Interview with T.H.E. Hill: ‘Voices Under Berlin’

T.H.E. Hill, the author of Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary, served with the U.S. Army Security Agency at Field Station Berlin in the mid-1970s, after a tour at Herzo Base in the late 1960s. He is a three-time graduate of the Defense Language Institute (DLIWC) in Monterey, California, the alumni of which are called “Monterey Marys”. The Army taught him to speak Russian, Polish, and Czech; three tours in Germany taught him to speak German, and his wife taught him to speak Dutch. He has been a writer his entire adult life, but now retired from Federal Service, he writes what he wants, instead of the things that others tasked him to write while he was still working.

Q: Welcome to Beyond the Books, Tom.  Can we start out by telling us whether you are published for the first time or are you multi-published?

Tom: Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary is my first novel, but my second book. My first book was a collection of short Stories entitled Once More Upon a Time. In addition, I have a non-fiction book published simultaneously with Voices Under Berlin as a companion piece. The title is Berlin in Early Cold-War Army Booklets. It is a reprint of a series of booklets published by Berlin Command for distribution to newcomers between 1946 and 1958, the historical period in which Voices Under Berlin takes place. The fact that these army booklets are quite rare and are not to be found in libraries—even in the Library of Congress—made me decide to reprint them as a single volume after I completed Voices Under Berlin. The booklets contain a wealth of background information on occupied Berlin at the time of the spy tunnel that forms the backdrop for the action of the novel.

Q: Is your very first book still in print?

Tom: Yes, Once More Upon A Time: A Book of Stories That Brings the Characters of the Old Fairy Tales Back into the Modern World is still in print. It is available from Amazon.com for only $6.95. Your readers can sample one of the stories that went into it at the Voices Under Berlin webSite by following the link above. Voices Under Berlin is full of the same kind of humor as is found in my short stories. Your readers can find a sample chapter so that they can compare the two with this link.

Q: For your first published book, how many rejections did you go through before you either found a mainstream publisher, self-published it, or paid a vanity press to publish it?

Tom: Once More Upon A Time went through over 50 rejections before it became a book. The count for Voices Under Berlin was only 47. I am obviously making progress.

Q: How did the rejections make you feel and what did you do to overcome the blows?

Tom: Rejection letters are part and parcel of being a writer. Each one is a test of your determination to tell the story that you are sure has something to say to others. You have to believe firmly that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s oft quoted statement—”You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say”—applies to you and your story. You cannot let a rejection letter shake that belief, because one day, if you don’t give up, you will indeed find your audience, and your faith in yourself and your story will be validated. My faith in myself and my story has been validated by the five book awards that Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary has thus far received. Your readers can see a sample of the reviews for Voices Under Berlin with this link.

Q: When your first book was published, who published it and why did you choose them?

Tom: When Once More Upon a Time was published it was not so much a case of me choosing them, as a case of them choosing me. With over 50 rejections, I had already exhausted my third tier choices from Writers’ Market. At that point, I was just pleased to get my book into print.

Q: How did it make you feel to become published for the first time and how did you celebrate?

Tom: I was thrilled to be able to hold the first copy of my book in my hands. It is a special feeling akin to becoming a parent. This is my “baby,” and it will carry my thoughts into the future long after I have gone to the undiscovered country. It is a type of immortality.

Q: What was the first thing you did for as promotion when you were published for the first time?

Tom: I put up a webSite. In this day and age, you need a webSite to bring your book to the attention of the growing number of people who are getting the information they need to decide which books to buy online, because more and more traditional media outlets are cutting the number of book reviews and the amount of literary coverage that they carry. Recommendations from book bloggers, supplemented with reviews by ordinary readers on Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.com, GoodReads.com or Shelfari.com are taking the place of the traditional-media literary arbiters who used to be able to propel a book to bestsellerdom, or dash its author’s hopes with a single review. Diversity is king in the marketplace for books in the twenty-first century, due to the technological advances that have made it economically feasible to produce books for niche audiences, but this economic feasibility only works if these books are distributed online. Authors and publishers who ignore this paradigm shift in the publishing industry do so at their peril, because they are ignoring a growing segment of their potential market, which, by some estimates, accounts for 25-30% of the books sold each year in the USA.

Q: If you had to do it over again, would you have chosen another route to be published?

Tom: There is no “easy” way to get published and be read. It is a lot of hard work, no matter which route you choose to be published. It only gets easier as you become better known to the reading public, which is why I am here today, to increase my name recognition.

Q: Have you been published since then and how have you grown as an author?

Tom: No, I have not been published again since Voices Under Berlin came out. I am, however, working on three follow-up novels.

Project number 1 has the working title The Day Before the Wall: Berlin August 1961. The plot is based on a “legend” that was still told on mids in Berlin when I was there in the Army in the mid-1970s. My story relates what happens to a young American sergeant in Military Intelligence who has a piece of information that the East Germans are prepared to kill for. He knows that construction of the Berlin Wall will begin at midnight on August the 13th, and that orders have been given to the East German engineer troops who will be building the wall to pull back if the Americans take an aggressive stance to stop construction. The Stasi, the East German secret police, are after him, but so are the West-Berlin municipal police and the U.S. Army MPs, because the Stasi have framed him for the murder of his postmistress. It’s August the 12th, and the clock is running almost as fast as my hero. The key question of the novel is: “even if he is lucky enough to make it back across the border, will anybody in the West believe what he has to say and take action on it before it is too late?” History says that he either didn’t make it, or they didn’t believe him. I’m not going to spoil the surprise of the ending by telling you now. You’ll have to buy a copy when it’s published to find out. It has turned out rather well, if I do say so myself.

My second project is called Reunification. It is set in the present day. It is about an American who used to be stationed in Berlin going back to post-wall, reunified Berlin and meeting his old “long-haired dictionary.” The key questions to be explored here are: “Is there an ‘us’ in this reunited German-American couple?”, “Is there an ‘us’ in the reunited eastern and western halves of Berlin?”, and “Is there a place for the ‘USA’ in the reunited Germany?”.

The third one has the working title of The Listeners at P.O.Box 1142: The Hunt for Nazi Secrets in Virginia. It is a return to the style and layout of Voices Under Berlin. The main character will be another transcriber, and the transcripts will be of the bugs in the cells of high-value Nazi prisoners of war.

During World War II, the USA had an interrogation center for Nazi POWs at Fort Hunt in Virginia. The operation of the center was so secret that it was only known by its post office box number. The history of P.O.Box 1142 has only recently been declassified, and the press immediately seized on the story to make comparisons to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba. The key issue that it will explore will be—like Voices Under Berlin—the idealism and morality of the linguists running the operation.

I have three projects going at once, because I’m one of those authors who sits down in front of a computer and lets the characters tell him what to write. Once I have the first words on screen to set the scene for a chapter, the characters are normally quite talkative. Some days, however, the characters don’t want to talk to me, and that is why I have three novel projects going at once. When the characters in The Day Before the Wall are mute, I see what the characters in Reunification or in The Listeners at P.O.Box 1142 have to say. It keeps me from being stuck in writer’s block.

Q: Looking back since the early days when you were trying to get published, what do you think you could have done differently to speed things up?  What kind of mistakes could you have avoided?

Tom: The twenty-first century is a time in which good books are finding it progressively more difficult to be accepted by a publisher. The only people who sail into representation by an agent or get a book contract on their first try have names like Madonna, Sharon Osbourne, or Sarah Palin.

The agents and acquisition editors of today are not infallible. They are making acquisition decisions based on their own subjective tastes, and market analysis, which is another way of saying “a knowledge of what the market was buying yesterday”. To put a smile on your face, just imagine how the 12 publishers who rejected J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series must feel in the light of its run-away best-seller status, followed by a string of movies!

The specific problem with Voices Under Berlin is that it is a different kind of spy novel. It is the kind of thing that has not been done before. One reviewer called it “A Spy Novel that Breaks all the Molds.” And therein lies the problem. More and more these days publishers and agents are looking for what was selling last week, rather than for something new. I think that is best illustrated by one of the responses I got when the manuscript was making the rounds of literary agents in search representation.

It was the best rejection letter I got. Almost all the others were just form letters with some vacuous reason for rejection like “It does not fit our current requirements.” This agent, however, took the time to write me a personal letter, in which he said that Voices Under Berlin was very Helleresque, but that it would sell better with more sex and violence.

I could have sped things up by taking his advice, and loading my novel with sex and violence, but that wasn’t the kind of book that I had set out to write. I wanted to write a book that was based on the reality of the mind numbing boredom of a Sunday mid while you’re waiting for the target’s loose lips to sink a ship.

Readers’ reactions to Voices Under Berlin indicate that I was right not to give in to the blandishments of the book marketplace. There is an audience for what I write.

The Day Before the Wall: Berlin August 1961 is a more “marketable” book. It has much more sex and violence than Voices Under Berlin. I decided to write it, just to prove that I could do that kind of a book, but even at that, it is still very different from anything I’ve seen published recently. It has my own unique mark on it.

Q: What has been the biggest accomplishment you have achieved since becoming published?

Tom: The positive response to Voices Under Berlin has been my biggest accomplishment, because I have been the primary driving force behind getting it recognition. It has an average of 4.5 stars for its reviews on Amazon.com, and there is a long, growing list of reviews and comments on the novel’s webSite. The book blogger “Puss Reboots” included it in her top ten list of books reviewed for 2009, and PODBRAM selected it as the “Best Historical Concept” of 2009. It won a Stars & Flags Book Award in 2009 at the Branson, MO, Veterans Week celebration. It was the Military Writers’ Society of America Book of the Month for September. And it won an award at the Hollywood Book Festival.

Q: If you could have chosen another profession, what would that profession be?

Tom: Actually, I have had several previous professions, but they have all included writing as one of the things that I did. Writing fiction is just the latest reinvention of myself. I started writing when I was in the Army, and I’ve written ever since. Somebody sat me down in front of a stack of files, said “read all this stuff, and then write me a report about it.” They apparently liked what I was doing, because they kept asking me to write reports. So I wrote more and more and more reports, and discovered that it was addictive. It was a gradual process. I’ve been writing constantly since I was about 20, which is longer ago than I care to think about some days. During my professional career, the clarity of your prose and the correctness of your analysis were the gauges by which a writer’s product was judged.

I would ask that those who look askance at novelists with this kind of writing background to recall that Hemingway was a journalist, who started out writing for his high school newspaper, became a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star, later was a correspondent for the Toronto Star, then wrote dispatches from the Spanish Civil War and covered World War II. Mark Twain worked as a journalist for twenty years before he wrote his first novel. Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s From Fact to Fiction: Journalism & Imaginative Writing in America (1985) provides an exhaustive account of the impact that journalism has had on American literature.

Q: Would you give up being an author for that profession or have you combined the best of both worlds?

Tom: No, I don’t think that I could stop writing. You might say that I have indeed managed to combine the best of both worlds.

Q: How do you see yourself in ten years?

Tom: I will have more book awards than the five I have thus far received for Voices Under Berlin. I will have at least one book with an Amazon.com sales rank of 100 or less, and at least one of my books will have been made into a movie.

Q: Any final words for writers who dream of being published one day?

Tom: Ignore the naysayers, and write the best book you can. If your book has a unique voice, it will speak for itself and find its own audience. Faith in yourself and the story your book has to tell, combined with persistence is the key to success in this endeavor.

Thank you for this interview, Tom. Can you tell us how we can find out more about you and your new book?

Tom: You’re very welcome. I am pleased to have been invited to do an interview for Beyond the Books. The easiest way to find out more about Voices Under Berlin is to visit the novel’s webSite at www.VoicesUnderBerlin.com. There folks can read a sample chapter, browse the reviews, see a list of the awards the novel has won, and learn more about Berlin in the 1950s.

You can learn more about T.H.E. Hill and his books at: http://www.VoicesUnderBerlin.com