ALIBI CLUB author Francine Mathews speaks with Terrance Gelenter

Francine Mathews has used her experience as a former foreign policy analyst for the CIA to achieve critical and popular acclaim in the field of espionage fiction. Her latest book set in Paris at the dawn of WW II blends fact and fiction in the race to control atomic fission–keep it out of the Nazi’s hands.

It also provided Madame Mathews with an opportunity to experience Paris anew, if only in her mind. Our conversation follows.
 
TG: When did you first go to Paris?
FM: Twenty years ago, when I was fresh out of Princeton and replete with Napoleonic history.  I traveled with my mother, and we stayed in a convent school in the 15th, near the Rue Vaugirard, that somebody had recommended or arranged for her.  She had this idea that I was fresh and ingenuous and lovely and would be ravished by a Frenchman if I didn’t stay in a convent at night.

TG: When and why did you keep going back?

FM: Oh, my God—I had to see something other than the convent!  No, seriously—is it possible to visit Paris only once?  Having seen it at all?  I think it was Paris that first showed me how to accommodate age.  How to endure with beauty.  That’s a lesson every woman needs to learn, particularly American women.  It’s our hardest truth.  And then as a simple member of the human race it’s essential to return to Paris at key points in your life—as you age—and measure yourself against its accumulated living.  Against that immense well of time.  I returned for my honeymoon and again for my fifteenth wedding anniversary and I plan to take my sons there soon, when they are capable of opening themselves to the place.

TG: Why did you decide to set THE ALIBI CLUB in France?

FM: Because it’s a story that could only happen in Paris—where an American lawyer and a French physicist and a jazz singer from segregated Tennessee are able to meet as equals at a time when, in most cities around the world, they’d never intersect.  ALIBI CLUB is a story of odd bedfellows.  And of course, I used Paris because I wanted to suffuse the war with an incongruous glamour—that last gleam of Thirties decadence Hitler killed. 

Why immediately prior the occupation?

FM: It’s the moment when the sands are running out through the thin neck of the hourglass.  There’s an inherent tension in May, 1940—a countdown to the despair of June--that  was vital to the pace and sense of jeopardy in the novel.

TG: Why the story of heavy water?
FM:Because it’s never been told!  Or at least, not in the way I chose to tell it.   By the spring of 1940, the Nazis had taken Czechoslovakia—Europe’s chief source of uranium.  They’d taken Norway, the world’s chief supplier of heavy water.  And they were poised to take Paris, where Europe’s only cyclotron was almost completed in a laboratory at the Sorbonne.  They were systematically invading countries that held vital components of an atomic bomb.  And when I realized that one man--Marie Curie’s son-in-law—stopped them dead in their tracks, I knew I had to tell the story.  It’s essentially one long nail-biting chase with a cast of desperate amateurs, some fictional—and some very real.

TG: Where did you stay (arrondissement?)
FM: On my most recent trip—to research this book—I was in a friend’s apartment in the 15th.  Again!  But I like the neighborhood.  It feels very bourgeois, very lived-in, authentique.  You can walk over to the Tour Eiffel at night and shiver under the iron lights.

TG: What’s your favorite café?
FM: Any one I haven’t tried yet.  I have a weakness for Café de Flore. 

TG: What’s your favorite starred restaurant?
FM: It’s hard to choose between Taillevent and l’Ambroisie, although they’re quite different.  I wish both of them were easier to book!

TG: What’s your favorite bistro du coin?

I like Café Bonaparte, mostly because I love the backstreets it fronts.  On a totally different level I enjoyed Les Bookinistes for its breezy style and great location.  But I’m dating myself.

What’s your favorite market?
FM: I love browsing the print sellers in Porte de Clignancourt—I collect Costume Parisien fashion plates from the 1810 period.  Napoleon, again.  Or rather—Josephine.  And then there are the stands around the Boul-Mich with produce and trussed chickens and whatnot that I pore over.  I love walking among the birds offered for sale on the Ile.  My favorite neighborhood will always be the Marais.  I haunt the Musée Picasso.

TG: What’s your favorite park or garden?
FM: The Luxembourg—particularly when the children are out, sailing boats.  But I also love to lie on the grass in the Place des Vosges, which doesn’t really count as a park, I suppose.  As for gardens…probably the one that surrounds the Musée Rodin, particularly when the roses are blooming.  Or the empty wilderness of woods and park that lead you, on foot, to Malmaison.  I’d move heaven and earth to buy Malmaison if it were possible.

TG: What’s your favorite time of the year?
FM: Autumn.  But that’s my favorite time, anywhere in the world.  I’m a complete sap when it comes to the dying notes of the year.

TG: How has Paris affected your work?
FM: You know, all fiction is an act of imagination.  That sounds obvious—but what I’m trying to say is that it’s a deliberate throwing of a mental voice.  A kind of unspoken ventriloquism.  When you write, it’s critical to love the place you must inhabit for the duration of the work.  Otherwise, you’d go mad.  To be able to live, mentally, in Paris for eight months of last year was an inexpressible gift.  I found that writing THE ALIBI CLUB was as effortless as taking dictation.  It’s my seventeenth novel, and I can firmly say that not all of them have been even close to effortless; but the soul of Paris made this one sing.  And so I’m grateful.  For the chance to breathe that mental air awhile.

TG: How has Paris affected your life?
FM: It has given me an insatiable longing—a restlessness of spirit.  Which is why, after all, we return again and again.