Some Background To Once Night Falls

[This is taken from November's edition of our newsletter. Incidentally, Lake Union Publishing is sponsoring a GoodReads Giveaway for this novel which ends November 30th.]

In 2007, an editor at Simon and Schuster, Zachary Shisgal, gave me a generous advance for a book on golfing, eating, and family time at Lake Como. I hadn't written a word of the book, just showed him an outline and some ideas, and he took a chance on it. (Zach left S&S shortly after THE ITALIAN SUMMER was published; I hope my work had nothing to do with that.)

The girls were nine and six. A real estate genius named Harold Lubberdinck, who sold and rented houses in northern Italy, found us a small house—half a house, really—on a hill overlooking the lake's western shore. One of the great features of the place was a swimming pool shared with half a dozen neighbors, so we were able to make friends quickly, and there were even some young boys for our girls to play with.



One afternoon, with the girls safely occupied, Amanda and I took a stroll along the paved, unlined road that ran in front of the house and parallel to the lake. The views were otherworldly, the weather was perfect, our kids were healthy and happy, and we felt like the luckiest couple on earth. After we'd gone a few hundred yards, we came upon an elegant, two-story home to our left, a place called Villa Belmonte. It was surrounded by fruit trees and set back behind tall wrought-iron gates and a low stone wall.

When we turned around there, we happened to catch sight of a two-foot-high black cross on the wall to the left of the gates. On the cross was written:

BENITO MUSSOLINI 28 APRILE, 1945.

It made no sense to me at first. I thought Mussolini had been killed in Milan, an hour to the south. There's a famous picture of his mutilated body hanging by the heels near a gas station in Piazzale Loreto.

When we got back to the house I went online, did some research, and was surprised to discover that the cross-shaped plaque marked Mussolini's place of execution: he'd been killed right there, in front of Villa Belmonte.

I started to wonder how he'd ended up there, and, just out of curiosity, I did a little more research. I learned, among other things, that the first—and by certain measures, largest—Allied landing on European soil wasn't in France on D-Day in June, 1944, but in southern Sicily in July of 1943. That landing—the fact that il duce, as the Italians called him (The Leader) had brought the war to Italian soil—resulted in a vote of no-confidence by Mussolini's previously compliant Fascist Council. And that vote led King Vittorio Emmanuelle III—also previously cowed and obedient—to have Mussolini removed from power.

The king had him arrested, in fact, but then didn't know what to do with him. Everybody was after Benito—the Allies wanted to capture him; the Italian partisans wanted to kill him; his good pal Adolf wanted to rescue him. So the king and the Italian generals now in charge of Italy moved him around—first to the tiny island of Maddalena just off the northern Sardinian coast, and then back to the mainland, to a hotel high up in the central mountains.

By a kind of evil magic, one of Hitler's commandos figured out where he was, and put together a daring mission—crash-landing gliders on the mountaintop—that freed Mussolini from captivity and brought him to Germany for a meeting with Hitler. By then, the Allies were battling their way up the boot, the King had signed an armistice, and suddenly the Italians were officially fighting, not against the Allies, but with them. Some troops remained loyal to the Italian fascists and fought with the Germans. Some fought with the Allies. Some just left the army and went home.

Hitler knew he was losing Italy, and he insisted that Mussolini return, to inspire his loyal troops. He installed il duce on a different northern lake, Lake Garda, where he remained, overseeing a puppet government called The Republic of Salo, until the Allies drew close, in the spring of 1945. Although he'd long boasted that he'd fight to the death, Benito gathered a million or so dollars in various currencies, sent his wife ahead, took his young mistress with him, and made a run for the Swiss border in a column of retreating Nazi soldiers.

He almost made it. The partisans caught him on the western shore of Como, a few miles from neutral Switzerland, held him and his mistress for a night in a house in the hills, then brought them to Villa Belmonte and machined-gunned them, along with a couple of loyal associates. They then took the bodies to Milan and dumped them on the stones of Piazzale Loreto, because the Germans had killed fifteen partisans there less than a year before. A mob of Italians did unspeakable things to the corpses, and then hung them up by their heels.

This strange saga intrigued me, and, over the next several visits to Italy, we made a point of visiting various places connected with it: Maddalena Island; Predappio, where Mussolini was born; the mountaintop hotel in the Abruzzo National Park, where he'd been held. I did this, not out of any affection for the Benito Mussolini, it should go without saying, but because I've been fascinated with WWII in Italy for as long as I can remember, and the twisted story of Mussolini's last years had been a chapter of history completely unknown to me.

At the time, I honestly had no notion of writing about it. But then I found a new agent, the wonderful Emma Sweeney. We met for the first time in Manhattan, went into a Morton's Steak House and had a drink, and, since I already had one of my quirky spiritual books in production (THE DELIGHT OF BEING ORDINARY), she asked if I had other interests, other things I wanted to write about.



"I've always had this strange fascination with World War II," I told her, "in Italy, especially."

"Why don't you write a novel about that?" she said.

I liked the idea. A quick look at my books will tell you that my interests are weirdly eclectic, and while the better-selling books have to do with spirituality and road-trips, I've also written about gambling addiction, cystic fibrosis, Russia, Revere, Cuba, badly treated young women in the woods of New Hampshire, golf, food, and Vietnam veterans living in the Micronesian Islands.

So I went home and started researching the partisans in Italy. I felt like a lot had been written about the French resistance, but not much about the Italian resistance, not here in the US at least. I had no interest in writing a whole book about Mussolini, but he fit naturally into the story of the brave Italians who fought against him and against the Nazi occupation. I tried to imagine the lives of ordinary people who lived through the terrors of World War II and the horror of Nazi rule.

After six months or so, I finished the book and sent it to Emma. She liked it, but had a lot of suggestions. I made those changes, according to my own vision, and sent it back to her. She still liked it, maybe even more, but offered another long list of changes. I went through it several more times, and sent it to her again, and at last she felt comfortable showing it to editors.

No one wanted it.

I did not have a readership for WWII suspense novels. I didn't have 'the numbers', which is what the marketing people at the big publishers care most about these days. How many editors rejected the book, I don't remember. A dozen, I'd guess. One by one, disappointing email by disappointing email, Emma gave me the bad news. After another couple of months, she felt she'd showed it to every major house in NY, and we agreed it was time to set it aside.

This was not a good moment for me, to put it mildly. I support my family by writing books. It looked like I'd worked for the better part of a year and would earn exactly nothing from it. At that point, thanks to my friend and former classmate, Joyce Maynard, I met up with the amazing Patricia McFarlane and she hired me to write the story of her life and business, Special Vacations, a company that hosts travel and recreation events for adults with intellectual and physical challenges. (I've written about that in an earlier newsletter.)



While I was on one of Pat's incredible trips, Emma called. "I was just contacted by someone at Amazon," she said. "They have a publishing arm called Lake Union Press and they're looking for historical fiction. Do you mind if I send your book to them?"

I didn't mind.

Lake Union bought the book right away. The advance was low, but I found their terms to be much fairer to writers than what I'd seen in the past, and since then, I've found their editors to be smart, thoughtful, and efficient: they actually answer emails within a day! The contract we agreed upon left me free to publish other kinds of books with other publishers (I have a new spiritual/road-trip book nearly done.)

There were several more rounds of re-working, but Lake Union's editors were respectful in the extreme, careful, attentive, offering good suggestions while giving me the last say in every instance.

My original title was 1943. The editors—and other friends—thought that sounded more like a non-fiction book, and wasn't particularly catchy. Emma suggested THOSE LEFT BEHIND, and, while the people at Lake Union liked that one, it sounded too negative to me. After a lot of back-and-forth, I decided on ONCE NIGHT FALLS, because there's a moment in the novel when one of the Italian mountain-fighters says to the Jewish girlfriend he's hiding:

"Once night falls, Italy belongs to the Italians."

We settled on that. They came up with a design (giving me, as few other publishers had done over the years) some say in it. They found someone to read the audio book (also giving me some say in choosing the reader). And so it turned out that the stroll Amanda and I took in August, 2007, was the mysterious seed of a novel that would be published twelve years later.

If you read the book, I hope you like it. Different as it is from most of my other novels (maybe not so different from FIDEL'S LAST DAYS) I think you'll encounter some of my usual obsessions: the struggle between good and evil; the challenge of finding meaning in life; a bit about food, a lot about place, a fair amount about belief or the lack of it.