Interview: When Angels Fly
Excerpt:
Please introduce yourself to those reading this blog post.
First, thank you very much Mary for having me on today! My name is Brodie Curtis and my debut novel, THE FOUR BELLS, came out in 2019 and told the story of Al Weldy reconnecting with his old-flame Maddy Beane, and the two of them reopening old wounds that the Great War had caused. Today I’ll be talking about my second historical novel, ANGELS and BANDITS, which follows up on some loose threads in THE FOUR BELLS to tell the story of two young RAF Spitfire pilots in The Battle of Britain who come from very different stations in life and must overcome their differences to become fighting brothers for the defence of Britain.
I was raised in the Midwest, in a small town not far from the Mississippi River. I was educated as a lawyer and ended the first part of my career in the California corporate tower of a large company. I left the corporate world to embrace life in Colorado with wife Sue and our then two young sons. Sue and I turned our talents and drive to building a business in Denver. With plenty of hard work that went well, and I began to write.
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said, “there are no second acts in American lives,” but with the effort I’ve put into my writing I feel I’m closing in on a third act.
Has writing always been part of your life and when did you “know” that it was time to start writing your first book?
Until not too many years ago, I hadn’t written much fiction (I’m sticking to my story that countless business letters, memos and documents written in the corporate tower don’t qualify!). My debut novel, THE FOUR BELLS, was set in motion years ago, in a homey lounge, when I heard a gorgeously mournful acoustic version of John McCutcheon’s song about the transcendent Christmas Truce of 1914. It inspired me to research reports on the Truce in contemporaneous writings and non-fiction, and to walk the fields of Flanders. I found that there wasn’t much fictional treatment of the Christmas Truce. At the time, we had pretty much stabilized our business, and looking back, I was meandering about, trying to find an activity that would fill a chunk of time (boy, did I find one in writing!) and decided to have a go at writing a novel on the Truce. It’s funny though, how our characters take us writers down their own road, and the Truce became just one important scene in my story.