The ideas behind Conspiracy Suisse were conceived long before the publication of the novel: The historical conspiracy that connects Swiss history with the Knights Templar over 36 years and the banking conspiracy, which is based on the premise that there is a coordinated attack on Swiss banking, over 6 years before. The main plot and the first five chapters of the book were indeed written when hardly anyone thought something could go wrong at Credit Suisse.
But then we got busy.
As explained on the page about Filia Pater, this novel was written by a daughter (‘Filia’) and father (‘Pater’) duo. Sometime before the summer of 2023, when the takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS was announced, we decided to take the time and give our book project another go, so all the research we had done over the years and the theories we had – often jokingly – discussed wouldn’t go to waste. We completed the novel within a time span of only six months after that.
Given this rather long backstory, and having each of us contributed differently to its making, we thought readers might enjoy our perspectives of how we experienced the creation of Conspiracy Suisse.
Filia’s Perspective
My professional ambition as a teenager was to become a novelist. When first starting to write books and take creative writing classes six years prior to this book’s publication, my father approached me with the idea of a novel we could write together. This idea was his way of allowing us to bond over our passions: Mine being ‘creative writing’ and his being ‘historical conspiracies’.
While we began the book years ago, it was long on hold. I was only able to pick up the phone and call him to restart the project six months prior to its publication, having finally acquired the commercial acumen and artistic craftsmanship to piece the project together and do it justice. With an educational background in creative writing and law, producing the novel was relatively straightforward.
On the Style of the Novel
I wanted the language and style of this novel to be inviting and yet simple. Given the length and subject matter, the book itself had to be ‘an easy read’. The idea was to create a novel where there was slight artistry to descriptions, well-rounded and developed characters as well as a healthy pace, ultimately making the story accessible. The book was created to follow the styles of John Grisham and Dan Brown. A stark contrast to what I had done academically when studying creative writing in the US and collating a portfolio of work that aspired to mimic the styles of Oscar Wilde, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and T.S. Eliot.
My father was keen to keep the historical and commercial content of the book embedded into the storyline, not explained in such layman’s terms as to come across as a ‘how-to guide’ for Swiss banking and Templarism. My mission was to ensure that there was depth to the story and that the reader could buy into the characters, allowing the novel itself to be multi-dimensional and resonate with a wide audience.
Whether I was successful or not in this objective is for the reader to determine. My observations were that, where I was able to write quickly and fluidly, I was creating text that the reader would be receptive to. Conversely, when I was stumbling in the dark, hitting a wall, or experiencing writer’s block, the reader would sense the words were being forced.
On the Locations of the Novel
As a Swiss citizen with experience living in both Zurich and Lucerne, all of the locations we used were familiar to me. When starting this novel in fact, my father and I, accompanied by my mother and sister, had followed the Grand Master’s route through Sion and Lucerne, discovering what the Templars would, together. (The image you see at the top is reminiscent of my father and I climbing the steps to the basilica in Sion several years ago.)
I also had the pleasure of writing this novel in spectacular locations during a time that was both the most transitional and enjoyable period of my career to date. Some of the locations I wrote this book in included my family home in Zurich, a house on the Southern Turkish coast, a café in Istanbul, a beach in Bermuda, and even a penthouse in West London… It seems it is only Rome that I am still due to pay a visit to and have described solely from my imagination.
On the Characters of the Novel
Creating protagonists who were lawyers or academics was an organic process, during which I had a lot that I could leverage using my personal experiences to build the characters. I wanted to embed concepts from Swiss corporate governance law and financial regulation into the story to make the lawyers more credible, though there was the intention of keeping the law quite ‘light-touch’, given the rich historical and philosophical content already being discussed. What the careful reader may also have realized was that, despite my own profession as a lawyer, it was not Winzeler, but Lehning who I most resonated with when writing the novel.
The Grand Master however was perhaps the most natural character to write, despite my own academic background having little to do with Templarism. While his character certainly evolved throughout the writing process, I attribute the ease I experienced in producing him to one simple detail: that the Grand Master, from my perspective, was the fictionalized manifestation of my father. It should come as no surprise that he is the main protagonist of the novel.
Arguably, the most intense moment in the entirety of this writing process was selecting the name of the novel. It was a September afternoon when my father, mother, sister, and I sat in our living room, and my father walked in, a bottle of rosé in hand, filled our glasses for happy hour, and announced that by the time the wine was drained, we should have a name for the book. Those three glasses of rosé were the most stressful of my life…
Ultimately, for me, this book was nothing short of a love story of my sacred connection with my father and is a testament to the relationship we cultivated through writing this novel together, which I will always cherish.
Pater’s Perspective
I did write a few books and give a few speeches in my 57 or so years on this strange planet, but they were all dry lectures… which this book would surely also have been, were it not for my darling daughter ‘Filia’. She took the speculative orations I bored every family member with at gatherings and turned them into an actually interesting novel so that I am no longer sure if it was the selfish hope that I had at the time that she would, when I proposed to her to write this story, rather than the fatherly instinct that a project we could do together would prepare her for her creative writing classes. In any case, she deserves all the credit for the book.
The 36-year history mentioned in the introduction above is actually true. It was during my first year at university sitting in the cafeteria of the machine laboratory with two friends when an acquaintance of theirs came to our table. He had a deep, fresh cut on his cheek so I dared ask what had happened. He said, somewhat annoyed, that he had gotten it in a duel. When I inquired further he got even more upset – more than Swiss do about personal questions anyway – and left. My friend Bernhard explained: “He is in a fraternity. They think they descended from medieval knights.” Even though I did join a few societies myself, later on in my life, but witnessed nothing of the sort, this incident seems to have remained in my subconscious.
Fast forward 16 years… I had quit my job and started my first company a year before my daughter ‘Filia’ was born and was still too busy working 7 days by the time she reached the age of three. That’s when my wife invented ‘Sunday Funday’ which meant that I had to spend every Sunday taking care of our daughter come what may. That way, we’d bond a bit and she’d get a break. So we did. Every Sunday I’d download things from the Disney website and we’d color princesses, cut out tiaras, and match up dresses together. Then we started going to the theatre and the movies to later create puppets of our own to recreate the scenes. She loved it the most when I changed the stories though, either to comedies or real tragedies. There were hundreds of variations to be had. Soon enough she started coming up with her own unique stories. With her creativity, our projects got more and more complicated. We created our own versions of audiobooks, animations, and even computer games.
This all is to explain that when I suggested to ‘Filia’ that we should write a book together it was only a natural continuation of what we always did. I thought she could hone her creative writing skills on a complex plot I would come up with.
Not so long before, when preparing a speech about the reasons neo-platonism could be revived in Europe after the Crusades, I had researched the history of the Knights Templar, especially their final years, in-depth. That’s where the historical conspiracy comes from. At the same time, I had been upset about the way things had developed after the 2008 financial crisis, like many others. We on the main street had lost our savings but the bankers who had gambled away trillions had showered themselves with bonuses. That had probably been what had triggered my curiosity to research what was going on in the world of finance and also where the cynicism comes from. So I added all those explorations about banking history, struggles for financial domination, and digital currencies into the mix.
As ‘Filia’ already stated, we did quite a bit of fact-checking for the book, including taking trips to plot locations. It was actually my responsibility to make sure that the story remained credible and consistent. I must admit I sacrificed some nice plot twists that ‘Filia’ would have liked to include for the sake of plausibility. Then again, we no longer have dialogues between people we declared dead in earlier chapters. Nevertheless, if you come across anything that makes no sense or historical rationalizations that are boringly long, that is my bad. I didn’t let her take them out.
On a final note, two characters in the novel represent real people: There is an old lady in the Valere Basilica scene who admonishes the Grand Master’s entourage about being respectful in the church. She is actually someone who screamed at us for taking photographs inside the church when we visited the site. And then there is the man in Istanbul who runs out of his house in his underpants when the car of the henchman destroys his gate. That man is in fact me and I did dash outside – albeit elsewhere – with almost nothing on when a car smashed into our gate. I think ‘Filia’ could never get that image out of her head.
We enjoyed writing this book and hope you’ll enjoy reading it.
