Throughout the month of November, as I anticipate the release of Angels of the Underground, I’ll be sharing some things I thought about as I researched and wrote the book.

I bet no one was expecting Humphrey Bogart.

He doesn’t make an appearance in the book, but whenever I think of the title, I think of the way Bogart said the word angel. It had an edge to it. Whichever woman he was calling angel, well, it was hard to believe he really thought of her as angelic.

Bogart would have used that tone when addressing the women in Angels of the Underground. To resist the Japanese occupation, to accomplish what they set out to do, to survive the war, they had to be anything but angelic.