Christina Lynch and Meg Howrey

Biographical details about Magnus Flyte are sometimes conflicting. He appears to have operated under several identities, and may have ties to one or more intelligence organizations, including the CIA, the Mossad, and a radical group of Antarctic separatists.

In fact, Meg Howrey and Christina Lynch are the authors behind Flyte, authors of City of Dark Magic and City of Lost Dreams. From their Q & A with Cabin Goddess:

Q: How did your collaboration under the name Magnus Flyte come about?

A: We met at a writers’ retreat on an island off Cape Cod and became fans of each other’s work. When we got back to California, we started getting together for mini writers’ retreats at Chris’s house near Sequoia National Park. The plot for our first novel, CITY OF DARK MAGIC was hatched on a walk with Chris’s dog Max. The name “Magnus Flyte” is a hybrid (much like our novel). “Magnus” was a usurping Roman senator (not so different from City of Dark Magic’s villain, Charlotte Yates) and “Flyte” is for Sebastian Flyte, Evelyn Waugh’s wonderful lush who, like Max in our novel, has a difficult relationship with his highborn family and the house they live in.

Q. There have been a lot of news stories lately about women who use male pen names, especially when writing genre fiction. Do you think it’s helpful?

A. Possibly helpful to the author, who may have any number of reasons to use a pen name – a desire to escape gender stereotyping, anonymity, sheer whimsy. One can only imagine how delighted JK Rowling was to watch her book get wonderful reviews without any references to Voldemort! Since we had heard that men avoid books by women, we decided to choose a male pseudonym to reach both genders. But then our identities were made public from the beginning, so we didn’t get a chance to see if “Magnus Flyte” would fool anyone. No matter, we love him anyway.

Q: In CITY OF DARK MAGIC, Prague was very much its own character as well as the setting for the novel. Why did you choose Vienna to be the setting of CITY OF LOST DREAMS?

A: Vienna was...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Magnus Flyte's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

The Page 69 Test: City of Dark Magic.

My Book, The Movie: City of Dark Magic.

The Page 69 Test: City of Lost Dreams.

--Marshal Zeringue