Hal Glatzer
Author Interview - Hal Glatzer
Author of The Two Birds
Teddie (nicknamed “Ducky”) and Herman (“Drakey”) are an affectionate couple in their sixties, married--but not to each other. They are friends with benefits, but they aren’t spending much time, lately, billing and cooing. Teddie has been cast as Lady Macbeth in the local community theater troupe; and she and her husband George have to practice to stay competitive in their tennis club. Herman has been drawn into pursuing a decades-old cold case; but his wife Sylvia needs his help fighting off a challenge to her professional life.
The spouses, who long ago gave up sex, are willing to tolerate the arrangement, as long as it doesn’t become public knowledge. But that’s a big risk, since Ducky and Drakey have flown into mysteries before [see below], uncovering murder and mayhem in Grand Lake City. Fortunately, police homicide detective Sarah Larson has, by the summer of 2019, come to accept their help and to help them in return.
The cold case revolves around an urban legend that somewhere in the city there is a warehouse of vintage motorcycles that were stolen from the factory—still in their shipping crates—back in 1948. Felix Long, an aspiring writer, brings this story to Herman, who is a retired magazine editor, hoping that, together, they can write a book about it. That would mean locating the con man Don Reynolds who, in 1986, claimed to have found those stolen bikes. He sold them, then ran off with the money, never having produced any bike but the one he drove around town.
Sylvia’s need for Herman’s help is more pressing. She chairs the local college’s School of Forestry and runs its research lab about 100 miles away in the mountains. The owners of the acreage just uphill from the lab are a 93-year-old man named Homer Gilley and a corporation called Harvest Gold, LLC. They are asking the state’s Department of Land Management to issue a logging permit. At a public hearing, Gilley says he wants to sell the timber to give a nest-egg to his daughter Agnes, who’s in her 70s. But logging would wreak havoc on the forest land around the lab.
To prioritize Sylvia’s dilemma, Herman sidelines Felix by introducing him to Irwin Duteriane, who has a local true-crime podcast; and to Shirley McKenzie, who writes a local true-crime blog. Each of them promises to help Felix, but after a week Irwin disappears; and two weeks later Shirley disappears too. So Herman feels he has to pick up the ball again.
Teddie is being whipsawed between the theater troupe’s more experienced leading ladies: Susie Warriner and Margo Boyd. Both are trying hard to be Teddie’s new best friend, even though each of them wanted—expected—to play Lady Macbeth herself, until Teddie came along. And her shoulder is giving her trouble, so she might not be able to compete in the tennis club’s upcoming tournament.
What seem like separate threads, however, are actually woven into a tapestry of deception, poison and murder. If Ducky and Drakey try to unravel it, they could zero out their benefits and—if they don’t watch their backs—wind up dead.
"The Two Birds" is the third mystery in the Friends With Benefits series, which includes "The Nest" (2023) and "The Office Wife" (2025).
"The Nest" is a breezy present-day cozy mystery introducing Herman and Teddie: witty, affectionate sixty-somethings who are friends with benefits. When the landlord of their trysting apartment is found dead under their balcony, the police suspect them of his murder. So they set out to prove their innocence, in the process uncovering a trail of suspects, shady neighbors, and a corporate cover-up. Their sleuthing leads to dangerous discoveries, forcing them to risk exposure of their own secret affair while convincing a skeptical Detective Larson of the real truth.
In "The Office Wife," Teddie’s husband George is arrested and charged with killing his closest colleague at work. Determined to clear his name, Teddie and Herman offer to help Detective Larson find the real killer. But George has issues with that. (If you were in trouble, would you accept help from your spouse’s lover?) Racing against time, they’re up against a tangled skein of suspects, including the victim’s co-workers and former lovers. To uncover the truth, Teddie and Herman are forced to bend the rules and put their affair on the line.
Author Interview - Hal Glatzer
Author I draw inspiration from:
Arthur Conan Doyle's stories of Sherlock Holmes were the first mysteries I ever read; and I am still an ardent fan. Books with teen sleuths, especially Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton, and the Hardy Boys, unleashed my imagination and propelled me down the road that led to becoming a mystery author. As a grownup, I quickly gobbled up all of Edith Pargeter's Cadfael books. And I have a standing order for each new imperial Rome mystery by Lindsay Davis.
Author Interview - Hal Glatzer | Author I Draw Inspiration From
Favorite place to read a book:
The most comfortable is my armchair at home, but long airplane rides go faster with a good book -- as long as the overhead light works!
Book character I’d like to be stuck in an elevator with:
Forgive me, but I'd like to have that time with the heroine of my other mystery series: Katy Green. She is a working musician in the years before World War II. Since I perform the songs of that era, we'd not only have a lot to talk about, we'd have our instruments with us (my guitar; her violin and clarinet) and we would jam until the elevator started up again.
Author Interview - Hal Glatzer | Book Character I’d Like to be Stuck in an Elevator With
The moment I knew I wanted to become an author:
When I was in third grade I wrote an adventure story called "The Mysterious Island." My teacher's critique: "Great imagination! Terrible handwriting."
Hardback, paperback, ebook or audiobook:
I don't buy (or publish) hardbacks; they're too expensive. I have had a lifelong love affair with paperbacks, and still have some I bought as a boy. But the last time I moved, I had to "de-accession" a huge collection of 1940s and '50s paperbacks with lurid covers. Shelf space is too tight now, severely limiting new paperback acquisitions. Unsurprisingly therefore, eBooks have become my go-to print format for reading. My own novels are published only in paperback and eBook editions.
Two of my Katy Green books are also in audio (they're multi-voiced audio-plays) distributed by audible.com. My Friends With Benefits books are narrated by Herman and Teddie in alternating first-person voices, his and hers; so they are ideally suited for audio. However, it is very expensive to produce an audiobook with professional voice actors in a studio. I would never recover the investment through sales (mainstream publishers don't, either). And I refuse to cut costs by using robot (AI-generated) voices. Unless the project can somehow be subsidized, there won't be audio editions of my Friends With Benefits any time soon.
The last book I read:
"The Hallmarked Man" by Robert Galbraith.
Say what you will about her, attention must be paid to J. K. Rowling. She will always have my respect and admiration for turning an entire generation of children into committed readers, by getting them hooked on a series of seven 500-page novels! And she is still outrageously prolific, having now written eight almost-as-long hard-boiled detective novels under the pen name Robert Galbraith. "The Hallmarked Man," like the previous seven, is convoluted; but the scope of her imagination is immense, and her talent for keeping all the balls in the air is stupendous. To get a feel for the series, I recommend starting with the earliest, especially if hardboileds are not your favorite genre.
Author Interview - Hal Glatzer | The Last Book I Read
Pen & paper or computer:
I got my first typewriter (an Olivetti Lettera 22) when I was twelve, and wrote with it until I discovered computerized word processing in 1978. Since 1980 I've written everything on my own computer.
How do I write? I'm a "lark" not an "owl." I do my best work first thing in the morning, though I can keep going (my wife says "obsessing") all day if I'm on a roll. I can't work into the night, though. When it gets late, I find a place to stop, switch off the computer, and relax. I may watch a movie, or a TV show, but in the months when I'm writing a book I won't read anyone else's books. I don't fear accidental plagiary; I just don't want to be distracted.
Book character I think I’d be best friends with:
[See Katy Green in the elevator, above.]
If I weren’t an author, I’d be a:
Performing musician.
If I could do one thing over in my life, I'd go to the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, instead of the Bronx High School of Science. I don't know if I'd be as successful in a musical career as I've been as a journalist and novelist, but that's the road not taken.
Favorite decade in fashion history:
No question about it: the 1920s, '30s and '40s styles collectively known as Art Deco. I love my double-breasted jackets and wing-tip spectators. I'd still like to get a Palm Beach suit that fits me . . . .
Place I’d most like to travel:
My wife and I travel extensively; we already have our reservations for trips in 2026.
My signature drink:
I would not live where I could not drink the tap water. Fortunately, New York has some of the country's best.
Favorite artist:
Too many instrumentalists and vocalists to name here. Watch my performance videos on YouTube and you'll get an idea of my favorites by seeing whose songs I cover.
Number one on my bucket list:
I want to live to 100 with all my marbles.
Anything else you'd like to add:
I like to think I write clever, compelling mysteries. One (amazon) reader/reviewer complained that she stopped reading "The Nest" when she realized my protagonists were committing adultery. But she went back and picked up the book, near the end, so she could find out whodunit!
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About Hal Glatzer:
Hal Glatzer
Although the Friends with Benefits series takes place in the modern age, much of Hal Glatzer’s mystery fiction has been set in the past. His Katy Green novels—Too Dead to Swing, A Fugue in Hell’s Kitchen, and The Last Full Measure—are set in musical milieux in the years just before World War II. And his illustrated bildungsroman, Dead In His Tracks, chronicles the rise and fall of a family-owned streetcar line.
In the 1970s, Glatzer worked as a reporter and bureau chief for newspapers and TV news stations. But in 1978 he began to cover the emerging high-tech industries of personal computers and telecommunications. For twenty years he contributed to and/or edited “computer” magazines for general readers. His influential non-fiction books include Introduction to Word Processing; The Birds of Babel - Satellites for a Human World; and Who Owns the Rainbow? - Conserving the Radio Spectrum.
He debuted as a mystery novelist in 1986 with The Trapdoor, about a hacker who gets in trouble with a criminal gang. He is a longtime member of Sisters In Crime; and of Mystery Writers of America, currently serving as vice-president of MWA’s New York chapter.
Glatzer also writes Sherlock Holmes pastiches, set authentically in the Victorian/Edwardian era, which have been published in U.K. and U.S. anthologies, and reprinted in his own anthology: The Sign of Five. He is active in several “scion societies.” And every year, he produces a Sherlock Holmes play in New York, performed in old-time-radio style.
When he is not working as an author, he’s working as a musician, playing guitar and singing the “Great American Songbook” from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway.
Email: info@halglatzer.com
Website: www.halglatzer.com
