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Detection, I am beginning to understand after seven novels and with number eight in progress, becomes for Martin Bora part of the business of living. Note: not of his military business (he is not a professional investigator, and often his inquiries are accidental), but of the very way he sets himself before reality. He is curious, attentive, notices the minutiae, the seemingly irrelevant detail; his senses are alert and his mind sensible and discriminating: his ideal brothers are in equal measure Natty in The Last of the Mohicans and the even-tempered Marlow in Heart of Darkness. The only literary investigator with whom he shares a recognizable trait - a tranquil melancholy veined with humor - is very different from him: Police Inspector Maigret.
BEN PASTOR
Q&A April 2020 
How are these surreal days influencing your normal writing process?
Interesting question. For the first two-three weeks, like most everyone else, I was glued to the Web and the TV, trying to understand what was going on in the world, especially as my daughter lives across the ocean in Vermont. Little by little, I realized there’s a risk in becoming obsessed with the latest news, many of which are incidentally unreliable. So I went back to writing. In The Gypsy Synagogue, my protagonist Martin Bora finds himself under siege in Stalingrad with the Sixth German Army.
The latest in the Martin Bora WWII series launches with a blog tour beginning tomorrow.
ShotsMag: "Highly Recommended: Pastor takes Bora back to the Spanish Civil War in 1937. He’s a fascinating character, a German officer turned detective, clever, tenacious yet deeply troubled and suspicious of his companions in the Nationalist ranks...The writing is sharp, the tone gritty, the characterisations vivid and the atmosphere of war brilliantly evoked. It’s a novel that destroys romantic notions about the Spanish conflict and shows how quickly hopes turned sour and disillusion set in."
ESSAY for The Life Sentence
Knight, Death, and the Devil, Or: How to Help Your Protagonist Save His Soul BY BEN PASTOR
