What's that, Skip? Did I just tear out an entire storyline from World War 3.2 to begin rewriting it from the floorboards up one week before publication? Why yes—yes, I did. Thanks for asking, Skip.
It was Dan Black, of course. That’ll teach me to bring a fan favourite back from the dead.
You might remember that, in the original series, Dan died off-page in a plane crash in Hawaii. Then he possibly, maybe, sort-of reappeared at the end of Stalin’s Hammer: Paris, while Julia Duffy was lying in bed, high on painkillers, recovering from a stabbing courtesy of a couple of murderous little KGB agents. And yes, I literally mean little—they were something like nine and ten years old, respectively.
I sent out an extract from 3.2 last week—the prologue, no less—confirming that Dan was indeed alive. We caught up with him in Cairo, in a big fight scene recycled from Stalin’s Hammer: Cairo, only this time told from his perspective. Julia had just been jumped by a couple of Russian hoods at the Cairo Hilton.
I’d written a full chapter further into the book—about 4,000 words—with Dan moving through a rubble-strewn, burning London, dodging missile strikes from the Red Army Rocket Force. I had this lovely plan to maybe put him and Julia back together in the last chapter.
But then it hit me: there’s no way I can convincingly or satisfactorily wrap this story up in a tidy little trilogy. So I’ve added four or five more books to my three-book epic. Naturally.
That opened the door to telling Dan’s story properly, right from the beginning. So yes, I ripped out 90% of his arc in 3.2, and I’m now replacing it with three new chapters that explain how he got from Cairo to London.
This is not my fault. You people pestered me about killing him off-page for so long, you basically asked for this.