A Predictable Disaster
By Ann
Siracusa
Readers always want
to know where authors get their story ideas. This is how my new release All For A Fist Full Of Ashes, second
novel in the Tour Director Extraordinaire series, came about.
The first book, All For A Dead Man's Leg, was an
experiment to see if I could write in first person and write humor. I'd never
done either. The romantic suspense featured a young tour director finding out
what life was all about and a Europol spy with a dark past. I loved the
characters, and I loved the voice, but I never intended to write a series
featuring Harriet Ruby and Will Talbot. So, needless to say, the second book
wasn’t planned.
The Inspiration
In early 2005, my
Italian-American daughter-in-law and some members of her family decided to take
a trip to Italy in the summer. She was taking her son, my grandson, so I
decided to make the trip with another grandson who was about the same age.
After mass
confusion, and a lot of family members wanting to go and then opting out, it
ended up with thirteen Italian-Americans, including four teenagers, and my
daughter-in-law's father, Vita Zaso, who was grew up in Palermo.
Oh, man! Knowing the
way Italians make group decisions, the trip was going to be a predictable
disaster. So I decided I should at least get the material for a book out of it.
Part of our Italian-American family
The four teenagers and Italian friends plus Vito
A group of
Italian-Americans taking a tour of Italy was a natural for my heroine Harriet
Ruby, Tour Guide Extraordinaire. And if Harriet was my heroine, I needed Will
Talbot on the trip with a spy story for him to chase after. So I came up with a
story idea based on some family history and wrote the first three chapters
before the trip, in part so I knew what to look for. The working title was "The
Italian Train Wreck" and, as you can imagine, that's what the trip turned out
to be.
The characters in
the book are fictitious, and not based on my relatives―the reviewer for
Coffee Time Romance, wrote she didn't think there was a more obnoxious family
on the planet than the Spinella/Mazza clan―but the trip provided many incidents
that spiced up the novel and quite a few that didn't get into the book.
About "All For A Fist Full Of Ashes"
In All
For A Fist Full of Ashes,
tour director Harriet Ruby and Europol
spy and special operative, Will Talbot (who've been seeing each other
for a year since meeting in Morocco), come together in Italy where their work
assignments again overlap. Harriet is conducting a custom tour for fourteen
members of an Italian-American family. The family matriarch is on a quest to
find the unknown location of her mother's grave so she can bury her brother's
cremated ashes which have been smuggled into Italy wrapped in Cuban cigars.
Will has one of the family members under surveillance as a suspect in an
assassination conspiracy.
Charming the matriarch, Will coaxes an
invitation from her to join the tour. The quirky family members, including the
four unruly teenagers and a pet green tree python named Fluffy, sweep through
Italy in search of relatives and a lost grave and leave chaos, hilarity, and
danger in their wake.
Will and Harriet find traveling
together for twenty-four hours a day threatens their budding relationship which
is fraught trust issues. Harriet wants to be involved in everything, and Will
won't tell her anything about his case. Harriet's intervention leads her to
intuit the time, place and victim of the conspiracy. Unable to reach Will, she
puts herself in danger to thwart the assassination.
Blurb
I’m Harriet Ruby: Tour Director
Extraordinaire. At least, I thought I was worthy of that title.
My first mistake: Agreeing to conduct a
private tour of Italy. Fourteen Italian-Americans from New Jersey? All family,
for three weeks, with four teenagers? What was I thinking? Fate responds to my engraved invitation by placing one of
the family members under surveillance as a suspect in an assassination plot. And
who is assigned to the case? None other than my favorite
drop-dead-gorgeous spy, Will Talbot.
My second mistake: Allowing Will to coax an invitation from the family matriarch to
join the tour.
And that was just
the beginning.
The matriarch, searching for the unknown location of her mother's grave so she
can bury her brother's cremated ashes (which have been smuggled into Italy
wrapped in Cuban cigars), and her quirky family members sweep through
Italy leaving chaos, hilarity, and danger in their wake.
The Story Behind The Story
This story is
based loosely on my husband's maternal grandmother, Orsola Giannoni, born in
Florence, who met a Sicilian sailor at a festival and married him against her
family's wishes. As a result, they disowned her and severed all contact. (In
those days, Sicilians were considered lower than pond slime by northern
Italians, and some says that's still true.) My husband says his grandmother had
red hair, blue eyes, and never spoke Sicilian in all the years she lived in
Sicily because she thought it was such an ugly dialect.
She never
heard from her family again.
During WWII,
when the Americans were bombing Messina (Sicily), my husband, in his early
teens, and his family left the city and lived in Bordonaro, a mountain town not
too far away. Three families lived together in an old barn. Orsola, then an old
woman, died during the heaviest part of the bombing.
WWII photos of bombing in Messina
Because of the
attack, there was no one to take the body away. The families that lived in the
barn built a coffin out of the dining table, the only wood available, and used
the casket as a table for several days. My mother-in-law used to tell the story
of crying all through the meals and asking, "Mamma, do you want a glass of
wine?" When the bombing stopped, government officials took away all the
dead bodies en mass (many had been killed), and the family never found out
where Orsola was buried.
Another ironic
piece of the story behind the story is the brouhaha over the cremated ashes. A
year after the book was written, Vito
Zaso died. At his request, he was cremated and my daughter-in-law and her
siblings took the ashes to Palermo to be inured with other members of his
family. They went through all kinds of misery and discontent getting the ashes into
Italy. Ultimately, they didn't have to smuggle
the ashes wrapped in cigars, but at one point it seemed like that might be the
best shot. The incident validated my research, and I dedicated the book to
Vito.
Of all the
books I've written, this was the most fun.
Also, my
oldest son has raised and bred green tree pythons and other constrictors since
he was in middle school, so I have "unwilling" experience with
snakes. However, no one brought a snake on the real trip. Thank goodness.
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