In the US alone there are on average 242 parricides a year. That’s about five instances a week of a child killing a father or mother.1 This seems a lot, and once I became aware of these numbers, I started noticing parricides in the news and elsewhere. A couple of acquaintances had stories about a friend of a friend who had killed a parent, and there was a case at my sons’ school where a boy killed his father in a dispute over his allowance. In the majority of cases, the perpetrators are white middle-class males without a history of violence. Often a parricide happens because the youth fears for their life or is desperate to end a cycle of abuse, but there are also cases where a child kills in cold blood.
It was these latter type of cases that interested me and I started thinking about the child-parent relationship in general – how volatile it can be, and how often a child goes through adolescence at the same time that one or both of their parents are experiencing a mid-life crisis. Often it is the child’s unreasonable behaviour that is highlighted while the parents’ conduct goes unremarked. It was this collision of tensions I wanted to explore in setting Alex up as the falsely accused murderer of Eddy.
I also wanted to explore the tension that comes with living in a city, particularly one like Paris which often feels like it’s about to erupt into a clash between the older, vested interests of the central zone, and the newer immigrant communities in the suburbs. I started writing this novel just after the Paris terrorist attacks of 2015. Five days after the attacks, police fired nearly 5,000 rounds during an hour-long siege in the suburbs at Saint-Denis where some of the perpetrators were hiding. I was living in Paris at the time and overnight, the city was transformed into a battleground with riot police on every corner and many places suddenly inaccessible without ID and security checks. The boulevard Périphérique was already a gridlocked motorway that separated central Paris from the suburbs, but after the attacks it was like a barricade.
This state of tension is familiar to Paris as it is a city built on defences. From the city wall that once enclosed the central island of the Île de Cité in Roman times, to the Thiers wall and the ring of forts that were built around Paris in the nineteenth century.
After the Paris attacks, I imagined how those forts might be used once again, not necessarily for defence, but for containment – to enclose and safeguard the vested interests and heritage of the central zone. The rich already live separate lives to the rest of us metaphorically speaking, and they increasingly live physically separated as well. The pandemic has exacerbated this, and it’s not hard to imagine a scenario where permanent physical separation of the super-rich within their own city-states develops not just on the basis of tax and affordability (as is the case, for example, in Monaco), but also for reasons of public health and ‘security’. Schemes are already underway to ‘future-proof’ cities and Paris has always had a special appeal for the rich.
Part of the inspiration for Eddy and the other journalists in The Messenger comes from Cold War stories of espionage. The Mitrokhin Archive, a cache of top-level KGB documents smuggled out of Russia in 1992 by Vasili Mitrokhin,2 provides details of the Soviet Union’s secret intelligence operations around the world, including post-World War II infiltration of the West, and French active measures during the Cold War. According to the Mitrokhin Archive, a number of French journalists were Russian ‘agents of influence’, and several publications were set up in France to disseminate pro-Russian propaganda and misinformation.
Material in the Mitrokhin Archive suggests that the French newspaper Le Monde was codenamed Vestnik (which means ‘Messenger’ in Russian) by the KGB3 and that during the 1970s and early 1980s, the KGB claimed to have influenced Le Monde articles and used it to disseminate misinformation and advance smear campaigns. Mitrokhin’s notes also identify six agents and two confidential contacts within France’s main news agency, Agence France-Presse.4
The romance between Eddy and Lara in The Messenger is inspired by a series of successful honey trap operations staged by KGB agents against various Italian diplomats working in the Italian embassy in Moscow during the 1950s-70s.5
The swingers’ scene of the fictional Matrix Club in The Messenger is inspired by the story of Karl and Hana Koecher, Czech agents who worked for the KGB and also for the Czech intelligence agency. The Koechers were active in the US in the 1970s and early 1980s, and Karl Koecher is thought to be the only foreign agent to have infiltrated the CIA. The Koechers were said to be active in the sex club scene in New York and Washington in the 1970s where they liaised with personnel from the CIA, Pentagon and other parts of the US government.6
1 This statistic comes from a 2007 analysis of US parricide cases over the period 1976-1999. Heide, Kathleen M. and Petee, Thomas A., Parricide An Empirical Analysis of 24 Years of U.S. Data. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, December 2007. In countries where access to firearms is more difficult there are many less cases.
2 The official historian of MI5, Christopher Andrew, together with Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist, compiled two volumes based on material in the Mitrokhin Archive: The Sword and The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books 1999) and The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York: Basic Books 2005).
3 Andrew, C. and Mitrokhin, V. The Sword and The Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB, p.469
4 Andrew, C. and Mitrokhin, V. Ibid, p.470
5 Andrew, C. and Mitrokhin, V. Ibid, p.477-9
6 Andrew, C. and Mitrokhin, V. Ibid, p.199-202, and also Kessler, Ronald, Spy vs. Spy (New York: Scribner’s, 1988)