First-time novelist William Maz captured lightning in a bottle with 2022's The Bucharest Dossier. Drawing on his experiences as a childhood immigrant from Rumania and then student at Harvard, he spun a deliriously complex tale of campus spy recruitment, espionage mentorship, double- and triple-crosses during the bloody Rumanian Revolution of December 1989, and lost love. The book's film and TV rights have been optioned and a sequel will debut in June.
It brims with great passages, as in this one from page 83, about main character Bill Hefflin and his undergrad mentor, high-society Catherine Nash:
That evening was to be followed by countless other magical nights during which she slowly brought him along, carefully, tenderly, until he had let go of his inhibitions. She had been his teacher in love as well as in spycraft.
Love and spycraft—you can't have one without the other, at least in fiction.
As I devoured the novel about CIA analyst/maverick field agent Hefflin, I found myself taking notes, not just on striking writing but also on evidence of the decline of copy editing and fact checking in the publishing industry. One flub I could accept, but I made notes on at least six.
The errors weren't typos, but rather indicated that the team at Oceanview Publishing needs to brush up on homonyms in English—words that sound alike but have different meanings—as well as history. Some are obvious and jarring, others a master of history and foreign language that could be explained as usages that, if corrected, could bog down the narrative.
Here's my discussion, offered in the spirit of one writer/editor to others.
Page 25. "No need for that, Bill." Avery's face lit up with his spook's smile. "We've already put you through the ringers, and we're satisfied." Here's the first homonym. For a novel that pays attention to mangled idioms, this one really jumped out at me. You put something "through the wringers" to indicate squeezing or twisting to extract information via pressure, or to remove water from wet clothes. "Ringers" are people who make noise with bells, or an imposter or fake, as in a sports event.
Page 26. Avery continues his spymaster spiel: "The issue is that we've never had an asset whose identity we don't know. That's a problem on many levels. We can't monitor him, provide aide if he puts up a flag, or influence him if he starts to waiver." "Aide" is a noun; "aid" is what an aide provides.
Page 36. Hefflin is musing about corruption in Rumania and worldwide. "I don't judge," Hefflin said. "In the Congo it may be a sack of flour, in Brazil a few reals, in America a lot more." This is the most subtle issue I found. It only jumped out at me because I've studied Brazilian Portuguese. The real is the name of the national currency of Brazil, but the plural form is reais. I could understand an English speaker creating the plural by adding an "s" to real, but, really, that's not accurate in Brazil's language. A worldly CIA analyst would know the difference.
Page 54. Let's go to Boston public transit matters. Hefflin is partying with fellow undergrad femme fatale and spy Catherine Nash. "We've both had too much to drink," she said to Hefflin. "He'll drive us back, then take the Metro." Would two Harvard students refer to the Metro? Author Maz graduated from Harvard and I doubt he called it that. Locals call the subway system the T. Granted, that may sound baffling to readers who don't know Boston, so Metro conveys the transit idea. Still, "Metro" showed a lack of awareness of local nomenclature.
Page 343. Hefflin is talking to his Soviet spy contact, Boris, who gives Hefflin details on his background as a soldier in the Red Army during World War II. "After the War, I joined the KGB. I was good at it, partly because I was no longer afraid to die." The reference to the KGB is technically accurate, since the KGB did exist after World War II, but the war ended in 1945 and the KGB didn't exist by that name until 1954. As of 1946, Soviet intelligence agencies were the NKGB, MGB and MVD. As a shorthand term for all these agencies, KGB works; explaining the name of whatever agency Boris joined would be distracting for readers in the context of the discussion. On the other hand, I'd expect two savvy Cold War operatives to use the right reference.
Page 348. Let's finish off with another homonym. Boris is waxing nostalgic about fast times in Rumania 1989 (Christmas Day, to be exact). "Let us go back to the day when the Ceausescus were executed. It was a grizzly affair, no point masking that fact, but they deserved what they got." Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena (a/k/a "Mother of the Nation") were indeed executed, but by a firing squad; they were not the main course at the Christmas dinner of revolutionary grizzly bears, even if they did deserve that manner of dispatch. Boris meant to say "grisly."
All this said, the book resonated with me on many levels. It had passages of great lyricism. This one deserves quoting at length from page 302, when Hefflin learns of the death of a beloved gypsy neighbor and fortune teller from his Bucharest childhood:
Hefflin sank into the chair. Tanti Bobo. in his child's mind he thought she'd always be there, the same way he had thought of his parents, and of Pincus. Now she, too, was gone. His past seemed to be evaporating, one person at a time, like a dream that fades away as one awakens. And now he'd be forever carrying the guilt."
That's powerful, something I'd like to write in my fictional efforts. I'm looking forward to the next book, The Bucharest Legacy—The Rise of the Oligarchs. I'm hoping Maz's success with his first novel gains him a bit more copy editing support for the sequel.
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