Jonas Budrys (AKA Jonas Polovinskas) worked for the Czarist Secret police, the Okhrana, became chief of counter-intelligence in Vladivostok for the Whites, and in 1921, took over counter-intelligence for the newly formed Lithuanian state.

He is seated, second from right in the rather poor photograph above.

I was restless while waiting for my next round of edits from my publisher, Thomas Allen, so I polished an essay, looked at some short stories I had been working on, and finally needed to launch into a major project or die of ennui.

Jonas Budrys’s story is an eraser of ennui par excellence.

His memoirs read like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle meets John le Carré. The new and impoverished weak state is under threat from Polish, Communist, German, and internal enemies, but Budrys is there to uncover secret plots while giving tips in the craft of espionage.

In 1923, Budrys became head of a secret army that seized the city of Klaipeda (also known as Memel to Germans) from the occupying French, became its first governor, and then returned to Lithuania to work in criminal cases before being assigned as consul to the USA in 1935.

He spent the rest of his life there, and had a son, Algis Budrys, who went on to be an important science fiction writer in America in the fifties.

Biographies don’t get much better than those two. Father and son are the inspiration for my next novel, of which I have written a total of five pages so far. I have pulled out dozens of books on the period and have been cruising web sites that cover that time, and I am eager to press on.

Instead, I’ll likely go back to rewrites on my next round of edit on Tuesday, but at least I’ll have something to look forward to after that. Life without another project on the horizon is just too dull.

In 1932, my uncle strangled his lover and put her body into a drainage well, intending to dissolve it later with acid from a laboratory where he and others were hoping to make a bomb to assassinate the Lithuanian strongman president, Antanas Smetona.

These are the kinds of intersections one finds when looking into the history of a small country, where the personal and the public lie very close to one another. I might never have stumbled on the murder story if historian Bernardas Gailius had not been writing about the politics and crimes of the period.

Not to say that everyone has a skeleton quite like this in the closet.

My murderous uncle is balanced by the uncle I am named after, a man who saved at least three Jewish children during the Nazi period. And my mother was the director of a teacher’s college where one of her employees eventually became one of Lithuania’s most prominent postwar partisans, Adolfas Ramanauskas, Vanagas.

But enough of the counterbalancing “good” relatives. Let’s return to my uncle Pranas, whom I never met and who died suddenly in Chicago in 1950.

My late mother barely knew him either, but remembered him as a silver-tongued storyteller, the must-have at any party, a scholar who taught German. We know as well that he was a volunteer in the Lithuanian war of independence, and one of the soldiers who helped seize the city of Klaipeda from the French in 1923.

Curiously, he was found guilty of the crime of murder but received only three years in prison because of “extenuating circumstances”. One wonders what those might have been, but the archives where the answer lies are crumbling with mold and so we only have newspaper stories to go by.

My godmother, who is still alive and who met him a few times in the forties, says that he was being followed around the country by an unbalanced woman who took every opportunity to lay false charges against him with the police, or embarrass him before his employers. Apparently, he finally broke under the strain and killed her in a moment of enraged passion.

This is the Fatal Attraction version of the story, the tale of a man pushed beyond his limits, and this version has some credence because of the short sentence he received.

On the other hand, part of the sentence was also that he support the child he had with the murder victim, a boy named Pranas as well.

If the victim had a child with him, one can see why she might have become unbalanced – the father of her child refused to marry her and make her a respectable woman. In a conservative society, her status must have been low, and as a single mother, she must have had trouble making ends meet, so she may have been chasing after him for support.

Where does the truth lie in this case? I can’t know for sure, so I just keep digging around in the country, a kind of archeologist puzzling over the moral artifacts.

My uncle Pranas has nothing to do with my forthcoming novel, although he might have something to do with the one after that. His story is just another one that I have stumbled across in my research, and it’s another  reason why I cannot leave history and the historical novel alone.

Some of the other cases in Gailius’s book are quite compelling true crime stories. There’s the one about the country’s postmaster, who kept forged postage stamps in a warehouse in order to sell the real ones for personal profit; the story of Stepas Rickus, who spent a summer drinking, thieving, and murdering, only to disappear without a trace; the story of the diplomatic mission to Moscow which financed its expenses by selling saccharine on the black market.

How does it feel to have a murderous relative? Not that great, but if I’m going to be serious about looking into history for my literary material, I have to accept the complexity of the stories I find. And since I’m a writer, I have no intention of keeping them secret, any more than I would keep secret anything anyone said to me.

Ponary Diary is a chronicle of the relentless shooting, primarily of Jews, in pits in a forest outside Vilnius in the years 1941 – 1943 as witnessed by a Pole who lived nearby. The executioners were overseen by Germans, but the actual shooters were usually Lithuanians.

Kazimierz Sakowicz was a journalist living in reduced circumstances, a man who moved to the outskirts of Vilnius where he began to record in great detail the goings on outside his front door.

These included the regular arrival of truckloads of prisoners, many of whom were beaten and then stripped and shot and dumped into the pits. But the dumping soon became too hard, so the victims were forced to step down into the pits and arrange themselves neatly before they were shot.

The grotesqueries are many: A local dog and ravens feast on the imperfectly buried remains; wounded victims awaken and crawl out of the pits, but are usually caught; eventually, lye is poured on the bodies to make the wounded move so they can be identified and killed before they climb out; some victims are taken aside and told they will be saved if they betray hiding places of others – then the betrayers are killed; one speculator in used clothing kills a woman of about the same size as a potential customer in order get a dress, and then cannot understand the qualms of the buyer.

Sakowicz himself did not survive the war, but was murdered under mysterious circumstances while riding his bicycle on a nearby road.

As I have mentioned in some of my other posts, the level of suffering in the East was very great, and many groups suffered in different ways. Anyone who wants his suffering to be known should know of the suffering of others. Thus anyone writing bout the hardships of the Lithuanians must also look squarely into the face of the holocaust in Lithuania and take accept responsibility where it is due.

But this sort of reading is very hard –  my dreams were full of it for two nights. Reading this chronicle of systematic murder was as relentlessly boring as observing any industrial process, and all the more monstrous for that.

The controversy about the Lithuanian postwar partisans does not end so much as undergo perpetual regeneration, with one, admittedly small, school claiming that they were simply fascist bandits who terrorized the countryside for a decade after the second world war.

The standard accusations have an uncanny similarity, claiming that the two most famous partisan leaders, Juozas Luksa and Adolfas Ramanauskas were criminals.

In an effort to hunt down the sources of these accusations, I managed to get my hands on a very rare Soviet publication of 1960, called Vanagai is Anapus.

This text depicts Juozas Luksa as the son of a wife-beating bourgeois, himself a petit bourgeois, an agent of the Nazi Abwehr during the first Soviet occupation and a vicious murderer. He is also the unwitting tool of drunken priests who are amused that he does not see through the lies of the Vatican.

Adolfas Ramanauskas, a partisan leader who managed to last until 1956 when he was betrayed, tortured, and executed, is depicted as a coward who clung to his wife’s skirts.

For all foolishness of Vanagai is Anapus, it does have certain drive, like a very good potboiler. It is also fascinating to see the heroism of to men turned into banditry.

If one were simply a literary critic, one could do an analysis of how different camps depict different historical characters.  But the effect this text, Vanagai is Anapus, continues to echo into the present beyond literary discussions. If you look at on-line commentaries that address the history of the partisans, the attacks usually refer back to this text as support for their argument. I have even heard that an official of the UK wondered out loud if Juozas Luksa wasn’t merely a fascist bandit. He gave no source for this claim, but presented it as a little-known fact – in other words, the power of a good potboiler is not to be underestimated. On the other hand, it’s remarkable, as if someone were to use the Da Vinci Code as a reference on the history of France.