Dinner with (imaginary) Friends

INGRID THOFT

There’s a standard list of questions that writers get asked. One of the favorites (it’s in the New York Times’ “By the Book” section every week) is: Which writers would you like to have dinner with—living or deceased? This question elicits interesting responses, but I think an even more interesting question is, which fictional characters would you invite to dinner?

So, who would I like to see around my dinner table? Whose brain would I like to pick? The personalities I’ve chosen are strong, so no doubt, it would be a lively evening!

James Bond (and yes, I expect him to look like Daniel Craig.)

Ian Fleming's super spy is licensed to kill, and he knows how to do everything.  Fly a helicopter?  Check. Disarm a nuclear weapon? Check.  Choose beautiful dresses for his female companions?  Check.  I’d want to hear about his adventures and near-death experiences, and I’d like to breathe in his confidence i.e. arrogance.
  

Quinn Colson

Full disclosure: I have a crush on the sheriff of Tibbehah County in Mississippi.  I know, I know, he doesn't really exist, but Ace Atkins' creation feels real to me.  The head of law enforcement in an area full of underhanded deals, backstabbing, and tangled family trees, Quinn navigates it all with a quiet strength. And biscuits. I'd like him to bring some biscuits.

Barbara Havers

Yes, she’d turn up looking unkempt, but Elizabeth George’s detective sergeant is whip smart and not afraid to speak her mind.  Often in the shadow of her handsome, nattily dressed boss, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, Havers holds her own. Time and again, she  proves a critical member of the Met’s investigative team.

What about your dinner party?  Which fictional characters would get an invitation from you?

Francine Mathews--A View From the Shadows

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Okay, here's a really bad thing about BOOK JAIL. My friend Francine Mathews (aka Stephanie Barron) is in Dallas for a few days, staying downtown, and I CAN'T HANG OUT. Boo. I am so totally bummed out. I was really looking forward to seeing her. Fortunately, Francine understands, because she has a book to finish, too.

The good thing is, we all get to talk to Francine here on the blog, today. Francine and I go way back. You may know her better as Stephanie Barron, author of the Jane Austen mystery series, which I adore. But Francine also writes terrific spy thrillers. And she has the chops to do it, because she was a real spy. Here's Francine to tell you about it, and about her latest novel, an historical thriller set in 1943 and featuring Ian Fleming--yes, that Ian Fleming--as the protagonist.

Here's a synopsis:
A tense and enthralling World War II thriller: British Naval Intelligence officer Ian Fleming races to foil a Nazi plot to assassinate FDR, Churchill and Stalin.

November 1943. Weary of his deskbound status in the Royal Navy, intelligence officer Ian Fleming spends his spare time spinning stories in his head that are much more exciting than his own life...until the critical Tehran Conference, when Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin meet to finalize the D-Day invasion.

With the Big Three in one place, Fleming is tipped off that Hitler's top assassin has infiltrated the conference. Seizing his chance to play a part in a real-life action story, Fleming goes undercover to stop the Nazi killer. Between martinis with beautiful women, he survives brutal attacks and meets a seductive Soviet spy who may know more than he realizes. As he works to uncover the truth and unmask the assassin, Fleming is forced to accept that betrayal sometimes comes from the most unexpected quarters--and that one's literary creations may prove eerily close to one's own life. 

FRANCINE MATHEWS:

THE VIEW FROM THE SHADOWS

I discovered the world of espionage early in life. I was the last of my parents’ six children, and thus was permitted a degree of freedom unknown to my five sisters. I suspect this was due to weariness with the whole business of parenting—there are as few photographs of me as a child as there were rules. Regardless, I was packed off to bed each night with the understanding that I would almost immediately creep back downstairs and sit behind my father’s wing chair in the den, where he would invariably be established with his newspaper, and the older girls would be watching television. As long as I made no sound, everyone would pretend that I wasn’t there. As a result, I saw a lot of movies and television I was not supposed to see. From toddlerhood, I found that lurking in the shadows gave the best view of life.

I grew up on Bonanza, Petticoat Junction, Wild, Wild West, and John Wayne films. Sometimes it was Laugh In or Lost in Space. But often it was Get Smart, which I absolutely adored. Never mind 007; I wanted to be Agent 99. Agent 99 was funny, glamorous, more intelligent than the men around her, and far more competent. Plus, she could wield any sort of weapon or gadget with an insouciance that was enslaving. In go-go boots.

Once I could read, I graduated to sitting in my father’s wing chair with my legs thrown over one arm, while I consumed the adventures of the Dana Girls and Harriet the Spy. This is the only book I know of that truly captures the mind and heart of an adolescent bent on observing, collecting and analyzing intelligence in an effort to understand and predict her uncertain world—until she’s blown, and the blowback from her espionage makes her that sad figure in diplomatic circles: persona non grata. It’s a wonderful object lesson in the necessity of cover.

 

From Harriet, I went on to the novels of Helen MacInnes—one of the great and unfortunately less-celebrated-than-she-ought-to-be novelists of the last century. MacInnes worked for the British SIS during World War II, and her books are filled with women who are glamorous, competent, and intelligent—Agent 99s, all of them. In one of my favorites, The Venetian Affair, the male protagonist—an amateur unwittingly embroiled, as men so often are, in a life and death episode of international intrigue—is astounded to discover that the innocent blonde he has his eye on is in fact a trained CIA professional; the Paris apartment he’s been sharing with her is a safehouse. Reason enough to love Helen MacInnes.

Bond is harder for a woman to love. I say that as someone who’s read everything Ian Fleming wrote, as well as biographies of Fleming himself, memoirs of him written by his friends—and even biographies of his friends written by total strangers. I’ve read nonfiction histories of World War II that Fleming haunts like an unquiet ghost—the best being rousing rales like Ben MacIntyre’s Operation Mincemeat. 

But it’s Bond’s women that are the problem for female readers. Unlike Agent 99 or Helen MacInnes’s pros, they have ridiculous names and a habit of dying in pathetic ways. I’ve noticed this is usually because they have a fatal girl flaw—they trip while racing through the dark in high heels, or they can’t drive a stick-shift getaway car, or they drown when the chamber in which they’re imprisoned unaccountably fills with water, because their lung capacity is lower than men’s. 

This is a trope of Bond stories; Fleming must have had a fear of drowning. I give him that experience in my book, Too Bad to Die, which is the story of Ian Fleming going undercover as a spy named James Bond during World War II, in an effort to prevent the Germans from assassinating Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin. But I also give him something much more valuable: Siranoush, an assassin trained by SMERSH—the division of the KGB’s wartime precursor, the NKVD, responsible for counterintelligence. (You thought Fleming invented SMERSH, didn’t you? Nope. He just followed its activities during his own operative period. SMERSH is a Russian acronym that translates as “Death to Spies.”) Siranoush knows all the tradecraft and techniques Ian Fleming lacks as a London-bound desk jockey. Plus, she introduces him to vodka—shaken, not stirred. I thought it was time Bond took lessons from a competent, glamorous, and intelligent woman for a change.

I often tell people that all writers begin life as readers—and that the things we’re obsessed with as children have a way of following us through the years.

So it can hardly have been a surprise that, having exited seven years of higher education without any skill beyond the ability to read and write, I applied to the CIA. One year-long FBI background check and a polygraph later, I found myself in the Agency’s Career Trainee program—required of those slated for the covert world, but granted like a special treat to a few of us destined for Harriet’s analytic life. For the space of several months, I got to do what every proto-spy dreams of. I rappelled off a helicopter skid with an M16 strapped to my back. I endured escape-and-evasion survival training, while helicopters with forward-looking infra-red hunted me from the air. I fired grenade guns at tanks and took agent meetings in safehouses and was fitted with a disguise by the Agency section we lovingly call Q branch, after the Bond films. I left exposed film cartridges in a discarded milk carton under a particular step on the Exorcist stairs that run between M Street and N Street in Georgetown—otherwise known as a dead drop. I tried to keep my husband from spilling the beans about my mysterious absences from “the State Department” each week while I lived at The Farm, the Agency’s covert ops facility.

I learned to admire and love any number of people who live life in the shadows. I learned to treat espionage, its risks, and its immense value, with appropriate seriousness. But eventually, I came back around to my Destiny—and quit the job to write about it.

Truth may be stranger than fiction. But getting to tell a story is most of the fun of living it.

What are your spy-girl fantasies, friends?

Until next time— 


DEBS: I am so ashamed to admit that I've never read Harriet the Spy. BUT, I discovered Ian Fleming's Bond novels when I was thirteen or fourteen, and loved them. Fortunately--I think--they didn't encourage me to wear high heels with bikinis, or drown. 


I loved Helen MacInnes, too, particularly The Venetian Affair, which I intend to revisit. Spy fantasies? Not a Bond girl. But a Helen MacInnes heroine, definitely. The latest? I loved Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa Faust in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation.  (And as a fun side note, it's Ilsa who saves Ethan Hunt from drowning in the big underwater scene.)


REDS and readers, did you read Fleming? And what are your Spy Girl fantasies?

Francine Mathews is the author of 25 novels of mystery and suspense, including the Jane Austen Mystery Series, written under the pseudonym Stephanie Barron.

Ken Salikof on Helen MacInnes, Ian Fleming's Challenger

SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Delighted to introduce novelist Ken Salikof, the author of the Jackie Kennedy Spy Novels: Paris to Die For and Spy in a Little Black Dress. Today he's writing about his muse, Helen MacInnes. She may not be as well-known as Ian Fleming or John Le Carre, but Ken feels she deserves to be. Let's see why.

KEN SALIKOF: When people ask me about the inspiration for my two Jackie Kennedy spy novels, Paris to Die For and Spy in a Little Black Dress, I always reply that I wanted them to read like a novel by Helen MacInnes. 

Helen who?

Well, quite simply put, from 1941 through 1984, the Scottish-American Helen MacInnes was the queen bee of the romantic spy novel. 

To put her career in context, the 1960s was probably the golden age of the spy novel.  And the three biggest spy novelists of that period were Ian Fleming, Len Deighton and John Le Carre, all Englishmen.  Fleming died in 1963 just as Deighton and Le Carre were coming on the scene.  But his James Bond novels continued to sell because of the growing success of the movie series starring Sean Connery as Bond, James Bond.  Le Carre tilled a more literary patch with his anti-Bond hero, George Smiley, while Deighton’s nameless hero (called Harry Palmer in the movies) was a Modish reflection of Swinging London.

            

The only female writer who could challenge this young Old Boys Club was Helen MacInnes.  By the sixties, when Le Carre and Deighton were cutting their teeth, she was into her third decade as a suspense novelist.  And would go strong for two decades more before death put a stop to her career in 1985 at age 78.  Like clockwork, she would produce a new novel every two years that would automatically appear on the New York Times Bestseller List.  Today, though, she is almost totally forgotten.  But thankfully, Titan Books has seen fit to rectify this omission by reprinting her work.

The wife of a classics scholar and MI6 agent, Helen MacInnes spent her whole literary career writing romantic spy novels.  They took place all over Europe, her stories set in colorful locations that added a touristy element to her narratives.   Taken altogether, her works are intelligently written, complexly plotted (with an overemphasis on coincidence to move the story along), and feature an astute take on foreign affairs.  

 For the most part, her protagonists — always men— are members of ordinary professions (scholar, economist, lawyer) who become accidentally involved in an espionage plot and find themselves navigating an ominous new geography of duplicity and danger with the hint of death around every shadowy corner.  And, of course, there is always a woman to help the hero through this maze of deceit.  The books followed a formula, but it was one that MacInnes shrewdly made work for her.

The sweet spot for Helen MacInnes’ writing career was the 1960s — the height of the Cold War —during which she produced what is arguably her best work.  The Venetian Affair (1963), The Double Image (1966) and The Salzburg Connection (1968) are all about the legacy of World War II and the lingering fallout from the Nazis’ failed attempt to conquer the world.  In these novels, World War II still casts a giant noirish shadow over the decades following the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945.  The first two novels take place in sunny locations—Venice, Paris and Mykonos—but there is a pervasive chill that blows through these stories, like the one that runs through the obviously more coldly climacteric Alpine setting of the third novel.

Surprisingly, for an author whose works were so popular and cinematic, only four movies were made from her books.  Her first two novels, Above Suspicion and Assignment in Brittany, both became feature films in 1943.  The former, about a honeymoon couple on a spying mission to Nazi Germany and starring the unusual combination of Fred McMurry and Joan Crawford, is almost in the same class as Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent and Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich.  

But the two movies made in the sixties are dreadful: The Venetian Affair (1967), an M-G-M programmer starring Robert Vaughn (then the star of the popular Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV series, whose episodes, coincidentally, always had the word affair in the title) and The Salzburg Connection (1972), starring Barry Newman (fresh from the cult existential road trip/car race movie, Vanishing Point).

Read together, Helen MacInnes’ novels are nothing less than an impressionistic history of the second half of the 20^th century, from World War II, through the Cold War, to the first stirrings of Detente.  Her view of world affairs is not quite as dark as Le Carre’s, but is equally as well informed.  Her books are escapist literature at its best.  I envy the reader who has yet to discover her.


SUSAN ELIA MACNEAL: Dear Reds and lovely readers, have you ever read Helen MacInnes? 

What mystery writer do you love who you think has been overlooked by history?

             

Ken Salikof is the author of the Jackie Kennedy spy novels, Paris to Die For and Spy in a Little Black Dress, both published by Grand Central Publishing.  He is also the award-winning screenwriter of Ernest Hemingway Slept Here.  His reviews and articles about books and movie can be found in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and the New York Daily News.

It Takes a Village--Meg London aka Peg Cochran

DEBORAH CROMBIE:  This seems to be our double-barreled week! I wish these talented writers

who can manage to be two people at once would teach me their secret...  Although today's guest, Peg Cochran, actually manages to be four people at once.

Meg London is the pen name for writer Peg Cochran.  Peg grew up in a New Jersey suburb about 25 miles outside of New York City and now lives (on exile from NJ as she likes to joke) in Grand Rapids, Michigan. 

She has two cozy mystery series from Berkley Prime Crime— the Sweet Nothings Vintage Lingerie series, written as Meg London, set in Paris, Tennessee, and the Gourmet De-Lite series, under her own name, set in Connecticut.  Her Cranberry Cove series for Berkley Prime Crime will debut in August 2015.  She also writes The Lucille Series for Beyond the Page Publishing.

Here Peg gives us a hint--

PEG COCHRAN: To use an expression that has become something of a cliche…it takes a village to

create a writer. 

My relatives were the first supporters to join my team.  I had decided at the tender age of seven that I was going to be a writer (it’s been a long journey!).  I figured that since I didn’t have the time to write an entire novel (second grade is pretty intense, you know), I would write a short play.  Which I did. I then forced, er, coaxed, my cousins into performing the three minute skit at Christmas dinner.  When it was over, and everyone in the family shouted, “Author! Author!” I was hooked.

My high school English teacher (another cliché, I suspect) was my first supporter outside the family.  She very graciously worked with me after school on my short stories (which only further confirmed my extreme nerdiness to the rest of my class.)  She told me my writing was very “visceral.”  As soon as I got home, I ran to the dictionary and looked up the word “visceral” to confirm that that had been a compliment.  Apparently it was, and I took that as a
good sign.

My late mother-in-law was also a huge supporter.  She would send me clippings about Janet Evanovich.  Janet Evanovich!  In my dreams, right?

I even “came out” at work about my writing and found an unexpected source of support in my boss who read my manuscripts and encouraged me to keep going.  She also suggested I show them to John Russell, former art critic for the New York Times, and a very elegant writer, who was doing research at the art foundation where we worked.

He very kindly read several manuscripts and pronounced them “jolly good fun.” (I imagine they were compared to Kafka or Tolstoy or the other greats I pictured him reading.)  He said he particularly liked the ending of one of my manuscripts (a jet ski chase scene), and that it reminded him of

something his good friend would have written.  “Maybe you’ve heard of him,” he asked casually, “Ian Fleming?”  Believe me, I was both shaken and stirred!

Finally I found enormous support in the on-line mystery writing community.  Publishing is a hideously competitive business but instead of running into Tonya Harding type writers, I found wonderfully giving people without whom I never would have made it to publication.  I won’t do the whole Oscar speech thing and name names, but you guys know who you are!  Thank you!

Who has been supportive in helping you realize your dreams?

DEBS: Peg, I absolutely love your story. And the photos!  I wish I had one of my--yes, cliched but true--tenth-grade English teacher, who read a poem I submitted for a class assignment and told me I had "talent."

But I did NOT have my work critiqued by a the former art critic for the New York Times, who just happened to be friends with Ian Fleming.  Ian Fleming!!

And you, by the way, were adorable!

REDS and READERS, Peg would love to give away a copy of the upcoming A FATAL SLIP, and we'd both love to know who supported and inspired you.

(And one last thing--the winner of Daryl Wood Gerber's  ( or Avery Ames's) book is Pat D.  And the winner of Terry Shames's THE LAST DEATH OF JACK HARBIN is Joan Emerson. Pat D and Joan, if you will email me your addresses at deb at deborahcrombie dot com, I'll pass them along to the authors.

AND THE BEST NEWS, JUST IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T ALREADY HEARD--OUR OWN JRW HALLIE EPHRON IS NOMINATED FOR THE 2014 EDGAR MARY HIGGINS CLARK AWARD FOR HER NOVEL,  THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN!  We are over the moon, so raise your glasses--or your teacups--with us in a toast to Hallie!