The Joys of Binge Reading

On Binge Reading today, USA Today bestselling author A.W. Hartoin talks about her World War II, Stella Bled spy thriller series, and the young American honeymooner who becomes a double agent, trapped into working for both Germany and England.

Hi there. I’m your host, Jenny Wheeler, and on Binge Reading today, A.W. talks about the sixth book in the series, Her London Season.

It’s 1940 and the Battle of Britain rages in the skies overhead. Stella is stuck, frustrated, in a lowly administrative job at the Special Operations Executive, the SOE. Until a mysterious set of orders arrives.

A.W. talks about crafting a story that challenges all the assumptions you may make about truth and power.

Our Book Giveaway this week

Our Giveaway this week is another Kobo Free Genre offer, a wonderful range of books from several genres – mystery, thriller and romance, and all of them First in Series, including Poisoned Legacy, my Book #1 in the Of Gold & Blood series.

Find the download link in the show notes for this episode on The Joys of Binge Reading website, that’s www.thejoysofbinge reading.com.

FREE KOBO GENRE LIST BOOKS

https://www.kobo.com/nz/en/p/free-ebooksKobo

And remember. If you enjoy the show, leave us a review, so others will find us too. Word of mouth is still the best way for others to discover the show and great books they will definitely want to read.

Links to subjects mentioned in today’s episode

Kristallnacht: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kristallnacht

(*See Editor’s note at the end of the transcript.)

Kelly Rimmer, The Paris Agent, https://www.kellyrimmer.com/books/the-paris-agent

Pam Jenoff, The Lost Girls of Paris, https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Girls-Paris-Pam-Jenoff/dp/0778308618

Martha Hall Kelly: Lilac Girls, h ttps://marthahallkelly.com/books/lilac-girls/

Janet Evanovich: https://evanovich.com/

Jana DeLeon: https://janadeleon.com/

Brian Cann, photographer: https://brian-cann.format.com/about

Laser guided bomb systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser-guided_bomb

The House Witch by Delemhach https://www.amazon.com.au/House-Witch-Humorous-Romantic-Fantasy/dp/1039410251

Stephen King: The Shining, https://stephenking.com/works/novel/shining.html

EM Powell: Stanton and Barling series. https://www.empowell.com/stanton-and-barling-mysteries

Liane Moriarty: What Alice Forgot, https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781743535493/

The Splendid and the Vile by Eric Larson: https://www.amazon.com/Splendid-Vile-Churchill-Family-Defiance/dp/0385348711.

The Rape of Europa by Lynn K Nicholas: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/121563/the-rape-of-europa-by-lynn-h-nicholas/

Kristin Hannah The Nightingale: https://www.amazon.com/Nightingale-Novel-Kristin-Hannah/dp/1250080401

Where to find A.W. Hartoin online

Website: https://www.awhartoin.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/A.W.Hartoin/

Introducing mystery author A. W. Hartoin A.W. Hartoin – Best Selling mystery author.

Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s A.W. Hello there, A.W. and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

A.W. Hartoin: Hi Jenny. Thanks for having me.

Jenny Wheeler: You’ve done a remarkably wide range of genres. You’ve done fantasy, you’ve done YA.

But I think the bulk of your work has been in mystery, either Second World War, a series with Stella Bled, or a more contemporary cozy mystery series with Mercy Watts.

So we’ll be focusing on those two today because most of our listeners are really interested in those mainstream genres. I wondered first what has attracted you to the mystery genre.

A.W. Hartoin: I’ve always loved my mystery since I was a child, but I think it’s the puzzle pieces and how they come together, and planting little clues here and there. I’ve always loved plotting and mystery’s all about the plotting And Cozy Mystery in particular is about characters and having really interesting people in them.

It’s not so gritty.

Jenny Wheeler: The plotting aspect, how do you approach that? Do you have. an involved grid or do you rely more on instinct? How do you do that part?

A. W. Hartoin: Intense cork board plotting

A.W. Hartoin: I break out my trusty cork boards. I start putting in exactly what I want to happen in scenes and moving them around. And then when I’m doing Stella, which is also a mystery and a thriller, I put in facts. I make sure I have every fact on the board so I don’t lose a fact, and I’ll have background on there.

It’s covered with note cards by the time I get done and I move things around constantly and make sure I don’t miss anything.

Jenny Wheeler: To give us a picture of it, how many boards do you have and how big are they?

A.W. Hartoin: I have two large boards. When I’m doing Mercy, it’s usually one board because she’s easier to plot, I don’t have a lot of historical facts to deal with.

When I do Stella, I have one large board for the actual plot and then I have one board that’s every fact that I want to have covered.

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. Now, Stella has evolved to a six book series, with Her London Season the sixth book?

You started in 1938. You’ve now got to 1940. Perhaps give us a sense of the arc of that series.

A.W. Hartoin: It starts out when Stella is newly married.

She’s on her honeymoon and she’s doing the Grand Tour through Europe in November 1938.

And she persuades her new husband to take her to Vienna. He’s less enthused about that idea, but they end up in Vienna on the eve of the Kristallnacht and are completely shocked by the events that happen and get drawn into a series of events where she ends up being a spy for the British Intelligence Service.

From politically naive to double agent

Then we go from there to trying to help people in Italy. Then she’s back in England and she goes on missions to different sections of the Reich, and in London season is actually already out, and that is one where she gets involved with the SOE and the formation of the SOE and a mystery that takes completely in place in London.

Jenny Wheeler: Fantastic. Now, the first one, she starts out as being rather politically naive, doesn’t she?

She hardly really understands what kind of world she’s entering. When she happily toddles off to Vienna, she’s got all these ideas about going to the opera and all that kind of thing, and gets really caught up in this heavy political stuff that’s going on.

How does her political understanding evolve during this series?

A.W. Hartoin: She’s completely naive at the beginning.

She comes from a very wealthy brewing family. They have no interest in politics whatsoever. She’s really insulated and with her family all the time.

She’s not been a person who is really interested in politics and she ends up there in Vienna and is completely shocked by how people are treated, and that the government is attacking their own citizens.

The police and the firefighters do nothing to help them.

And then she’s going through these things and experiencing Italy, for instance in Vienna, how the Italian population treated the Jewish population there.

And she becomes involved and understands more and more. How these things came about and how she can affect the war herself.

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100%;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] [data-style="minimal"]{padding:40px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"]{margin-left:-5px;margin-right:-5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field,.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{margin:0 5px 15px 5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field{-webkit-flex:100 1 auto;-ms-flex:100 1 auto;flex:100 1 auto;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{-webkit-flex:1 1 auto;-ms-flex:1 1 auto;flex:1 1 auto;} How Stella reconciles her moral dilemma

Jenny Wheeler: We’ve just very recently interviewed the Australian author, Kelly Rimmer, with her book The Paris Agent. It was posted online this last week, and that book also deals with the SOE and the issues that arose that became very clear with the SOE after the war about the double agent aspect of the organization that they had there.

The whole double agent thing, I think that Stella becomes a particularly. committed to double agent in Book Five does she?

She’s working for both the Germans and the British at this stage, as a matter of self preservation. How do you handle the moral code side of that?

A.W. Hartoin: I think she really does struggle with that. She doesn’t expect to have that happen. Becoming a double agent was a complete accident. No one thought that was going to happen.

And then she’s in it. She’s dealing with real people. She lives and works with the people working for the Reich, and it’s painful.

She becomes attached to them. And even though she would, in theory do anything to defeat the Reich, it’s very different when you’re face-to-face with someone you actually like.

And when she returns from a mission, she’s very haunted by what she’s seen and done. She wouldn’t change it. But that is part of the guilt and that has been something I’ve tried to keep going, that she’s not a character who forgets what’s happened and just goes on.

It stays with her. She remembers everyone. She’s haunted by what has happened to them after she’s loved them. And surprisingly, she’s very attached to people that are working for the Reich against her.

And she still does what she has to do, but it’s very difficult.

Balancing fact and fiction

Jenny Wheeler: With the aspect of balancing fact and fiction, when you get into the SOE, for example, a lot of that history is very closely recorded now. How do you handle the fact and fiction balanced?

A.W. Hartoin: Stella’s mainly an SIS asset. She is involved at the SOE also by accident.

She gets involved with them in their formation. It is very difficult to deal with the SIS section because there’s not a lot written on the actual spy organization. But SOE is easier because a lot has been written and I try to get the exact facts every time.

It takes a ton of research to get that done, but there has been, as you said, much written about the SOE, so that’s a lot easier than any other kind of spy operation which remains cloaked in secrecy.

Jenny Wheeler: So how do you manage that and are you multilingual? Do you have to go to multiple sources or do you have people who translate for you? How do you work with that side of things?

A.W. Hartoin: One thing that’s really helped is going to actual sites and being. in Paris and going to all the museums. There’s a lot of very small museums that you’ll find on the Resistance in France, for instance, where you’ll be able to find, information. It won’t be in English, so I’ll be in there with my translator.

I’m not multilingual. I’ll be in there with Google Translate, pointing it at the placards and using books and trying to figure out exactly what they’re saying.

But I tried it with every book, whether it’s Mercy or Stella, go to the place where it’s happening. And when you see it, and the best research books are always at the museums and I can’t get them anywhere else, you’ll find something you’ve never saw before.

They’re almost always in English. Occasionally I can’t get it in English, but Google Translate is amazing and I just get so many facts that way.

Travelling to do research

Jenny Wheeler: How did you manage during Covid? Were you still able to travel during that period?

A.W. Hartoin: I was not able to travel during that period. I wrote the Berlin book while I was in lockdown here in Germany, we could not do anything or go anywhere, Berlin is a little interesting because it was mostly destroyed, so I had to really use a lot of historical photographs and things like that

I could use the grid map of Berlin itself, so I knew exactly where things were, but they don’t exist anymore.

I have since gone to Berlin and explored that area, but at that time I couldn’t go. But that’s the only book I have done where I did not go before I wrote the book.

Jenny Wheeler: Have you got an arc in mind that takes Stella right through the whole war? I don’t want to do any spoilers because of course, she could get killed during wartime, but how far ahead are you foreseeing with the series

A.W. Hartoin: I plan to have her go through the entire war. I know what happens at the end. And the next book is in Lyon, France, and that will be prior to the Butcher of Lyon being there. Then she’ll be in Nuremberg. And then she’ll be in Prague. I’ve plotted it out pretty far.

Jenny Wheeler: Going right back to the beginning, how did you get inspired to even start this? It’s like a patchwork series, or like a kaleidoscope. It is amazing the way that you fit all these aspects into it. How did you even get the idea for it?

A.W’s fascination with Kristallnacht

A.W. Hartoin: We were stationed in Germany for the first time in the early 2000. I had a British friend who had an intense interest in World War II history, and she gave me books to read on the history and one of them was on the Schindler’s List survivors. Their real stories behind there those people.

And one of the survivors talked extensively about his experience in Kristallnacht, and I had never heard about it.

I took history classes in college, and nobody ever talked about it. If it was mentioned, it was just in passing.

So, I really got interested in the Kristallnacht itself and then started looking at it and thought like what a catastrophic event and what would it be like to be there as a person who has no expectation of anything like this happening?

What would it be like to just have this event because it happened suddenly. It was not something that was building up like a war machine was building up. It just happened and so that’s how the Stella idea happened. An intense interest in the Kristallnacht and wanting to put someone in there that would be shocked and have no expectation at all.

Jenny Wheeler: You convey that very well with Stella at the beginning.

You’ve had some wonderful reviews and you’ve had some great writers that you’ve been compared to for that series. People like Pam Jenoff and her. The Lost Girls of Paris Book and Martha Hall, Kelly’s Lila Girls, which I’m sure a lot of our listeners would be familiar with.

World War II has become an amazing subgenre of historical oral fiction, remarkably popular. What do you think that people are really attracted to in the World War II area?

Why World War II fiction is so popular

A.W. Hartoin: I think we’re living in a time of great uncertainty and the Ukraine situation is very reminiscent of Hitler invading Poland.

We know how World War II it turned out, but it was filled with uncertainty at the time, but it was black and white. It was good versus evil, which is really appealing.

I can’t stop thinking about the price that people paid during the war. The more you learn, the more amazing people get.

My grandfather flew in the Pacific during the war. He played a terrible price and he lived with that for the rest of his life.

He never spoke about it to us. He did not want to talk about it at all, but my grandmother did talk about it, and it was very hard for the both of them.

Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Mercy, because you do have a lighter, more fun side to your mysteries, as we say with the Cozy Series and Mercy Watts. She’s been compared to more great names, like Janet Evanovich and Jana. DeLeon. So, you’ve got great company there. Tell us about your sleuth Mercy.

A.W. Hartoin: Unlike Stella, who is a great person, but Mercy is a lot of fun. She’s young, she has this large group of family and friends. Everybody’s interacting all the time.

She is not an alone detective. Her father is a retired police officer and a PI, and he really wanted her to follow in his footsteps.

She did not do that and became a nurse, and he’s always trying to pull her in cases because it’s the family business and she’s not real thrilled about that.

But she does what she has to do for the family.

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A. W. Hartoin – Best Selling Mysteries