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- [00:00]
A
Hi everyone. I want to tell you all about another podcast I think you'll enjoy. College Matters from the Chronicle College Matters is a weekly show from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it's a great resource for news and analysis about colleges and universities. You'll hear sharp discussions with Chronicle journalists offering fresh perspectives on the latest salvos from the Trump administration and keen insights about how faculty and students are adapting to technological changes. College Matters also features incisive interviews with newsmakers, including recent conversations with Chris Eisgruber, Princeton University's president, and Rick Singer, who is best known as the mastermind of the Varsity Blues admissions scandal. Check out College Matters wherever you get your podcasts.
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Felicity Cowell fled, her bare feet slapping the cold stone of the corridor. She tried to soften the sound, but her heart said run. And she followed her heart until the corridor turned, ending abruptly at a steep flight of stairs. She stopped short, teetering on the top step. This path led to a ground level door and the lawn. Another miscalculation. She needed a different escape. This is GP Gottlieb, host for New Books and Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today I'm talking to author Tracy DeHaan about her latest mystery, Swiss Vendetta, set in a stunning medieval Swiss chateau in the midst of an unusually fierce storm. A Swiss American homicide detective has been sent to investigate the murder of a young woman who was there to inventory the art collection. Agnes has a host of issues to grapple with, from the power outage, lack of heat and being away from her children to her husband's recent death, the vert murder victim and the sudden disappearance of a child. There's also the cast of characters all of seem to have something to hide. Hi Tracy, thanks for joining me today.
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B
I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.
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C
So the most important character in Swiss Vendetta might arguably be the weather. Can you talk about that storm?
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B
Yes. This was inspired by living through a huge ice storm when I was in Kentucky and being without power, very cold for about five days. And then we living in Switzerland and thinking about that environment, which is a very kind of wintry cold environment, but not really. I mean they're not a bitter cold climate. And then also having some friends. My husband is Swiss friends of his who actually live in basically an old monastery right on the lake. And then visiting someone else who kind of has a chateau and then, you know, there's a real famous chateau on that lake. And putting all those things together, what does it feel like to live in this beautiful environment when you have this unbelievable cataclysmic event. Everyone thinks it's a perfect place. Oh no. Things can go wrong. And then taking some of the realities of the life we saw when we lived there and blending them all together. The setting is crucial.
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C
So is that castle, the chateau, is it based on a real medieval fortress?
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B
It is, it is based on an actual Chateau Chillon which is down the lake from my fictional setting. And it is truly a medieval fortress that sits out over the lake a little bit like it has like one foot in the actual lake. And Lord Byron, you know, did poetry about this place and it's a big tourist attraction. And so I situated my. In fact, I think the real chateau is mentioned in the book briefly, like as being, you know, a neighbor down the street, so to say. But yeah, I was inspired by real things.
- [03:47]
C
So let's talk more about your love of Switzerland. Your husband is Swiss. You spend time there. We just visited last year and had a amazing. The food was so excellent, but the German was really hard for me to understand. So tell a little bit about your. Where you are there, what's it like?
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B
So my husband went to boarding school at Gruyere, which is a famous. Is also a very famous chateau. A fortress, castle. A castle of Gruyere. And then the boarding school was right next to it. So it's all in this very idyllic part of Switzerland, kind of between right at the border of the French and the German speaking parts. Because there's the French speaking part, Geneva, Lausanne, places like that. There's the German speaking part, Zurich, Basel, Bern, the Italian, which is near Italy and is slightly more rural, although they do certainly have cities, you know, small cities. And then the fourth official language is Romansh, which is a very old language which has some Latin in it, which is spoken officially by like 1% of the people. So my book Swiss Vendetta is set in the French speaking part. It's set in the area kind of down the lake from Lausanne. We lived in Zurich. My husband taught at the university there. So I was around that German. We lived really in Lausanne, but he taught in Zurich. We spent half of some weeks there. German is very interesting in Switzerland. There's Hotdeutsch, which is High German, which is what I unofficially call real German, which you would hear in Germany. The spoken language in Switzerland is Schweitzerdeutsch. It's Swiss German. My husband, as a Swiss citizen going to school there, does not understand Swiss German. It is truly its Own language. And so when he was teaching at the ETH in Zurich, very multilingual there. But if he spoke in German with a student or with another faculty member, he would speak high German. Hochdeutsch. So if you knew German from school or whatever, and then you ended up in Switzerland. Yes. You were lost.
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C
So will you introduce your protagonist? Agnes Luti.
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B
Yes. Agnes Luti. Yes. You know, she is Swiss, American. I think it's often when we're writing a character, we say, whose eyes are we gonna see things through? And so whose eyes am I gonna see? Not just the story, but the place. The place is very important. Some of the cultural aspects of the place are very important. And so for her to be a police inspector, she's going to be someone who is very familiar and all these things. But I thought, what if her parents were American? What if she grew up there? But she grew up in that American household. So she would also be able to cast an eye on things and be able to say, you know, why is this done? Or I've thought about why it's done in a way that someone who is 100% native just kind of does stuff, and we never even think about it. It's not that we don't question. It just doesn't even occur to us. But. And this is a little bit triggered, I was taking French lessons when we first lived in Lausanne, and there was, like 10 of us in the class. And at the end of the class, you know, the teacher might then close with just a question to see, you know, how we were getting along with conversational tools. And she said, you know, what are you doing this weekend, let's say? And I said, we are going to a friend's house for dinner. I said it in my very best little baby French. And she kind of asked me again, gave me another try, and finally she switched to English. And she said, so you're going to a friend's house for dinner? Not with friends to dinner, like in a restaurant. And I said, no, we're going to their house. She said, that's very unusual here. And so she took it as a teaching moment for the class. She said, most people will go to a restaurant. Wonderful. So I go home and I ask my husband, and he goes, oh, you don't know that many real Swiss people.
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C
I'm like, what do you mean?
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B
Because our friends were all of his friends from, like, university or even from earlier, you know, like, you know, the kind of middle school, high school, and all that kind of thing. And he's like, right. But it's a very international community. So he then points, he's like, well, so and so is Swiss, but his wife is really truly French. I just thought she was French speaking Swiss. So there were all these people that he's like, you know, they're all kind of multinational households with maybe one Swiss person. And so the habits were not like just, you know, hardcore Swiss habits. And then the other little funny thing is the old joke used to be that if you would just point your finger in a telephone book, like, you know, that person was going to be a policeman or the people above him that, you know, like 10% of the population were in the police. It's kind of a joke. And he was like. And so, and so, you know, is, is his brother is a policeman and he was, you know, it was great for me to have somebody to ask about police things for the book. But you know, part of that Swiss American was give that insider, outsider perspective through my main character.
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C
So there's a lot of interesting people we don't have to talk about every single one of them. But the ones that really interest me, there's an elderly aunt who is a marqu. Why is she living there on her.
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B
Own with a staff.
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C
What's her position in the family and what exactly does it mean that she's a marquise?
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B
Well, so she married, she is Swiss. This is the kind of chateau of her childhood. And so she was married and she married a Frenchman where they would still have the titles, are no longer politically active. So for example, in the United Kingdom, if you have a title, you're in a hierarchy sometimes of the political world, like dukes, royal dukes and things like that with, you know, heirs to the throne. But lots of countries, you know, France is one, still have an active aristocracy. Hereditary titles that exist to this day, they have no significance in the legal system. They don't mean anything special there. So she was married to a man who was a marquis and she's a marquise and has retained that as her married title. And she came back to Switzerland at some point in her life. And I won't go into too many details there, giving it away, but she's kind of the matriarch of the family in many ways. You know, this is your childhood home and these places are large enough that they are in a way multi generational. Why not? You can have your own wing. And she was one of my favorite characters. My mother in law, who has passed away many years ago, was in a tiny way inspiration for the marquis. My mother in Law came from a very diplomatic family and had many amazing experiences in her lifetime. Incredibly multilingual. My husband speaks four languages, languages fluently and knows a little bit of some others. And his parents book like eight and nine fluently. And so she was just a little bit of my mother in law, but only in the very best way. Okay. Yeah.
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C
They think we Americans are just absolute idiots for only knowing one language. Most of us.
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B
It's a big country. It's a big country. You know, when you live really close to other people who have their culture that they, you know, is both linguistic and all sorts of food and all this, then you want to make an effort to, to really interact with them in the best way possible. Right. And we're just so big that I think we have unfortunately, you know, skipped that.
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C
In a way, Raif Mulholland is the Machis godson. Can you say more about what that means? I really don't even know godson.
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B
Okay. Well, you know, I think the idea of a godson is probably potentially different in different cultures. I do know people in the United States maybe who have that. I think of it as a little bit more of a European thing. It may even be a Catholic thing or a Church of England thing. And so, you know, my husband has godparents, and those are people who, when you're Christened, are going to stand up for you. You know, they're going to. Usually a man and a woman. It could be more than that. It could be, you know, two women or three men or whatever. But it's usually, you know, two people, maybe more, and they're your godparents. My husband has a goddaughter, for example, and it's someone who is not necessarily a member of the family. Usually not. But the idea is that you can be another adult who can be active in their life.
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C
But what's her responsibility? Does she have a responsibility to.
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B
There's no real responsibilities. It's very much, you know, each family, each individual. You know, I'm sure that different families, it's kind of like, oh, the godmothers always do this. This is what you'll do. And often it's the relationship of the people. So, for example, if you were a godparent and you had children of the same age, they may really grow up playing together and being great friends, almost like cousins, you know what I mean? We live in the United States and my husband's goddaughter was living in Switzerland, and so we didn't really see her often or we see her parents, but she was a little kid. And then when she was 11, they sent her to America to come and stay with us for a few weeks. It was a big deal. She flew. It was a direct flight on her own. So we've had several very special moments like that with her throughout her life. And now she's in her 30s.
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C
But talk about Rafe.
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B
Yeah, Rafe, you know, he had a godmother who I think, you know, who's his mother and the godmother were close friends. That made sense. His parents were no longer living, so you might feel a little bit more of a protective nature toward the godson. You know, you can only help these people as much as you can. Sometimes they. I'm not going to say he was a bad egg, but, you know, sometimes people can do things you're not necessarily proud of. Right.
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C
He might have made some bad choices. And then there's the owner of the chateau, Julien Vallotton.
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B
Julien Vallotton.
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C
What's his story? Aside from being early 40s, tall and good looking?
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B
Yeah, well, you know, he is, in my mind, one of these people who inherit a kind of family responsibility. And you can choose to walk away from it, you can choose to embrace it, but it is there. And so in his instance, it is a chateau that's been in the family's house for literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. They've always lived there. They've always played a role in society. Back in the early days, it would have been much more like a political role or the role of having the knights to guard the border and all these kinds of things. And I think when we live in a very. The modern political entity of the United States, obviously we exist on older lands that other people inhabited, but our political history only lasts about 250 years. So imagine living in a place where the political and cultural and ethnic group has been the same for 700, 800 years. And your family has always been. Been at the kind of pinnacle of what was going on, whether it's ties to the church or politics or economics or whatever. And there's a weight that comes with that. And I think some people can be buried by that weight and some people can find their way within that. I think there's a place in the book where he's asked about his wife. She is deceased and doesn't really come up at all in the book. But he mentions marrying her and he's like, she was just somebody he always knew. It was like, for me, it was just a little tiny way of saying, you may live a Life that seems of great privilege, but there can also be great responsibility that you have to accept and live up to. And there also may be a kind of constraints of just the situation.
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C
The beautiful Marie Chantal is married to Rafe's younger brother. What's going on with her and her husband?
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B
Yes, she's married. She's married to Julian's younger brother, Daniel. And, you know, Daniel's kind of the bad boy, right? You know, he's the younger son. He's the one who I think is like, well, you know, we can all live here. It's a huge place. But I'm not the real heir. I'm not the guy who's gotta, like, you know, guide the family finances and make the big decisions. But then, I mean, we see this with, you know, the famous Prince William and Prince Harry. Does that make you feel like you're an outsider? Does that. You know, how does that make you feel? And so I wanted to show that while he's. He's kind of the bad boy, he's not really. He's kind of. He can't figure out who to be, I guess, because he wasn't handed this defined role. So in some ways he has the freedom to view who he wants to be. But he. It's very. It's very easy to look at someone else's life and say, oh, but you have the flexibility to do whatever you want. And I think that can also be very hard. So, you know, a little bit looking at people's lives who are very privileged and they don't have the worries of money and things like that. But it doesn't necessarily mean your life is easy.
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C
No, it does not. There's a neighbor across the way. It was a little confusing about. Exactly. I'd like to picture it when I see the movie version of your book. There's this gorgeous chateau, and then there's this home across, a little bit away. And those are the only homes in the whole area.
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B
So imagine that you're living in an area that has kind of. You're coming into the mountainous area kind of up from Lausanne, and it goes up to the mountains there. But there are vineyards in that part of the world. And at some places there will be land that's almost down a cliff. It doesn't have to be literally a cliff, but you have the kind of high part where the village is that they live near. But then you go down the steep drive and you're on a kind of plateau that's more down at lake level there, which is where you might have built a chateau, fortress to protect. You've got the mountains behind you that are very protected, but you're also protecting from across the water, which is France is on the other side of Lac Lemon, which is a lot of people call Lake Geneva. So imagine this kind of peninsula below the area of the cliff or mountains, and you have the chateau, but you also have much more, I think, of a French style home, much more recent 18th century. The big windows looking out across the lake. The heir of Napoleon, for example. You're no longer building a fortress and he's the old Russian guy who lives there. And so they're separated by property. But certainly you could walk between the two in 10 or 15 minutes. So it's like you're two big properties and you're kind of down there together, yet separate, if that makes sense, because there is a sense of real privacy between the two. But they're isolated. They would have to go up a steep drive to go up to the village and to the road that takes them to the rest of the Switzerland.
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C
And these are people that are really alone. They're living in this very exclusive. It's difficult. Their lives seem very, very difficult. But they have whatever they want and they have a whole staff. So I told you this. I don't like to ask questions about plot because I don't want to give anything away. But are there any other characters you'd like to mention?
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B
Well, there were so many more.
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C
There's a few more. Not so many more, but there's a few more. And I wasn't sure which one you really want to say.
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B
Yeah, you know, for me, there were a lot of relationships that I wanted Agnes to have. This is her first. This is not giving away anything. You know, it's not on the book jacket. But this is her first kind of murder that she's in charge of. It's a whole new level of responsibility. She's been on the police force. She's, you know, think of it as joining the murder squad. And because of the weather that you mentioned, she gets kind of isolated there. And so she doesn't have the resources you would normally have. And you would have, you know, something really bad happened. You know, the highest level of what can happen, a murder, you would usually have other people coming in who are more experienced, and because of the storm, she didn't have that. Now she was there with Robert Carnet, who she had known and worked with before. And so they come to that relationship as friends, as colleagues. And of course, when you're Trapped with anyone. And you're in a position of maybe having to demonstrate that you bring value even to someone that you know and like, what does that do to them? And then other things come out about the. Not just, not really their relationship, but part of her life that comes out and she's really feeling trapped here. And then of course, she has a family. She's a widow, but she has children who are fairly young. She has a mother in law who, you know, the children are being well cared for. During the storm, she's separated from the family, the powers out. I wanted this sense of kind of a locked room. There's limits to what the locked room is. But the sense of great responsibility, the sense of being trapped with your colleagues, how that's supportive, but also perhaps pressure, the pressure of a mother in law and the children. And I mean, think about it as any woman or any really parent, why are you away from your children? And that kind of pressure that's coming to bear on her. And then she's really outside of her. Her milieu in terms of the people that she is now there, that she is investigating, but also living in their place. I mean, it's just kind of crazy, I think. So I wanted to explore all of those. I wanted to have a whole ensemble cast. Everybody brings their own personal life to bear in the story and she gets to know each of them and maybe to better understand the things she wouldn't have expected about their situation.
- [21:19]
C
Can you say a word or two about your research? Did it involve a few weeks in the mountains surrounded by great wealth and fabulous food?
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B
Well, you know, we lived there for several years. And so for me, we were not living there when I finished writing this, but for me, my husband's Swiss, we would go back every year. And so I could do very targeted research to make sure that something very special with the book that comes after this. A well Timed Murder, that's the one I had to do real special research for because it's set at Baselworld, which was a. It's was at the time the biggest and most important watch exhibition in the world. And so I did go to Baselworld for that very specific thing. That's not something I would have normally done for Swiss vendetta. It was more giving some thought to some of the police things that went on. And again, we have a friend whose brother's a policeman. I was able to contact other people. It is funny though, when you're looking at the final details of anything you write, sometimes there'll be a detail like When Agnes is driving to the chateau the first time the storm is starting, and she sees a kind of, let's say, a landscape marker, you know, it'd be like the equivalent of driving past the bridge, you know, and people who know it would know where she was. And I said, my husband read something about this, and he's like, it's not there. Like, yes, it is. He's like, no, it's not. And so I had to get on, like, Google Earth because I was in the United States at the time and, like, prove to him that the statue that I happened to mention in passing was really there. And I say this because even someone who is from a place, sometimes your memory fools you, you know, and you have to just go back and double check things.
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C
Oh, absolutely. And sometimes you're driving in that place.
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B
That you grew up in and you forget where, which way to turn. So, yeah, makes sense. You're like, really? The red barn? You're like, yes, the red barn is farther than I. But in my mind, it was different. Yeah. So.
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C
So what are you working on next?
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B
Well, I am working on two things right now, and they're not mysteries in the sense of a mystery with a murder necessarily. One is a little bit more of a political thriller. Very exciting to be working on that. And it has a historical aspect because it is set back in the 60s and the 90s, so the 1960s and 1990s. So technically, it's almost entirely historical at this point, but it's set in two timelines back then. And then I have another manuscript that I'm also really working on finishing. It was the kind of thing where I had to take a step back from the rabbit hole of some aspects of the book and get some distance. And it's a book that starts basically the day before the beginning of the First World War, and it ends after D Day in the Second World War. And so it's a kind of bigger drama, bigger scale book, and I felt like I needed to set it aside and finish the political thriller.
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C
It sounds really interesting.
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B
A palate cleanser, right?
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C
A palate cleanser. Also, could there be some Swiss chocolate with it? Anyway, Tracy, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a pleasure.
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B
Oh, it was my pleasure to be here. Always love to talk about books.
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C
And thank you for joining me again. This is G.P. gottlieb, author of the Whipped and Sipped Mystery series and host for New Books and Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Today, I've been Talking to Tracy DeHaan author of Swiss Vendetta. Hope you all have a gripping mystery to cuddle with today and always. Happy reading.
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D
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C
Experian.