Mansion

In the novel I've been working on, my heroine lives in 1940 London in a mansion block of flats. That is, if I can be said to be working on something involving ten years of research, many fits and starts, a partial outline, and one first chapter.

The word "mansion" has its root in the Latin word manere, to remain. In later Latin (my source is vague on the point of how much later, but I'm going to guess that the time is after 410 CE, when the Romans left England), mansio came to mean a place to stay during a journey.

Every twelve miles or so--the distance an ox-drawn cart can cover in a day--a large wayside inn or mansio provided food, lodging, and respite for the animals. Sometimes it also served as a government checkpoint, requiring travelers to show proper identification and pay road taxes. At least six sites have been identified as mansions in Great Britain; for one, the excavated mansion at Godmanchester on Ermine Street near Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire.

In Old French and late Middle English, mansion took on an additional meaning, a large, impressive house for an important person. The French word for house, maison, comes from mansion.

Lately, on a kind of journey of my own, if you will allow a lame play on words to help me tie this post together, I gave up on the novel I was working on and created a new heroine. I thought, what if I have somehow constrained myself with the old story and that is why I am having so much trouble moving forward? What if I set the work aside, or even pretend I've finished it and learned everything I can from it, and move on to something I can outline and write?

So I've started a story about a young woman, Rosalie, who, in 1952, works as a secretary in Saigon for the Military Assistance and Advisory Group, MAAG--I. This team of officers and enlisted men from Army, Navy, and Air Force, established in late 1950 under Brigadier General Francis G. Brink, supervises our handing over of World-War-Two-surplus weapons, trucks, and airplanes to the French Expeditionary Corps: the United States' first involvement in Viet Nam.

The French requested our aid in early 1950 and the MAAG--I is President Truman's response to that request. But, in fact, the French are working at cross-purposes with us. They do not want to build a nation resistant to Communism; they simply want to take Indochina back as a colonial power. Yes, this is the theme of Graham Greene's the Quiet American: the old theme of American innocence and naiveté up against European greed and corruption.

Except that, in my story (and in fact) the corruption has now spread to the Americans as well. The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) helps the French restore the opium trade to finance covert ops. On a visit to the United States to attend a conference on Southeast Asian affairs, General Brink tells a friend at a party that he is worried about his own safety: he knows too much about what is going on in Saigon. On June 24, 1952, while sitting at his desk in the Pentagon, he shoots himself three times in the chest with a revolver. The coroner rules his death a suicide brought on by depression.

My story begins here, as Rosalie and the Army Chief Warrant Officer Tom try to figure out why General Brink was murdered and what to do about it.