Putin can’t sue me!
While there’s a litigation trial in my upcoming novel The Klimt Connection, Vladimir Putin can’t sue me in any court of the free world. First, he’s a monster who’s been ostracized by more than 140 nations—only a handful of Russian puppet countries voted against the resolution in the UN’s General Assembly. Second, no country would let the man headed to the Hague for war crimes besmirch their courtrooms. And third, I write nothing about the megalomaniac that’s false and not readily available to the general public. at least outside Russia’s oppressive censorship.
I will focus on the third point. (This article is about writing, after all.) Generally speaking, good authors still collect background material that will infuse their fiction with realism. Even writers if cozy mysteries and romance novels do that, (Fantasy writers might be an exception, but even J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and his wizarding friends are often among the Muggles at times.) To paraphrase Tom Clancy, the best fiction has to seem possible and real. The process of collecting this background material is often incorrectly called “research,” but today it’s more just trawling the waters of the internet, although I will often use real physical reference works from my bookshelf.
In particular, I’ve been collecting background material on Vladimir Putin for years, and I can categorically state that all facts in The Klimt Connection, beyond the ubiquitous vitriolic adjectives uttered by my characters, are absolutely true. No UK barrister or US lawyer would ever represent Putin if he decided to sue me for libel or slander.
The general advice writers read all the time is that one can use real persons as characters if what is said about them, real facts or otherwise, is complimentary. I followed that advice in my novel Aristocrats and Assassins (where Esther Brookstone’s current husband, Bastiann van Coevorden had a cameo appearance, by the way). But I have nothing complimentary to say about Putin, so I stick to the facts. Just the facts, ma’am, as Joe Friday used to say. (Guys will probably enjoy the novel too, of course.)
Putin isn’t even a major character in the novel, though; he’s such a worthless piece of human garbage, he doesn’t even deserve to be a secondary one. And the major theme of the novel only involves him in his role of bad actor trying to destabilize western democracies. (It’s interesting that the invasion of Ukraine has served to unify the world against him.) No, the major theme of the novel can be summarized in this Thomas Paine quote: “Our greatest enemies, the ones we must fight against, are within ”
As I explain in the end notes of the novel (I’ve always included them, by the way, and I hope people read them), I wrote much of The Klimt Connection as the ex-KGB madman from St. Petersburg waged war on Ukraine, but I’ve often gone after Vladimir Putin before. Even my arch-villain Vladimir Kalinin hates that other Vladimir and probably celebrates the Ukrainian Zelenskyy’s ability to motivate his countrymen to fight the real Russian monster.
Of course, there’s also an art theme in the novel. After all, Esther Brookstone is the “art detective”! Please look for this novel that will be available wherever quality ebooks are sold by reputable retailers (that excludes Amazon). You will enjoy Esther’s new adventures…and the Putin bashing. And there’s an easy way to catch up on some of her previous adventures you might have missed: Download Defanging the Red Dragon and Intolerance. They’re free. (See the list of available free PDFs on my “Free Stuff & Contests” web page for these and other free fiction.)
