Silver, Mitch 1946–

views updated

Silver, Mitch 1946–

PERSONAL:

Born, 1946, in Brooklyn, NY; married Ellen Highsmith Silver; children: Sloane, Perry. Education: Attended Yale University and Harvard Law School.

ADDRESSES:

Home— Rye, NY. Agent— LJK Literary Management, 708 3rd Ave., 16th Fl., New York, NY 10017.

CAREER:

Novelist, 2007—. Former advertising copywriter and creative director in New York, NY, and Paris, France.

AWARDS, HONORS:

American Song Festival Lyric Grand Prize for "Sleeping Single in a Double Bed."

WRITINGS:

In Secret Service(novel), Touchstone (New York, NY), 2007.

SIDELIGHTS:

Mitch Silver's first novel,In Secret Service, draws on the life story of Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. Fleming had been an assistant to the British Director of Naval Intelligence during World War II, and had helped form a special intelligence-gathering unit that played a role in the D-Day invasions of June, 1944. Perhaps most importantly, however, Fleming was responsible for writing the memorandum that led to the creation of the OSS, the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Silver's book is a fictional account of a secret mission Fleming supposedly undertook during World War II at the behest of Winston Churchill. Fleming's role in the mission emerges when American medievalist Amy Greenberg inherits a forgotten manuscript from Fleming that he gave to her grandfather decades before. Greenberg discovers that Churchill sent Fleming to gather evidence that Edward VIII left the British throne in December, 1936, not because of his love for Wallis Simpson, the American divorcée, but because of his sympathy for and relationship with Adolf Hitler. "I was thinking about the ‘cover stories’ people in the news are constantly feeding the public these days," Silver told an interviewer for the Web site MI6. "What if it really isn't such a modern phenomenon? If Edward VIII didn't simply abdicate for ‘the woman I love’—but was pushed from the throne—who might have done the pushing? These days, it would turn out that his greatest public supporter would be the one greasing the skids. At the time that was Winston Churchill. That got me started on In Secret Service. "

Soon Greenberg and her boyfriend Scott Brown are caught in a wide-ranging battle over the manuscript. "Amy," wrote a reviewer for Fresh Fiction, "finds herself in a race against time—she must unlock the manuscript's shocking and fascinating secrets and outwit the unknown assailants who would do anything to bury the truth and protect a traitor's name." "Even almost five decades after Fleming finished the memoir-styled manuscript entitled ‘Provenance,’" declared a reviewer for the Web site Curled Up with a Good Book, "the secrets contained within it are still worth killing and dying for in the eyes of many. In fact, the secrets contained in the manuscript are so worth keeping hidden that they are behind the death of Princess Diana, according to this conspiracy-laden book, though they deal with people and events that date to the WWII era." "A first-time author," declared Esther Hammer in the Tampa Tribune, "Silver mounts suspense ever so slowly but ever so surely so that you find yourself breathlessly waiting for a startling denouement."