It's Nazi-occupied Denmark, 1943. Two men drop by parachute from a lone aircraft. Only one survives. But what is his real identity? And what is the terrible past that he hides? Geoffrey Hart, an Austrian refugee drafted into the Special Operations Executive, is tasked with finding the missing British agent who is being hidden by Danish resistance. Before he leaves, his eye is caught by Lilian, a Danish woman working at the SOE training school. It is love at first sight but duty soon forces them apart, perhaps for ever. Once he has located the missing agent, Hart must infiltrate a German U-boat on its way to Ireland, carrying secret scientific technology. Meanwhile, SIS operative Katharine Simmons is tracking the vital submarine. When danger threatens, can she prevent it being blown out of the water, thus losing its precious cargo? And Katharine has made a jaw-dropping discovery, one which will put Geoffrey and the whole of Britain in mortal danger - In this, the sequel to "Goodnight Vienna", loyalty and love are played out against the backdrop of simmering revenge.
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 By now Helen had tapped into a rich vein of unpublished research about the refugees from Nazism who fought for Britain in WWII.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.
