Where Did HAVANA LOST Come From?
After finishing reading Havana Lost, I couldn't help wondering what prompted Libby Fischer Hellmann to write this most intriguing thriller. So like I've done before, I asked, and this is what she told me.
After I finished writing A
BITTER VEIL a
historical thriller set during the days of the Iranian revolution of the late
Seventies, I was talking to my sister on the phone. I was already about 60
pages into my next Georgia Davis thriller, but something kept me from investing
in it. I briefly considered writing a World War Two thriller instead of Georgia—I’m
continually drawn to periods of extreme conflict in which some people are
heroes, others cowards, and you never knew who to trust. However, I quickly realized
there was probably nothing I could write about World War Two that hasn’t been
done better by someone else.
Our phone conversation turned to other time periods and settings
of extreme conflict, and my sister brought up Cuba. As soon as she mentioned
it, I started to get that itch—the kind of itch that can only be scratched by diving
into a subject. We both remembered how my parents flew down to gamble in
Havana. This was when Batista was still in power. I must have only been about 7
or 8, but I remember being jealous that they were going to a foreign country
and culture. I wanted to go. Of course, they didn’t take me.
A few years later Fidel took over and Cuba was suddenly
off limits to Americans. Soon afterwards it turned Communist, and Communism was
our enemy! Because of that, Cuba seemed even more mysterious and exotic, and I
wanted to know more about it. A year later came the Bay of Pigs, followed
fifteen months after that by the Cuban Missile Crisis, both of which made Cuba
even more impenetrable and threatening. So close and yet so far.
Finally, and I’m not ashamed to admit it, I remembered
one of the Godfather films where Al Pacino (Michael Corleone) and Lee Strasberg
(Hyman Roth aka Meyer Lansky) are on a rooftop supposedly in Havana discussing
how they’re going to own the island. Shortly after that, Michael sees a rebel
willing to die in order to overthrow Batista. Michael changes his mind about
doing business with Roth.
That clinched it. I realized I had most of the elements
for a terrific thriller: revolution, crime, conflict, an exotic setting. And
while I knew it would be a stand-alone story, rather than a series, there is a thematic
link between HAVANA LOST, and the two previous
stand-alone thrillers I’d written: A BITTER VEIL and SET
THE NIGHT ON FIRE. That theme is revolution and what it does to an individual, a
family, a community, a country, a culture. In fact, I consider HAVANA LOST the
noir leg of my “revolutionary trilogy.”
There was only one other element I needed. I enjoy—actually it’s more than that… it’s
probably an obsession at this point—writing about women and the choices they
make. I needed a female character I could insert into the middle of the
volatile situation. It would be fascinating to see what she did and how she
coped. How would she survive? What kind of a woman would she become? I found
that woman in Frankie Pacelli, the daughter of a Mafia boss who owns a Havana
resort. She’s eighteen when we meet her but in her seventies by the end of the
book.
The rest was, as they say, is history.
Btw, I finally did make it to Cuba in 2012 with my
daughter, and it was just as fascinating as I thought it would be. I want to go
back. In the meantime, I hope you’ll take a look at HAVANA
LOST. It’s
in paperback, ebook, and audio.
It's exclusive on Amazon as an ebook: http://www.amazon.com/Havana-Lost-ebook/dp/B00CS7TICY/ref=tmm_kin_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1371047019&sr=1-1-catcorr
But is also available on audio and in print.
Chicagoan
Libby Fischer Hellmann is the award-winning author of ten compulsively readable
thrillers. They include the Ellie Foreman series, which Libby describes as a
cross between “Desperate Housewives” and “24,” the hard-boiled Georgia Davis PI
series, and three standalones: SET THE NIGHT ON FIRE, A BITTER VEIL, and HAVANA
LOST, a historical thriller set largely in Cuba. She also has written nearly
twenty short stories and novellas. A transplant from Washington DC, she
says they’ll take her out of Chicago feet first. More at libbyhellmann.com
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