His first objective: write a page-turner

IF the point of a thriller is, after all, “to thrill,” how much other stuff can you fit in? Especially when the other stuff -- character, theme, setting, ambiguity -- is really what novels are about, or at least what they can do better than the movies.

If you’re Mark Frost, former “Hill Street Blues” writer and “Twin Peaks” co-creator, you keep your plot moving, and you keep everything else lean and mean. Characters explain themselves pretty quickly. Descriptions are swift and efficient.

That doesn’t mean, though, that bringing it all together is simple.

“I see my responsibility as to give people something they want to keep turning the pages of,” the scholarly looking Frost said recently at a postwar coffee shop. “And giving people something to chew on, looking at some aspect of human nature that hadn’t occurred to them recently.”

His new book, “The Second Objective,” tells the story of World War II’s Operation Griffin, only declassified a decade ago and still not widely known, in which a small number of German soldiers sneaked behind enemy lines impersonating American GIs. Their goal, as they dressed in U.S. Army uniforms and cursed and joked in Bronx-inspired English, was first to sow confusion among the Yanks and then to execute a “second objective” meant to bring the Allies to their knees. The Germans prepared their men by bringing them to camps full of American POWs to show them, as Frost explained, “the way POWs slouched, or chewed gum, or unwrapped the cellophane on their cigarette. To fundamentally alter their behavior and their being.” They even watched American movie musicals.

More than half a century past the end of the war, and decades after “Hogan’s Heroes” and “Springtime for Hitler,” Nazis don’t seem as scary as they used to. In pop culture, there’s often something campy about stern Prussians in seemingly homoerotic leathers. Novelists don’t return to them as the embodiment of evil the way they used to.

That makes “The Second Objective,” according to Hyperion President Robert Miller, “a good old-fashioned page-turner.” The book reminds him of World War II thrillers like Alistair MacLean’s “The Guns of Navarone” and Ken Follett’s “Eye of the Needle.”

“It’s not a postmodern thriller, or post-Cold War,” Miller said. “It’s not subtle, or about the writing, or experimental. It’s just really smart and really satisfying in a way that reminds me of the great thrillers of yesteryear. You have a real hero and real villain, a high-concept premise, and that pacing, that atmosphere.”

Frost, 51, grew up mostly in New York and Los Angeles, the son of a stage actor who’d served with the Navy in the North Atlantic. He recalls being surrounded by the lore of World War II both at home and in the popular culture.

“What led me to the story,” he said, “was my father’s generation’s formative experience. It cast a gigantic shadow ... the legend of that generation having confronted this great evil.”

Movies like “The Great Escape” and “The Longest Day,” he recalled, “were absolutely imprinting experiences.” But while the Nazis became the symbol of absolute evil, the Germans themselves, he said, were “hard to characterize as ‘the Other,’ as you could with the Japanese.”

Historians, Frost said, are increasingly seeing the period of both world wars as one long “family squabble” between Europeans. “Germany and England obvious had tremendous ties, cousins all the way up to the monarchy.”

Frost read about Operation Griffin in a book by British military historian John Keegan. “So that led me to examining issues of identity: What constitutes good or evil in that context? What makes you an American or a German or an Englishman, and what happens when those lines get blurred?”

Writing the book after 9/11 and during the Iraq war, he stuck close to the historical record, but was also interested in the origins of terrorism.

For his main characters, he tried to give these ideas flesh: One is a charming, sadistic Nazi named Von Leinsdorf; the other is a confused Brooklyn-bred soldier of divided loyalties named Bernie. And before long, a hard-bitten American MP named Grannit picks up their trail, and the book becomes what Frost calls “a triangle.”

Another character, the charismatic SS officer Otto Skorzeny, who masterminded Operation Griffin and freed Mussolini in ‘43, lurks in the background in the novel. Frost calls him “kind of the godfather of modern terrorism.”

“This is the man who would go on to form ODESSA after the war,” Frost said of the group thought to have funneled SS men to Spain and South America. “And we’re all kind of living with the consequences of what happened when these guys decided they could blur the lines.”

‘You can’t just live in the present’

The book sprang from hundreds of pages of declassified documents -- Griffin was only declassified in 1995, it’s thought, because of a postwar alliance between American intelligence and Skorzeny. Frost and an assistant also read through dozens of books on the Battle of the Bulge.

But he’d been a history buff for decades, as previous books like “The List of Seven” made clear.

“As you get older, you come to a place in life where you can’t just live in the present,” he said. “Especially the American present, which is dominated by this loud, blaring pop culture of ours. It’s best to know a little about where you’re coming from and why you’ve arrived where you are.”

One of the most vivid passages in his book cuts against the “Greatest Generation” myth by showing an entire battalion of GIs who hijack trains and steal luxury goods intended to lift soldiers’ morale. Much of the ill-gotten gains ended up in Paris.

“After Paris was liberated, there was a huge criminal underground that came into being almost overnight, dealing in black market material,” Frost said. “Criminality is a basic part of human nature. And thousands of GIs were involved.” The story of the “million-dollar outfit,” which ended with more than 100 soldiers in the brig, was also classified for 50 years after the war.

The war was full of bravery and valor, Frost said. “But it wasn’t just unalloyed heroism. Joseph Heller got it right in ‘Catch-22.’ Let’s not romanticize it; let’s look at it with clear eyes.”

While the years that followed World War II became the heyday of the cinematic and literary thriller, the end of the Cold War dealt the genre a real blow. Gone are the days when every airport bookstore was festooned with swastikas and hammer-and-sickles on the jackets of bestsellers. Thrillers now are as likely to take place among lawyers or serial killers.

Cold War conundrum

Two of Frost’s favorite writers responded to the fall of the Berlin Wall in very different ways: John le Carre has largely abandoned Cold War settings, putting his books in Africa or among international criminals, while Alan Furst has thrived with historical espionage novels set in an elegantly re-created 1930s and ‘40s Europe, especially Paris.

“Writers haven’t known which way to go,” Hyperion’s Miller said. “Do you invent a new villain that’s modern, and post-Cold War? Maybe they hesitate to go back to World War II, because they figure it’s been done. But what’s great about Mark is he reminds you what was great about the genre while putting his own take on it.”

Frost’s novel is not as literary as the work of his two idols: It lacks Le Carre’s unforgettable characters and London-fog-like moral ambiguity, as well as Furst’s Old World ambience and convincing sensuality.

But what makes “The Second Objective” stand out, besides the historical detail, is its absolutely relentless pacing and cliffhanger turns. At times it feels so much like a movie that you can see the camera angles.

It was partly his years writing episodes for “The Six-Million Dollar Man” and “Hill Street Blues” -- which the author says was always intended as “an apprenticeship” to a career writing books -- that taught Frost the importance of tight, old-school three-act storytelling.

“I’m really driven by narrative more than interior experience, both as a writer and as a person,” Frost said. “I think a lot of contemporary fiction gazes inward more than out, and can hover dangerously close to narcissism,” which he sees as well established in the culture at large.

Despite his collaborations with David Lynch -- the two created the “Twin Peaks” series together and worked on several movie projects, which may be why Frost is able to live today in Beverly Hills -- Frost is not a surrealist.

The two worked together quite fruitfully in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, he said. “And then David lost interest in conventional narrative, or narrative in general. And I didn’t. So we went our separate ways.” (Lynch was on location in France and not available for comment.)”To me, narrative is a need people have that’s genetically coded. It’s not a trend and it’s not a fad,” Frost said. “It’s hard-wired into us.”

scott.timberg@latimes.com