It is March 1938. Hitler has marched into Vienna to a triumphant reception, but the 180,000 Jews living in the city fear the future. Katharine Simmons, an undercover SIS agent working at the British Passport Office, is distraught when her husband, also an undercover agent, is taken from their home and disappears without trace. Left alone in Vienna, Katharine's secret work prevents her from returning home, but the noose is tightening around the SIS operatives as a suspected double agent is betraying them. Can the love of a mystery man save Katharine from the Gestapo? Who is her secret betrayer? And what is the past that haunts her? In this extraordinary debut novel, love, honor and power compete against a backdrop of the growing tensions of 1930s Vienna.
J H Schryer is the pseudonym for the fiction writing partnership of historian Dr Helen Fry and author James Hamilton. As J H Schryer, they have written "Goodnight Vienna" which is set in Vienna in 1938; and its sequel "Moonlight Over Denmark" which takes place during the Second World War. "Goodnight Vienna" is currently attracting some interest for possible film. They are now working on their third novel of historical fiction, set in the mid-1930s.
They are on Facebook as "Jh Schryer".
Dr Helen Fry and James Hamilton have been working as a writing partnership in fiction since 2005. When Helen first met James, she was struck by his creativity and vivacious character. Unsure whether she could turn much of her dynamic research into the very different genre of historical fiction, he offered to write with her. By now Helen had tapped into a rich vein of unpublished research about the refugees from Nazism who fought for Britain in WWII. This included material on Sigmund Freud and his family living a precarious life in Vienna under the Nazis. She was working on the most dramatic point in Vienna's history - March 1938 when Hitler marched into Austria and annexed the country. Along with the discovery that a female British spy carried out extraordinary undercover work in Vienna for MI6 at that time, Helen and James embarked on capturing this period in their first novel Goodnight Vienna. Little did either of them realise the unconscious forces which had brought them together. James began to work on the material which Helen had given him. The first draft of the first chapter was full of dark emotion and anger which James expressed through the narrative. It was then that James told Helen that his family had come out of Vienna as refugees and he had never addressed the past. He had been living behind a wall of silence that blocked out anything to do with the Nazis. The writing process became cathartic for him. There was to be a further twist when it came to chosing the name they would use when the novel was published. It was not literary etiquette to publish a novel in two names, so they made a conscious decision to retain their initials J for James, H for Helen, and Schryer - which was James' original family surname and the one he was born with. Two generations after the Schryer's fled Vienna, and the family had changed their name to Hamilton, the surname was re-born.
The unconscious force was still at work and "J H Schryer" would shortly cross paths with another Freud - this time artist Jane McAdam Freud. Although doing fiction with James, Helen continued to write her books on the refugees from Nazism who fought for Britain in WWII, and that included a number of members of Sigmund Freud's family. It was during the launch of Helen's non-fiction book Freuds' War at the Freud Museum in London on 5th February 2009 that Helen and James first met Jane McAdam Freud. Jane attended the event, partly because Helen's book was about her uncle and great-uncle; but also because of her own ancestry roots in Vienna through her great-grandfather Sigmund Freud. Jane was immediately struck by the creative dynamic of J H Schryer and a gem began in her about capturing their writing partnership in sculpture. This she has done in her major new work "Stone Speak". This major new work is on view at the Freud Museum, London from 15th April - 16th July 2010.
