Hal Glatzer is the author of the new novel The Two Birds, the third in his Friends with Benefits series. He is also a journalist and a musician.
Q: The Two Birds is the third in your Friends with Benefits series—how did you create your characters Herman and Teddie, and how would you describe their relationship?
A: The series began with The Nest, which was inspired by a 60-something couple I knew casually. They were always together at the movies or community theater productions, or the farmers' market. I'd see them walking down the street romantically, arm in arm or holding hands. So I was surprised to learn from a mutual friend that they were married, but not to each other.
I don't know the actual details of their relationship, and I was not close enough to either of them to ask, but it seemed to me to be a friendship-with-benefits. There are cozy mysteries whose protagonists are seniors; they are married, or business partners, or colleagues, or old chums. But there are no cozies in which friends with benefits are cast as the accidental detectives.
This was a niche I decided to fill. I put myself in the shoes of this couple, and posed to myself the challenges they would face. What would it be like for them to solve a mystery, knowing that sleuthing around to expose other people's secrets would risk exposing their own?
Q: How would you describe the relationship between this novel and the two previous books in the series?
A: Having Herman and Teddie solve one mystery at their peril, I immediately wanted to drop them into another. Absolute secrecy was no longer so much of a deterrent because, by the end of The Nest, their spouses have been told. And having given up sex themselves, his wife and her husband are willing -- albeit grudgingly -- to tolerate the arrangement as long as nobody *else* finds out.
But suppose Teddie's husband were arrested, suspected of killing his "office wife." I found the conundrum delicious: If you were in trouble, would you accept help from your spouse's lover? Ultimately, George has to.
Q: So what inspired you to write The Two Birds?
A: Two books are a novel and a sequel. If this was to be a series, it had to have at least three books.
I was a journalist for many years. Writing articles -- especially long features -- you're always left with "overset": things you've written that don't make the final cut. And from The Office Wife manuscript I had generated quite a lot of overset: a subplot that was mostly about Herman; not so much about Teddie.
So I brought it up on my screen, expanded it, and simultaneously wrote a plot for Teddie with not much of Herman in it. Since the great fun of the series, for me, is having them share the narration in alternating first-person voices, his and hers, I made their separate stories come together in a surprising way.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I regard these books as Cozies, and Cozies require readers to suspend disbelief. In the real world, people with no training in law enforcement or criminal behavior cannot and do not solve murder mysteries.
The Cozy genre also imposes limits on the author: protagonists must not seek out mysteries; they must be thrust in against their will or better judgement. Cozy mysteries must have no actual violence, blood or gore.
And, by tradition, Cozy novels should not involve sex. That, of course, I had to finesse. Herman and Teddie are frank in their dialog, but neither explicit (as in erotica) nor euphemistic (as in romance novels), and there are no actual "sex scenes."
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I wasn't left with much overset from The Two Birds. And I don't already have a plot in mind for a new Friends With Benefits adventure. But at mystery conventions, I am often asked if I will ever revisit my series from 20 years ago.
Those three books (two are also in audio) feature Katy Green, a working musician in the years leading up to World War II, whose gigs turn into mysteries and who tells her own story in the first person. I kept my notes and outlines all these years, for a possible fourth Katy Green book. And now, I think, it may be time for me to bring Katy back.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: My readers have to accept the fact that Herman and Teddie are committing adultery; that they are meeting a need, unmet at home, that helps to keep them happy and lively and eager for adventure.
A YouGov survey in 2023 found that, while most people want to be monogamous, of all the alternatives to monogamy, friends with benefits—not polyamory—is the most preferred. https://today.yougov.com/society/articles/45271-how-many-americans-prefer-nonmonogamy-relationship
I want my readers to see Herman and Teddie as real people, so I have had them set and abide by rules for their affair. Those rules are first discussed in The Nest, and alluded to or summarized in The Office Wife and The Two Birds.
I have written a nonfiction essay about these rules that Herman and Teddie live by, and I am happy to share that essay with any readers or relationship counselors or advice columnists who would like to read them.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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