Shaina Steinberg is a screenwriter and novelist whose second book in the Bishop and Gallagher series is just out from Kensington Books. The story of Evelyn Bishop and Nick Gallagher, two OSS operatives who meet again after the war – years after leaving government service and breaking up with each other – each returned to Los Angeles, struggling to find something unlike the lives they left behind.
Her new book An Unquiet Peace centers around the Berlin Airlift, a scientist that Evelyn and Nick had smuggled out of Germany, and an old friend of Nick now running a gentleman’s club whose relationship with the mob and the police gets disrupted by a new player. It represents a leap from her first book and delivers on the promise evident in the small moments and details there. Harder to summarize, the sequel is still a romantic tale of a wisecracking couple, but it’s also a deeply felt and researched look at the period and the city of Los Angeles.
Though this is not mentioned in her official bio, Steinberg and I lived next door to each other in college and we’ve spent years discussing books and films – and Los Angeles, a city where she lives and where I once did. I know the influence of old films and noir on her book series and about how fiction has helped her to better understand the history of Los Angeles. We spoke just months after the recent devastating forest fires in Los Angeles, which gave more weight to how tenuous the past can be in so many places. We spoke recently about the city we both love and how fiction can be a way to learn about and understand history.
It’s only been a few months since the recent fires. You didn’t lose your house but I know you evacuated and you know people who lost their homes. And in your book, not to give anything away, Nick and Evelyn lose their house. Though not because of a fire.
Technically, it is a fire. A bomb which started a fire. Obviously, this was written long before the Los Angeles fires, but added poignancy to Evelyn and Nick losing everything. More than the physical structure of her house, the thing she most grieves are the memories and mementos of her family.
Our fires started January 7th. I know that because the next day was my mother-in-law’s birthday. We’ve had fires here before, but they were largely confined to individual parts of the city. For a few days, it felt like all of Los Angeles was ablaze. Every person I know was affected in one way or another. My son and I evacuated. A lot of family and friends were evacuated. I know people who lost their homes or were forced into hotels for months because of the smoke damage. Unfortunately, in Los Angeles, we’re at risk of losing two wonderful neighborhoods. Altadena, especially, is a very diverse place that has been home to an incredible arts scene. My fear is that people will be forced to sell their property and developers will scoop them up, destroying the multi-generational community.
The cliché is that L.A. has no history, which is nonsense. But a lot of it gets lost because of fires, mudslides, earthquakes. It’s not just developers and highways. It’s these things which are complicated and filled with grief and trauma for individuals.
In Los Angeles, we have history, but it doesn’t live in our buildings the same way as it does in twelfth century cathedrals in Europe. Many of my favorite buildings went up in the 1920s and have that incredible art deco style. I love going downtown where all those movie palaces have been refurbished in such a loving way that you feel like you might be there for the premiere of Casablanca. Or you go down to the Bradbury Building and walk inside and it really feels like you’re stepping into a different time. I love City Hall. The Central Library is one of my favorite places. I love that you can go to these beautiful places and that they still function as their original purpose. You can really feel the history there. Downtown L.A. is really one of the few places where you can find that history so concentrated. I really love that there has been a recent effort to preserve that history. It’s not just the iconic buildings. A lot of the character [of the city] can be seen in single-family homes or apartment buildings. You can step into these places, see the details in the floor, the banisters and the windows. You can imagine generations of people living here.
L.A. is a city that is constantly changing. Some of it is for the better, some, not so much. Right now feels like a particularly perilous time. The entertainment industry is struggling and I’ve heard rumors we’re going to lose a lot of the old movie studios like Paramount and Warner Brothers, where I started my career. They’re going to become Caruso Buildings and mixed-use apartments. I’m not quite sure that’s progress.
Your description of the book is “Mr. and Mrs. Smith meets Code Name Verity”–
That’s my publisher’s description, but yes.
I am, as you know, one of those people, who went, of course, the 1941 Carole Lombard comedy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
[Laughs]
But I know that old movies and fiction have been an influence on you. In part because of how they capture the city at this time and place, which has been lost. And you’re working with a lot of why noir came about after the Second World War. It was dealing a lot with trauma that people were not talking about, but clearly affected by.
Anybody who goes to war has to be changed by what they experienced. I don’t know how you can not be. Luckily, now we’re in a culture that’s more accepting of therapy. That’s more accepting of saying, hey, I need help, and I need to talk about this. In the 1940s, people came home and it was like, no, we don’t talk about that. The war is done, put it in a box, go back to being the person you were. And you can’t do that.
You look at the noirs and there’s this code of silence. When we talk about private eyes from this era, I picture Humphrey Bogart. He is the man’s man. If he has any emotion, it’s anger. That’s probably reflective of the way many men have been raised for years. The great thing about this genre is that you have such a fascinating interplay between what people are hiding, why, and how the detective finds it out. A lot of these movies have strong female characters, but they’re often stereotyped into being either a helpless girl, the villain, or the vixen. One of the things I’ve always struggled with is that you don’t see many female characters in noir films who have their own agency.
You have the character of Helen in this book and you’re very conscious of playing with the femme fatale archetype, which I always think of as, amoral and practical above all else.
It’s not even that she’s amoral. She just doesn’t really give a shit about what society wants or who society is telling her to be. There’s this line from a Raymond Chandler book, he described a woman as being a blonde who would make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window. I love that description because you can picture that in your mind. However, when you think about it, the only thing we learn is someone else’s feelings about her – she’s beautiful and desirable and she makes men do crazy things. But none of that is her character.
Then you have Evelyn who is beautiful and aware of the fact that her appearance can get her into certain places. Especially as a spy. Men are often trying to impress beautiful women. I always see Evelyn as being happy to play to the stereotype when it serves her and ignoring it when it doesn’t.
This book is more complicated than the first one, with multiple stories that don’t really dovetail. As you sat down to write a sequel, what did you want to do differently?
I really love Nick and Evelyn as a couple. I think they complement each other very, very well. One of the things I didn’t want to do is throw another person into the middle of them and wonder if they’re going to break up. Recently, I saw a saying on a tea towel that said, I love my boring marriage. When you’re in a happy relationship, it’s often boring in a good way. You support each other. You’re not fighting about random stuff. But all happy relationships have their bumps. Especially at the beginning where you’re still learning how to live with each other.
Nick’s first case involves this woman who feels unfulfilled and unappreciated trying to catch her husband having an affair. The 1940s was a time before no fault divorces, when marital rape was not illegal. A lot of abuse happened behind closed doors. Marriage, at the time, could be a prison. I don’t think Evelyn ever feels like Nick is going to trap her, but there was huge societal pressure to get married and become “Mrs. Husband’s Name.” You don’t even get to keep your first name. You lose your identity. Evelyn doesn’t want to fit into the typical women’s role in society. And especially the typical married women’s role in society.
In terms of them having divergent cases, I really wanted Evelyn to grow and expand. At the end of the first book, it felt very natural to me that she would take over Bishop Aeronautics. I wrote that, and it felt great. When I started outlining Book Two, I was like, shit, what does she do now? [laughs] They were no longer in the same occupation, but they were still detectives. Evelyn will always have that element of, wanting to get to the bottom of things.
Evelyn is a problem solver, whether that takes the form of being a detective, being a spy, being an engineer, being a manager.
Also she’s curious about people, she’s curious about situations, and she likes the world to work in a way that makes sense to her. So, if something is not making sense to her, she wants to understand why.
In the post-war era, there is so much that’s not making sense.
There’s so much that’s not making sense! We can look back at from our perspective and say, you lived like that? That’s crazy. How did you treat certain groups of people this way? How were you okay with that? Of course, very few of the people benefiting from racism, homophobia, sexism, and all the other isms were interested in holding a magnifying glass up to their privilege.
In this book, you really get into the period. It takes place during the Berlin Airlift, you get into Mickey Cohen and how Los Angeles functioned – which is not the official way that the city of Los Angeles functioned.
No! There was so much corruption.
It felt like you really dove into the research and let that shape the book.
For the first book, I had a story I wanted to tell, and I did the research to fit that story. With this one, I was really interested in the Berlin blockade. I did a lot of reading about post-war Berlin. After the war, there were a lot of people who never asked, where did my Jewish neighbor go? They still believed the propaganda that there were no concentration camps, that the Jews all migrated to America and now they’re controlling the world. For a long time, I’d thought that immediately after the Holocaust people were like, that is horrible. We should make sure it never happens again. But for a long time, it wasn’t talked about. Whenever I think about that, it shocks me. That something so huge and so terrible, could just be swept under the rug.
I also read several books about the LAPD. I was raised in a world where if something goes wrong, you go to the police. For a lot of people back then – and for a lot of people now – that’s not the case. What happens when the police – who are supposed to protect you – are not people you can trust? Where do you go? I read a couple of really great books like L.A. Noir, and a couple of books about Mickey Cohen. You look at Mickey Cohen and a big part of what made him rise was that he was absolutely ruthless. And people knew it. Being willing to do things no one else would consider was a huge source of his power.
Writers of historical fiction, and historians, occasionally have to check themselves about nostalgia. You’re interested in the period, but you don’t wish you lived back then.
Oh, God, I would never want to go backwards! I might go backwards maybe ten years, but beyond that? No! Even with everything going on, this is a better time to be a woman than any other time in history. There are more opportunities for everyone. There’s more acceptance. Not among everybody, but I think that it’s easier to find your community.
So what are you working on now? Have you begun working on the next? Planning many books ahead?
I’m currently writing the third book. Unfortunately, is going slower than I would like.
I feel like I’ve heard this from you before, but you’ve had two books come out over two very busy years while raising a young child.
You have heard it before and it’s usually true. I can’t write nearly as fast as I could when I was single and childless. The next book deals, in part, with the aftereffects of the Japanese internment camps. Evelyn is expanding her factory, which has been a goal throughout the first two books. However, beyond just the hiccups that come with any construction, hers also involves a lot of complications in her professional life. I feel like the next book is where she really steps into her own.
And should I be so lucky to have the series continue, I do have an idea for the fourth book. I’m excited about it.
The first book seemed to do well.
It’s so weird. You put a book out into the world and maybe twice a year you get a statement that says, yes, you’ve made money or, no, not quite yet. Beyond that, you’re just hoping someone tells you that they enjoyed reading it. I haven’t been reviewed at a ton of places, but the ones I’ve gotten have been really positive. One of the best compliments I got was from my mom’s neighbor who told me that she stayed up way past her bedtime reading my book. And I was like, yes! That’s what I want to hear.
