war. His family was part of the resistance—the same group that rescued my dad—and as a boy, he remembered sitting on his grandmother’s lap while she told him the Americans would save them. Unfortunately, the Russians occupied Hungary after the war, and it wasn’t until 1989, when the Iron Curtain fell, that many Hungarians were able to contact the West.

But that’s not the whole story…

Flash forward twenty-five years, my dad was ninety-five and ailing. His correspondence with his Hungarian friend had waned over the years; they had lost touch, and Dad needed me to go through his filing cabinet to search for important papers in preparation for his passing. It was a daunting experience. In addition to his important papers, I found an old manila folder in the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet. It looked like it hadn’t been opened in years. Inside, I found yellowed flight logs from the thirty-two missions Dad had flown, along with maps, copies of his orders, a diary he had written about his experience behind enemy lines, and copies of the letters he and his Hungarian pen pal had exchanged years earlier.

It was during this time that Dad asked me for a favor. Would I go back to Hungary, find his Hungarian friend, and if possible, locate those underground members who had rescued him and his crew all those years ago?

     My father’s request became the basis for my new series. And yes, I did go to Hungary. However, I was never able to find my dad’s plane, but I did visit one of the locations where Dad stayed while being secretly moved behind enemy lines. Ironically, he remembered one address: Twenty-two Beethoven Street, Budapest. The apartment building occupying that address was much too modern to be the same as when my father had hidden in a subterranean shelter, and the people who had lived there had long since moved away. However, it served as a touchstone and the inspiration for the first book in my new series, The Navigator’s Daughter.

I’ll confess I took a certain amount of literary license to fill those parts of my father’s journey that I thought needed to be ramped up for mystery’s sake. However, I was careful not to distort history and stuck to actual historical events, which allowed me to end the book with two very different endings. When I first started writing The Navigator’s Daughter, I thought it would be a standalone, but as I got further into it, I realized it could be a series, and I wanted to give my publisher the option. So, I wrote two different endings. She chose the second. And I’m glad she did. This month, the fourth in the Kat Lawson series, A Spy in Saigon, will drop on Veterans’ Day.

Visit Nancy’s website:  www.nancycolesilverman.com.