In my last blog post, using “second bananas” to describe secondary characters in fiction was probably a bad choice on my part. A broad definition of a “second banana” is someone who is subservient. In truth, none of my characters, especially the women characters, are subservient. I wouldn’t even know how to write that kind of character.

But the primary definition of “second banana” is someone who is in a supporting role to a top banana. Okay, I can accept that. In my desire to show spies realistically (you know, “real spies with real lives”), my intent is to show that spies can’t do their job alone. At work, they need interpretations of intelligence obtained, and that’s the job of analysts. If they have young children who need supervision and, perhaps, personal security, they hire bodyguards.

So that brings me to the next two secondary characters who will appear later this year in the eBook box set, Secrets, due out in June 2024: Olga Lubova and Grace Lydell.

Olga Lubova

This former KGB colonel has appeared in most of my books and short stories. That’s logical when you consider that since 1991 and until 2002 she had been engaged as the au pair/bodyguard for my main character Alexei Bukharin’s granddaughter, Natalia Bukharina. I gave glimpses into her personality and her relationship not only with Alexei and his wife, Mai Fisher, but with Natalia as well.

However, when it came to writing an entire novel about her, I realized I had lots of questions that needed answers. Why did she join the KGB? How far did she rise and how? What about her parents? Did she have siblings, and what was her relationship with her family? Did she have lovers? Children? Why did she leave the Soviet Union right before it ended? And lots more.

When I wrote the rough draft of Olga’s novel it was 2020, right in the midst of the COVID pandemic. By my calculations, in late 2020, Lubova is 81 years old and has been a widow for two years after the murder of her wife. (See the story “Pick the Time and Place for Action” in Spy Flash III: The Moscow Rules.) She is living in a rather nice apartment attached to a guest house on the grounds of Mai Fisher’s and Alexei Bukharin’s home in Geneva, Switzerland–spoilers! However, like many of us after months of lockdown that year, she begins to wonder why she’s still alive or if she has anything at all to live for now.

She’s done her research and decided the best way to end her life is to drown herself in Lake Geneva, which is only a few yards from her apartment.

But though that scene was important, it was a rather blah opening per a critique workshop I put it through in June 2023. There was, however, universal excitement about a later chapter which portrayed Lubova’s first day at the KGB training directorate where she’d been assigned after completing her own training.

I could have written this as a biography of a fictional character, but I decided that it should be entirely in Lubova’s voice, so I restructured the draft novel as a “memoir.” That meant writing an entire novel in first person, something I had never done. Short stories, yes, but never a full-length novel. As I progressed with the rewrite into first person, though, I became more comfortable with it, and I’m happy with the result. However, let’s see what the beta readers and my editor say.

Fleshing out Lubova’s character, i.e., showing how she became who she was when she came to America to work for Mai and Alexei, was a challenge but also a great research opportunity. I had long had a copy of The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, but now (well, in 2020) I had the opportunity to study it closer. I also did some reading to refresh myself on the history of the Soviet Union from the mid-1950s to its dissolution in late 1991.

Not all books are “fun” to write, but this one was because I could draw on both my historian status and my understanding of Soviet culture in that time. So, I “discovered” some things about Lubova that were interesting and unexpected.

The same was true for the third secondary character, Grace Lydell.

Grace Lydell

Grace is another character who appears in several of my books. She’s The Directorate’s chief analyst. She has a long-standing friendship with Alexei Bukharin from the time of his defection in 1964 and with Mai Fisher when she joins The Directorate as a trainee in 1977.

However, that’s it. That’s all we know. Unlike Lubova, who had some back story, Grace had none. At all. So, I did a biographical sketch for her.

I decided to make her a little bit older than Alexei. Her father was a Navy pilot stationed on Oahu on December 7, 1941. I wrote in my notes, “Her parents created Grace with a bang–her father and mother finished making love when the first bomb fell, and Grace was born nine months to the day on September 7, 1942.” I didn’t actually write that scene, but it stayed in the back of my mind.

When Grace was six months or so old, her father was killed in action in the Pacific Theater, and a couple of years later, her mother married another Navy pilot. They moved about a great deal after the war, with her stepfather finally coming to Pax River NAS with his family (Grace and four younger brothers) as deputy base commander.

Then, I had to decide what her ambition was, i.e., did she decide one day, why, I think I’ll be a counterintelligence analyst, or did she want to be something else?

She did, indeed. From the time she was in middle school, she was always in drama club, a standout in high school plays, principally musicals. When she goes to American University in D.C. to major in international relations, she minors in theater and graduates a couple of months before her 19th birthday. She has her eyes set on Broadway, and when the “United Nations” wants to hire her, she figures she could give it five years, save her money, then start auditioning for Broadway plays.

But the recruiter for the U.N. has something else in mind for her. That recruiter was none other than Nelson, The Directorate’s top operative, who eventually became head of The Directorate.

The difficult part of writing this draft in 2022 was not creating Grace’s back story but incorporating how women in the workforce–particularly a male-dominated workforce–were treated. I left teaching and temping for a government job in 1979, roughly 18 years after Grace came to work for The Directorate, but at that time, not much had changed. I drew on my memories of my first years in a government agency but conducted some research as well, talking to women friends who were older than me and who started working in an office in the 1960s. A great deal of it made me angry, though I could see how far we’ve come–progression, yes, but still a long way to go.

For anyone who reads this section of the box set and says, “Oh, it couldn’t possibly have been like that,” email me, and I’ll tell you some horror stories.

So, book three isn’t much of a spy story, per se. A lot of preparation for missions and a lot of aftermath from missions, but little action. However, it’s a character study of someone who worked in intelligence for 50 years, who saw so much history and participated behind the scenes in much of it, and who rose to be a powerful woman manager in a global espionage organization.

When Can We Read This?

Book one has been beta-read and is with my editor now. Books two and three are with my beta readers and, I hope, will be with my editor by March or April, which will put it on schedule for a June 2024 release.

Secrets will initially be an eBook-only box set (because the three books total over 200K words), and I’ll release each novel in a print edition throughout the summer. So, stay tuned.

As a reminder, book one is titled A Spy’s Legacy, book two is For My Country, and book three is, for now, titled Grace Above All. Frankly, I’ve tried three titles that are puns on the name/word “grace,” but I’m not happy with any of them. Let’s hope something jumps up to inspire me. Soon.

I’m pretty excited about this project, and I’m looking forward to hearing from you about these three secondary characters–or second bananas.

If you have any questions or comments, please email me HERE.