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‘House of Spies,’ My Talk with Daniel Silva

July 11, 2017 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

Daniel Silva is the international award-winning author of the Gabriel Allon series which has topped the New York Times’s bestseller list many times. He burst onto the literary scene with his debut novel, The Unlikely Spy, which became a bestseller.

He soon began writing books about Gabriel Allon, an Israeli art restorer, assassin and spy. These novels have been translated into twenty-five languages and are available in more than thirty countries. Before becoming a novelist, Daniel was the Chief Middle East Correspondent for UPI in Egypt, and the Executive Producer of CNN’s Crossfire.

In House of Spies, London is the target of a horrific ISIS attack. Though coordinated brilliantly, there is one loose thread which leads Gabriel to the south of France where contact is made with a wealthy Frenchman and a British former fashion model. Gabriel must expertly engineer the situation to fight the global war on terror.

You completed “House of Spies” just before the recent ISIS attack in London. And last year, you completed “The Black Widow” just before the Paris attack. Is this prescience or do you have connections in the world’s intelligence communities?

It’s a little of both. Anyone who seriously follows these issues knew ISIS was desperate to attack the United Kingdom. ISIS painted a bulls eye on the UK. There were twelve or thirteen plots British intelligence and security services thwarted and disrupted, but it was only a matter of time before one slipped through the cracks. The Director General of MI 5 told the British people point blank there would be attacks in Britain. That’s why I chose to use Britain as a jumping off point for this story. While I was deeply saddened to see certain aspects of my book actually happen, I was not at all surprised.

“House of Spies” involves two fascinating new characters—one is Jean-Luc Martel. Tell us a bit about him.

Jean-Luc Martel is a wildly successful French entrepreneur who is in the hospitality industry—restaurants and hotels. That’s all a cover for his job as a drug trafficker.

After the eruption of the Arab Spring, and the eventual toppling of Muammar Gaddafi, ISIS set up shop along the Libyan coast, moving huge shipments of hashish and narcotics into Europe.

In my book, Jean-Luc Martel’s drug network is doing business with ISIS.

This presents Gabriel Allon and his allies an opportunity to penetrate ISIS indirectly by enlisting France’s biggest drug dealer as an unwilling asset of Israeli and French intelligence.

Among other things, the book explores the very real subject of coerced recruitment of assets.

The other new character is Olivia Watson. Tell us about her.

Olivia Watson is a former British fashion model who left the industry with some expensive habits, shall we say. She wasn’t in great financial shape and wanders down to St. Tropez where she works in a small art gallery. She meets Jean-Luc Martel. They form a partnership. He sets her up in business in a posh art gallery, but the gallery is a front for a giant money laundering machine for his drug enterprise.

Is there some significance to your having decided to make Gabriel Allon, a spy-assassin, and also an art restorer?

When I created Gabriel, I wanted him to have a distinct and prominent “other side” to his character. He had been a gifted painter, until he lost his will to create art because of his work as an assassin for Israeli intelligence.

Art restoration not only provides the perfect cover for him, but allows him to stay connected to art, which is his passion.

He’s a complex man, and it’s important to me that the reader see him in all his dimensions.

At the time I was creating Gabriel, I happened to be having dinner with one of the world’s foremost art restorers. He helped me turn this Israeli assassin into a restorer of Italian masterpieces.

You publish a new book during the second week of each July. Is there any significance to that date?

If you look at the publishing calendar, many authors publish books around the same date each year, whether it’s John Sandford, Lee Child, Michael Connelly, or myself. We all have our ‘slots.’ Mine became the second Tuesday of July. I’ve had at least ten books published on that day: it helps the industry with such things as production schedules and ordering; and hopefully, I’ve got readers who know to look for my next book at that time.

How long does it take you to write a novel?

Roughly, from Labor Day until April Fool’s Day. I finish my draft by about March first, and spend the next month rewriting and editing.

Do you have first readers for your novels?

I rely on two people only: my wife, and Lewis Toscano, my editor. Lewis has been editing my manuscripts and making them better since I was a twenty-four-year-old kid.

I’ve learned you write in longhand on a legal pad. Is that true?

Yes, that’s true.

Why not use a computer for that first draft?

I do use a computer for parts of that first draft, but I sit comfortably and quietly while I write in longhand. I think better by writing in longhand. I love the quiet atmosphere of it. I prefer not staring at a computer screen all day. For me, the pace of putting words on paper with the human hand lets me form my sentences as I go. I end up with a skyscraper-tall pile of legal pads by the end of a book.

I’ll tell you something: you could go through those papers and pull out large sections of the novel written in one take from beginning to end. For me, writing in longhand produces a far more polished first draft than I could ever produce by typing on a keyboard. I think it has to do with the slower pace of physically executing words and sentences. Thoughts go from my brain to my fingers and onto the paper via my pen.

All your novels, have plot twists and explosive turns. Do you usually pre-plan them or do they arise as you write?

For the most part, they arise as I write.

I don’t outline at all. My first draft is my outline. [Laughter]. I tried outlining once and felt it was a complete waste of time.

Tell us about the deal with MGM Television to turn Gabriel Allon’s adventures into a series. And why TV instead of a feature film?

It’s the deal I’ve been waiting for. We’re moving forward at full speed.

I had to make a basic choice: film versus television.

That decision became easy when I considered having the prospect of twelve hours of a television series devoted to Gabriel Allon versus two hours of film.

There’s a vast amount of material to capture and explore, and I’m fascinated by the prospect of seeing some of the older material updated.

Television has become quite innovative, and I think it was the way to go.

You once said you wanted Gabriel to live solely on the page. What changed your mind?

For many years, I was convinced Gabriel should live only on the page.

But, after The Black Widow was published, I was inundated with so many offers, I was finally able to feel pretty confident that the offer I would ultimately select would get the complex character of Gabriel and the tone for the series done correctly.

Do you see Gabriel Allon continuing for many more books?

That’s a difficult question to answer. Let’s just say that I’m working on another Gabriel Allon novel right now. [Laughter].

Congratulations on penning “House of Spies,” another electrifying novel about one of the most intriguing protagonists on the planet.

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Filed Under: About Books, book launch, crime, Huffington Post Column, Interviews Tagged With: intelligence, Israeli assassins, Israeli Mossad, spying

‘The Boy Who Saw,’ A Conversation with Simon Toyne

July 4, 2017 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

Simon Toyne was a highly successful writer, director, and producer in British television. He worked on many award-winning shows. Now, he is a full-time novelist, whose first book, Sanctus, became part of an internationally bestselling trilogy. His second series features a mesmerizing character, Solomon Creed.

In The Boy Who Saw, Solomon Creed is a mysterious hero who has no memory of who he is, or from where he came. The only clue to his identity is a label stitched inside his jacket saying: “This suit was made to measure for Mr. Solomon Creed.”

The jacket fits perfectly, but there is a second name on the label: the name of the tailor who made the suit and an address in Southern France.

Solomon heads to France in search of this man, hoping to discover more about his own identity. But instead of answers, he finds a bloody corpse with the Star of David carved into its chest and the words “Finishing what was begun” written in blood on the wall. Solomon continues his quest and finds himself amid a decades-old conspiracy that threatens his life and the well being of France.

It’s clear that The Boy Who Saw explores some dark themes based on some recent political events. Will you tell our readers what those events are and how they relate to the novel?

The central story revolves around a killer who has murdered a tailor and is trying to get the names of other people to kill. Along with the body of this tailor, the police discover a wall in his shop on which is written in blood, ‘Finishing what was begun.’ The ritualistic murder suggests it had something to do with the Nazi deathcamps. The victim, this tailor, was one of only four survivors from a specific death camp.

As the anniversary celebrating the end of the Second World War looms, someone is trying to complete the murders that began seventy years earlier. The novel is also set amidst the current political shift in both America and Europe—the turning toward hard, nationalistic right wing politics. The nationalists are looking for scapegoats, just as the Jews were scapegoated by Germany in World War II.

The entire story is really about the importance of remembering our history; otherwise, it will repeat itself. While it’s a thriller, with Solomon becoming a suspect who must escape and clear his name, it deals with modern themes and larger concerns set against the backdrop of a survivor’s memoir which ties it into what is happening today.

I like to explore a relevant theme through my writing, but I didn’t want to do so in a non-fiction format. I wanted it to be a dramatic rendering so it would be an exciting read that would still explore these larger themes and questions.

While it’s a true thriller, The Boy Who Saw, also deals with the beguiling mystery of memory, both on a grand scale and for an individual. Tell us more.

Memory is a theme that permeates all the Solomon Creed books. Solomon is a sort of genius in the sense that he knows virtually everything about anything. He has a Wikipedia-like mind. He knows history; he can speak many languages; but he can’t remember anything personal. His story, both in this book and in the rest of the series involves him being on a journey back to finding himself.

In this book, he’s in France because he’s wearing a beautifully tailored jacket with a note in the pocket saying it was made expressly for him. And in tiny stitching is the name and address of the tailor who is the person who was killed at the beginning of the book. Solomon knows he must have met the tailor, but of course, he has no recollection of it.

In the world-at-large, populism is rising at the same time the people who lived through the Second World War are dying off. So, I felt it was crucially important to tell this story lest we repeat our pasts.

The Boy Who Saw begins unravelling some of the mystery of Solomon Creed’s life. Do you intend to reveal more of it as the series progresses?

Yes. When I started writing these books, I knew who he was and what the ultimate revelation will be. I want each book to take place in a different location, with a distinct element of mystery, each addressing a specific moral dilemma or question. I want each volume in the series to solve a mystery, as Solomon goes through these experiences on his way to finding out historical bits about himself. By taking part in these difficult and dangerous experiences, he will learn more about himself. And of course, I want to take the reader on that same journey with Solomon.

It’s a gratifying challenge for me as writer to tell a satisfying story with a beginning, middle and ending in each book, but also with a thread running through it. It’s as though each book is a bead on a necklace.

There’s something mystical and mythological in your books. I’m reminded of the Myth of the Birth of the Hero by Otto Rank. Will you talk about the “myth” of Solomon Creed?

Even though the Solomon Creed books are modern thrillers, they have historic backstories, whether it’s The Searcher or The Boy Who Saw. And, though the books are thrillers, Solomon isn’t a stereotypical action hero. He’s somewhat ethereal. Typical action heroes have solid pasts—they’re ex-cops or ex-military who use their skillsets to solve crimes. With Solomon, the biggest mystery is himself. He lacks that centeredness. He has a mythological—nearly a supernatural—quality.

Yes, he bleeds and is mortal, but I wanted him to have a somewhat mythical dimension. And the novels raise the question—perhaps even the possibility—that he’s been reincarnated. There’s a tension and a question about the reality of Solomon, and he keeps cropping up in these historical contexts. I like playing with that possibility. As a reader, I enjoy characters who assume a quality of being slightly larger than life, someone who’s slightly other, or heroic. In fact, this Solomon Creed series is effectively, an odyssey of self-discovery.

You left a successful television career to begin writing your first novel. What motivated you to do so?

I was thirty-nine and perhaps it was a classic midlife crisis. I’d done everything I had wanted to do in TV. I always had this notion that I wanted to tell big stories. Approaching forty, I felt I was getting stale with my TV work, and told my wife I’d love to write a book and get it out of my system.

It would mean taking time off from my television job, which was all consuming. I didn’t want to write at night when I would be tired, and leave open the possibility of blaming any failure on fatigue. If I was going to fail, I wanted it to be an honest failure.

When I told my employer what I wanted to do, he offered me a one year sabbatical. That was certainly a sensible way to go, but I turned it down. I felt I had to remove the safety net and take on the dare for myself—without the security of knowing I could go back. I knew writing a novel would be very hard, and wanted to remove any possible temptation to give up and return to my old job.

We saved up some money. I quit my job; we rented out our flat, and went to live in France for six months. That’s how it started.

My first novel Sanctus was a hit and was translated into twenty-seven languages.

What, if anything, keeps you awake at night?

I’m a good sleeper. With three young children, I’m worn out at the end of the day. I do have fitful sleep when I’m about two-thirds of the way through a book. At that point, I know everything I’ve written needs a good deal of work, and there’s a deadline looming. I know I’ll have to tidy things up, and it feels like I’ve got this terribly heavy weight on my back. That’s also the point in the writing where I think the idea that I first thought was really good, suddenly seems like the worst idea anyone has ever had. [Laughter]. And, I still have to show up every day and finish this thing that’s fallen out of favor.

What’s coming next from Simon Toyne?

I’m well into Solomon Creed’s third book which is set in England.

Congratulations on penning The Boy Who Saw, a propulsive thriller with historical, philosophical, mythical, political and religious undertones, a novel that hooked me from the first page and propelled me to the vary last one.

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Filed Under: About Books, Huffington Post Column, Interviews Tagged With: amnesia, conspiracy, history the Holocaust, memory, Murder, thrillers

‘UNSUB’ A Conversation with Meg Gardiner

June 27, 2017 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

Meg Gardiner is the author of 12 critically acclaimed crime novels, including China Lake, which won the Edgar Award. Her best-known books are the Evan Delaney novels. Her latest novel is a taut and terrifying thriller, UNSUB.

UNSUB features Caitlin Hendrix, a detective, whose childhood nightmare reemerges: a serial killer known as the Prophet. He’s an UNSUB—an unknown subject—who again begins terrorizing the Bay Area after a hiatus of 20 years. This series of ritualized murders virtually destroyed her father who had been the lead investigator on the case back then. Caitlin is assigned to the case and must avoid making her father’s mistakes, or worse.

I understand you had some terrifying experiences that led to your fascination with unsolved serial murders such as those appearing in “UNSUB.” Will you share those experiences with us?

The first experience I had was as a child when I saw a police drawing of the Zodiac killer in my local newspaper. It was a picture of a gunman wearing a black executioner’s hood with the Zodiac symbol on its front. Seeing that drawing, I asked my parents what it was, and my father told me it was a picture of the infamous Zodiac killer who murdered people for the hell of it. As a little kid, it shocked and rocked me to think someone could do something like that. It kept me awake at night.

Only a few years ago, I found out there had been two double murders in the neighborhood where I grew up—a safe, easygoing suburban area in Santa Barbara, California. At the time, the murders hadn’t been linked, and it’s only been since the advances in forensic science that investigators determined these murders were committed by that same person: the infamous and still uncaptured serial killer who roamed California. He was first called the Night Stalker and is now called the Golden State Killer.

Learning there was a walking path between where these murders happened and where my brother’s family lived—two-hundred yards away—freaked me out. The crime scenes were directly across the street from his house.

Simply realizing how close these things can come to you, even when your world seems completely normal and safe—knowing someone is out there masquerading as a normal person who has a job, goes to your local supermarket, and has a nighttime hobby of rape and murder—is very unsettling.

Do you think that early, fearful experience of the Zodiac has expressed itself in your writing?

I think the idea that someone is out there when we would all like our worlds to be orderly and predictable left its mark on me.

“UNSUB” features a troubled and conflicted detective, Caitlin Hendrix. Tell us a bit about her.

Caitlin is young, ambitious, green, and haunted by the fact that her father, a homicide detective, had been dealing with this serial killer who destroyed him emotionally and tore his family apart. One of the reasons she’s become a cop and a detective was to be involved with this case, not only to bring the killer to justice, but also to redeem the family name.

Caitlin is a fascinating character. What characteristics make for a good protagonist?

A protagonist must have some burning desire—maybe for justice, survival, love, or passion. I want to explore what my main character both wants and fears more than anything else because that will affect everything she does. What is the protagonist afraid of losing beyond all else?

The serial killer in “UNSUB” is terrifying. What makes serial killers such fascinating subjects for crime fiction?

I think the public has a sense that serial killers are clever; their motives are mysterious; they don’t kill for money or revenge; they’re sneaky and crawl through the cracks while hiding from society. We all want to have a glimpse into the dark side of human nature. We want to try understanding why someone would engage in these kinds of killings.

You became a commercial litigation attorney and worked in that field before becoming a novelist. Tell us about your journey to becoming an author.

I wanted to write from the time I was a child. I grew up in a family of attorneys with fulfilling careers and love of the law. When I finished college, my father suggested that if I wanted to be a writer, I could write while I was half-starving, or I could write when I took a break from my litigation practice.

So, I went to law school. It was a fascinating, challenging and rewarding career. I had three small children and knew I needed a break from going to court, so I took a job teaching legal writing at the University of California. Ultimately, that was my gateway to writing fiction. I eventually escaped from law [Laughter]. I wrote short stories and magazine pieces while I was teaching, and attempted to write a novel, but had no idea how to do it.

Then, my husband was offered a job in London. We moved from Southern California to the UK. I had no job waiting for me and I was the trailing spouse [More laughter] as they called it in the expat community. The kids were out of diapers. I’d told myself I was going to write a novel and I decided it was time to put up or shut up. I wrote a terrible novel which I put away. Then I wrote another which was published in the UK. Then a few more were published there.

So, your novels were published in the UK. How did you become published and well-known in the U.S.?

I had a British literary agent who was shocked that I was published in the UK and almost everywhere else in the world, but not in the U.S. I’d written five books in the Evan Delaney series, but American publishers were uninterested in my fiction.

Then, an American author looked through his closet looking for a book to read on a flight to England. He found my book China Lake, which the publisher had sent him. He probably decided the print was large and easy on the eyes and he stuck it in his carry-on. He read it, and when Stephen King got off the plane, he decided he liked my novel. He read the rest of my books and didn’t understand why I had no American publisher. He kindly mentioned me on his website, urging people to look for my books. He then wrote a column for Entertainment Weekly, again mentioning my books. Strangely, within forty-eight hours of that column being published, fourteen American publishers were interested.

It was all due to the fact that Stephen King is an incredibly gracious and generous person. He supports other writers, artists and musicians and he uses his voice to bring attention to other artists. I’m eternally grateful to him.

You once said, ‘I put my demons on the page.’ What did you mean?

If something scares me, upsets or worries me, if it troubles my sleep, it’s likely to do the same thing to readers, and I can turn that into compelling fiction. I was once on a conference panel and another author said she writes to exorcise her demons. She felt it was cathartic. She asked me if I felt that way and I said, ‘I inflict my demons on my readers.’ [Laughter]. But I try to do it in an entertaining way.

You said you write crime fiction ‘because it gets to the heart of the human condition.’ Tell us more.

Crime novels—whether they’re thrillers, suspense books, or mysteries—always feature people facing the greatest challenges of their lives. Some evil has invaded their world, and chaos undermines everything they’ve known and they must rise to the challenge and put things right. The human condition, as I see it, isn’t about the English professor trying to suppress his crush on the sophomore coed.

A well-known critic once said crime writers lack real talent. You had an interesting response to that statement. What was it?

I thought the entire notion of talent was silly. The idea of talent being everything is really pernicious. The idea that if you don’t have sufficient talent you might as well just give up. As a writer and a parent, I think that can be undermining. Yes, talent is important, but on its own, it’s not enough. Hard work, training, dedication, observing the world, and putting in the work—sometimes joyfully, sometimes as a struggle—that’s how you get to be good at writing or any other endeavor. I said to the critic, ‘I once had talent, but I sold it so I could write a crime novel.’

Your blog is titled “Lying for a Living.” How come?

It’s labelled that because I get to make things up. Things come out of my imagination. It’s a little bit flip. Actually, I think fiction is the lie that tells the truth. The only lies on paper are non-fiction memoirs. [Lots of laughter]. Fiction is a metaphor for life.

What’s the most challenging part of being an author?

I think the most challenging part is executing an idea. Ideas are everywhere. It’s not only coming up with an idea, but turning it into something in three-hundred fifty pages, that’s the challenge.

I understand you were a collegiate cross-country runner and a three-time Jeopardy champion. Will you tell us a few things about your life that readers would find interesting?

I have an overdeveloped trivia lobe in my brain. Jeopardy is the most fun you can have standing up, I’ll just say that. [Laughter].

Is it true that “UNSUB” will also be a CBS-TV series?

Yes, that’s true. It’s been bought by the people behind Justified and Masters of Sex. They are great at developing cool and exciting dramas. I’m very thrilled by it.

Who do you see playing Caitlin Hendrix?

Oh, no. I can’t answer that because everybody who reads UNSUB creates the character in their own mind. In a way, every reader is a casting director and I don’t want to take over that job.

If you could meet any two fictional characters in all of literature, who would they be, and why?

Dave Robicheaux from James Lee Burke’s series, because I’m in love with him [Laughter] My husband won’t appreciate that. And…Kinsey Millhone from Sue Grafton’s series because she’s from my hometown and would be a great friend. If I ever got in trouble, I’d have her to call.

Will you complete this sentence: “Writing novels has taught me___________?”

It’s taught me perseverance and patience. It’s taught me that we all have the possibility to be successful if we take the chance when it’s presented to us.

What’s coming next from Meg Gardiner?

Next is the sequel to UNSUB.

Congratulations on your career and on penning “UNSUB,” a novel Don Winslow compared to “The Silence of the Lambs” for its chilling plot, and about which he said, ‘The UNSUB, or Unknown Subject, at the heart of Meg Gardiner’s thriller is terrifying.’ I agree completely.

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Filed Under: About Books, Huffington Post Column, Interviews Tagged With: detectives, fear, serial killers

‘The Force,’ A Conversation with Don Winslow

June 20, 2017 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

Known to millions of fans, Don Winslow is an author of crime and suspense novels, including a series of five novels featuring private investigator Neal Carey as the protagonist. His highly acclaimed standalone novels include Savages, The Winter of Frankie Machine, The Death and Life of Bobby Z, The Power of the Dog, and The Cartel.

The Force, his latest novel, features Detective Denny Malone, a NYPD sergeant who’s head of Manhattan North’s task force for narcotics, dubbed “Da Force.” For 18 years, Malone has done whatever it takes to serve and protect a city of glitz, glamour, depravity and corruption; a city where no one is clean—including Denny Malone himself.

Very few people know that Denny Malone and his partners have stolen millions of dollars in drugs and cash in the wake of the biggest heroin bust in the city’s history. But now Malone is snared in a trap of competing forces, and must thread his way through conflicts that may involve betraying his brothers and partners, the Job, his family, and the woman he loves.

“The Force” is a mesmerizing novel: part police procedural, and crime novel; and part, epic tale. It’s a searing and soul-searching depiction of a tortured NYPD detective.  You said, ‘This is the book I’ve wanted to write my whole life.’ Tell us about that.

I was born on Staten Island where Denny Malone lives. I was raised in Rhode Island but as a kid I was always running down to New York. I lived and worked there in the late seventies and early eighties. New York has always been a home to me.

But it’s more than that: the movie The French Connection is one of the reasons I’m a writer. I remember distinctly going into the theater on Broadway and seeing that film. I was just blown away by it, and by Serpico followed by Prince of the City. Those were important and evocative works for me, both the books and the films. Having lived and worked in New York and having been so influenced by those movies, I always had an ambition to try writing this book.

In “The Force,” Denny Malone is a conflicted man: he uses drugs, is separated from his wife, feels guilty about his kids, and lives on the edge. Many of your protagonists can be described as ‘messed up’: Frankie ‘Machine,’ Ben and Chon from “Savages,” and Tim Kearney aka Bobby Z. How do you manage to dig so deeply and depict such flawed and troubled people?

Those kinds of people are more interesting. The edge is always more interesting than the center. I recall Michael Connelly and I were at some conference and he was talking about writing. He took a cup and put it on the center of the table. ‘It’s not very interesting now,’ he said, and kept moving it toward the edge to the point where it was about to fall over and shatter. And then he said, ‘Well, now I have your attention. Now, it’s interesting.’

He was dead right about that. He was talking more about action than about character, but I’ve always taken that concept and applied it to character. I think one of the great advantages we have in our genre of crime fiction is we write about people in extremis. We write about people in extraordinary situations. And, we write about flawed people. Before this, I wrote more about criminals than cops, but it’s the same principle. The flaws in these people make them interesting and compelling. At the end of the day, the flaws make us love or hate them.

You and I have been married a long time. You know that you get into a relationship because of someone’s virtues, but after a while you begin to love their flaws. I often feel that way about my characters. I come to love them in spite of and because of their shortcomings. I often think our greatest strengths are also our greatest weaknesses.

That’s true of Denny Malone: the same things that drive him to do great things, also drive him to do bad things.

You have an extraordinary backstory. You’ve been a movie theater manager, a private investigator, led photographic safaris in Africa, hiking expeditions in China, and directed Shakespeare productions in Oxford, England. How have these experiences informed your writing?

I think—and you know this, too—everything we do informs our writing. That’s what makes us writers. Everyday observations and experiences become grist for the mill. More specifically, I grew up on Shakespeare. I was reading and memorizing Shakespeare when I was eight years old. Having the chance to work with great people in England, working with language every day as a director, I had to make the language understandable and physical. I had to bring out the muscularity of the language. It definitely helped inform my writing. My involvement with the theater company was mostly before my first novel was published. I was still struggling to make a living. From seven in the morning until ten at night, I was either rehearsing Shakespeare, teaching it, or talking with other directors. I was constantly immersed in language—with its rhythm, sound and with dialogue, all of which was a tremendous foundation for my writing.

The investigative work was not terribly different from what I do now, in the sense that I looked at lots of trial transcripts, read records, and interviewed people. I developed a capacity to search out certain details, looking for things that didn’t quite match-up. I looked for discrepancies between documents and testimony. That background informs my writing. For example, while writing The Cartel and Power of the Dog, I went through thousands of pages of records. Those were skills I learned as an investigator.

As a photographic safari guide in Kenya, my job was to notice details. For instance, when trying to find a leopard for people to photograph, I had to keep in mind there would be a certain kind of tree at one time of day, and another place at a different hour. In other words, I was always looking at details. I become a trained observer and would look at underlying reasons for things being the way they are.

In crime writing, there are the events, but then there are the underlying reasons for what has happened. Providing that richness is what I hope to give the reader.

As do “The Power of the Dog” and “The Cartel,” “The Force” explores, among other things, the drug trade, politics, police, and corruption. What has drawn you so intensely to these issues?

I never started out to write about the drug world and these issues.

I live near the Mexican border, and back in the late nineties, a massacre occurred just across the border. I wanted to understand why it had happened. I found myself sitting at the keyboard and writing about it.

Living on the Mexican border, I eat more tortillas than bread [Laughter] so it’s very real for me. In the course of researching and writing about it, I’ve met people who keep it vivid for me. It’s one thing to talk about the heroin epidemic, it’s another to go to the funerals.

As a writer, you want to write about the most interesting and important things happening today. I want to write about race relations, about police shootings, corruption and drugs. In life, you can’t separate things from each other; they’re all interconnected parts of a larger piece.

Did growing up in Rhode Island also influence you?

Rhode Island had a large Mafia presence, more so when I was growing up than it does now. It was always around, and I saw it. It was always written about in the Providence Journal, and Jimmy Breslin was a big influence on me. I recall being in high school and reading Breslin’s columns and thinking that’s what I want to do. In college, I was a journalism major. I wrote columns basically imitating Breslin’s style [Laughter].

Is there anything about your writing process that might surprise our readers?

I don’t know if it’s a surprise, but I treat writing like a job. I don’t really believe in inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs.

You know the old saying, don’t you? ‘If you wait for inspiration, you’re a waiter, not a writer. [Laugher]. You can wait on tables at Le Cirque or at a diner, but you’re still a waiter.’ [More laughter]

Let me tell you a cute story about Le Cirque.

Years ago, while working as an investigator, I stayed at the hotel where Le Cirque was located. But I wasn’t going to eat at that restaurant, not at those prices. So, I ordered in some Chinese food. When I got my hotel bill, there was a forty-seven-dollar surcharge for them having let the delivery guy come up to my room with the food. So, the next time I stayed there, I ordered the food and asked the delivery guy to meet me in the hotel lobby. I ate the take-out in the lobby, right outside the entrance leading to Le Cirque. I stood there with a brown paper bag and ate the Chinese food. They told me it looked seedy and asked me not to do it. So, I negotiated with them and they dropped the surcharge.

But getting back to the writing: to me, it’s a deliberate process. It’s not based on inspiration. The other thing that might surprise our readers is I don’t start writing a book until I know the main characters well. I’ll think about them—sometimes, for years, like in the case of Denny Malone.

How did writing “Savages,” the novel, differ from teaming up with Shane Salerno and writing the screenplay for the movie?

They’re two different breeds of cats. One is static, the other is kinetic. One has plenty of time for the story to unfold, the other is on a clock. In a movie, you have to make a scene do five or six things simultaneously. That can be difficult for a novelist.

I understand that “The Force” has been sold to Fox with James Mangold directing, and Ridley Scott is directing “The Cartel,” which is going to be a film. How have these events impacted your career?

For me, it’s been huge. To have directors of that stature is fantastic, and that sunlight reflects on me. The major effect is I now have the economic freedom to write all the time. That’s been true since The Death and Life of Bobby Z was made into a film. I was six published books into my career before I could quit my day job. I always made a living. I wasn’t going to penalize my family for my ambition, but as for how I approach my day? It’s always been the same: Get up and show up.

“The Force” reminds me of “Savages,” which I still view as one of the most audacious pieces of contemporary fiction I’ve read. Both books are written in an edgy, lyrical, cinematic, even radical style. Will you talk about your writing style?

As in architecture, form follows function. I think story dictates style. I try to write from inside the character’s head. It’s kind of sneaky: it’s third person but it has a first-person point of view. Does that make any sense?

Yes, it does. And it’s written in the present tense, which gives everything a sense of immediacy.

Yes, when I began writing in the present tense, the story suddenly had a sense of immediacy it never before had. It was not like I was looking down at a table and describing what was there. So, I’ve stayed with writing my novels in the present tense. That way of writing lets me inhabit a character. It dictates the style, the rhythm and the choice of words. This may sound pretentious, but I try to pay attention to the musicality of the writing.

It doesn’t sound pretentious at all. There is a music to the words.

Yes, there is. I go back to Shakespeare with that concept.  You have to stage it, you have to put it on, you have to hear it. Sometimes when I was writing some of the chapters in The Force, I would listen to the hip-hop music referred to in the chapter, and pump it up to the point where it was painful. I’d write while the energy and edge and anger of the music was pounding in my head. In other scenes, I’d listen to the jazz referred to in that chapter I was writing.

I think readers love being there in the midst of the action. That’s particularly true in the crime genre. There’s a powerful link between film and novels, especially in noir fiction.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers today?

I’d simply say: Write. Like most things in life, it’s a verb before it’s a noun.

The second thing I’d urge is: Don’t write anything unless you have to. I would say you shouldn’t write unless you feel an inner compulsion to do so. And then, don’t listen to most people.

The third bit of advice is simple: just read. Read good books. I just finished War and Peace for the fifth time in my life. I wanted to see how a great writer handles a multi-generational story. So, one has to read good things.

Another pointer: Don’t pay attention to so-called peer-reviews. It’s too easy to get nibbled to death by ducks. [Laughter].

I’d say one other thing: there’s a difference between a writer and an author. An author is published. I would say to any writer, if you sit down and write something and finish it and wrestle with it, you’re a writer. And don’t let anybody ever tell you you’re not a writer. And you’ll have my respect as a writer. Welcome to the brotherhood and sisterhood.

Other than writing about crime, what do writers like Michael Connelly, Lee Child, John Sandford, David Morrell, Laura Lippman, Reed Farrel Coleman, Patricia Cornwell, and so many others have in common?

I think these writers and so many others like them share something important: a great sense of humanity. I think they know people and love to explore what humanity really means in terms of language, story, and in terms of place.

Will you compete this sentence: “Writing novels has taught me___________?”

Tenacity. It’s taught me tenacity [More laughter]. It’s a marathon. It’s like I’m at mile twenty-two and think, I’ll never make it. And you feel the same way the next time, but now you have the experience and can tell yourself you got through it last time and you’ll get through it again. And it will come out pretty well.

What’s coming next from Don Winslow?

I’ll probably write another book. [Laughter].

Congratulations on writing “The Force,” a brilliant novel, rich in language, conflict, setting, and character. It resonates deeply with realism, honesty, and sheer magnetism. Fans of “The Godfather,” “Mystic River,” “The Wire,” and “The Departed” will absolutely love this book.

 

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Filed Under: About Books, Huffington Post Column, Interviews Tagged With: Cartels, corruption, drugs, police, tragedy

‘The Marsh King’s Daughter,” A Conversation with Karen Dionne

June 19, 2017 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

Karen Dionne is a member of the International Thriller Writers, where she has served on the board of directors. She has been honored by the Michigan Humanities Council as a Humanities Scholar.

The Marsh King’s Daughter features Helena Pelletier who has a loving husband and two young daughters. The family lives on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Helena has a dark secret: she’s the product of an abduction. Her mother was abducted as a teenager, and Helen is a result of that event. She and her mother lived for the first twelve years of Helena’s life in the company of the kidnapper—Helena’s father—until he was captured and sent to prison.

When a prison inmate kills two guards and escapes from prison, Helena’s past threatens to return, and only she possesses the skills to hunt her father down—ones her father taught her.

The very first lines of the novel are compelling. “If I told you my mother’s name, you’d recognize it right away. My mother was famous, though she never wanted to be. Hers wasn’t the kind of fame anyone would wish for. Jaycee Dugard, Amanda Berry, Elizabeth Smart—that kind of thing, though my mother was none of them.” How did the idea for this novel come to you?

I woke up in the middle of the night with those sentences fully formed in my head. I wasn’t dreaming about the character, although I was looking for a back story about a character in another novel. I was in that dream state where you can’t get out of bed and write it down, so I repeated it enough times so I’d remember it I in the morning.

I wrote a few paragraphs which became the first section of the novel.

Once those first few pages were written, by what process did the novel come into being?

As I wrote those paragraphs that morning, I almost gave the book an urban setting. I was thinking about the women in Cleveland who were hidden in plain sight. But at the last minute, I changed the setting to a cabin on a ridge, surrounded by swamp in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The reason I chose that setting was I wanted to make the book different; and, my husband and I homesteaded in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the 1970s with our infant daughter. I know that area very well.

In the following days, the character kept talking to me, and I kept writing little snippets in her voice—such as her imagining what it was like for her mother to give birth in the cabin. I finally decided to find a story for her. I went to my childhood book of fairy tales because I always loved fairy tales—the darker, the better.

You’ve anticipated my next question which is: the novel takes its title from a Hans Christian Anderson fable. Tell us about that.

I also like modern stories that have fairy tales as the bones of the story. I paged through my book of fairy tales, and when I found Hans Christian Anderson’s The Marsh King’s Daughter, it gave me chills. Everything in that fairy tale dovetailed beautifully with the story I was starting to tell. The daughter in the fairy tale is the child of an innocent and a monster—she has a dual nature, which I envisioned for my character.

Using one of the main story threads in the fairy tale that resulted in the redemption of that character, I structured my story to determine what would happen with Helena. I named her Helena because in the fairy tale, the character’s name is Helga.

Not only did the character of the fairy tale mesh with my story, but the fairy tale was set in a northern Viking marsh.

It was astonishing. I knew I was on to something, and it just developed from there.

You paint a compelling picture of Helena’s life (and her mother’s) while being held for years by her father. She has a complicated relationship with him. Some would call this a Stockholm Syndrome. Will you talk about that?

I don’t consider Helena’s relationship with her father to be a Stockholm Syndrome. I think her relationship with her father is a lot more complicated than that. In many ways, it’s the same as any child’s relationship with a parent. When we’re small, we don’t judge our parents as good, bad, moral, or evil. We love them because they’re our parents. I’ve always been fascinated by people who survived a far less than perfect childhood and made something good out of themselves. I see Helena as an extreme example of this. Her situation was very stark—there was no one other than her mother and father. At the beginning, she loves him unconditionally, but he’s manipulating her. But her attitude toward him changes over time. I won’t say anymore because I don’t want to spoil the book for readers.

In some ways, The Marsh King’s Daughter and its descriptions of the wilderness remind me of Jack London’s writing. Tell us about that.

I lived in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for thirty years. Like Helena, I love wild places. I feel very much at ease with nature. I wanted to convey my love of the wilderness to readers. I really feel the book is partly my love letter to the Upper Peninsula.

The novel is replete with psychological suspense. Did you intend it to be a suspense story?

When I started writing the novel, I didn’t know what I would write. As I said, the character came to me and I started writing down her story. I wasn’t sure if it would be a thriller or literary fiction. I think it helped to enhance the book because I didn’t slot it into any particular mold. I was just writing Helena’s story in the most compelling way I could. And it turns out that there’s a strong psychological component to the book.

Your prose is quite lyrical and yet, crisp. Who are your literary influences?

I enjoy reading books that have won Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and Booker Prizes. I want my prose to be of good quality. I try to reach up. But I also admire the writing of Lee Child in his Jack Reacher series. It’s very spare. He told me he deliberately writes at a fourth-grade level because he wants to reach as wide an audience as possible. I admire the way he can write a simple sentence and include just one descriptor or one adjective or adverb and it’s perfect for hitting that note. So, I like making my prose a combination of the two—elevated but very accessible.

What’s your writing day like?

I write all day long. I start at about five a.m. My best work is done in the early morning. I hit a lull in the mid-afternoon and write again in the evenings.

If you could have dinner with any five people, real or fictional, living or dead, who would they be?

They would be the kind of people who’ve accomplished something elevated or who have taken a stand in life. Martin Luther King comes to mind. So do Gandhi and Jesus. I’d add Bill Gates because of his philanthropy and also, Jimmy Carter.

What’s coming next from Karen Dionne?

I’m writing another standalone novel that’s also set in the Upper Peninsula. It’s psychological suspense and will also have a fairy tale element.

Congratulations on penning The Marsh King’s Daughter, a superbly written and mesmerizing novel that’s been praised by the likes of David Morrell, Lee Child, Megan Abbot, Karin Slaughter, and many others.

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Filed Under: crime, Huffington Post Column, Interviews Tagged With: abduction, crime, fairy tales, hostages, kidnapping, Stockholm Syndrome

‘Am I Being Too Subtle?’ A Talk with Sam Zell

May 11, 2017 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

Sam Zell, a self-made billionaire and chairman of Equity Group Investments, started out with a larger than life personality, an ability to see what others did not, and a willingness to take prudent risks. “If everyone is going left, look right,” is one of his compelling beliefs, and he acts decisively on his intellect and instincts. Over the years, he’s sponsored nearly a dozen IPOs and has created thousands of jobs. He’s active in a diverse group of industries, including real estate, manufacturing, logistics, health care, and communications. One of his mantras is, “If it ain’t fun, we don’t do it.”

Am I Being Too Subtle takes readers on a fascinating journey across Sam’s business and personal landscapes in an entertaining way that sheds light on an iconoclastic and legendary entrepreneur.

Your first entrepreneurial business experience with supply and demand occurred when you were twelve years old. Tell us about that.

My parents moved to the suburbs when I was twelve. They’d started me in Hebrew school when I was five, so by twelve, I needed an advanced school that didn’t exist in the suburbs. While my friends played baseball after class, I got on the train every day and went to the city. That gave a curious twelve-year-old boy an opportunity to see Chicago without a chaperone.

I discovered was there were magazine stands beneath the el tracks. Some of the magazines there weren’t for sale in the suburbs. In 1953, a local guy named Hugh Hefner came out with a magazine called Playboy. I quickly realized this was going to be in great demand among my friends because none of the suburban stores would carry something as risqué as that magazine. [Laughter].

I would read it on the way home. A friend looked at it and said, ‘Wow! Would you sell me your copy?’ It cost me fifty cents and I quoted him a price of three bucks. That opened my eyes to the fact that where the demand significantly outstrips the supply, margins could be very great. I was able to turn it into a viable business, and I imported lots of Playboy magazines to the suburbs. [More laughter].

As a second-year college student, you began a small business dealing with fraternities. Tell us about that.

I’d joined a fraternity during my first year at the University of Michigan. Fraternities always had pledge formals. The fraternities would give each attendee a memento of the evening. They were usually large glasses or dishes. I came up with the idea of selling the fraternities something different. My most successful product was an eight-foot-long stuffed snake.

So, I spent many a late-night tying ribbons with the fraternity’s or sorority’s name around these snakes to personalize them, and then I’d deliver the snakes. It was very profitable.

Why is the book titled Am I Being Too Subtle?

I went back and forth trying to think of potential names for the book. When we started thinking about why I’d succeeded beyond my own expectations, it struck me that I was very proud of the fact that no one has ever left my office and said, ‘What do you think he means?’

I’ve always been very direct with people. Though sometimes I may pay a price for my candor and lack of subtlety, it’s a clear way to achieve my objectives. When meeting with people and discussing different opinions, I sometimes jokingly ask, Am I being too subtle? Or I’ll say, Should I talk slower? Somehow, that mantra of mine best describes the spirit of the book.

Am I Being Too Subtle? details your first real estate investments while you were a student at the University of Michigan. Will you talk about that?

When I was a college junior, a friend and I wanted to live off-campus, rent-free. We went to the owner of a building and convinced this guy to hire us as managers in exchange for rent. This was the beginning of our rental management operation which grew exponentially over the next few years, and all through law school.

Simultaneously, I bought my first apartment house—a three-unit building for $19,500, with $1,500 down. We cleaned it up, repainted it, changed the furniture, and doubled the rent.

During the three years of law school—which I thought was an incredible bore—I kept my sanity by building a real estate business. I ended up buying a square block, house-by-house, and got very involved in the business. It taught me a lot.

After graduating from law school, I had to decide if I wanted to stay in Ann Arbor and be a big fish in a small real estate pond, or return to Chicago. I chose to return to Chicago to test my limits, and find out what I could do.

After returning to Chicago, Am I Being Too Subtle? describes an interesting element in your life. You were a practicing attorney for about four days, and then went into your own business. Will you explain?

On my first day of work at a Chicago law firm, I was given the task to write a contract between a linen supply company and a university. For those who don’t know, after graduating from law school, you know virtually nothing about law.

I was doing my best to draft this agreement. After two days, I sent my effort off to the senior partner. When it came back to me, it looked like the guy had slit his wrists all over it because the papers were covered in red marks. It was clear I wasn’t the greatest scrivener in the world, and it also became clear to me that the legal profession was excruciatingly boring.

Despite having a pregnant wife at the time, the Friday of that first week, I went to the senior partner, and as only a twenty-four-year-old could say, I said, ‘I didn’t think what I’m doing is a good use of my time.’ He asked, “What are you going to do?’ ‘I’m gonna go back to what I was doing at Ann Arbor,’ I replied.

That was the totality of my legal career: four days.

However, despite law school being one of the worst things I’ve ever endured, the training was incredibly important. We live in a legalistic society. Over the last fifty years, my legal training and its focus on how to think have been extraordinarily valuable. From that perspective, going to law school was vital for me, though I can’t imagine why anyone would want to practice law. [Laughter].

Am I Being Too Subtle is filled with very personal stories. One of the most compelling is how your parents came to America. Tell our readers about that.

My parent lived on the eastern side of Poland until August thirty-first of 1939.

Hitler attacked on September first of that year.

The details of their trip are harrowing.

On August 24, 1939, my father was on a business trip to Warsaw when his train made a stop at the halfway point. He saw a newsboy selling papers and stepped off to buy one. The headline read that Germany and the Soviet Union had just signed a nonaggression pact. He knew with certainty that Poland, squeezed in the middle between Germany and Russia, would be attacked from both sides and be divided between the two aggressors. It was time to get out. My father immediately crossed the tracks to board a train heading back home.

His train arrived in Sosnowiec at 2:00 p.m. It was a ten-minute walk home, and when he got there he told my mother to pack what she could carry. They boarded the 4:00 p.m. train out that afternoon.

He took my mother and sister, Julie, to a relative’s house in Kielce, about seventy-five miles away, and then returned to their hometown in one last effort to beg their families to leave Poland with them. But, they refused. So, my parents and sister started out alone on a nearly two-year odyssey. The Germans invaded Poland at dawn. My father had caught the last train out of Sosnowiec before the Nazis bombed the railroad tracks.

My parents and sister spent the next twenty-one months travelling east, which was the only direction they could go, eventually arriving in the United States in May of 1941.

I was born in September, so, I was really the child of immigrants.

As a result, I came to understand the importance of immigration, and realized that immigrants are a self-selected population of risk-takers. The reason the United States is exceptional is simple: we’re filled with immigrants, people who took immense risks in coming here rather than simply believing their lives elsewhere would be ‘okay.’

Unfortunately, my parents’ families who choose not to go with them, didn’t survive the Holocaust.

Speaking of your parents, both had an enormous influence on you. Tell us about that.

In our house, it was very clear that love was abundant and wonderful, but respect was required. I was always sensitive to my parents’ position. Frankly, there were lots of situations where I disagreed with them. Growing up in that kind of household had profound implications for the decisions I would later make. My curiosity and appreciation of international issues are very much connected to the fact that I realized we were given the extraordinary opportunity to become Americans. It bred in me a sense of patriotism and a need to learn about the rest of the world.

How and why did you get the moniker the Grave Dancer?

In 1977, I was buying lots of distressed assets. I was asked by Real Estate Review to write an article about my experiences. Trying to decide on a title that would reflect what I was doing, I decided the piece would be called The Grave Dancer. That caught on. As I bought more and more distressed properties and businesses both in and outside of real estate, the Grave Dancer moniker just stuck to me.

You’ve worn jeans to work since the 1960s.  You’ve even worn them to the fanciest restaurants on the planet. Am I Being Too Subtle describes the unique culture at Equity Group Investments. Will you tell us about that?

I think it comes down to a very simple mantra: If you dress funny and are really good at what you do, you’re eccentric. If you dress funny and you’re not so good at what you do, then you’re a jackass.

From the beginning, we realized at EGI, that if we really excelled, we would get a pass on almost anything we did, so long as it was legal. We work very long days, and the last thing we want to do is dress in straight, uncomfortable clothes. We started coming to work in casual clothing. After wearing a suit and tie to work for a couple of months, I said to myself, ‘This is crazy.’ So, I just started dressing accordingly. In 1969, our clients wanted to come to our offices to see how anyone could possibly dress like we did and still do a good job. I think we were testing our limits.

Testing your limits is what you’ve done throughout your career, isn’t it?

It’s always been my intention. It’s been my mantra.

If you could live your life over again, would you do anything differently?

Of course, there are things that might have been done differently, but I only look forward. I’ve never rued any decisions I’ve made. I never sat around thinking, ‘If only I’d gone right instead of left.’ I don’t spend much time worrying about what I could’ve or would’ve or should’ve done. It’s much more important to focus on what I’ll be able to do.

Enormous wealth provides great opportunities as well as potential predicaments. Will you talk about that?

One thing I hope I convey in the book is for me, money is only a way of keeping score. It’s not the ultimate goal.

Being economically productive has given me resources well beyond my ability to spend. I make lots of charitable contributions. Having the means to make a difference in people’s lives is really an extraordinary gift. Perhaps, it’s the most important gift success has given me.

My wife, Helen, has established a creative writing program at the University of Michigan. I’ve created a real estate program at Wharton. I not only fund endeavors, but I personally involve myself with them. I concentrate on programs that can make a difference. I very strongly believe anyone can write a check and put their name on a building. My goal is to create programs that change the way people think and to make a difference in the world.

What about the predicaments of great wealth?

My first reaction to that question is that I’ve lost a sense of privacy. I’ve been in the public eye for more than thirty years. Some people would love that. I’d much prefer not to walk down the street and have someone whisper to somebody else, ‘That’s Sam Zell.’ My diminished privacy is an unfortunate development.

How about wondering if people are being genuine with you or simply ‘stroking’ you because of your wealth?

Stuff like that happens every single day. I’ve always been somewhat cynical. I don’t know if I became more of a cynic by being wealthy, but I know I’ve often avoided people because I don’t want to get caught up in those kinds of hustles.

What, if anything, keeps you awake at night?

Many things in the world are disturbing. But, I’m sometimes kept awake by thinking about the future—not so much my own, but my family’s; and what’s going to happen in the world. I wonder what opportunities await us.

The last chapter of Am I Being Too Subtle? details the “rules” for success. They’re all unique, but most intriguing to me is ‘Obey the Eleventh Commandment.’ Tell us about that.

I once did an interview with a reporter who asked me if I had a mantra for success. I thought about it and said, ‘The Eleventh Commandment is Thou shalt not take one’s self too seriously. That’s been an important part of my life. Nobody laughs at me more than I do. No one’s more willing to challenge my own ideas that I am. One of my favorite comments to my associates is, ‘I’m not interested in your agreeing with me. Take me on. Challenge me.’ By not taking myself too seriously, I avoid falling into the traps egomaniacs suffer from.

Do you ever think of retiring?

People often ask me when I’m going to retire. My answer is, ‘Retire from what? I love what I do. The reason I’m good at what I do, is because it’s not a burden. It’s a joy. It’s what gives me fulfillment.’

Congratulations on penning Am I Being Too Subtle? a highly readable and revealingly personal book filled with unique insights, and unvarnished straight talk about business, people—their quirks and potentials—and about life itself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Filed Under: About Books, Aging, Huffington Post Column, Interviews

‘Little White Lies,’ A Conversation with Ace Atkins

May 4, 2017 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

Ace Atkins is the bestselling author of 21 novels, including The Fallen and now, Little White Lies. Ace has been nominated for every major award in crime fiction, including the Edgar Award. A former newspaper reporter and football player at Auburn, Ace also writes essays and investigative pieces for several national publications including the Wall Street Journal, Garden & Gun, and Men’s Journal.

Little White Lies picks up on Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels for which Ace was selected as the writer by the Parker estate. The story beings with Connie Kelly who thought she found her perfect man on an online dating site. She fell so hard for M. Brooks Welles, she wrote him a check for nearly $300,000 to be invested on her behalf. Soon afterwards, both her money and Welles are gone. When Spenser discovers everything about Welles was phony, it’s just the beginning of a trail leading from Boston to the backroads of Georgia, where deadly surprises await Spenser and his friend Hawk.

Before we talk about Little White Lies, some questions about Ace Atkins. Was there an event or influence in your early years that made you want to become a writer?

The biggest thing for me was I really loved books as a kid. I wasn’t just a causal reader. I really was obsessed with books. In high school, I became a book collector of rare editions and I was very into Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, so it just fed into my wanting to write my own stories.

You obviously have a natural talent for storytelling, but you were also influenced by these early exposures. In your view, is becoming a writer an inborn trait or something one learns? Is it nature or nurture?

I’ve thought about that with my own kids. I think there are kids who tend to have a richer fantasy life than others. They seem to have more imagination and possess a creative tendency.

I think the most valid view is a writer has to have a little bit of both. There must to be talent and innate curiosity, but a writer should hone these abilities to translate what’s inherently in his mind on to the page. So, it’s a bit of DNA coupled with learning the craft.

You were a varsity football player at Auburn and became a journalist. How did that come about?

It wasn’t easy [Laughter]. My biggest motivator was I didn’t want to become a football coach. I majored in mass communications, studying screen writing, and also took English and Southern literature courses.

I had a friend who said ‘It you want to become a writer, the best place to do it is to go into the newsroom.’ I thought about people like Hemingway and Graham Greene and other writers I respected who honed their craft as journalists. I was living in Florida and took a job with the St. Petersburg Times. I was scraping by earning pennies writing stories. I’m not kidding, I was paid thirty bucks per story. If I got fifty bucks, it was a windfall. Eventually, I became a fulltime reporter.

It took a few years before I got my sea legs because I didn’t have a journalism background. It was also a bad time with the recession. Reporters were being laid off, but eventually, I became a staff writer at the Tampa Tribune. That experience was valuable because the editors helped me hone what I was doing and I became a much better writer.

How did your career as a journalist prepare you for writing fiction?

One of the things I see with amateur writers, or those who haven’t been in the news business as print journalists, is a failure to get to the point of a story. As a journalist, you learn that words are cheap, and that everything you put on the page is not magic. Having worked with some very tough news editors, I learned how to get to the point of a story. For instance, in a news story, I might have two-thousand quotes, but I had to decide which were the best quotes to use in a story. I learned the meaning of dialogue and which words had the most impact. I learned how to write good sentences and to write with clarity and color.

Those were the lessons that prepared me to become a fiction writer, drawing on my training and experiences writing news feature stories.

I understand Little White Lies is loosely based on an ex-FOX News pundit’s false CIA claims and other con men you covered as a journalist over the years. Will you talk about that?

I’ve always been fascinated by con men. Let me tell you something, Tampa and the St. Petersburg area of Florida are con man havens. Certain kinds of people who’ve screwed up go there to reinvent their lives.

I was really fascinated by Wayne Simmons. His story is relevant to today’s news cycles where people are debating what is truth versus what is fake news. People who watch news programs on television may not realize that what they’re seeing is programmed more for entertainment than for imparting accurate information.

This guy, Wayne Simmons, was able to work his way onto television shows claiming to have been a CIA analyst and officer. He was eventually ‘outed” by people who had actually worked for the CIA. He conned a woman out of a few hundred thousand dollars in a real estate scam.

I also ran into a story about a man I covered as a reporter. He’d worked a similar kind of scam with women all over Tampa. The CIA scam is the best one these people use. It’s the greatest go-to for con men because the CIA cannot confirm or deny employment. It can’t be verified or disproven. While I was working at the Tampa Tribune, I wrote about this guy and did a three-part series on con men.

Since Spenser never had to go up against a good con man case, I figured Little White Lies would involve this kind of scam. Years ago, I actually met Frank Abagnale, a reformed con man who was about to have a movie made about his exploits. Catch Me If You Can is based on his story. Another con man scam is someone claiming to have been a former Navy SEAL. I know a former SEAL who ‘outs’ about thirty of these guys every single day.

I’ve noticed that in Little White Lies and other books in the Spenser series, Spenser has a cynical and edgy sense of humor. Will you talk about the role of humor in thrillers and mysteries?

There’s humor in Spenser’s world view as originally written by Robert B. Parker. And, it’s somewhat consistent with my own view of things. Spenser is the same as he was in the 1970s. Ironically, I feel I have more in common with Spenser than with my own creation, Quinn Colson.

As for humor in thrillers and mysteries, when I pick up a book that doesn’t have a thread of humor in it, I have very little patience for it. I sense my patience dwindling as I get older. The writers I really respect, and who write with a nice helping of humor—for instance, Carl Hiaasen—do so, even though they write serious stories. I’ve been writing fiction for almost twenty years, and as an older writer, I realize it’s something I enjoy incorporating into my writing. Raymond Chandler wrote about some very dark alleys in LA, but he wrote with humor, as did Bob Parker. Humor made Spenser very special for me.

Little White Lies has some chilling fight scenes. Will you talk about constructing such pulse-pounding scenes?

In his later years, Bob Parker got away from some of the raw violence. In his last few books, the violence was somewhat bloodless. The fight scenes in his early books were really nasty and didn’t feel choreographed. And Spenser did not always win, but he always persevered. I’ve tried to craft Spenser’s fight scenes with realism. Violence is ugly. It’s not a video game. I write it with detail, grit and authenticity.

In Bob Parker’s early books, gritty violence was a hallmark of the series, and fans commented they liked that very much.

You’ve written various series with different protagonists. Which character has been the most compelling for you to write?

The most compelling for me would have to be Quin Colson. I’m vitally invested in watching Quinn grow and evolve. I’ve been writing the Spenser novels for seven years. He’s a fully formed man who knows who he is. He’s well aware of his faults and strengths.

Quinn Colson is more of a work in progress. He’s a younger man who is changing. Like many heroes in legends and myths, he’s gone off to war, has come home and must fight things in his own backyard. It’s interesting for me to see who he will become. When I first created him he was twenty-nine years old. Now, I hope I’m writing him as an older man who’s going through an evolution.

Can you complete the following sentence? Writing novels has taught me____________.

I think it’s taught me to understand people more than I did before. I would like to say that it’s given me empathy, but I don’t think I’m there yet. Writing novels has helped me understand people more than I did before. It’s helped me understand the motivations of people—even the bad guys. It’s allowed me to explore human nature. So, sort of like Quinn Colson, I’m evolving, too.

What’s coming next from Ace Atkins?

The new Quinn Colson book, The Fallen, is next. My foreseeable future involves Spenser and Quinn. I’m very fortunate because I do love these two characters.

Congratulations on writing Little White Lies the latest in a series described by the Associated Press as “Classic Spenser—the Spenser of wry wit, tasty food and drinks, hard workouts and lethal confrontations…once again, Atkins has delivered a thriller that evokes the best of Parker’s Spenser series.” The AP assessment is right on the money!

Mark Rubinstein’s latest non-fiction book is Beyond Bedlam’s Door: True Tales from the Couch and Courtroom, a medical/psychiatric memoir.

 

 

 

 

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Filed Under: About Books, crime, Huffington Post Column, Interviews

‘Fallout,’ A Conversation with Sara Paretsky

April 18, 2017 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

Sara Paretsky is the award-winning author of the V. I. Warshawski detective novels. In 1982, when Sara wrote Indemnity Only, she revolutionized the mystery novel by creating a hard-boiled woman investigator.

Growing up in rural Kansas, Sara came to Chicago in 1966 to do community service work in the neighborhood where Martin Luther King was organizing. Sara felt that summer changed her life; and after finishing her undergraduate degree at the University of Kansas, she returned to make Chicago her home.

She received a PhD in American History and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Sara shares her heroine’s passion for social justice. In 1986, she founded Sisters in Crime to support women mystery writers. She established a foundation to support women in the arts, letters, and sciences; and has endowed scholarships at the University of Kansas, as well as mentoring students in Chicago’s inner-city schools. She serves on various advisory boards for literacy, and for supporting the mentally-ill homeless.

Having received many literary awards, her novels have been translated into nearly 30 languages.

Fallout continues the V.I Warshawski series. V.I. is on the trail of a vanished film student and a faded Hollywood star. The film student is a prime suspect in a drug-related ransacking of a local gym. As V.I. pursues the couple, she begins to realize much more is at stake than it first appeared. As she tracks her quarry through a university town in Kansas, she encounters secrets and lies going back fifty years. As the mysteries accumulate, so does the body count.

Fallout has V.I. leaving her comfort zone, Chicago, and going to Kansas. You mention in a note that this is part of your own “origin story.” Tell us more.

I set the story in Kansas because much of the story had to do with research on biological weapons which is a field of study in which my father had been involved as a cell biologist. I could only imagine placing the story at the University of Kansas where he did his research and also taught. So, I devised a way to get V.I. out of Chicago and have her travel down the Mississippi and over to Kansas. I grew up in eastern Kansas and am very familiar with the area.

The issue of race appears in this novel. You mentioned you relied partly on your own memories with regard to this history. Will you tell us more about that?

My father was one of the first Jews hired at the University of Kansas. When my parents had enough money to buy a house, the realtors told them there was one section of town where the Jews and African-Americans lived. Because my parents didn’t sound Jewish, they were shown homes in other areas. They opted out of the area and bought a house in the country. But that was my first exposure to issues of race in the city. We didn’t have a large African-American population, but they were barred from college-track classes at the high school, and couldn’t live in certain college housing. My father was intent on bringing students of all races and nationalities into his lab at college. Things began coming to ahead in the late 1960s and early 70s, so awareness of racial issues was part of my early life.

As the novel progresses, medicine and bacteriology come into play. How did this idea come to you?

My dad worked on an organism that causes Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. It’s closely allied with typhus which is one of the diseases the Soviets were interested in developing as a bioweapon. Two labs doing work similar to what my father was doing were located behind the Iron Curtain. He never got permission to visit those labs.

In the mid-sixties, there was a conference about this organism held in Czechoslovakia. He attended and persuaded a technician to inject him with their strain of this organism so he could bring it home in his bloodstream in order to study it. I wanted to write that story, and did so in a short story in a collection called Ice Cold, edited by Jeffery Deaver. My father got off the plane from this conference with a fever of one-hundred and five. He didn’t start antibiotic treatment until his lab technician could take a blood sample from him. He didn’t endanger the other passengers on the plane because the disease can only be transmitted by a tick bite.

I don’t know if he was a hero, an idiot, insane or a combination of the three. So, this found its way into Fallout.

Which, if any, aspects of Sara Paretsky are embodied by V.I. Warshawski?

Oh, I would say that V.I. is the tough tenacious person I would be if I weren’t something like Hamlet, “sicklied over with a pale cast of doubt.” V.I. says the kinds of things I sometimes blurt out, but more often I only imagine saying them. In Fallout, the character Sonia has more of my tendencies.

Is there anything about your writing process that would surprise our readers?

I wish my process wasn’t so tormented. I always feel you can smell burning rubber when I’m writing. [Laughter]. I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to work out story lines. For example, right now I’m working on a book and when I got to page ninety,  realized it isn’t working. So, I must burn more rubber before I can go any further.

So, the excruciating aspects of your writing process might surprise our readers?

Exactly. By the end of a novel, I send it off with a certain amount of dread because there’s chewing gum and scotch tape holding the manuscript together. [Laughter].

If you could read any one novel over again, as if it were for the first time, which would it be?

Of the books I’ve read within the last decade, certain ones stand out: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, and Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel.

Which book you read as a youngster has stayed with you?

Little Women was the iconic book of my childhood. I first read it when I was seven or eight. It was a bit above my reading level. Later, I read it many, many times. It was a magical book for me.

What’s coming next from Sara Paretsky?

The working title of the next novel is Shell Game, which has V.I. dealing with Syrian immigrants and ICE agents.

Congratulations on writing Fallout, a riveting novel that’s received praise from many of the biggest names in the mystery-thriller genre, including Lee Child, Lisa Gardner, Jeffery Deaver, Harlan Coben, Karin Slaughter, and C.J. Box among others.

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Filed Under: About Books, Huffington Post Column, Interviews Tagged With: crime-fiction, detectives, fiction, women detectives

Now More Than Ever: The Most Important Book of Our Time

March 13, 2017 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

Arnold Newman, with a Ph.D. in conservation biology, is the Founder and Executive Director of the International Society for the Preservation of the Tropical Rainforest. For over five decades, he has been an advisor to 80 countries in which tropical rainforests are located, and this work has taken him to all continents where these forests exist.

His book Tropical Rainforests is viewed world over as the lead book on our endangered habitat and its survival for the Third Millennium. It is very likely one of the most important books published in our time.

As described in the book, what is a tropical rainforest?

A tropical rainforest is a place in which a consortium of material and climate come together in a perfect combination of temperature and rainfall. The botany takes care of the rest. There must be at least 80 inches of rainfall per year for the environment to form a tropical rainforest, the most life-giving environment on our planet.

As we cut and denude tropical rainforests, there is less evapo-transpiration coming from the leaves, which is responsible for the rainfall nourishing the rest of the mass of the trees and the undergrowth. Ten years of investigations by climatologists have discovered there is less rain falling on Amazonia, which has led to the environment drying out, causing devastating results.

What about our tropical rainforests makes them so important to our planet?

Let me name some of the products that come out of the tropical rainforests. Just look at our breakfast cereals. Rice Krispies come from Asian forests; corn flakes come from harvests in South America. Enormous amounts of sugar come from Indian rainforests. Pineapples come largely from Venezuelan rainforests. Hash brown potatoes don’t come from Ireland, but are derived from Andean rainforests. Much of our orange juice comes from Asian forests; tomato juice from Central America; cocoa—not from Switzerland—but from Latin American rainforests. Coffee and tea are grown in Asian and Ethiopian forests. The origin of our beef cattle owes a great deal to the benteng bull, originally found in the Java rainforest.

What about medicinal preparations?

We’ve analyzed only one percent of tropical plants for possible use in medicines. Fifty percent of commonly used medications are derived from plants, and twenty-five percent of prescription drugs are derived from tropical rainforests. The National Cancer Institute recognizes that seventy percent of plants with anti-cancer properties grow only in tropical rainforests. We’ve only analyzed one-percent of those tropical plants for possible use of their alkaloids.

One plant, the rosy periwinkle, produces seventy-five alkaloids—and only two of them have produced vinblastine and vincristine, chemotherapy drugs which bring about a ninety-nine percent remission in acute lymphocytic leukemia, and a high rate of remission in Hodgkin’s Disease. This single plant, with only those two alkaloids, has given us this incredible benefit.

Your book describes some of the threats to our tropical rainforests. Tell us about them.

Imagine rivets popping from an airplane in flight. What’s the tipping point when one more rivet pops and a wing falls of during flight?

We’re creating climate change by deforestation of the tropical rainforests. Tropical deforestation is responsible for nineteen percent of greenhouse gas emissions. If we could prevent half of that deforestation, we would be cutting back more on our emissions than has been done since the issue of climate change was first discussed. We’ve seen how difficult it is to curtail the use of fossil fuels, but it’s far easier to cut back on the denuding of the tropical rainforests.

Currently, we’re very quickly obliterating our tropical rainforests. They’re being decimated because of our planetary birth rate and the consequent demand that places on the use of resources. Humanity gained its one-billionth person in 1835. Presently, we add one billion people every thirteen years.

The second factor in the denuding of the tropical rainforests is the massive industrial complex which excavates the riches of these forests. This primarily involves logging for mahogany and other timber species. Every mahogany tree felled causes seven other trees to die. The sun penetrates to the forest floor and weed species flourish, all transforming the forest into something different from what it had been. The logging roads make easy access for peasants who then farm, using slash and burn techniques which further erode the forests. More and more land is used as the ash from the burned forests makes the land usable for only a few years; consequently, the people move on; cut and burn more forests; and the problem widens. Cattle pastures last for six years, but after that use, the land becomes so degraded nothing else will grow. Even with abundant rainfall, the formerly life-giving land remains barren.

Palm oil and soy bean production are very lucrative businesses. Enormous amounts of money are made by very few people, who often bribe the ministries of agriculture and forest in tropical rainforest countries in order to be allowed to strip the timber and establish massive plantations.

What happens to our planet if we lose more of the rainforests?

Climate change is accelerated by tropical rainforest destruction. Deforestation is now causing superstorms, floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornados, cyclones, and glacial melting all over the world. We’re seeing a rising sea level which is wreaking havoc on island nations like Bangladesh. Because of melting of the Himalayan glaciers, lowland villages are being flooded and destroyed. People are migrating to the capital of Dacca, overwhelming the city. Similar migrations are beginning to occur all over the world, and are part of the problem causing the refugee crisis in the Middle East and in Africa, along with civil wars.

Rising sea levels will impact everyone on this planet.

This not only happens in places like Bangladesh; let’s look at Miami Beach.

It sits on fossil coral, which is porous. Even with water breaks to stop the sea from coming in, seawater seeps in under the walls. It’s moving inland to Miami. One day in the not-too-distant future, there’s going to be an enormously wet wake-up call.

Your book describes steps we can take to ensure the survival of the rainforests. Tell us about them.

Tropical rainforests hold ninety percent of all life forms on earth. It’s our duty to put a stop to their destruction. Each of us is responsible for creating the market for tropical rainforest products. Globally, sixteen million trees are cut each day. If we change the motivation for industries to denude these forests, they’ll find other ways to make their livelihoods.

Twenty years ago, I helped Los Angeles pass into law a provision that tropical hardwoods would no longer be purchased for city benches or be used in city facilities.

We still have a chance to save the forests and our planet. We must maintain pressure on the government. One letter to a representative elicits a form letter from that representative. Three to five letters or emails, elicit personal responses. If a member of congress recognizes there’s a huge constituency concerned about this issue, there will be legislative pressure put to bear for environmental safeguards. We have to demand action on the local, state and federal levels and we have to change some of the ways we live our lives.

Congratulations on writing this important book with its clear explanations, awe-inspiring photographs, and eye-opening diagrams explaining so many issues crucial to our planet’s survival. This book is so important, it has a Foreword written by the Dalai Lama, and an Introduction by Jane Goodall.

 

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Filed Under: About Books, Huffington Post Column, Interviews Tagged With: deforestation, ecology, medicine, nature's balance

‘Say Nothing,’ A Conversation with Brad Parks

March 7, 2017 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

Brad Parks, a former newspaper reporter, is the only author to have won the Shamus, Nero, and Lefty Awards, three of crime fiction’s most prestigious prizes. Say Nothing is his 7th novel.

Say Nothing features Scott Sampson, a federal judge who’s held in great esteem. He has a lovely wife and two great kids. One morning, Scott and his wife, Alison, discover that their six-year-old twins have been kidnapped. Scott receives a call warning him to decide exactly as he’s told in a drug case he’s about to rule on. If he doesn’t follow these instructions, his children, Sam and Emma will suffer the consequences. He is told not to call the police, or anyone else. He’s told the Say Nothing.

But the call is only the beginning of a terrible ordeal. The first case is only a test run. It becomes clear, the kidnappers want to influence the outcome of the most high-profile trial of Judge Scott Sampson’s career. The ensuing events are harrowing.

When we last talked, you told me the newsroom has given you enough material for twenty novels. How did the idea for Say Nothing come to you?

I owe my friend Steve Hamilton a debt of gratitude. He gave me some advice years ago. He said, ‘You have to write the book that scares you.’ Ever since then I’ve ruminated about that. One day while I was jogging, I asked myself, What scares me? I’m the father of two elementary school-age kids. Nothing scares me more than the thought of something happening to them—like a kidnapping. I asked myself, ‘Who would want to kidnap my kids?’ From a storytelling standpoint, a ransom demand would be boring. I began considering what kind of character might have something to offer a kidnapper that could not be gotten any other way. And then it came to me: a federal judge might be a good target because he could not be bribed. He’s a moral paragon and the only way to influence him would be to have control of his children. He would then be forced to do the kidnappers’ bidding.

In Say Nothing, Scott Sampson is faced with ethical dilemmas of momentous proportions. Talk to us about the role of conflicting ethical decisions in your thrillers.

Conflict is paramount in many novels, especially in thrillers. However, in Say Nothing, there’s really no decision for Scott Sampson to make. Nothing matters to him but his children. His future, his financial situation, his reputation and his job are all secondary to the wellbeing of his kids. He really has no choice and it’s interesting to see how the decision he must make impacts him in the larger sense. He makes the decision he must, and the question becomes, what will it cost him? As the novel continues, it costs him more and more. Yet, he’s still willing to put everything on the line. He began the book with an ideal life: he has a wonderful job, a lovely wife and healthy children. He has everything a person could want. And then, slowly but surely, every one of those things is taken away.

Say Nothing has been described as a ‘Domestic thriller.’ Define that for our readers.

Different people might have slightly different definitions of a domestic thriller. To me, it’s a thriller in which the protagonist is someone you could meet at the grocery store. It doesn’t involve a superhero with Special Forces training. Rather, it concerns an Everyman or Everywoman. That’s always appealed to me because that kind of character is easy to relate to.

I’ve read a few of your novels. Among other things, they all involve the importance of family. Will you talk about that in relation to the novel?

As a writer, I need an emotional entrée to a book. If I care deeply about the characters and what’s happening to them, I’ll be able to make the reader care, as well. The notion of family resonates with me and with many other people. I could not have written this book when I was single and not yet a parent. Being a husband and parent gave me the insight to be able to write this novel. I’m always writing from a place of personal knowledge. When you get rid of all the trappings of your life, what really matters above all else is family.

Many thrillers involve either a missing person or a kidnapping. These issues seem to hold a special attraction for so many readers. Will you talk about that?

It goes to the heart of the definition of a thriller. Of course, a mystery is about solving a crime, while a thriller is about preventing one. The threat of something awful happening—like someone going missing or being kidnapped—is something we writers use in our writing. The threat must be real to the reader.

For instance, I’m afraid of spiders. I was once sitting in my office and a huge spider appeared on the wall. It was nearly as large as my hand. I tried to kill it with a rolled-up newspaper. But this creature was so huge, it laughed off my feeble attempt and disappeared. So, I was left with this massive spider lurking somewhere in my office. And then, I suddenly felt something tickle my leg. I jumped and screamed. I think thrillers must have something like that spider at their core. So, I’m always looking for that spider.

You mentioned writing from some well of personal knowledge. You’re neither an attorney nor a physician. Yet, Say Nothing involves easily understandable and vivid descriptions of the federal court system and certain aspects of medicine. Tell us a bit about your research for this novel.

As a newspaper reporter, I was no stranger to courtrooms. The law has always fascinated me. For this book, I shadowed a federal judge for a while and learned a great deal about the federal system and the law. I could never have written about Scott Sampson without that access.

The dialogue in Say Nothing is very realistic and highly believable. Tell us about your process for writing dialogue.

It helps that I was a newspaper reporter. I spent years listening to people talk. I learned to listen carefully and to distill the essence of what people were saying. I always looked for quotable moments. When writing, I read my dialogue out loud. I ask myself, is this how someone would talk? It it doesn’t sound realistic to me, I re-do it.

What has surprised you about the writing life?

What’s surprised is that I’ve learned that some of my greatest enjoyment comes from being read by other people. I love getting reader emails such as, you wrote this character…do you know my Aunt Betty? That kind of feedback tells me the reader has internalized my story and fleshed out the character even beyond my own imagination. That shared experience is wonderful and I enjoy that kind of magic.

You’re having a dinner party and can invite any five people, living or dead, real or fictional, from any walk of life. Who would they be?

I’d invite Harper Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, and we might as well have Jesus at dinner. He might have some answers to questions we all have. [Laughter] Then, to balance it out, I’d invite Mohammed.

What would you all be talking about.

I think we’d find universal themes to talk about. We’d realize issues that drove people in Jesus’s time were the same things Mark Twain wrote about and Thomas Jefferson wrestled with when he wrote the Bill of Rights. And those same things still drive us today. So I think the conversation would be about timeless issues of the human condition.

What’s coming next from Brad Parks?

Another standalone for which I don’t yet have a title. It concerns family again. [Laughter] It’s about a woman whose child is taken from her by Social Services. Someone is framing her as a criminal in order to take away her child.

Congratulations on writing Say Nothing, a propulsive, harrowing, and deeply moving novel that kept me turning pages because I had to find out what would happen to this extraordinary family.

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Filed Under: About Books, crime, Huffington Post Column, Interviews Tagged With: dialogue, domestic thrillers, kidnapping, legal thrillers, mysteries

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