MOTHER DAUGHTER SISTER STRANGER--Which ones are YOU?

 DEBORAH CROMBIE:  It's a big day here in-- what did we decide to call it our little English village? Redfields? Anyway, we are all here celebrating Hanks newest thriller! Library Journal called Mother Daughter Sister Stranger “terrific.” And it’s a “Most Anticipated” from Zibby Owens, BookBub, Goodreads, Scary Mommy, Beyond the Bookends, AARP, and more!

Congratulations, dear Hank, on your 18th novel!  (And, hint hint, you all can order it here!

What’s it about and where did it come from? And questions for you, Reds and Readers, and a giveaway, below!

DEBS: Hank, where did MOTHER DAUGHTER SISTER STRANGER come from?

Hank: Oh, it's a total magpie story. A little bit of this and a little bit of that and then, at some point, the story fragments reach critical mass and become something else. An entirely new story. Know what I mean? It’s amazing and so exciting when it happens.

One fragment: I was thinking about how often, when I was a teenager mostly, I'd lied to my mother. Not big deal lies, just homework and where I was at a pick a particular time. I'm sure she didn't believe a word of it, but she let it all go. But recently I started wondering, had she ever lied to me? How would I ever know? What if I found out? I kept thinking about that, that fragile relationship, and how we assume that what we've been told about our family history is true.

I must have been being a little nostalgic, too, because I also thought about how when I was growing up, and my mother would read out loud to me. I was always so frustrated when she said: “The End.” Because that couldn't be the end, could it? What happened after that and after that and after that? 

I have always been fascinated by what happened to the Narnia kids, what happened to Nancy Drew, and later, what happened to Nick Carraway and the Bennett sisters. How did their lives turn out after their books ended? Were the endings actually happy?

I was also looking back at a prior manuscript of mine, and reading bill notes that my editor had put in the margins. And I realized how that shaped the story, how that shepherded what stayed in and what got cut and how people's motivations and desires changed. How the notes in the margins of a manuscript, the discussion between author and editor, can reveal the real story behind the story. More I cannot say.

So, Mother Daughter Sister Stranger:  A missing mom. A frightened daughter. And a sister determined to find a happy ending for their family. Even though, as she discovers, her family's history turns out to be terrifyingly sinister, and all of their lives may go up in flames once again.

DEBS: You are famously a pantser. Were there big changes from the first draft to the final?

HANK: Well, that is a perfect question for this book! When Mother Daughter Sister Stranger was in first draft, the main character, Eliza Ramsey, had a blog where she wrote happy endings for characters in her favorite books. As she says in the original manuscript: she took Psych 101, and is well aware she’s really looking for a happy ending for herself after the devastating tragedy of her childhood, but that is something she cannot control. So she writes happy endings for others.

But!  All that got cut! ALL OF IT! Because my darling editor and I decided it was just a little too much information. Eliza is still looking for happy endings, but in a completely different way. You’ll have to read it to find out.

DEBS: Did any character unexpectedly take the story in a direction you hadn’t expected?

HANK: As you said, I never plan. So the entire book took the story in directions I hadn't expected! But yes, there were two characters, certainly, who as they grew on the page, behaved in ways that were very surprising to me. I kept trying to nudge them back into the personality I thought I was writing. But finally I realized they were right, and that's who they were in the final version.

Yes, I know I am not being specific about this. I am doing that on purpose. I want you to experience the story the way I did--a total surprise!

DEBS: Your books starts in Boston, but then heads way out to western Massachusetts. Why?

HANK: Oh gosh, I adore the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts, my husband and I go every summer to take peaceful walks in the woods, and go to art museums, and try wonderful new restaurants, see every play we can, pay homage to Edith Wharton at The Mount, and enjoy the glorious music of the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood. The rolling hills and gorgeous scenery are absolutely immersive, there's a peace and a calm in the Berkshires that is like nowhere else. 

However. It's also a place where many people go just for the summer, And the dynamic between the summer people and the people who live there year-round can be full of simmering conflict. As one character in the book admires the graceful geese flying overhead, another character sneers, and says:  if you had to clean up golf courses after the geese depart, you would not be so in love with them.

Two different worlds. Beautiful on the outside, but sometimes festering on the inside. And that's what shapes the story. 

DEBS: Where are you in your family's birth order? Do you have sisters? Tell us one thing you learned from your mother or your sisters--something that we hear in the book.

HANK: I grew up with three sisters and a brother, and I am the oldest.  And know best. As I remind them at every turn.

But when I was in college, I made a game called Familial Pursuits. It was all questions about our family's history. Like: “Who dented mom's new car? And how did it happen?”  And “Who was home when the barn burned down?”. Let me tell you, we all had different answers to those questions. And we were all absolutely convinced our answers were right.

How did we all remember the same thing so differently? And what did we all assume about each other?   In MOTHER DAUGHTER SISTER STRANGER, family memories, family legacies--and some terrifying murders-- are the center of the story.

As it says on the cover:  Every family has its legacy, and this one's deadly.

DEBS:  I love the title, too. Because everyone of us is at least one of those nouns, right? And some of us are all of them. I'm a mother, and a daughter, and a stranger to many people. 

HANK: Yeah, so true! I'm a daughter and a sister and a stranger. And the way we play those roles is what dictates our lives. What would you do if your mother went missing? What if she had lied to you from the start?

DEBS: Whoa. Love this. Congratulations, Hank!

HANK: Thank you! SO exciting! I’ll be on book tour for about two weeks—hope to see some of you out there! (And I just saw Amanda in one of my online classes! SO fabulous!). Here’s my schedule.

DEBS: Reds and Readers, What's your birth order? And do you think it has made a difference in who you are and how you face the world?

And Hank is giving a copy of Mother Daughter Sister Stranger to one lucky (US only) commenter! 

Bond. James Bond. by James R. Benn

JIM BENN: In the very first Ian Fleming novel, Casino Royale, CIA agent Felix Leiter introduces himself to Bond, who responds, "Mine's Bond—James Bond." The shortened version, “Bond—James Bond” appears in the 1958 novel Dr. No when Bond uses it to introduce himself to Honeychile Rider. But when it came to the film version, the screenwriters liked the delivery so much they moved it to  the opening scene  of the film, when he introduces himself to Sylvia Trench at the baccarat table. There, they became the first words Sean Connery spoke as secret agent 007.  And one of cinema’s most famous introductory lines.

Now that we’ve been properly introduced to the world’s most famous fictional spy, the question becomes, who exactly is James Bond? And where did he come from?

Commander Ian Fleming is a character in my latest Billy Boyle World War II mystery, The Ninth Circle. I dove into the research on his life, as I wanted to get a sense of the person he was. I found him to be complicated, infuriating, often selfish, but always interesting. 

It’s fair to say that at the time of the events in my book—January 1945—Fleming had not yet conceived of James Bond. He had talked about writing a spy novel someday. But he had yet to emerge from the shadow of his wildly successful and devilishly handsome older brother Peter to whom success came as easily as it passed Ian by.

Peter had excelled at Eton and Oxford and then quickly become a travel writer and journalist. He traveled the world and produced multiple books. He became famous immediately..

Meanwhile, Ian dropped out of Eton, where he had excelled only at athletics. He went on to spend one year at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst before he contracted gonorrhea and left in an undistinguished rush.

When WWII broke out, Peter Fleming was already a reserve officer in the Grenadier Guards and fought in the Norwegian campaign with a commando unit. He also found the time to write a satirical novella in 1940 about Adolf Hitler flying to Britain to propose peace. It was a literary success. Peter went on to serve in Greece and then in India as head of D Division, in charge of military deception operations in Southeast Asia.

While Peter was establishing his reputation, Ian was adrift. After the Sandhurst fiasco in 1927, his mother shipped him off to Kitzbühel, Austria. There, he was enrolled in a small private school run by Ernan Forbes Dennis, a former intelligence officer, and his wife, novelist Phyllis Bottome.

The idea was for Ian to learn French and German and prepare himself for the Foreign Office exam. The whole matter got off to a rocky start.  Forbes Dennis states that Fleming "was really quite impossible when he first came to us.”  After a visit by Peter, Forbes Dennis described the brothers’ relationship this way: Peter is  “a glossy racehorse out in front, Ian struggling to keep up with him.”

Ernan Forbes Dennis and Phyllis Bottome were adherents of Alfred Adler, a member of Freud’s inner circle who specialized in education. Applying Adler’s democratic, non-authoritarian approach to Ian, they realized he was engaged in “an endless neurotic duel” with his brother who caused him to feel “dethroned or otherwise outdistanced.” 

At one point, after Ian had impregnated a local girl who was dating a friend of his, they’d had enough of him. Forbes Dennis saw this as a reflection of Ian’s neurosis and wrote “The intense sibling rivalry he experienced with his brother Peter seemed to be replayed in his endless cuckolding of men he regarded as his friends.” They were ready to expel him and send him back to his mother, a notion which held little appeal to Ian.

This was a wake-up call. Ian begged for a chance at redemption which he was granted. Under the couple’s tutelage, he spent three years at Kitzbühel, where he perfected his German and greatly improved his French. He ultimately was not selected for the Foreign Office. But he returned home to England after three years in Austria a more confident and better educated young man. He had learned about the intelligence business from Forbes Dennis and writing from Phyllis, who encouraged him to work on short stories. Both were valuable assets, as was the Tyrolean scenery which Ian loved, and would later play a role in several books.

Ian returned to Britain and worked for two years as a journalist without much success. In 1933 he ended up at a London investment firm. He was unsuccessful as a stockbroker. He told a colleague at Rowe & Pitman, “My brother Peter’s the writer in the family and he’s terribly good at it.”

Alfred Adler might have said that Ian had found his place in life as the failed younger brother and was neurotically wedded to his persona.

But the Second World War was Ian’s salvation. After a string of failed enterprises, in 1939 he found himself at the center of an intelligence network where he was elevated to the rank of lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. Not that he’d had any naval experience. Even so, he was recruited to be the personal assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence. 

Whatever he lacked in military attributes, he made up for in organizational and planning skills. With his keen and devious mind, he generated a number of plans for intelligence operations. One of those plans became known as Operation Mincemeat, in which a body disguised as a British officer carrying secret documents was left on the Portuguese coast. The successful deception was aimed at drawing German troops away from Sicily in advance of the Allied invasion.

Ian Fleming wrote the original memo suggesting this general concept in 1939. It was operationally run by two other Royal Navy officers.

Even so, while Peter Fleming was fighting in Greece to slow the German advance, Ian could lay claim to being at the heart of Royal Navy espionage efforts. For the first time, he may have felt himself the equal of his older brother.

By the end of the war, Ian had a stockpile of ideas for the spy novel he’d always wanted to write. Each James Bond novel has roots which harken back to WWII. 

Early in his Royal Navy career, Ian had watched M16 double agent Duško Popov run a massive baccarat bluff at the Casino Estoril in Portugal. Popov placed a huge fifty thousand dollar bet to unnerve an unpleasant opponent. Fleming was astounded, and more than a decade later that scene was recreated in the opening of his first book, Casino Royale, which was written between February 17 and March 18, 1952, at his Goldeneye estate in Jamaica. Coming in at 43,790 words, it’s more novella than novel. 

Popov was a daring spy and a dashing playboy. He is one of the many real-life agents it is thought Fleming based James Bond on. Bond also shared many of Ian’s own attributes. He smoked the same cigarettes, drank the same liquor, used the same barber, was the same height, and shared the same rank in the Royal Navy.

Fleming himself had very specific ideas as to what Bond should look like. Early on, he likened Bond’s looks to the entertainer Hoagy Carmichael. 

Fleming also commissioned a sketch of James Bond for a comic strip that ran in British newspapers. This is what he thought Bond should look like.

I think it’s pretty obvious who James Bond really was. Fleming described 007 as having dark, clean-cut looks, cold grey-blue eyes, straight black brows, and a "cruel" mouth. Meet Peter Fleming in close-up. Need we look further?

No one can ever really know, but I have the feeling that Ian finally figured out how to one-up his older brother. By combining Peter’s good looks with his own wartime experiences, Ian crafted a persona that no one could ever get the better of. Accomplished in both the civilized graces and the brutal underworld of espionage, Bond stands alone. 

Ian Fleming was no longer dethroned.

What Fleming accomplished was also important for readers in his native Britain. As postwar Great Britain faced a reordering of global power, Bond carried forward the flag of the Empire with style and panache He masked the national decline and made London the center of world again, if only on the page and the silver screen.

As Carly Simon sang in the theme for the 1977 film “The Spy Who Loved Me,”

Nobody does it better

Makes me feel sad for the rest

Nobody does it half as good as you

Baby, you're the best.

Well, that does it for my armchair psychoanalysis. But as an only child, how can I be certain of anything about brothers and sisters? So tell me, my sibling-supplied friends, what do you make of this - would there have been a James Bond without Peter Fleming? Does sibling rivalry spur healthy competition?

Signing off, it's me.

Benn. James Benn

James R. Benn is the USA Today best-selling author is the author of the Billy Boyle World War II mysteries. The debut, Billy Boyle, was selected as a Top Five Book of the Year by Book Sense and was a Dilys Award nominee, A Blind Goddess was longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, The Rest Is Silence was a Barry Award nominee, and The Devouring was a Macavity Award nominee.

In The Ninth Circle (number 21 in the series) Billy Boyle is thrust into an investigation of a murdered Royal Navy intelligence officer in Havana. He is brought in by none other than Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, who needs a fresh set of eyes to gather intel from sources inside Havana’s criminal underworld, including the notorious gangster Meyer Lansky. As the body count grows, it becomes evident a Nazi spying is behind the violence.

End of Summer Reading

 LUCY BURDETTE: I hope all of your summers are going well! I’m a little horrified to see how quickly September is bearing down on us. Is it time for a quick summer reading check in? I think so! 

I loved Ann Patchett’s Whistler, though John is close to finishing and isn’t quite as enamored. For his birthday, I bought him Chris Bohjalian’s THE AMATEUR, and promptly stole it to read first. The story is about a promising girl golfer at a chi-chi country club who accidentally drives a ball through a practice net and kills a young caddy. He writes from the perspective of the young woman who is an absolute train wreck. It’s exciting and horrifying and gripping. Next I read Kristen Harmel’s MEET ME IN PARIS, which had 7 protagonists all arriving in Paris for very different life-changing reasons. I zipped through it, loving the Paris background, but would have preferred fewer, but deeper characters. Right now I’m reading a pickleball mystery by Zac Bissonette for a blurb—clever and funny and I can’t wait to see if pickleball enthusiasts embrace it. It will be out from Kensington in 2027. Next up will either be Barbara O’Neal’s A THOUSAND PAINTED HOURS or Kent Krueger’s new Cork O’Connor. Can’t wait for both of them! By then Hank's MOTHER DAUGHTER SISTER STRANGER should be on my doorstep–hooray!

JENN McKINLAY: How funny! I’m reading Zac Bissonette’s DINK OR DIE! mystery as well. Having just started playing pickleball, I’m really enjoying it. I’m also reading Mia Sosa’s romance THE GIRL FROM IPANEMA and Ellie Alexander’s upcoming mystery MURDER MOVES IN. As you can see, all of my reading at the moment is advance reader copies for potential endorsements. I feel very lucky and reassured that so many good books are coming out in the coming months. Of course, I can't wait to get my hands on Hank's upcoming MOTHER DAUGHTER SISTER STRANGER, dropping on Sept 1st. A perfect thriller just in time for autumn, which is my favorite season for suspense novels.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Awww, thank you, Jenn! I am so excited! Cannot wait to read The Amateur, it is in my pile staring at me. And Jennifer Hillier's HEART OF GLASS. I have Tess Gerritsen’s book up next, THE SHADOW FRIENDS. Love her, and this new one in her series about retired CIA agents banding together is terrific. And then HOW TO WRITE A MURDER by Jessica Brody–one of the authors I’ll be interviewing soon. Also Jason Rekulak’s now one,in advance of interviewing him soon, too.! It’s called LOOK WHAT THE CAT DRAGGED IN. So funny! But his books are wonderfully creepy. I am also stacked with blurb requests and books for contests. La dee dah. But I am so happy about it!

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Eeek. Since Jenn, Rhys, and Lucy’s books, I seem to have lost my reading mojo. I checked my journal and there were three books I started but didn’t finish: One called THE OTHER MOTHERS, a British thriller by an author whose name I didn’t note, Jo Piazza’s THE SICILIAN INHERITANCE, and Julia Kelly’s THE LAST GARDEN IN ENGLAND, which had been sitting on my bedside table for yonks. I liked all of these, but just couldn’t seem to pick up speed. This had me really worried, but then I got a book I’d preordered, the sixteenth in Damien Boyd’s Nick Dixon series, called SEEING RED, and I powered through it in two days! So the other books just hadn’t been the right fit for the moment, but I hope to go back to them. The Nick Dixon books are British procedurals–I’m sure I’ve mentioned them before–and I highly recommend if you like that sort of thing.

I have a copy of HEATHER by Caitlin Mullen up next, so fingers crossed on that one.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I so enjoyed THE ENDING WRITES ITSELF, a classic “country house” mystery set on a private island in Scotland, where a group of authors compete to write the ending to a bestselling series. It’s by Emilia Clarke, the pen name of Cate Clarke and fantasy writer VE Schwab, and they stick the ending, despite this being their first mystery.

I’ve set a goal for myself to get back to some of the books in my library I picked up and set aside; so one of my recent reads is RED HILL (2013) by Jamie McGuire. She’s done mostly supernatural adventures and romance since then, but her debut is a cracking science-gone-wrong zombie thriller.

Speaking of science gone wrong, my nonfiction read is BIOLOGIAL WARFARE: A SCENARIO by Annie Jacobsen. Do not read this if you’re prone to the heebie-jeebies! Otherwise, it’s a brilliant, bleak look at the possible results of the release of biological weapons still held by many countries.

On a much more fun note, I’m combining two of my faves - mystery and SF - and catching up with the latest in Mur Lafferty’s Midsolar Murder series. In INFINITE ARCHIVE, our sleuth has to deal with a sentient ship carrying all Earth’s Internet archives (shades of the AI data centers!!) and a mystery con on her space station. These are delightful novels, perfect for fans of either (and both) genres.

HALLIE EPHRON: As I’ve mentioned here, I’m in the throes of downsizing, making room for others to move in with me, addressing accumulated decades. The books are so hard to part with but books you haven’t cracked open in ages have got to go. And then there are the keepers. Which I’m working my way through.

One of them is an anthology of Agatha Christie short stories, “Masterpieces in Miniature.” It’s a collection of 40 shorts, and I’m having a lovely time revisiting the antics of Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, Parker Payne, and Harley Quinn. I’ve never been much of a short story reader, and I thought I was familiar with all of Dame Agatha’s tricks. Not so!

Plus it’s refreshing to read something that I don’t have to commit to focusing my attention on for 300 pages, given how much there is to distract me around here.

So far, Parker Pyne is a snarky revelation. Who knew!?!?

RHYS BOWEN: Like Hallie I have had little time for reading. I too am in the throes of rearranging the entire house so that my daughter can move in. This involves repainting and recarpeting John’s former study, moving my media room there, making old media room into guest bedroom and reflooring the two rooms that Anne will have as her private space. We have already filled one dumpster with unwanted items kept for years by my husband. Brochures from a tour he sent to Nepal in 1980! So much to go through and decide what was important to family history and what wasn’t.

All this is an excuse for not reading much. And when I have had time to read it has been to blurb two books: Rocket Girl by Diane Vallere and Year of Lipstick and Poetry by… name escapes me. The former good, and similar to Lessons in Chemistry. The latter only just starting and a bit slow going so far. As a mystery writer I expect to find a body at some stage!  

Reds, please pile on and tell us what you’re reading!