It started out as an image: It’s night, a woman is standing in front of my father’s office and I have the sense that she is in some peril. Why? That’s the question I started with. Why is she there?
Jane Rosenthal – 11 March 2025
The Back Flap
It’s 1941 in a small Jewish community in South Carolina, and Solly Meisner, a recently returned Spanish Civil War veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, has barely settled in after his return home when he risks his life after discovering powerful Nazi sympathizers are working behind the scenes in his new hometown. Determined to stop them, he signs on with a newly formed U.S. spy agency. His first assignment: travel to the Yucatan and infiltrate a group of German spies and collaborators—including Estelle, a beautiful British woman he fell in love with in Spain, and whom he fears may have betrayed him.
In the Yucatan, Solly encounters a band of European exiles, not all of them who they claim to be. With his contacts dropping like flies, danger lurks at every turn. But with the Nazis only a few hundred miles from the U.S. coast and making plans for an invasion, there is no time to lose, and Solly trusts no one to track them down and stop them but himself. If he fails, the world he once knew will be gone forever—and the people he loves with it.
About the book
What is the book about?
The The Serpent Bearer is a World War Two spy thriller, full of buried family secrets and with a cast of fascinating characters whose lives converge at a dangerous moment in history.
When did you start writing the book?
August 2020. It was the middle of Covid. The Serpent Bearer is my Covid novel.
How long did it take you to write it?
About three years, which is long for me.
Where did you get the idea from?
I knew that I wanted to write about my parents and their milieu, a group of southern Jews, Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighters who managed to make it out alive, Jewish survivors of Nazi controlled Europe, people I grew up around who found themselves for one reason or another in the Jim Crow south.
Were there any parts of the book where you struggled?
See the answer to question number two. Yes, sort of. The story was a bit big and unwieldy in the beginning. I really cannot tell you how the novel came to be. It just emerged out of all the things I’d known or felt most of my life. It started out as an image: It’s night, a woman is standing in front of my father’s office and I have the sense that she is in some peril. Why? That’s the question I started with. Why is she there?
I have no idea why this image came to me, if I had witnessed something like this as a child or what, but the image was so clear. She is standing in front of my father’s yarn warehouse, a Quonset hut on Atando Avenue in Charlotte NC. They are now called the historic Quonset huts of Atando Avenue, and I think they are bars or something. But in the fifties, they were in the middle of nowhere. That’s what I began with. How it went in the direction it did I will never know. Writing this book was a little like river rafting. I was just trying to steer the story as it came to me.
What came easily?
All of the characters, their dialogue and so on came easily. What was hard was putting all their stories into a coherent whole, considering the span of time and the places I wanted to cover, the whole history.
Are your characters entirely fictitious or have you borrowed from real world people you know?
All writers borrow, and I am no exception! For years, people told me I needed to write about my father, and while Solly is not my father, the vibe is totally my Dad, brave, daring, difficult! An uncle of mine was in Spain during the Civil War, more in a journalistic capacity, but my parents did have a friend whose brother fought in Spain and didn’t return. I grew up knowing that the war in Spain was “The Good Fight”, that we could have stopped Hitler there. The fictional town of Pennington is based on stories my father and his friends told about coming down south in the rag trade, what the south was like then when Jews were only allowed to go into certain places and the Jewish community had no temple only a circuit riding rabbi. There is even a Life Magazine article about that rabbi!
We all know how important it is for writers to read. Are there any particular authors that have influenced how you write and, if so, how have they influenced you?
I read constantly from the poetry of Louise Gluck to big, wonderful novels like The Goldfinch or One Hundred Years of Solitude. I love the crime novels of Raymond Chandler and the books of Tana French. The writer that got me started though was Elizabeth George and a class I took with her at Books Passage in Larkspur California many years ago. She set me on this path.
Do you have a target reader?
I love to tell stories, so my ideal reader is someone who wants to get lost in a good yarn, but a tale with depth and history. I want a reader who likes to go on unforgettable journeys.
About Writing
Do you have a writing process? If so can you please describe it?
I have to mentally wander around in my stories before I start writing. Each novel starts with some image, and I keep asking myself questions about that picture, the person or people in it, until I hear the first sentence. Usually that first sentence gets me off and running. In The Serpent Bearer there was a fair amount of research, as well, about code breakers in the US, WW2 radio equipment, about Nazis in Mexico, about how European Jewish exiles got to Mexico with the help of Mexico’s ambassador to France at the time, Gilberto Bosques. I also hired the tour company Journey Mexico to drive me around the Yucatan and Campeche to places like the ones I write about. The trip they planned for me was invaluable.
Do you outline? If so, do you do so extensively or just chapter headings and a couple of sentences?
Yes, I do in a way. After I have an idea of some of the characters, I begin to write scenes with them in it to see what comes up, what I can learn about them. After that, I begin outlining scenes. If a scene arrives in my head fully formed, I write the whole scene. My outlines go through many drafts.
Do you edit as you go or wait until you’ve finished?
A bit of both. I hire a professional editor and we go through several iterations until the story becomes as clear on the page as it is in my head.
Did you hire a professional editor
Yes. I need another trained pair of eyes on the manuscript to tell me if I’ve done what I set out to do.
Do you listen to music while you write? If yes, what gets the fingers tapping? N
I need quiet or at the very least, background noise that doesn’t require my attention. I wrote my novel Del Rio in part in Mexico, and the background noise was traffic!
About Publishing
Did you submit your work to Agents?
Yes.
What made you decide to go Indie, whether self-publishing or with an indie publisher? Was it a particular event or a gradual process?
Well, after my second agent and I couldn’t see eye to eye, I sort of wandered in the wilderness a bit. During that time, I attended the San Miguel Literary Festival and first heard about She Writes press through an agent there.
Did you get your book cover professionally done or did you do it yourself?
She Writes does an incredible job. I love them and feel so grateful they took me on. Julie Metz is one of their cover designers and she designed both my books covers. I couldn’t be more pleased.
Do you have a marketing plan for the book or are you just winging it?
I am working with a wonderful team of publicists at BookSparks and couldn’t do this without them. I also have a marketer Michael Caroff who does website and social media stuff. I am a klutz at that sort of thing and he does a beautiful job.
Any advice that you would like to give to other newbies considering becoming Indie authors?
Do it! There are wonderful classes available, fabulous freelance editors, formatters, cover designers. My strongest suggestion is to hire an editor who really understands what you want to do. You need to bounce your work off of someone skilled in listening.
About You
Where did you grow up?
Charlotte, North Carolina
Where do you live now?
Santa Fe, New Mexico
What would you like readers to know about you?
In my next life, I hope to live in Paris and be a fragrance designer. Everyone is surprised when I say that! Well, not the Paris part.
What are you working on now?
Another thriller! This one is set during the Cold War.! have always been fascinated by the artists who came to Black Mountain College in the mountains of North Carolina in the 30s,40s, and 50s—Helen Frankenthaler, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Charles Olson, Ruth Asawa, the Jewish refugees— all Beatniks before that was even a thing. One particular (fictional) character has appeared to me. I’m going to follow her where she leads.
End of Interview:
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Get your copy of The Serpent Bearer from Amazon US.