← Living The Next Chapter: Candid Conversations with Authors and Writers for Readers Searching for a New Read
Living The Next Chapter: Candid Conversations with Authors and Writers for Readers Searching for a New Read
E717 - Hal Glatzer - Accidental Detectives, Friends With Benefits and How Music Influences Writing
00:51:58
Loading summary
Transcript92 lines
- [00:00]
Hal Glatzer
The inspiration for this couple, I should tell you, is that I knew a couple who I always assumed were married. They'd walk down the street very romantically, arm in arm. You'd see them at the movies, they'd be cuddling in their seats. You'd see them at the farmer's market. They'd be buying produce together and comparing the size of the mangoes or the avocados or whatever, and, oh, what a lovely couple. And you'd sometimes see older people say something like, oh, what a charming couple you are. Well, it turned out they were not married to each other. They were married to other people. And I wound up befriending them and sort of sounding them out on how they accomplished this. And then I thought, you know, nobody's ever taken a couple like that and made them the protagonist, made them the accidental detectives in a mystery. And I thought, okay, let's see if I can make that work.
- [01:05]
Dave
Everybody. Welcome back to Living the Next Chapter. It's the author podcast. We get to meet great people from around the world. I meet a lot of talented people on the show that have a list of things they've done over the years, and all that experience finds its way into their writings. And I think you as a reader get the benefit of a lifetime of experiences and projects and writings and music and acting and on theater, there's so much. And Hal brings a lot of that to the table today, and I'm excited to have him here on the show. Hal, welcome to Living the Next Chapter. Glad to have you on the podcast.
- [01:43]
Hal Glatzer
Thank you very much, Dave.
- [01:44]
Dave
It's amazing. I'm scrolling through your website. I'm seeing you at all different parts of your life. I'm seeing your story, your journey, some great candid shots of you. Let's talk about your website right off the bat, Hal, because I want people to go there and take a look at it. It's a beautiful website. Can you just tell us a little bit about your site and what people are going to see when they get there?
- [02:05]
Hal Glatzer
Yes. It's in three sections, really. One is about the mysteries that I write, which is primarily what we're going to talk about today. Another section is about the music that I perform. And a third is a biography, which has, you know, some shots of me when I was young, and it gives more background, people can understand where I was coming from. Manhattan is my native island. And I'm back living in Manhattan now for the past almost four years. After many, many years living away from New York.
- [02:42]
Dave
You were on the complete Other side of the US For a long time as well. Right.
- [02:47]
Hal Glatzer
I spent almost a third of my life in Hawaii and I still return retain a. A great aloha for Hawaii.
- [02:56]
Dave
That's great. Yeah. I know people from there and they talk about their. Is it their ohana, is how they say it?
- [03:04]
Hal Glatzer
Family.
- [03:04]
Dave
Is that right? Family. Right. And how that's so important to them.
- [03:08]
Hal Glatzer
Yeah.
- [03:08]
Dave
And I thought that's such a great term and a great. A great visual too. I think when people start talking in those terms, I think that's something that all of us could probably learn from.
- [03:20]
Hal Glatzer
Oh, there is, actually. I wrote an essay once on what people in the mainland US can learn from people in Hawaii.
- [03:28]
Dave
Well, we have listeners in Hawaii, so. Hello, everyone. Nice to have you here as well. You have one of your native sons there, which is great. Let's talk a little bit because we have those three categories. Let's talk a little bit about your music background, Hal, as we get into focusing on your writing. But I think music is a great creative outlet. It helps us to tap into a part of us that nothing else does. In the same way, I'm a musician as well, so I'm interested to hear a little bit about your musical background as well. Can you tell us a little bit more?
- [03:58]
Hal Glatzer
Sure. Well, I had classical training in violin and clarinet when I was a boy. When I was 12 and 13, I was a soprano and I was in the Boys Chorus of the Metropolitan Opera Company here in New York. And then in my teenage years, I fell into the folk music revival of the 60s, and I played bluegrass music right through college. I had a bluegrass band at Syracuse University, and I continued to play bluegrass music pretty much until I moved to Seattle in 1980 and and discovered that quite a lot of my folk and bluegrass friends were learning the swing chords, the sixths and the minor seven flat fives that characterize the popular music of the Tin Pan Alley and Broadway. And I knew that material. My mother sang and played piano, so I actually had a leg up on a lot of those songs. And I started playing them. As soon as I learned a new chord. I suddenly could add three or four new songs. And that's pretty much where I've been since the 80s, is performing what is now called the Great American Songbook.
- [05:20]
Dave
And do you continue to play to this day?
- [05:22]
Hal Glatzer
I still continue to play. And one of my early mystery heroines, a woman named Katie Green, is a professional musician. In the years just before the Second World War, I wrote three book about her.
- [05:37]
Dave
Wow. So what does music mean? For you, all these years of playing and all of the. The places you played and all the notes, you know, and every chord, what does all that add up to you for you?
- [05:48]
Hal Glatzer
You know, a very moving experience for me, and I've done it many times, is playing for people in nursing homes, old age homes, veterans homes. Quite a few of these folks are wheeled out to their recreation room. They sit still. They are uncommunicative. They can't really speak or make themselves understood. They need help with everything. But you start singing, even if it's not a song from their own childhood, and you see their fingers drumming on the armrests of their wheelchairs, or you see their mouths moving, particularly if they do know the song. Singing along. And you realize how deep in the brain, in the human psyche, how deep music is embedded. I mean, music stays with you longer, I think, than almost everything else. I'm certainly no expert in. In memory loss or anything like that, but it's incredibly clear to me that of all the things one may lose in the course of aging or illness, music is one of the very last things that ever goes away. And I want to just keep playing. If I can live to 100, I'll be delighted. And I hope to be still making music in some way, shape or form when I reach that. That point.
- [07:28]
Dave
That's amazing. I love it. I watched a video recently of a father and son in the front seat of the car, and the son was driving, and the father has early dementia, and the son put on one of his father's favorite songs, and his father just came alive word for word and knew every part of the lyrics, and that they had such a bonding moment that they don't have had it not been for that song and for music. And I'm like, what an amazing thing, right? The power of music.
- [07:59]
Hal Glatzer
Yeah.
- [07:59]
Dave
I mean, I just think it's. It's not just background noise, Right. It's really powerful.
- [08:03]
Hal Glatzer
No, apparently music is stored in multiple places in the brain. It's not just in one particular region. And it's probably the reason why people can remember music or respond to music is because even if some section of the brain isn't working up to parent, another section is, and. And it triggers more neurological responses. Again, I'm not a medical expert in this, but the explanation satisfies me as. At least as a metaphor.
- [08:38]
Dave
Right. Yeah. And then. So until you bring that to your writing from a musical perspective, which gives you a very unique foundation as a writer, and then you have your whole entire background of what you've done professionally, in addition to music. Again, going through your bio on your website, it just, it's its own book. Just reading this on your website, talk a little bit about your career background as well and what maybe some of the elements from your career that you brought forward into your own writing today.
- [09:11]
Hal Glatzer
Well, I was a journalist working for newspapers and shooting television news film in the 1970s, and I got hooked on the emerging technologies of semiconductors and what they could do. The personal computers and the miniaturization of telecommunications was fascinating to me. I'd always had an interest in what you'd call science for the citizen. I still to this day, since I was a teenager, subscribed to Scientific American magazine. And I thought of myself as an explainer, as somebody who could turn technology into plain language for people. And that's what I chose to specialize in. It's like I found my beat as a reporter and I became a journalist and editor of magazines that tracked computers and high tech, both consumer magazines and trade publications. I wrote four nonfiction books on those subjects and was also inspired to write my first published mystery in 1986, called the Trapdoor, about a hacker who gets in trouble with organized crime and has to hack his way out. And that's what got me professional level membership in Mystery Writers of America. Soon after that, when I started writing the Katie Green books, I joined Sisters in Crime. And that's really where I've been from as an author. I've stated almost exclusively in the mystery genre ever since.
- [10:57]
Dave
Now, if somebody could have tapped you on the shoulder back when you first started writing those articles about technology and said to you, in 2025, you're going to be doing a virtual video conference with some guy in Canada on something that is called a podcast. All of that information, what would that have done to your writing if you had a little window into the future?
- [11:18]
Hal Glatzer
I might have turned to science fiction.
- [11:22]
Dave
Right.
- [11:22]
Hal Glatzer
You know, I mean, when I was in third grade, I, or first grade even, really, I collaborated with a guy I'm still friends with from the playground on a sci fi story called the Phantoms of Pluto. And of course, it was a childhood thing. And sci fi, which I consumed in mass quantities when I was young, was certainly another genre. But I didn't warm to science fiction the way I warmed to mysteries. I'm not even sure why. Part of it really is that in a mystery and in science fiction, you do have to create a world, but in science fiction, you have to go into considerably greater detail about what that world entails, particularly if it's truly unlike the world that we live in. Whereas mysteries, even if you set them in another time, and I do pretty much, you know, people are still people, animals are still animals. Dogs bark. I mean, the world is basically very much like it is today. But of course, for example, in my current series, I've invented a city for the stories to take place in, in addition to inventing the characters. And I did this for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that I wanted to be able to control a lot of variables that I couldn't control if I set the story realistically in a real city. The only downside is that, you know, I don't get invited to bookstores in that city.
- [13:14]
Dave
It's true. Well, I guess if the other thing would be, if you did base it on an actual location, then people from there would be like, that's not how it is here. That's not true. You know, that's not real. You can tell. You like, it's kind of like. So now you have the freedom to do whatever you want with the location.
- [13:30]
Hal Glatzer
Main street runs east and west. It does not run north and south. I'm sorry, Mr. Glatzer, you really got that wrong.
- [13:38]
Dave
Yeah, that'll show up in a review somewhere, right? Yeah. It's meant to be a story, everyone.
- [13:45]
Hal Glatzer
Fortunately, I haven't heard from anybody in Grand Lake City, so.
- [13:49]
Dave
Okay, good. There you go. All right. Well, good. Tell us about Grand Lake City. What. What if you could describe it as a location?
- [13:56]
Hal Glatzer
Oh, sure.
- [13:57]
Dave
As a tourist going there, what would we see?
- [13:59]
Hal Glatzer
Grand Lake City is what I call a recovering Rust Belt city. That is to say, it is in the mold of, but without being entirely true to Syracuse or Buffalo, New York, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Louisville, Kentucky. Places that almost lost out when the industrial base fled or was lured away, but have managed to find new sources of revenue, new sources of taxation, have managed to attract new residents, have managed to build themselves back up. And that's the milieu in which I place Grand Lake City.
- [14:52]
Dave
Why are you so attracted to that location, then?
- [14:55]
Hal Glatzer
Well, I went to New York State, New York, at Syracuse. I visited all of these other places that I mentioned. They have some things in common. One of my protagonists, Herman Korn, is a magazine retired magazine editor. He grew up in Grand Lake City. He went to college in New York. He became editor of a national magazine, and after it closed, as so many print magazines did, he moved back to Grand Lake because, frankly, he could live more cheaply there than he could live in New York. On what he was still able to earn or, you know, Social Security and all that sort of thing. And so many of these cities are actually attractive because they have lower costs of living than the big cities, particularly New York or Los Angeles or Chicago. My other protagonist, Teddy Woodley, are having an affair, and they're able to afford to share a little studio apartment or another little place to have their trysts without bankrupting them themselves. There are still affordable rentals in these. In these cities.
- [16:16]
Dave
Okay. Yeah. Because I live near Buffalo, so I know that part of the world really well. And then Detroit would be another one for me that comes to mind hearing you list off these cities. And definitely the one thing I know. Yeah, yeah, I know about the people that I've. I know in Buffalo, I know in Detroit is there's just a certain type of people that live there and remain there even when things get tough. They stay. And they love their city. They love their community. Right. So that's another part of it, too, I think. Y. Sometimes when things get hard, people just leave. They just go. Right. They have no allegiance to where they. Where they're from.
- [16:55]
Hal Glatzer
Herman and Teddy are lakies. They're from Grand Lake City.
- [16:58]
Dave
There you go. Lakey's. I like that. Yeah, that's good. Okay, so talk a little bit more then about the. Your newest book that's coming out and kind of how that fits into some of your more recent releases. Because I see a theme here as I look at your stuff on your website. So your newest book comes out. When does it come out?
- [17:17]
Hal Glatzer
Officially launches February 3rd. Although people could get it now. I'm kind of waiting to do a big publicity push until after the holiday season is over.
- [17:28]
Dave
Okay.
- [17:28]
Hal Glatzer
But it's a. It's a series. The third book in the series. The first book in the series was the Nest.
- [17:34]
Dave
Okay.
- [17:35]
Hal Glatzer
And the second book is the Office Wife. And the third book, which has just come out, is called the Two Birds. Herman and Teddy are an affectionate, witty couple in their 60s, married, but not to each other. They are friends with benefits, their spouses. After many years of marriage, their spouses, for different reasons, have given up on sex. And in the nest, they are brought together quasi accidentally by a mutual friend who knows their situation. And they decide that they're going to just have a little quiet, private affair. They'll rent a little space and, you know, always be home for dinner. You know, just only do this on weekdays and never on weekends. They're not looking to leave their spouses. They're not looking for divorces. They're, they. They have determined that the best possible arrangement is a friendship with benefits with someone more or less their own age. Herman is in his late 60s, Teddy is in her middle 60s. And they're very comfortable in each other's presence. Now they have differences. Herman, being basically first and foremost an intellectual, is not happy that Teddy mangles her grammar. Teddy is the kind of person that he calls a straight. A illiterate who says things like, she gave the book to Herman and I. Where it has to really should be to Herman and me, right? And at least in the early parts of the books, this kind of gets Herman's goat. And Teddy, by contrast, is more emotional. Teddy is also a tennis player. She and her husband are tennis champs in their tennis club. She's more physical in a lot of ways than Herman is and is not happy that Herman does things like he stoops when he walks and he eats red meat, which she thinks is not a good idea. And, you know, if it helps to grasp who they are, and this is kind of a baby boomer thing, which they are, after all, Herman is an Aquarius and Teddy is a Pisces. I'll let it go with that for the time being. They are signs that are not associated with being conventionally romantically attracted to one another. And indeed, it helps to remember that romance is off the table in their affairs. What keeps them together is a. The need to get together for sex a couple of times a week and be the fact that they tumble into mysteries which they feel they must solve. They are what mystery writers call accidental detectives. That is, they are not amateur detectives. An amateur detective. Nancy Drew is an amateur detective. She doesn't get paid, but she puts herself forward as a detective. People come to her for her sleuthing skills. They regard her as a detective and she regards herself as a detective. Herman and Teddy are nothing of that. Herman is a retired magazine editor. Teddy is a retired high school math teacher. They have no background in law enforcement or detection, and yet they wind up solving mysteries, particularly murder mysteries. This is a genre usually called cozy, in which the protagonists are shopkeepers, artists, weavers, homemakers, caterers, anything but detectives or law enforcement professionals. And yet they solve crime. So they tumble accidentally into mysteries and are therefore called accidental detectives.
- [22:06]
Dave
Who would you say is your ideal reader? Who are you trying to reach?
- [22:09]
Hal Glatzer
My ideal reader is a grown up, my idea. And I mean that not just, you know, in the sense that these are not books for kids. There's. There's no actual sex scenes. Herman and Teddy speak Frankly. But they don't use explicit language. They don't have euphemisms the way romance novels do. Yeah, but they're grown ups, you know, I mean, I mean, look, one of the people who, who posted a review on Amazon, two star review, not five star review at all, two star review said, you know, I started reading this book and then I discovered that they're having this affair. They're committing adultery. I hate adultery. But I went back and read the end of the book because I had to see how it turned out to see who done it. And I thought to myself, okay, my target reader is willing to. Is a grown up, is willing to accept the situation that Herman and Teddy have found themselves in and willing to accept the solution to their needs that they have settled upon. They don't do risky things. They don't go on Tinder pretending to be single. They don't hire hookers. They don't seek out partners who are so much younger, are young enough to be their children or grandchildren. They have established a very comfy, quiet relationship, which of course is almost always under threat. When they go out to uncover other people's secrets, they are always risking the exposure of their own secret. So there's quite a bit of tension in that angle.
- [24:07]
Dave
If this gives away anything, then we can skip this. But how does Herman and Teddy find each other in the beginning? Because it sounds like they travel in different circles that don't overlap.
- [24:20]
Hal Glatzer
They have traveled in different circles. In the nest is where they meet. And it's reiterated in the exposition of the subsequent books. You have to do this when you're writing a series. When Herman was a magazine editor in New York, there was a woman who was a friend of his. Not a lover, but a friend of his in the magazine's office. She was an attorney in the publishing company that published the magazine. And she too was a Lakey and retired to New York when the magazine closed and continues to be an attorney specializing in intellectual property law. And Herman has written some nonfiction books. She represents him dealing with the rights and reprints and all of that. So that's how he knows her. Teddy was a math teacher, was a retired math teacher, but she was in college and had a sorority sister. And that attorney was one of her sorority sisters. And when the sorority sister came back to Lake City, they got back in touch and had been friends ever since. So Herman felt close enough to this woman as a friend to tell her about his problem at home. Teddy was close enough to this woman as a friend to tell her her problem at home. And so the attorney, whose name is Maxine, threw a party and said, look, I happen to know somebody who's in a similar circumstance. If you find each other at the party, I'm not going to push you two together and say, oh, isn't this one, you know, but if you two find each other, so be it. And that's essentially how they met.
- [26:15]
Dave
All right. Kind of thinking from a. From an observer's perspective, would someone notice these two together out in public and see them interacting with each other and be like, what's up with these two? One that's not. That's not. That's not their partner. That's not their spouse they're with. And why are those two all together all the time? Like, would they be out and invisible in public?
- [26:37]
Hal Glatzer
Well, they. They try not to be. Okay. They were in. The inspiration for this couple, I should tell you, is that I knew a couple who I always assumed were married. They'd walk down the street very romantically, arm in army. You'd see them at the movies, they'd be cuddling in their seats. You'd see them at the farmer's market. They'd be buying produce together and comparing the size of the mangoes or the avocados or whatever, and, oh, what a lovely couple. And you'd sometimes see older people say something like, oh, what a charming couple you are. Well, it turned out they were not married to each other. They were married to other people. And I wound up befriending them and sort of sounding them out on how they accomplished this. And then I thought, you know, nobody's ever taken a couple like that and made them the protagonist, made them the accidental detectives in a mystery. And I thought, okay, let's see if I can make that work. And I think I've made it work pretty well again, as you know. I mean, look, it's like any murder mystery that with accidental detectives, you have to suspend a certain level of disbelief. You have to pretend that people with no training whatsoever in law enforcement can get to the solution of a murder mystery sooner than the police.
- [28:14]
Dave
Right.
- [28:14]
Hal Glatzer
You have to assume that the police will be initially very skeptical, but will ultimately accept their help. Whether this is true in the real world or not, I doubt. But it makes for great stories. And there are literally thousands of mysteries that require you to have that suspension of disbelief. And so my books fall into that category. I like to think that I've staked out a unique piece of territory in having the protagonists that I have being friends with benefits and not shopkeepers, homemakers, caterers or whatever.
- [28:54]
Dave
It's very unique. It's very interesting. I love, I love this, the idea of it. How many books do you envision for the series altogether?
- [29:03]
Hal Glatzer
You know, that's a, a real good question. The first book was published in 2023. I started writing the second a little while after. But as soon as the second book, as soon as that's the Nest, was the first. As soon as I had finished the Office Wife, I realized I had a lot of material left over that I did not find a place for in the Office Wife. It would have set up a competing plot in certain ways. And then I thought, well, why don't I just start right in on a third book and use that material as the foundation of the third book. I don't right now have an idea or an outline or a plot that would be a fourth book. I like to think that in the next couple of months I'll probably come up with something, but we'll see. And I would also like to revisit my Katie Green books. There are three books with Katie Green the Working Musician in the years before the Second World War. I have long held a fourth plot, really well developed plot for another Katie Green book, but I really haven't gotten around to writing it. I wrote other things since I wrote Katie Green and of course I've written these three Friends with Benefits books. So I'm not sure where I want to turn if I get a lot of demand for another Friends with Benefits books, believe me, I'm going to start another Friends with Benefits book for you.
- [30:59]
Dave
As you write all these different stories and then series. What, what is the one thing that you love to write like you just. Is it, is it the characters? Is it the, is the, the dialogue? Is it the, the world building? What part of the writing is the thing that keeps bringing you back to keep writing new projects?
- [31:20]
Hal Glatzer
Okay, well, I, the dialogue is a big thing for me. I, I have a sideline writing what I call audio plays, which are basically what would be radio plays if they were still live radio theater. And I present some plays in that format. I have written several, I have produced some. I'm producing a Sherlock Holmes play in old time radio style on the 7th of January during the week when Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts come to New York from literally from around the world to enjoy events and dinners and stuff like that in celebration of the great detective. So dialogue is very important to me. I like to think I can tell a good story in dialogue. The characters I'm in Love with. I could not write characters other than for the purposes of tension in fiction. I could not write disagreeable people for very long. I could not write unfriendly people. I'm a friendly cuss. I. I love friends, and I'm friends with my characters. Katie Green, the musician, I'd like to jam with her. I'd like to get my guitar out. I was asked once, if you were stuck in an elevator with a fictional character, how would that work out? And I said, oh, great. I'd like to be stuck in an elevator with Katie Green. We'd have our instruments, she'd have her violin and her clarinet, and I'd have my guitar, and we'd jam until somebody got the elevated started up again. Sure. I mean, that's. That's what drives fiction. People want characters. People don't want. This happened and then that happened, and then this next thing happened and then the other thing happened because this first thing happened and then it all turned out all right. People don't want those stories. They want something where characters banter back and forth. They want. Yeah, they want dialogue. They want things to move forward in speech as well as in plot.
- [33:43]
Dave
Now, you have. You have more experience in music than I do, so I want to honor that. But from my experience in music, music's taught me about rhythm, timing, having dynamics to the music. So it's not just one tempo. You can play around with tempo and time changes. You can change keys. You can. People can be in the lead, people can be in the background. It's. There's a lot of interplay that happens when you play with other people. That kind of approach to music, does that filter into your writing so your characters, one will step forward and kind of solo and take the spotlight, and the other ones will be supported. Do you have that kind of flow and tempo to your writing at all?
- [34:24]
Hal Glatzer
I do. To. To some extent, I'm limited to duets between Herman and Teddy, and that forms the bulk of the story. Teddy and Herman narrate the book in alternating first person voices, his and hers, and they have dialogue which each of them is narrating, if you will. So to some extent, I'm playing with the duet format mostly, but as a musician, I vastly prefer playing with other people. I really don't. I've certainly done my share of solo performances. I've gone busking on street corners with, you know, my hat open at my feet, my guitar in hand, hoping that people will toss dollar now quarters once, dollar bills or bigger bills now. But I don't Love playing alone. I don't love what musicians call woodshedding. Sitting in the woodshed and working up material. I like spontaneity. I like the give and take of playing. Playing with other musicians, even one other musician that I can play with and play against is valuable. So, yes, it does. It does inform my fiction to have a sense of rhythm and timing and a trading of solos. First you play, then I play, then we play together, and then the song comes together.
- [36:05]
Dave
Yeah. And I think the one thing too about playing live is you have instant feedback from your audience. If so, if everyone gets up and leaves, that's a sign. It's like. But people stay, they clap, they enjoy. You talked about tapping of the fingers of the seniors home. Right. When you connect with the music.
- [36:22]
Hal Glatzer
Right.
- [36:23]
Dave
You can tell that music has an impact on your audience. It's hard as a writer because you're writing to an invisible audience at the beginning until you start getting those feedback from. From people that are reading, but you're writing to a. An empty room almost as a writer.
- [36:37]
Hal Glatzer
Oh, sure. I mean, you never know if they're going to just close the book and say, I'm going out, I'm going shopping. I'm, you know, I'm going to go play with my children. I don't know what. May I just say quickly on behalf of musicians everywhere, look, if you're going to leave during my set, would you please wait until I finish the song? Yeah, you know, I got no problem. You, you want to talk while I'm singing, I. I can't stop you from doing that. But please don't get up and leave and walk right in front of me on your way out the door. Wait until I've stopped and then, you know, I'm gonna wait to start my next song until you're out the door. So that's just a little.
- [37:20]
Dave
Yeah.
- [37:21]
Hal Glatzer
Little.
- [37:21]
Dave
Little, you know, tip from public service announcement. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. That's good. Yeah, I'm the type of person, when I get to my destination, I have to hear the end of the song before I go in and before I leave and move to the next thing, I want to sit there and honor what's kept me company the whole time on my travel.
- [37:37]
Hal Glatzer
That's it.
- [37:38]
Dave
I want to stay there and hear the end of it. Right.
- [37:39]
Hal Glatzer
It's common courtesy.
- [37:41]
Dave
Yeah, it's good. And common courtesy to read the books completely and leave great reviews.
- [37:46]
Hal Glatzer
Yes, thank you. Please do that too. Don't leave before I've finished.
- [37:52]
Dave
Okay. So in the two birds, the Newest book. Can you give us a sense of what we're going to hear from the story for this one as we look
- [38:01]
Hal Glatzer
forward to this coming in the Two Birds, Herman and Teddy. The book begins with basically Herman and Teddy pursuing separate interests. Their affair has been going on close to four years and there's no way that they're bored with each other, but they do have other interests. Teddy has gotten involved with community theater and has just been cast as Lady Macbeth for the community theatre's annual Shakespeare in the park in the summer. And this is a big step up. She's not had a big starring role like that before and this is her chance to really show what she can do. And of course, the two other want to call them divas or the two other longtime leading ladies in the company are more than a little jealous. They were expecting to be Lady Macbeth. It's a prime role. Obviously. It's one of the few roles really meaty roles for women, at least in the tragedies. Shakespeare's tragedies for grown up women. For. For not Juliet, obviously.
- [39:16]
Dave
Yeah.
- [39:16]
Hal Glatzer
So Teddy and Teddy's also remember she and her husband are tennis champs. They're mixed doubles champs in their tennis club. But Teddy is. Is feeling a pain in one of her shoulders that might be the rotator cuff. And this could keep her from competing in the upcoming tournament. Herman, meanwhile, has gotten a call from an aspiring writer who says, oh, you know, there's this thing in the magazine that you edited years ago, a magazine called Echo. There's this picture from 1986, an issue in 1986. There's a guy in the picture trying to track down. Would you help me track him down? There's this cold case and it involves stolen motorcycles and a con man who was trying to sell these motorcycles but absconded with the money before he sold a single one of them. And I'm trying to locate this guy because I'd like to write a story about him. I'm an aspiring freelance writer. I'd like to kind of make my name. Maybe you'd come in on a book with me and Herman, who hasn't really got another project, hasn't really got anything else going that stimulates his writerly side. Thinks, yeah, okay, you know, not really something I might have thought up on my own, but yeah, okay. But then this leads to. Herman realizes that he can't devote as much time to it as he'd like to. His wife is the chairman of the forestry school at the local college and she runs a research lab in the forest in the mountains, about 100 miles away, out of town. And there's a threat that the land next door to where the research lab is could be logged. And if it were logged, it would be an ecological disaster for the forest land around the laboratory. And so she needs Herman's help to fight off this challenge. You know, he's got to help write speeches or solicit donations to help the lab overcome this challenge. So he's kind of whipsawed between the cold case and his wife's dilemma. And it's starting to take time away. These two pursuits are starting to take time away from the Herman and Teddy affair, from the friendship with benefits. They're not having as many benefits as they're accustomed to having. But unbeknownst to them, until the story is well underway, these are not actually separate issues. These are threads that they don't know it yet, but are woven into a tapestry that they will have to unravel together and confront some perpetrators that they didn't even know about until it became obvious that they were really looking at a single problem from two different angles.
- [42:28]
Dave
Okay. It's interesting that there's a. In the third. One, third book, now that there's a little bit of a. There's a little bit of a gap in the relationship or how things have been working in the past. Right. There's a little bit of something there just opens the door.
- [42:41]
Hal Glatzer
When I first started the nist, I was in a small group of mystery writers. We critique each other's work and talk about issues and stuff. And I described my. What I had started with the nest. And I gave one of my colleagues an early copy of the manuscript. And she said to me, you know, this couple, Herman and Teddy, they can't be lovey dovey all the time. You have to introduce some tension in their relationship. They have to confront a problem, not merely solving the puzzle of the mystery. They have to confront something that is driving them apart or that could drive them apart. They have to overcome obstacles. And I thought, you know, right. They really do, because otherwise it's just not natural for them to just coast along on an even plane all the time. Real, real people. And you have to assume that your reader, you have to make your reader believe that these are real people on some significant level. Real people are not, you know, constantly on the same, same plane. They have ups and downs in the nest. Herman and Teddy actually threaten to quit one another in the office. Wife, Teddy's husband, is arrested for murder, and she has to balance her affection For Herman, with her loyalty to her husband. And her husband has to confront the moral dilemma which I express as if you were in trouble. Would you accept help from your wife's lover? And then in the two birds, they would like to pursue interests that are distracting them from their affair, from the comfy, cozy affair that they've been having for a couple of years. And they have to try and find a balance between things that they want to do for themselves and things they want to do as a couple.
- [45:00]
Dave
This is interesting. There's a lot of different dynamics at play and it all seems very. It feels very strong, but also feels very fragile at the same time. Like anything could fall apart.
- [45:13]
Hal Glatzer
Oh yes. Oh yes. It absolutely could fall apart at any time or could be driven apart right by circumstances out of their control. And I think a fourth book in the series. One thing that I have thought about, a fourth book in the series would absolutely involve somebody who finds out what their situation is and actively threatens to expose it. In. In these three books, the exposure of their affair could happen and some people do find out, but ultimately it's never going to. It doesn't get made public. I think if there's going to be a fourth book, one of the issues in the plot and the affair is that the affair is actually severely threatened by public exposure.
- [46:16]
Dave
The reason I like asking and talking about future projects with you is that opens the door to have you come back in the future and talk about.
- [46:23]
Hal Glatzer
Thank you.
- [46:23]
Dave
I would love to.
- [46:24]
Hal Glatzer
Dan. I'd really like.
- [46:26]
Dave
So I love. I love hearing how you're unpacking this. I love your. The depth of thought behind your characters and the story. Your love for your characters as well. I can tell that you're really passionate about these stories and they really mean something significantly for you. Like you. You are definitely connected to these two in some way, which is amazing. I do have a question to kind of wrap up Hal, as we're kind of heading towards the door, but can you kind of give us again your website and. And just kind of what. What you would like listeners to do next as far as connecting with you? Let's send them to your website.
- [47:03]
Hal Glatzer
Sure. I'm. I'm Hal Glatzer and the website is easy to remember. H A L G L A t z e r.com and info@halglatzer.com which is. Will reach me by email. That's probably the easiest way. The books, all three books are retailed in both paperback and ebook format by Amazon and bookstores can order them order the paperbacks through Ingram, the international distributor Ingram Spark. It's I, I'd love to do a bookstore appearance if somebody can set that up. You've probably guessed I'm pretty good on a mic. I, I can extemporize pretty well. I'm a public speaker consequence of being a musician and performer and I'd love to do live events and also be grateful for people to send me letters, emails about the books that I've written. Certainly if you, if you buy something from Amazon, please do leave me a review. And frankly, I don't care if you didn't like it, put it in or at least say why you didn't like it. I've got no problem with that. And I think that a good author accepts that's all feedback. A good author does not cherry pick only the five star reviews and say see, everybody loves it. No, I mean this two star review of the woman that's uncomfortable with adultery. Good. If you're uncomfortable with adultery. My books are. My Friends with Benefits series are really not for you. But if you want to read it because you like the fact that I can do a good who done it and and are going to turn to the back of the book to find out who did it right. That just, oh, that only shows that I know what I'm doing and I like to think that, that I do.
- [49:22]
Dave
And then on top of the the great mysteries you can get from Hal, go to his website and check out the video links for his music as well his YouTube channel because there's a lot of great songs to tap your foot to and get to see Hal doing what Hal loves as well as outside of writing to be sharing music with the world. It's great. I think it's a, it's a beautiful website, Hal. I love everything you have on there. A lot of, a lot of great stuff for us as readers and music lovers.
- [49:47]
Hal Glatzer
Thank you, Dave. I appreciate it.
- [49:49]
Dave
Excellent. Everyone. You know all the information we have for our guest is in the show notes. I'd love for you to go check out all that information. We'll have Hal's link to his website as well in the show notes. And as Hal mentioned, leave a review. I'm going to challenge you to leave a great review because Hal is a great writer, a great person and because everything you write in those reviews will help other people to make a decision whether or not Hal's books are perfect for them or someone that they know and love. So I'm encouraging you to write a great review. That's my encouragement but again, Hal, thank you so much for being on the show. Come back in the future and let's celebrate book four, possibly and maybe a little bit more about two characters that we. We've now grown to love by hearing you describe them to us. So thank you so much for being part of the show.
- [50:35]
Hal Glatzer
Thank you, Dave. It's great to be here.
- [50:40]
Dave
Hey, thank you so much again for pressing play. As you've heard, great guests on the show, and one thing you didn't hear in this conversation is what? What did you not hear? Think about it for a second. That's right. Not a single solitary commercial for a mattress or a supplement or whatever you call it. No. Why? Because we don't want to break up the conversation with commercials. So the fact that you're still here means that you are a fan of the show, I'm assuming. So if you want to help to keep the podcast going and to make me feel really happy, all I really care about is coffee. Okay. I just gotta be honest. I love coffee. I'm drinking one right now. Starting to get cold. I need. I need to warm it up. Helping us with our Buy me a coffee link over@livingthenextchapter.com and also in the show notes, helps kind of keep the lights on around here. Remember, I'm doing this for free. I. I'm paying for everything, so I would love to have a little coffee donation. You know, even five bucks kind of fills up my cup. And I would love to enjoy a coffee from you. So if you're interested. Again, thank you for listening, but you can use our Buy me a coffee link and fill up the cup. Thanks for being here.