Rhys and Lucy Celebrate Pub Days!

RHYS BOWEN: Hooray, hooray, it's publication day! Champagne all around! Raising a glass to our readers!

It’s always a time for celebration when one of the Reds has a new book out. And today it’s a double celebration because we have two new books—I am excited to launch my new stand-alone THE PARIS ASSIGNMENT, into the world, and Lucy is equally excited for the pub day of her latest in the Hayley Snow Key West series, called  The Clue in the Crumbs. And so we decided to have a little chat about them.  (and this is a photo of the last book launch we did together. What fun that was!)

So congrats, Lucy! And hooray that Hayley is back with us. It’s interesting that we share a pub date, you with a light and fun cozy and me with probably the darkest book I’ve ever written. I think we’re showing the full scope of Jungle Reds! Is this lucky number 13 in the series? Did you ever think it would go on this long? Are you finding it more fun to write now that you know the characters and the setting so well? Or is it harder to come up with new and fresh ideas?  I know these are a lot of questions at once. 

LUCY BURDETTE: Huge congrats to you too, Rhys! It’s an honor to share a launch date with you. I couldn’t even guess what number published book this is for you! I love writing a long series, because the further I get into it, the better I know the characters. Honestly, it feels like the long-term psychotherapy I used to do in my other career as a clinical psychologist—uncovering layers and layers. I don’t ever get bored with my setting because Key West is such a many-layered town, with many visitors and a rich history. The longer I live there, the more I understand about the place, and the more I can show readers.

 But now here’s a question for you, since THE PARIS ASSIGNMENT is a stand-alone. You have so much experience with both long-running series and single titles. Isn’t it harder to think up a whole new set of characters and an entirely new setting? How do you feel about leaving Madeline and her son Oliver behind when you’ve invested so much in them (and put them through multiple wringers!)?

RHYS: I think it's book 55! And It’s definitely more work to write a stand-alone because I have to begin by researching a whole different world and getting to know a new set of characters. As you know with your series, when you begin a new book it’s like going back to a family reunion. You know the characters. You know how they will react to certain incidents. The challenge is to make each new story fresh and interesting. When I write a stand-alone I do enjoy getting to interact with a new set of characters, putting them through the wringer and then walking away. Although I have to tell you I get emails all the time asking when there is going to be a sequel to any of my stand-alones.

So, about your new book: I loved the Scone Sisters in the last book and I’m so glad you brought them back. Did you have that in mind when you introduced them last year? Did they come to you before you went to Scotland? When you were writing A SCONE OF CONTENTION did you know you wanted to use them again?

LUCY: Thanks for that Rhys, I love those characters too! I’m not too good at planning ahead.  I knew I wanted to include the town of Peebles, Scotland after we visited it in 2019 during the Solstice celebration. When Hayley Snow went to the home of Violet and Bettina after the shocking loss of Violet’s son, she had no idea what she would find there, and neither did I! But the sisters really popped as I wrote about them, and they got along like a house afire with Miss Gloria. Miss Gloria is a very popular character in this series, and I loved imagining highlighting the three older women in another book. Since they had won a contest with their cinnamon scone back in Scotland, a baking show seemed like the logical solution.

But since we’ve mentioned setting a couple of times, I have to ask you about the research that goes into a book like THE PARIS ASSIGNMENT. It’s a very complicated plot that swings through England and France and finally Australia, and covers some horrific events that happened over the course of World War II and beyond. How do you research a huge project like this one and decide what to cover and what to leave out? I can remember in one of the blogs you wrote for JRW that you wrote out stories in two separate timelines and actually spread the pages out in a hallway so you figure out how to weave them together. How did you manage the structure of this big sweeping story?

RHYS:  I didn’t have to spread the pages on the hall floor for this one as it’s all a sequential story going from 1930 to 1947. But I did have to do lots of research. I started when we rented a house on the Seine River near Fontainebleau and I saw the chateau and the forest and thought what a great setting it would make. Covid intervened and I had to wait until last year to go back and choose my houses in the Marais, take a river trip to see what the locks feel like and check out the museum of the resistance. In the meantime, I read the autobiographies of several real women who were spies/couriers in Nazi occupied France. I read the training manual for exactly what their training entailed (I would have quit the first day) and realized how incredibly brave they were. They knew the survival rate was twenty five percent and yet they signed on.

And part of the book takes place in Australia. I didn’t have to research that much as I lived there, was married there, my parents moved there and I used to spend a good portion of each year there until my mom passed away. I love the feel and openness of the Australian countryside so it was lovely to revisit it in the book.

So are you having a launch party, Lucy? Any events our friends should know about?

LUCY: : Yes! Big double book launch tomorrow night for A CLUE IN THE CRUMBS and THE INGREDIENTS OF HAPPINESS! This will be at RJ Julia Bookseller on Main St. in Madison CT. Call 203-245-3959 to reserve a seat. (Cake! Wine! Books!) How about you?

RHYS: I did a virtual event at the Poisoned Pen last night. There are signed books if you’d like one. And a live event coming up at Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA on August 19. I’ve also done/am doing numerous interviews/podcasts/chats etc. I post them on my Facebook page (www.facebook.com/rhysbowenauthor

So thank you to all of you who are our loyal readers. We appreciate you so much! If you like this latest one do please post a review on Goodreads, Amazon, or wherever else grabs you.  It really helps get the word out. 

Which Came First? On Prequels

HANK:  When Len Rosen is famous, really really famous, and he will be, I'm gonna be so thrilled to say I knew him when.... 

Len Rosen is amazing. A brilliant writer, a brilliant storyteller, thoughtful and careful and passionate and...I had the joy of reading his first novel, ALL CRY CHAOS, when I was on the Edgar judging committee. From moment one, it was brilliant. I will say brilliant again. 

He made a brave decision, in that book, to have a main character who is 60 years old, and to have his family go through hell. What do you do for a sequel? That's what Len talks about today as his new book, the Tenth Witness, hits the bookstores. 

Reds, one of the great things about this blog is that we are able to introduce you to authors whose path you might not have crossed. 

Len Rosen.  I bet you will be seeing his name in lights--what's the literary equivalent?--very soon. 

On Writing a Prequel

     
by Len Rosen

I pretty much cemented the necessity of writing a prequel when I set my first novel at the end of my main character’s active career as an Interpol agent.  Henri Poincaré is 60 years old when I leave him in All Cry Chaos.  While he discovers a good deal that redeems him in that novel, the cost of his discovery is dear: real trauma to the ones he loves.  I left the Poincarés recuperating at the end of All Cry Chaos; and I could not imagine subjecting Henri or Claire, his wife, to more trials in his retirement—at least while Claire is alive.

So the follow-on novel, if it were to concern Poincaré, would need to be a prequel.  I faced two questions immediately: (1) when would I set the story and (2) what moved Henri to become an Interpol agent at the age of 28?  I had forced this timing on myself by making the Henri of Chaos a senior investigator with 30 years of experience.  I set that novel in 2010 or thereabouts.  The math forced me to set The Tenth Witness in 1978, give or take.

Who and what was Henri in that year?  I wanted this story to be his first case, before he became an Interpol agent.  What, I wondered, would move him to choose a career with the international police?  I needed also to show a character in formation, someone whom readers would recognize as a younger Henri.  The veteran investigator of Chaos is methodical, thorough, ethical (sometimes to a fault), decent, and relentless.  All this I would need to show emerging in the younger man, and I would do it in his voice, an intimate first person.

I decided to make Henri a mechanical engineer in The Tenth Witness: a problem solver, aware of large systems and intricate parts, skillful with cause-and-effect thinking, and practical.  But Henri also needed to be a soulful, conscience-driven man who would track a problem to its source however dangerous the stakes.  In these dangerous places, he would need to confront real evil.  That’s what would impel him to give up a safe and prosperous life in engineering.

I could imagine some characters choosing international police work for the love of adventure.  But Poincaré, I knew, would be driven for reasons of conscience.  My target year 1978 was just 30 years after the second world war.  The timing was perfect: Henri would engage with prosperous, unreconstructed Nazis.  They would harbor secrets from the past and secrets from the present.  As a kind of dreaded bonus, this choice would force me to dive deep into my own fears; for as a child in the fifties and early sixties, I woke with nightmares of swastikas and jackboots.  In the Third Reich, Henri and I would face an evil larger than them all.

He would fall in love with a woman his same age, Liesel Kraus, whose father made steel for the Third Reich.  I saw her clearly: smart, capable, athletic, attractive, wealthy.  They both fall hard.  I make no secret in the opening pages that Claire is Poincaré’s wife (30 years later), so we know from the outset that the affair is doomed.  But why?  What does Henri discover?  And how does that discovery drive a wedge between his affection and his conscience? 

Add it all together and a story emerged.  Witness is not a Holocaust story per se, but a story about the legacy of evil.   As a writer, I want to force difficult choices on my characters.  In weighing whether or not to leave engineering for Interpol, Henri must clarify what is important to him.  Here’s how he puts it toward the end of the novel.  (Viktor Schmidt is closely allied with the Kraus family.)

Still in my twenties, I had trained for a profession that brought technical answers to difficult problems. When rivers needed spanning and foundations needed shoring, I was your man. Give me a dive platform to build and anchor over a treasure ship, and I could do it. Viktor Schmidt was a different sort of problem. For him I had no answers, yet the world needed answers.

As a prequel, The Tenth Witness placed both forward and backward demands on me as a writer: backward in the sense that the first novel constrained me to a certain timing and set of emerging character traits for my protagonist; and forward in the sense that every fiction moves forward: in showing the arc of characters faced with obstacles, changing in convincing and (let’s hope) memorable ways.

Thus far, critics are loving The Tenth Witness.  I hope you will, too.  You can read the opening chapters here. 

HANK: And we'll give a copy of ALL CRY CHAOS to one lucky commenter--Len says he had nightmares about Nazis as a kid. Do you remember any of your childhood bad dreams? Or good ones?

**************

Leonard Rosen lives and works in the Boston area.  He has contributed radio commentaries to Boston’s NPR station, written best-selling books on writing, and taught writing at Harvard University.  

His just published The Tenth Witness (Sept. 2013) is a prequel to All Cry Chaos, a much-praised award winner in both the literary and mystery/thriller categories. 

 Both feature Interpol agent Henri Poincaré, “a protagonist,” wrote one critic, “who reads like a literary figure in a thriller.”  Learn more at his web site.