A bit of an “idle” enquiry; but – I recently got from the library, a murder mystery by an author hitherto unknown to me: The Beast in the Red Forest, by Sam Eastland. Set in the USSR during World War II. I am usually up for some fairly nasty stuff in my thriller-reading; but, my word, I found the content of this book nightmarishly horrible, as regards all-pervading cruelty and casual humans-on-humans slaughter. To the point of closing it halfway through and saying, “no more”. One does not expect anything set in Stalin’s USSR – especially in the 1941 – 45 period – to be all sparkly rainbows and baby unicorns; nonetheless, this book was for me, stomach-turning.
I found from “book jacket blurb”, that Sam Eastland has written a number of novels, all with “red” in the titles: suggesting, all set in the Soviet Union in that general period, and likely featuring his highly loathsome protagonist as in TBITRF: secret-police Inspector Pekkala. Can anyone confirm – is that the case? These novels could well be compelling and delight-giving reading for some people (no problems – de gustibus, etc.); but I’ve discovered that they aren’t my bag – am just mildly curious.
Thanks for your pointer. Dopers seem so amazingly knowledgeable about a huge variety of things, that I thought that I might as well make my OP. “You can’t win 'em all”, etc. One knows that “Google is your friend”, and so on and so forth – just sometimes, one is moved to take the chance on maybe getting more-personal interaction. If not, “no harm, no foul”.
There’s no shortage of writers who have churned out spy, detective and similar genre stories under a variety of pen names. It sometimes seems to me that a pseudonym is a license for a writer to go really off-track and write creepy, grungy, hyper-violent stuff without necessarily polluting their real or other “nice” names.
One of my favorite multinomics is Leonard Wibberley, best known for writing “The Mouse That Roared” under his own name and the “Black Tiger” series of juvenile/YA car books as Patrick O’Connor, and two or three other genres under other well-regarded names.
GPU squads were a third line in WW2 and their job was to shoot stragglers and malingerers. Reports are that they killed one million of their fellow Soviets. It was perhaps the bloodiest four years in the history of humanity.
I’ve read and loved The Mouse that Roared and the sequel, The Mouse on the Moon – but had no idea that Wibberley had written different stuff, under “aliases”. I suppose he wasn’t, also, Patrick O’Brian of “Aubrey / Maturin” (just kidding !).
At one point in The Beast In…, there’s a “throwaway mention” that in the Soviet retreat from Hitler’s summer 1941 onslaught, the Soviet secret police put to death some 100,000 people in Lviv (Polish until 1939) before abandoning the city; and that this kind of thing was SOP in many cities in similar case. I looked up Wiki, which just says that at that time, the Soviets killed many people in Lviv – doesn’t give figures.
I’m aware that generally, however horrible you imagine historical horrors to be, they were probably actually at least twice as horrible: but, 100,000 people, repeated in multiple towns? It strains belief; or at least, has one feeling that, if true: the standard figure for total deaths in World War 2 – a paltry 60 million – must be much understating the case.