John Mutter
“A philosophical spy novel, a literary love story, and a meditation on moral choice set inside the gathering darkness of WWII Berlin, Fortune and Glass follows two people bound by forbidden desire and quiet resistance that unfolds inside a society descending into authoritarian madness. Berlin, 1932. Germany’s fragile democracy is fracturing, its ideals cracking like thin glass as political violence and paranoia seep into the streets.”
Both my parents were in WWII. My father was part of the British Expeditionary Force, the contingent of the British Army sent to France in 1939 after Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany. He ended up in Dunkirk and was evacuated.
My mother was in charge of other women (ATS) at an anti aircraft gunsite on the Isle of Wight.
What was so interesting for me was that this great book was set in Germany just before the war and during the war. You'll get to meet Sara and Rudi, the main characters along with Hans and Dr. Traum and many others. You'll learn more about how the Jewish people were slowly and sadly annihilated, and why Rudi decided to become a spy.
I really loved this book and I can’t recommend it enough.
Now John, tell us about where you live and what you love about it.
I live in North Sandwich, New Hampshire,
in the woods at the foothills of the White Mountains and just north of the Lakes Region. On our mile-long stretch of a dead-end dirt road, there are two other houses occupied by year-round residents and several summer houses. We can't see our neighbors, and we have a great view of a small mountain and are close to a brook.
As you can imagine it's pretty wild and very peaceful. If a car goes by, we get curious about it. I like walking in the woods, hiking, swimming (or more like dunking) in the brook, watching the wildlife, which at times includes moose, bear, deer, foxes, and hawks.
There's a lot to maintain, and I love most of it: mowing the fields, cutting brush (the forest always wants to take over), cutting down trees and splitting wood, stacking firewood, using my tractor (and backhoe) for all kinds of things. I feel connected to the land and universe in so many ways. One example: being able to see the Milky Way Galaxy on clear, moonless nights.
Yet we have broadband, so I'm able to do all my work here and just need to turn my head to get an amazing view of the mountain.
One downside is that travel is a bit of a bitch, similar to what Australians call "the tyranny of distance." It takes hours to get to Logan Airport or South Station in Boston. Before we moved here permanently in 2018, I never thought I'd say I missed being close to Newark Airport!
Where were you living when you were seven years old? Are they fond memories?
For the first six years of my life, I lived in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, because my father was a sales rep and moved around regularly. Then he was promoted to company headquarters in New York City, and we moved to Westport, Conn., where my parents lived until they retired, and where I really grew up.
John (on the right) and his brother.
I do have fond memories of when I was seven. We lived in a rented, solid little arts-and-crafts house built in the 1920s. My elementary school was a five-minute walk away. Downtown was 10 minutes away. I had friends in the neighborhood, and we all played for hours without adult supervision. I also spent time alone, mostly reading, especially early in the morning before I had to get ready for school. There was so much to do with New York nearby, and we were much closer to family in New England. Life felt stable after so many moves.
Is there a book that changed the way you look at life?
It's so hard to narrow that down to one book. So many books changed how I look at life. But reading The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, particularly his early ones, had a huge effect on me. The stories stunned me in the best way. They were so well crafted. Each word meant so much; no words were wasted. They made me want to write, and that's when I first started writing short stories and novels. I still like those short stories. The novels? Never mind.
Do you have a favorite children’s book and what about it makes it so?
From when I was a child, I loved Blueberries for Sal, which might as well have been set in New Hampshire, where I went regularly because of family connections.
It's a great tale of mistaken identity, good-natured rebelliousness, and peaceful co-existence on cross-cultural and cross-species bases, although I wouldn't have put it that way at age four lol. Picking blueberries in the woods was so familiar and I loved it that Sal and Little Bear switched places for a while. Another attraction: I thought Robert McCloskey so wonderfully captured the sound of blueberries landing in a tin pail. "Ku-plink, ku-plank, ku-plunk!"
I also loved Norman the Doorman by Don Freeman for its tale about a creative "doorman" mouse who lives in the basement of a museum like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and enters an art contest with a mouse on a trapeze made out of some of the many mouse traps left by a "sharp-eyed" museum guard.
Norman wins the contest and is accepted by the other artists, and the guard becomes "kind-hearted." So it was another tale of cross-cultural and cross-species connection with a happy ending where art and creativity triumph. I loved it, too, that Norman lives and creates his art in a knight's helmet. Later in life, I loved it, too, that my wife worked as an editor for many years at the Met. (She did see a mouse once in the museum basement, but it wasn't Norman.)
As an adult with young children, I most enjoyed Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown because I loved reading it to my sons.
We all had so much fun noticing different things with each reading. It was a children's book I didn't mind reading aloud again and again and again, unlike some others.
What are the funniest or most embarrassing stories your family tells about you?
In a family with people who were practical and knew all about building and making things (my brother became an engineer), I was made fun of for not having some of those skills. For example, my dad was amused when I went downtown to a jewelry store to get a new watchband and didn't bring the watch along. My brother laughed for years about a pencil holder I made with holes that didn't line up. My sister has made fun of me for making reservations online for shows and screwing up the dates, so that several times we showed up for a performance that had already taken place.
I have to add that since moving to the country, I've gotten much better at all kinds of nuts and bolts things, leading my wife to call me Practical Guy.
How did you meet your beloved? How did your first date go?
It was 1975, so it wasn't exactly a date. My senior year had just started, and I had taken Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad out of the library's reserve room, an archaic place where photocopied parts of books or complete books that were assigned reading could be taken out for a few hours or overnight. I sat down with a friend in the nearby snack bar, and my future wife was there, too. He introduced us to each other, and the three of us sat there for maybe four hours, joking around and laughing most of the time. The double (and maybe triple) entendres flew. And more than 50 years later, the laughter continues. I still enjoy that our
"first date" took place in a school library.
John’s wife Cyd Clark
How are you different now than you were in your 20’s?
I tried to be so so so serious then, which sometimes led me to being less than tolerant about people and organizations, to put it diplomatically. I feel more understanding about humanity, even if some of them disappoint, especially these days.
And in my writing, I tried to be so so so serious, not realizing yet that humor and lightness have their place, too.
Is there a question no one has ever asked you that you wish they would? Something, perhaps, that people would be surprised to know about you?
No surprises here, but no one's asked what my rules of writing are.
They are:
Write or do something related to a work in progress every day, even if it's "just" re-reading what you've already written.
Re-read notes about a project--my version of an outline--regularly.
Write as early in the day as possible.
Write down seemingly random thoughts about a work in progress or idea for a piece whenever and wherever they strike. They often don't return.
Run with inspiration as much as you can. Don't wait.
Give up writing for the day if nothing's percolating and you're tired and the whole thing makes you cranky.
End writing for the day with a little tidbit in mind for the next part you'll be working on, no matter how small.
We all have or can point to a certain experience where, because of this experience, it shifted our lives in a way that led to where we are today, it could be a person you encountered or you were in a certain place or you had a certain experience or all three, but it was so pivotal that you can say that because of this experience, I am where I am today as a writer or in a greater sense as the person I am now.
I mentioned it above, but reading the early stories of Ernest Hemingway was so important since it made me aware of writing in a way I hadn't been before. I'd always been a happy, avid reader, but to consider trying to write anything, particularly fiction, was utterly new and exciting.
Can you remember a particular random act of kindness from a stranger?
About 10 years ago, my wife and I were in Istanbul, Turkey. At one point, we were resting in a park in the sun, a little out of it, looking at our cell phones. An innocent abroad, I set mine down, and a few minutes later, after we left, a man came up behind me, tapping me on the back. I was instinctively suspicious, but then he held out my cell phone. I thanked him profusely in broken Turkish, and he simply nodded and took off. In the digital age, I felt as if he'd saved my life.
Is there a song, person, or group that you listen to when you are feeling a bit down?
Most of my favorites are my favorites from my college and high school years, including (early)
Bob Dylan
Were there parts in your book that your editor cut that you hated to see go? If so, what were they?
All in all, I think the cuts--which I made to get the MS to under the 100,000 words my publisher wanted--were good in the end. Probably like many writers, my first few drafts kept expanding. I wanted to tell a story--and tell related stories! And more! I even started a novel within the novel. If I'd gone in every direction I considered, the final result would have rivaled War and Peace in length.
The cuts that were closest to surviving were mostly the stories of minor characters in the book. I did miss those, but they weren't essential and became less important as the plot tightened through editing.
How do you feel about “Independent Bookstores” and their role in your success?
Independent bookstores have been a focus of my life going back to when I was in high school and spent a lot of time in the two indies in my town growing up, the Remarkable Bookshop 
store, Klein's. My wife points out that when we drove cross country after college graduation--my first time west of Ohio--the places I most wanted to visit were indie bookstores. And then, of course, for decades indies have been the focus of my career at Publishers Weekly and then Shelf Awareness. Indie booksellers are some of the smartest, most interesting, and nicest people I know. It's a pleasure to have so many as friends.
And finally John,
IF YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME
to any period from before recorded history to yesterday, be safe from harm, be rich, poor or in-between, if appropriate to your choice, actually experience what it was like to live in that time, anywhere at all, meet anyone, if you desire, speak with them, listen to them, be with them.
When would you go?
Where would you go?
Who would you want to meet?
And most importantly, why do you think you chose this time?
I live in a town where the population in 1830 was the most ever, about double what it is today. The forests around us are full of cellar holes and abandoned roads and railroads. Long stonewalls go through the forest. It's all quite mysterious, and it's hard to imagine what life was like, especially for farmers in this rocky, unforgiving soil. I'd love to go back and see what this area was like a century and a half ago, before so many people moved west.
Thank you John, I loved your book and your answers to my questions, you're the best!
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