Rebecca Cantrell: Characters are Like Cats…

Hey #bookjunkies!!  Today on my blog I have a pretty cool Author Guest Post from Rebecca Cantrell, author of the Hannah Vogel series.  A collector’s edition is currently available, and I’ll tell you a little bit more about that after we find out a bit about Rebecca!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Cantrell’s novels have won the Bruce Alexander and the Macavity awards and been nominated for the Barry, Mary Higgins Clark, APPY, RT Reviewers Choice, and Shriekfest Film Festival awards. She and her husband and son just left Hawaii’s sunny shores for adventures in Hannah Vogel’s hometown–Berlin.

She is the author of the Hannah Vogel mystery series, including A Trace of Smoke, A Night of Long Knives, A Game of Lies, and A City of Broken Glass. She also co-writes the Order of Sanguines series with James Rollins, including The Blood Gospel and the upcoming Innocent Blood.

As Bekka Black, Rebecca wrote the critically-acclaimed YA cell phone novels iDrakula and the iFrankenstein.

ABOUT THE BOOK(S)

This Collector’s Edition features three novels of the Hannah Vogel Series (A Trace of Smoke, A Night of Long Knives and A Game of Lies) as well as a never-before seen short story The Cigarette Boy, unavailable anywhere else.

In A Trace of Smoke it’s 1931 and crime reporter Hannah Vogel is writing under the male pseudonym Peter Weill. As a widow of the Great War, she’s used to doing what she must to survive. When she decides to investigate her brother’s death she finds herself caught up in scandal leading directly to a powerful leader in the Nazi party, and responsible for a five-year-old orphan whose birth certificate names her dead brother. Further complicating matters are her evolving feelings for Boris Krause, a powerful banker whose world is the antithesis of Hannah’s. Fired from her job and on the run from Hitler’s troops, she must protect herself and the little boy who has come to love her, but can she afford to find love for herself?

A Night of Long Knives finds Hannah hiding in Bolivia with her young ward, Anton. She seizes an offer from a newspaper to cover the journey of a Zeppelin from South America to Switzerland, particularly as it will allow her a rare opportunity to meet with her lover, Boris. When the Zeppelin is diverted to Germany, she knows she’s walked straight into a trap, just as The Night of Long Knives—the purge headed by Himmler after Hitler supplanted the SA with the SS—has begun. Hannah and Anton are kidnapped by Ernst Röhm, who wants to force her into marriage as a result of rumors of his homosexuality. Hannah must enlist all of her allies, including Boris—and a few of her enemies—to track Anton down before the Gestapo can. Traveling to Berlin, she is caught up in the Nazi’s continuing purge and must learn to trust—and protect—those she has loved, and hated, in order to survive.

A Game of Lies brings Hannah back to Berlin to cover the 1936 Olympics. At least, posing as travel reporter Adelheid Zinsli, lover of SS officer Lars Lang, that’s her cover story. Rather, she’s collecting Nazi secrets fromLang and smuggling them back to Switzerland. When her mentor collapses at her feet, Hannah must scramble to create a cover story, particularly as she is surrounded by former colleagues who could identify her. The cover-up drives a deeper wedge between Hannah and Lars. To ensure her safety, and clear Lars’ doubt, she sets out to discover the identity of Weill’s killer, only to be driven into the arms of Boris, a former lover. In order to get Weill’s package out of the country, she must decide whom to love—and whom to trust—before her true identity is revealed.

In the brand-new short story The Cigarette Boy, Hannah’s brother, sexy cabaret star Ernst Vogel investigates the murder of the club’s cigarette boy, he chases down several suspects, including a high-ranking Nazi who may save him or destroy him.

Characters Are Like Cats
By Rebecca Cantrell
I control most of my characters about as much as I control my cats. In fact, my characters are eerily like cats. Both usually come when I call. I can pick them up and move them around, but they don’t stay where I put them unless they really wanted to go there to begin with and sometimes not even then. I have things that I want them to do, and if I’m very clever, I can convince them to do those things.

Some of them even have nine lives, like Hannah Vogel’s brother Ernst. He dies in the first book (not a spoiler, it’s in the book’s description). But he would not go quietly. In the first version, he talked to the reader from beyond death. I liked it, but it confused my agent and my early readers, so I had to cut those scenes. Eventually, I was able to post one scene on my blog,  but readers never got to hear the rest of his story.

I love that character. If I had known Hannah Vogel was going to become a series, I might never have killed him. He’s funny and charismatic and clever, and he stayed in my imagination for ten years after I finished the book where he dies. He’s a gay cabaret singer in 1931 Berlin, at the top of his game. Who wouldn’t want to know more about him?

When I turned back to Hannah Vogel after a five-year hiatus, Ernst’s story was the first one clamoring to be told and I figure he’d earned an extra life, so I wrote up one of his tales in a short story called Cigarette Boy. In Cigarette Boy, Ernst is the headliner at Club El Dorado, a well-known Berlin cabaret, where he makes a promise to help the new cigarette boy, but the young man disappears while Ernst is on stage. On the way home, Ernst finds his bloody body in an alley. After realizing the police don’t care about the death of one young hustler, Ernst determines to find justice on his own. His search leads him into the dark heart of Berlin, where he encounters the truth about his friend’s death and realizes the cost of that knowledge might be his own life. Here’s an excerpt for the curious.

Some cats have already used up their nine lives. Since these books are historical, I have memories of cats and characters gone by. These characters are based on people who actually existed, such as Ernst Röhm or Bella Fromm or Sefton Delmer. They did what they did, said what they said, and all I can do is accommodate that if I want to use them. They have all the control, but I have all the poetic license. If I want to make them deviate from their actual lives, I feel guilty but I can sneak explanations into my author’s notes.
Then there are the feral cats. I used to have one. I had limited control over her. She disappeared for days at a time and came back when she wanted. She never came when I called. It was my honor to work hard to please her and make her life better.

Like cats, I have feral characters. They go where they’re not supposed to go and do things I’d rather they wouldn’t. In the Hannah Vogel mysteries, for instance, there’s Lars Lang. I put him in the first book because one of my earlier editors said a certain scene needed more tension. He was only supposed to be in that one scene, do his job, and get off the page. But he kept popping up in the rest of A Trace of Smoke. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he started inserting himself into the next book, and the one after. I tried to shoo him away, as I would a persistent cat, but he sneaked back every time. Like a cat, he had his own agenda and I could only ever see part of it. In the end, I had to give in and let him tell his as much of his story as he wanted.

That’s the messy, furry, and complicated process by which I create characters. So, which do you prefer? Housecats with nine lives? Memories of cats gone by? Or feral cats?

Great post, Rebecca!  I think I prefer a mixture of characters…and cats!  To grab a copy of this collector’s edition, click the book below and #WatchThisSpace for my review of The Cigarette Boy, coming soon!