Crane interviews Bethune’s Sanatorium cottage mates, who are now prominent physicians, about Bethune’s Communism. Springer says is in Saranac Lake began before 1953, perhaps when Bethune was a patient. The murals’ existence surfaces when Crane tries to determine if the Communism Dr. Norman Bethune drew the murals on paper that he hung on the walls of the cottage he shared with other men at the sanatorium. Springer tells Agent Crane that the Trudeau Foundation Board of Trustees are Communists who want “to destroy capitalism.” So begins Agent Crane’s interest in Communists in Saranac Lake, and to a patient who drew murals while he was there in 1927. A Seinfeld episode made fun of the era and “naming names,” but it wasn’t funny when it happened.ĭr. It is when prominent people were asked “are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party,” and to sign a loyalty oath to the United States. The year is 1953, the time of the House Un-American Activities investigations and the ascendency of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Springer has come to New York to warn the FBI that the Trudeau Foundation is under the influence of Communists. Arnold Springer, the director of the Trudeau Foundation’s Saranac Laboratory in Saranac Lake. Holtzman begins his story in the New York City office of FBI agent Larry Crane, who is meeting with Dr. A decade later, Bethune became a well-known Communist, working, and dying, in China. Holtzman’s new novel, “The Bethune Murals,” focuses on Norman Bethune, a physician who was a tuberculosis patient at Trudeau Sanatorium in the 1920s.

Axton Landing by Tony Holtzman