Robert Zimmerman has written more than a dozen mysteries under the name R.D. Zimmerman, an array of children’s books under the name Alexander Wacker (Wacker Drive is named for his great-grandfather, Charles) and he took on a new name, Robert Alexander, for his book “The Kitchen Boy,” which was recently released in paperback (Penguin, 240 pages, $14). The novel looks at the imprisonment and murder of Russia’s Czar Nicholas II and his family. Shortly before her death, Empress Alexandra wrote in her diary about the boy in the kitchen who played with her 11-year-old son, and Zimmerman imagines what happens to the Romanov family through that boy in the kitchen. On a recent trip to Chicago, Zimmerman, who divides his time between Minneapolis and Russia, spoke with Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor about his novel, which reaches from Siberia to Lake Forest:
Q. Why all the name changes?
A. Now I’m doing historical fiction, and when you change categories, the publishers want you to use a different name.
Q. Why? Wouldn’t it be nice for kids to grow up on your books and continue reading your work through their adulthood?
A. It’s essentially because the [bookstore] chains order not by an author’s name but by the category. The historical market is much larger than mysteries. I was tired of being at the back of the bus my whole life. And so I get great shelf space under Alexander, which is a family name.
Q. What made you decide to move into historical fiction?
A. Well, my background is really in Russia. I’ve been going to Russia since 1976. I first started reading about the Romanovs and got interested in things Russian because of the book “Nicholas and Alexandra.” And so I went there as a student in 1976, and then I returned and worked [for the] U.S. government in 1978. I was an exhibit guide on an American exhibition that toured the country. I was followed for the last six months I was there by the KGB, and so I [say] that I started writing suspense fiction because everybody I met with got picked up by the KGB.
Q. You are also a businessman in Russia.
A. We provide a duty-free zone, customs clearance for American goods–Western goods, anybody that needs anything. But then we also have a small chain of espresso and wine bars, and ship coffee from Minneapolis to St. Petersburg. But the weird thing is, it’s Italian coffee. We can by it cheaper in Minnesota and ship it over. We get our foam cups in Chippewa Falls. And we load up these containers and ship them over.
Q. It sounds like you brought Midwestern ingenuity to Russia.
A. I was born and raised here, in Lincoln Park, and then the suburbs. Charles Wacker was my great-grandfather. And everybody lived on Michigan Avenue or right on Lincoln Park. Everybody back to my great-great grandparents is buried in Graceland Cemetery. So I imagine there’s a divot waiting with my name on it there. . . .
The book opens and closes in Lake Forest. There’s a number of Russian nobility here in the Chicago area. It goes way back to Gen. Grant’s granddaughter, who was Potter Palmer’s niece.
Q. How did you get the idea to write through the eyes of a kitchen boy?
A. There are two things every writer must have, and that is the ability to finish something [and] that innate ability to ask, “What if?” You know, to look at something: “What if this was made out of oak? What if it was made out of pine? What if, you know, blah, blah, blah.” Just to be able to spin like that.
I read the last diary of Empress Alexandra, and on the very last page, . . . in the second-to-last paragraph that she wrote a few hours before she was murdered, she wrote about her kitchen boy, who was suddenly and oddly taken away by the Bolsheviks. And she wondered if she’d ever see him alive again.
So I thought: What if he were alive? What would he be able to tell us about those secret rescue notes that they received? They received four secret rescue notes. No one knows who wrote them or how they got into the house. They replied to three of them.
They had two suitcases with them when they went into captivity, and they smuggled these jewels–when the nuns would come, they’d give them a satchel of stuff. Stalin found one suitcase in 1933, 15 years after they were executed. The other suitcase has never been found.
Then, of course, the big thing for all Romanov buffs is when they opened the grave in 1991 and found two bodies missing, two children: the heir to the throne and Maria.
And so that’s sort of fodder for any kind of writer. You know, missing royal remains, $500 million worth of missing jewelry, and secret rescue notes. So what if the kitchen boy were alive today, or in 1998, what would he be able to tell us? So that’s how I got it. So he’s alive and well and living in Lake Forest.
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Q. I understand that you used much historical material, particularly photographs.
A. Nicholas and Alexandra . . . came at that really weird corner of time when they would record everything. They would write in a diary or letter to different levels of the palace. We have all of that stuff from the Romanovs.
The weird thing is they got caught in that little corner where they were doing the old way of recording information, and then they had the new technologies, like a little bit of audio, motion picture and then, primarily, photograph. And the children were kept royally confined, and they were all given a wooden Kodak camera. And they were continually shooting pictures–it’s not on film, of course, but on silver nitrate glass plates. And they left behind 150,000 family snapshots.
Q. How did writing mysteries and suspense prepare you for historical fiction?
A. As soon as I learned how to write suspense, it was like the light bulb went off in my head: You’ve got to tell a story. You’ve got to have pace. You’ve got to have plot. You’ve got to have tension. I think that good writing is all about laying down cards. It’s that slow release of information.
Q. What is the next thing you’re working on?
A. I’ve got a book coming out in 2005 called “Rasputin’s Daughter.” Rasputin did have children. Only one of them escaped the Russian Revolution, and she came to the United States and became a lion tamer in Los Angeles who died in a bungalow close to the Hollywood Freeway in 1977.
Q. And that’s non-fiction?
A. No, it’s fiction. I’ll fictionalize her story.
Q. With so many books behind you, it sounds like you’ve really found success.
A. “The Kitchen Boy” made The New York Times best-sellers list in hardcover. And it just sort of took everybody by surprise.