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‘The Travelers,’ A Conversation with Chris Pavone

January 10, 2017 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

‘The Travelers,’ A Conversation with Chris Pavone

Chris Pavone, formerly a book editor, is the author of two previous New York Times bestsellers, The Accident and The Expats, and winner of the Edgar and Anthony Awards. His latest novel is The Travelers.

The Travelers features Will Rhodes, his wife Chloe, and Malcomb, his boss at the magazine Travelers at which Will is an international correspondent writing about food, wine, foreign cultures, celebrities and expats. But Will has no idea of the secret agendas of some people, including those of his wife and Malcomb. When Will travels to Capri, Bordeaux, Paris, London and Argentina, he finds himself at the center of a dangerous web, one imperiling his marriage, career, and his life.

The Travelers takes readers from the beaches of France, to Barcelona, New York, Argentina and to Iceland, all places hiding a dark story of surveillance, lies and espionage. How did you acquire so much knowledge about clandestine espionage operations?

[Laughter] I don’t think I’ve acquired much knowledge about espionage.

I imagined this novel as a story about people who don’t really know for whom they work. We all live in a universe in which we’re either asked to or are forced to accept certain premises about our employment without having the opportunity to verify them. There are some types of employment where it’s perfectly clear for whom you’re working: for instance, teaching in a public school, your boss is the principal, who works for the Board of Education which is publicly funded, it’s very clear.

It’s less clear in the private sector. We go to work every day and often don’t know who owns the company or what their real agenda may be. We don’t truly know what kind of contribution we’re making to some hidden end-game. It took me a decade of working for a large company before I had the curiosity to find out who actually owned that company.

That experience became the premise of this novel. Espionage is somewhat incidental to the story I wanted to tell.

In most espionage novels, the characters risk their lives trying to save somebody, or while protecting a nation from some threat. In The Travelers, that’s not what’s going on. I used espionage as a device to heighten the characters’ personal dramas.

Self-interest thrusts the characters into conflict with one another. Deceit in both personal and business relationships results in their lives spinning out of control.

Speaking of conflicts, I loved your depictions of the inner workings of various characters’ minds, especially Will’s and his boss, Malcomb’s. Will you talk about that?

I try to construct each of my novels around one central theme—core tensions shared by the characters. In The Travelers, everyone is defined by his or her relationship to work. I put each character on a different rung of the ladder: from the lowliest assistant to a powerful man in the world of media.

Will occupies a middle rung; while Malcom, as the editor, is perched at the top.

Their seemingly comfortable and enviable lives have been intertwined for many years, and they consider each other friends; but certain tensions are added to the mix when Will finds himself working for Malcom. That tension is central to the drama in this book.

One man is lying to the other about something critically important to the other.

We’re not  worried someone’s going to get killed, but rather, we’re worried someone will be found out.

Much of The Travelers orbits around marital secrets, as did your novel, The Expats. Will you talk about secrets and lies in a marriage?

I think secrets are a compelling issue for a novel to explore. Most people are married and I don’t think Im going too far out on a limb by saying no one is completely truthful about everything. What if a particular lie your spouse is telling you has enormous consequences ?

What if he or she isn’t who they claim to be ? What if what they actually do for a living is not what you’ve been led to believe they do? What if you’re waking up each morning next to someone who at least in part, is a stranger?

Although I don’t have those concerns about my wife [Laughter]; at times, I  do have those irrational thoughts about people in general. And, I don’t think I’m alone in that regard. So, I like that kind of tension in a novel.  It allows the reader to root for both sides: on one hand, you want the person to be found out, but you also want the secrets to remain intact.

I was impressed by your rich descriptions of even the most quotidian things: an airport, a party, a yacht, a room, or a building’s basement or lobby. How would you describe your writing style?

I think my writing style is sensual. I attempt to engage all the reader’s sense memories when I’m writing descriptive passages. I use descriptions to set a mood and drive the reader to expect or worry about something. It helps to engage every sense—not just seeing things, but tasting, smelling, and hearing things. I try getting as much of that onto the page as is reasonable. I try to engage readers so it feels like they’re actually there, in the scene.

Who are the writers who have influenced your own writing?

That’s such a hard question to answer. The truth is that I’m influenced in some way by practically everything I read, and I read an enormous amount of fiction. I’m constantly taking notes on things that occur to me while I’m reading someone else’s book. The jottings have nothing to do with the book I’m reading, but something I’m reading triggers my own imagination in a completely different direction. There’s very little that makes me want to write more and better than my being immersed in a very good book.

What do you love about the writing life?

I absolutely love writing. As a kind of labor that people will pay you to do, I can’t imagine anything better. I love making things up and my favorite part of writing is when creating the first draft of a novel. I love making decisions and finding new plot twists. I love the invention. The one thing I don’t like is that too frequently, I get ideas in the middle of the night. I have to write them down or I won’t remember them. Then, I can’t get back to sleep because my imagination is all fired-up.

What’s coming next from Chris Pavone?

I’m writing a sequel to my first book, The Expats. This one is called The Paris Diversion and features some of the characters from the first novel.

Congratulations on writing The Travelers, a propulsive, richly imagined, insightful, literary thriller that had me guessing all the way to the last pages.

Mark Rubinstein’s latest book is Bedlam’s Door: True Tales of Madness and Hope, a medical/psychiatric memoir.

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Filed Under: About Books, Huffington Post Column, Interviews Tagged With: Conflict, espionage, lies, novel, secrets, writing

‘Guilty Minds,’ A Conversation with Joseph Finder

July 19, 2016 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

Joseph Finder is the bestselling author of twelve previous novels, including The Fixer and Suspicion. His bestsellers Paranoia and HigJoe FinderGuilty Mindsh Crimes both became major motion pictures. His awards include The Barry, Gumshoe, and The International Thriller Writers Award for his novel, Killer Instinct. His new Novel is Guilty Minds.

Guilty Minds, the third book in the Nick Heller series, has Nick Heller called to Washington, DC to defang a potentially explosive situation. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is about to be defamed by a sleazy gossip website called Slander Sheet, which publishes online dirt about celebrities and politicians. They’re about to expose the Chief Justice as having liaisons with an escort, paid for by a wealthy casino mogul. But when the call girl is murdered, the case veers into dangerous territory.

Nick Heller is a fascinating character. Tell us a bit about him.

Nick is a private spy, not a private eye; and as such, he doesn’t work divorce cases. Instead, he gets involved in high stakes cases which require his using the sophisticated methods and techniques employed by intelligence agencies.

Nick’s the son of a Wall Street tycoon who was found to be crooked and wound up in prison. His childhood of wealth and privilege was suddenly upended and became one of poverty. Nick’s familiar with the wealthy and powerful, but is not intimidated by them. In fact, he’s somewhat cynical about them. He’s got a dry sense of humor and is very loyal, but he’s stubborn. And, he’s quite streetwise.

The first lines of the novel are ‘Lies are my business. They keep me employed.’ How do these lines lead into the heart of the novel?

Lies and trouble are Nick’s business, and a lie is at the heart of Guilty Minds. The book explores the uncovering of lies, and the damaging power some lies possess because of the Internet’s extraordinary ability to disseminate “dirt” and lies.

In Guilty Minds, Nick and his assistant, Dorothy, rely heavily on technology. Has the explosion of technology been a help, hindrance, or both to thriller writers?

I think it’s a help, not a hindrance. Writers can agonize over the fact that with cell phones, no one is out of reach. In the old days, you had to get to a phone booth. I think it’s a matter of playing with the technology we have. We’ve all had cell phones that ran out of juice, or have been in dead zones. Or, we’ve lost our phones. There are great possibilities with technology.

 In Guilty Minds there’s technology far exceeding the use of cell phones.

Yes, and it’s all reality-based. I talk to friends who are private investigators and intelligence operatives. I research the latest technology. If the technology is described properly and used to full advantage, a writer can create a very exciting narrative.

Guilty Minds seems to draw from actual instances of scandals involving prominent government officials. Were these events part of the inspiration for writing the novel?

Yes. I’m fascinated by websites like Gawker and TMZ. They’re irresistible. Everyone reads them. Yet, the standard of proof is very low. We’re reading no more than allegations, and people often believe what they read. I love stories about Washington scandals, such as the one about Wilber Mills and his dalliance with an Argentinian stripper, Fanny Fox. Some of the most powerful politicians have been brought down, completely derailed, by dalliances. So, a website focused on politics provides so much potential for both abuse and discovery of scandal.

This is the third book featuring Nick Heller. How has he evolved over the course of the novels?

He hasn’t. He’s the same guy he was in the first two books. I often tell my readers they don’t have to read the first two to enjoy the third one. They all function as standalones. Nick is just who he is, fully formed. He’s a character like Jack Reacher, or Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. They appear to us, full-grown and fully developed. Nick will find out things about his past, his family, but doesn’t really evolve.

Having read The Fixer and Guilty Minds, it strikes me that you seem equally at home setting a story in Washington, DC or Boston. How come?

I consider myself a Bostonian, but have spent time in Washington. The two cities have very different feelings. To write a story based in Washington, I go there to do research. But in essence, I’m quite familiar with both cities.

Do you ever read your earlier novels? If so, how do they strike you now?

I enjoy looking back over what I’ve done, and those books represent a sort of photograph of where I was at that point in my career. Some of my earlier books are international conspiracy novels, and although I still write conspiracy novels, I don’t do international thrillers any longer.

Now, I’m interested in different things. We grow and evolve as writers. Looking back on some of the earlier books, I have mixed feelings about them, but they were the best I could do at that time.

Even today when I re-read a book shortly after it’s been published, I usually find something or other I would have done differently. In fact, with every book, you should be more demanding of yourself. If we’re not getting better at our craft, something is wrong. Actually, that can make writing new novels harder. Because our critical faculties are more highly developed, we become less tolerant of mistakes.

 Do you have a favorite among all your own novels?

I have a couple. One is Extraordinary Powers, the novel that did the worst in the marketplace. I’ve always felt a connection to that book and have been very protective of it. It’s quite different from the rest of my fiction, and involves mind-reading. The other is Paranoia, my first New York Times hardcover bestseller. It was a breakthrough novel in ways for me, and was a novel that was as close to my real voice as possible. I appreciate different things about each book.

Who are the authors you read these days?

There are many. I read a lot but try not to read when I’m working full-blast on a novel. I read Nelson DeMille, Harlan Coben, Lee Child, Chris Pavone, Lisa Gardner, and John Grisham, among others. There’s really fine writing being done in the thriller genre.

If you could read and experience one book again as though reading it for the first time, which would it be?

It would probably be A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. I read it as a kid and it blew me away. E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime would be another, along with William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice. These were books in which I was completely immersed.

What’s coming next from Joseph Finder?

A standalone is coming next. I love writing both the Nick Heller books and the standalones. You can do different kinds of stories with standalones—ones where the protagonist’s life is turned upside down. You can’t do that in a series novel because Nick Heller has to survive each book. But, returning to a Nick Heller book feels like I’m coming back to an old friend.

Congratulations on writing Guilty Minds, a high-octane thriller melding mystery, murder, politics, and the awesome power of technology in our hyper-connected world.

Mark Rubinstein’s latest novel The Lovers’ Tango, won the 2016 Benjamin Franklin Award Gold Medal in Popular Fiction

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Filed Under: About Books, crime, Interviews, psychological thriller Tagged With: espionage, scandals, Supreme Court

‘The Black Widow,’ A Conversation with Daniel Silva

July 18, 2016 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 These books about this art restorer, assassin and spy have been translated into twenty-five languages. Before becoming a novelist, Daniel Silva was the Chief Middle East Correspondent for UPI in Egypt, and the Executive Producer of CNN’s Crossfire.Daniel Silva photo c Marco GrobThe Black Widow, cover

In The Black Widow, ISIS has detonated a bomb in Paris, and a desperate French government wants Gabriel to eliminate the man responsible before he can strike again. A master terrorist known as “Saladin” is intent upon establishing a new caliphate in the Islamic State, and he will strike throughout the West, including on U.S., soil to reach his goal. Gabriel hatches a daring plan: he will insert an Israeli agent—a woman—posing as a vindictive Palestinian “black widow” into ISIS.

Looking at actual events and the publication date of The Black Widow, it’s clear you wrote about the Paris bombing before last November’s attack. How did it feel to see your own plot element play out in real life?

It felt so terrible that I seriously considered setting the book aside and writing something else. In the end, I chose to pretend the Paris attack in November had not happened in the universe where my characters live and work. The similarities between the attack—the use of bombs and guns, the links to Molenbeek in Brussels—were all written before the actual Paris attack.

I think people like me who’ve been writing about jihadism in Europe and have been watching and listening carefully to ISIS, were not at all surprised by what happened in Paris. We all knew because of the number of foreign fighters who have gone to Syria and who then return to Europe with their European passports which allow them freedom of movement within the EU, that Europe is low-hanging fruit for ISIS.

Everyone who reads international thrillers and spy novels knows about Gabriel Allon. Is it true he was never intended to be a character in an ongoing series?

It’s true. When I wrote about Gabriel in the first book, he was going to appear only in that novel and then quite literally, sail off into the sunset. My publisher at the time, Putnam, wanted another book on Gabriel. My editor was the great Phyllis Graham, and I explained to Phyllis all the reasons why an Israeli continuing character was not going to work. [Laugher] I felt there was too much anti-Israeli sentiment and frankly, too much anti-Semitism in the world for Gabriel Allon to work in a mass market way. No one has been more surprised than I to see an Israeli character appear at the top of the New York Times bestseller list on a regular basis.

What happened after book two?

Well, then came book three. [Laugher] My third book in the Allon series is called The Confessor and I originally conceived that book as a non-Gabriel Allon novel. After the success of that book, I had the sense I had a series going.

What do you think makes Gabriel Allon such an enduring and popular character?

I really think it’s the fact there are two distinct sides to his character. He’s a man of violence, a soldier and assassin, but he’s also an art restorer. His duality allows me to construct my stories in a way that might make them appeal to someone who might not necessarily read spy fiction. I know for a fact that many of my readers really don’t read much else in the genre besides the Gabriel Allon books. I think that’s a testament to the character. He makes the books appealing to a broader range of people. I also think the abundant controversy about Israel and the Middle East gives him a certain heft and significance. It gives him some personal heat because the subject matter is both real and critical. Many historical tides move the character of Gabriel.

The heroine of The Black Widow, Natalie Mizrahi, is a fascinating character. Tell us a bit about her.

Natalie was born and raised in France and is a recent emigre to Israel. She and her family moved there like many thousands of other French Jews to flee the rising tide of anti-Semitism in France. She’s a skilled emergency room physician at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and happens to speak fluent Arabic. She’s recruited by Israeli intelligence to undertake a mission ‘That no one in their right mind would ever undertake,’ as it’s described in the book.

What would Gabriel Allon say is now the greatest threat to the world arising from the Middle East?

I think he would say ultimately, the threat is twofold.

As an Israeli, he would view the nation-state actors as the biggest threat. I think he would say the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran in the near future—let’s be clear: it’s only a temporary scaling back of the program that will expire in the blink of an eye in the historical arc of the Middle East—is the biggest threat to Israel and the world.

That said, there’s a sea of instability in the Middle East. Various Middle East factions are fighting each other, and ISIS is now a real threat both regionally and worldwide. The region is a cauldron of unrest. Millions of refugees pouring out of the region have politically destabilized Europe. That’s a consequence of the Syrian civil war with which we’ll live with for a long time. The greatest potential threat to Western security is some sort of radiological or nuclear device being smuggled into an American city. A very senior Israeli intelligence officer said to me, ‘We don’t know what we don’t know.’ We really don’t know the capabilities of ISIS but we should assume the worst, that they will try getting their hands on the most destructive weapons imaginable.

The Black Widow, as do all your novels, has plot twists and explosive turns. Do you usually pre-plan them or do they arise as you write?

It depends on the type of plot twist. For the most part, I don’t write with a structured outline. I have a sense of the story and some touchstones and landing pads before I start, but I begin writing with very little plotted out.

How did you learn so much about intelligence and spycraft as exemplified in The Black Widow and your other novels?

I have read every single major work on the history and practice of intelligence. Then, quite frankly, some of my best friends are spies and I spend a lot of time around them. I don’t go to an Israeli who’s a former spy or intelligence officer and ask ‘How do you do that?’ I can make that stuff up. But I do like to capture their view of the world, their characters, and sense of humor.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned about writing?

I always thought the dumbest piece of advice I ever heard was ‘Write what you know.’

I disagree. Write what you’re passionate about. Write what you’re interested in writing. Choose your material; then bury your face in it. I learned not to worry before starting a project. I’ve never quite understood the fear some writers have about beginning a novel. I never fear beginning something; I know I can always fix the book.

The other very important lesson I learned is to try to enjoy the writing of that first novel, because once you’re a published author, it’s never quite the same again. It’s important to make sure you’re doing something that’s a lot of fun to do.

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

Churchill would be there. I’d invite George Orwell who might be coughing and wheezing and not feeling well but I’d love to talk to him.  It would be fun to have FDR along with Churchill—to have the two leaders who saved the world sitting at the same table. How about inviting the acerbic Graham Greene? And then, I’d love to have Hemingway join us. Can you imagine the amount of drinking going on with Churchill and Hemingway there? [Laughter]. I’d watch the whole evening explode.

What’s coming next from Daniel Silva?

I haven’t quite decided and I’ve learned a very important lesson: never talk about a book that isn’t written yet. [Laughter]

Congratulations on penning The Black Widow, a page-turning novel exploring the foundation of ISIS, jihad, the Syrian civil war, anti-Semitism in France, and the future of the Middle East.

 

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Filed Under: About Books Tagged With: espionage, Israeli Mossad, syping, Terrorism

“Secrets of State” A Conversation with Matthew Palmer

May 27, 2015 by Mark Rubinstein Leave a Comment

Matt Palmer Author Photo Credit (C) Kathryn BanasMatthew Palmer is a 24-year veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service. Having been at ground zero for many pressing global issues from Kosovo to Africa, he has extensive knowledge of international crises. His debut thriller, The American Mission, has been compared to John LeCarre’s The Constant Gardner. As a son of the late Michael Palmer, Matthew’s writing pedigree is clear.

Matthew’s new novel, Secrets of State, is a gripping thriller focusing on the world’s most dangerous nuclear threat—war between India and Pakistan. After leaving government service, the novel’s protagonist, Sam Trainor, is working for Argus Security, a private consulting company. He stumbles across a startling bit of intelligence: a telephone transcript implying the delicate balance between India and Pakistan could be deliberately upset, and it becomes clear something catastrophic could be looming: nuclear war between these South Asian giants. The clock is ticking as Sam Trainor must do what he can to prevent a world-changing disaster from occurring.

Read more on the Huffington Post >>

 

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Filed Under: About Books, book launch, Huffington Post Column, war Tagged With: Character, conflict-free diamonds, espionage, India, Michael Palmer, nuclear war, Pakistan, storytelling, thrillers, U.S. State Department

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