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Jay MacDonald

NonfictionTrue Crime

Ben Mezrich

Interview by Jay MacDonald

You’ve probably never heard of Thad Roberts, the brilliant young NASA recruit who pulled off one of the most audacious heists in history when he tiptoed out of the Johnson Space Center one rainy Texas night in 2003 with a 600-pound safe containing $20 million in moon rocks.

Even Ben Mezrich, the gonzo-inspired biographer of Ivy League geeks (Bringing Down the House), drew a blank when Roberts called him out of the blue following an eight-year prison sentence. Mezrich fields hundreds of such calls these days, thanks in part to the success of the Oscar-nominated film The Social Network, based on his bestseller about the founding of Facebook, The Accidental Billionaires.

“Everyone who does something kind of crazy calls me, so I get like 10 of these a day and 99 percent of the time it isn’t something I can use,” Mezrich says by phone from Boston. “But this one was different.”

If Mezrich’s hunch is correct, you will recognize Thad Roberts from the talk show circuit by summer’s end and, despite yourself, you’ll either love him or hate him, all because of Sex on the Moon, Mezrich’s stranger-than-fiction, true-life thriller of a man who went where no man has gone before.

For a participatory journalist like Mezrich, who describes himself as “Hunter S. Thompson without the guns, alcohol and drugs,” the Roberts story ticked all the boxes: a charismatic dreamer with a troubled past, a Romeo-and-Juliet love story, a geek-alicious high-tech setting, an ingenious Oceans 11-style heist—and perhaps the most boneheaded mistake any man ever made to impress a girl.

Even better, it was a journalist’s Holy Grail: a truly uncovered story.

“It was completely covered up; there was nothing on it,” Mezrich says. “NASA never wanted this story to get out. In prison, Thad was basically strong-armed not to talk about it. Nobody knew the story.”

It goes like this: Roberts, a working-class Mormon, is ostracized by his parents for having premarital sex. He and his girlfriend soon marry and plunge deep into debt while Thad, a triple major in physics, geology and anthropology, studies hard to earn a spot as a NASA co-op, essentially an astronaut intern. Once at Johnson Space Center, Roberts reinvents himself from loser to winner by daring to take risks, thus becoming a leader of the co-ops.

Thad’s marriage is on shaky ground when he catches a glimpse of a cache of invaluable moon rocks, now considered waste by NASA because they’ve been contaminated by scientific study, and soon becomes obsessed. When a risk-taking new co-op captures his heart, the two cook up a scheme with a third ally to steal the lunar samples, sell them to a collector in Antwerp, Belgium, for $100,000, and disappear into private research.

Unfortunately for Thad, the buyer is well aware that it is illegal to traffic in moon rocks and tips the FBI to the scheme. The night before they’re busted, the daring couple spend the night in an Orlando hotel room with lunar samples from Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 moon walk tucked under their mattress—hence the book’s intriguing title.

Mezrich didn’t know what to expect when he met Roberts in a Utah hotel lobby near where Roberts is now completing his Ph.D.

“First of all, the kid’s a genius, absolutely a genius,” Mezrich says. “He was this charismatic, incredibly smart guy and he had done something incredibly stupid out of love. What was interesting was how complex his personality was. He wasn’t just this guy who stole something to make money; he was on his way to being an astronaut, to achieving his dream. That made him different from all of the other characters I’d written about.”

Mezrich spent months obtaining the voluminous FBI file on the case through the Freedom of Information Act, including transcripts of conversations by wired FBI undercover agents that add authenticity to much of the dialogue.

“When you’re interviewing a guy like this, your first question is, how much of this is true?” he says. “Thad felt his sentence was very harsh, that he was very unfairly characterized by the FBI and others. He did steal a 600-pound safe full of moon rocks, but at the same time, they got them back. For him, it was almost like a college prank. But NASA didn’t look at it that way at all.”

True to his gonzo ethos, Mezrich managed to tour NASA with remote help from Roberts. “They didn’t know I was writing the book and I got this Level 9 tour,” he recalls. “While I was walking around NASA, I was texting back and forth with Thad and he’d be like, ‘Now go to the back of the room, there’s a door there, go through that door, take a left, that’s the room! ’ So I got to see everything with him guiding me.”

Mezrich received pushback from NASA, which labeled him persona non grata at the Johnson Space Center. The women involved shut him out as well, having moved on with their lives. It will be no surprise to the author if critics lodge their usual objections to the way he reinvents dialogue and weaves whole cloth from random threads of speculation. He’s used to controversy, he says. It comes with the territory. It’s not bad for sales either.

“There are always going to be a million articles about the form of nonfiction that I write,” he says. “But I’m very clear up front [about] exactly what I’m going to do and how I’m going to do it. This story follows very closely with the facts. It’s written like a thriller but it’s very, very true.”

Will readers embrace Roberts?

“He’s an interesting guy,” Mezrich says. “I think when he starts going on TV, people are going to be fascinated by him. Some will think he’s awful and he’s a thief; others are going to see him as a romantic character. I think he’s somewhere in the middle.”

You’ve probably never heard of Thad Roberts, the brilliant young NASA recruit who pulled off one of the most audacious heists in history when he tiptoed out of the Johnson Space Center one rainy Texas night in 2003 with a 600-pound safe containing $20 million in moon rocks. Even Ben Mezrich, the gonzo-inspired biographer of […]
Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

Don Winslow

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Don Winslow knows a thing or two about riding waves.

Not the lazy SoCal curls that buoy San Diego's surfing private eye Boone Daniels and the colorful supporting cast in The Dawn Patrol and its new sequel, The Gentlemen's Hour, but the swells of incipient fame that have inexplicably failed to yield Oprah-level notoriety for one of America's great mystery stylists.

That's OK with Winslow, a gracious guy with an easy laugh and the patience of a surfer. He is familiar with the downs, having already quit this writing gig once and returned to his private-eye career after his critically acclaimed Neal Carey PI series failed to connect with readers in the early 1990s.

Besides, his wave is finally coming in, big-time.

Over a period of 15 months, Winslow has essentially created his own legend by writing three novels that share almost nothing in common besides their author. Savages, his darkly comic Paso Doble involving three Cali dreamers and a nasty Mexican drug cartel, garnered rave reviews. The film version, with Oliver Stone directing Pulp Ficton co-stars John Travolta and Uma Thurman, began shooting in July.

Satori, his authorized sequel to Trevanian's Shibumi, was an expertly crafted, pitch-perfect, left hook of a spy novel set in China and Vietnam that knocked out the critics.

The Gentlemen's Hour is an endless summer love letter to surfing culture.

Now, to complete the trifecta, comes The Gentlemen's Hour, which reunites Boone Daniels with his Dawn Patrol buddies Johnny Banzai, High Tide, Hang Twelve, Dave the Love God and a new addition, the properly sexy British lawyer Petra "Pete" Hall.

On this wave, Hawaiian surfing legend Kelly "K2" Kuhio is brutally murdered outside The Sundowner surfer bar by a gang of surf punks. The Dawn Patrol is outraged when Petra enlists Boone to work on behalf of the accused, the son of a wealthy mover and shaker, to solve the murder.

Like its predecessor, The Gentlemen's Hour is an endless summer love letter to surfing culture, overflowing with musical polyglot surfer slang, a Mexicali soundtrack and enough twists and cutbacks to make it an epic ride.

Winslow's not exactly one of those writers who returns to the ocean to recharge. He admits he's not much of a surfer and lives 40 miles inland on an old ranch in the high desert above San Diego, "east of the five" (as in Interstate 5) in surfer lingo. But the imagery and bebop language of the surf community are flavors he likes, tools that allow him to explore the mystery that lies beneath.

"I think when you live in these sunny climes, there's a lot of beauty, which is real, but underneath that, there's some ugly. And sometimes it's the ugly that funds the pretty," he says. "As a writer, you can have it all. To me, crime fiction is a lot like the ocean: there's always something happening on the surface, and that's real, but there's always something happening underneath that you don't see that's driving what you see on the surface."

Winslow learned to create a community on page from palm trees, sand and driftwood by reading the Travis McGee novels of John D. MacDonald, the guy who virtually invented the modern beach bum detective.

"What we learn from John D. and those cats is that place is a character," he says. "Readers like to not only hang out with people; they like to hang out with people in a place. For me, the location is just one of the major characters. It informs who everybody is."

In the sequel, Boone subtly moves from the Dawn Patrol, which is made up of early risers who squeeze their surfing in before work, to the Gentlemen's Club, professionals and others who gather after the Dawn Patrol has departed. Could it mean Boone is actually growing up?

"You didn't think it would happen, did you?" Winslow laughs. "The surf culture in many ways is a perpetually adolescent state because, at its core, it's irresponsible; it's about freedom from obligations. But I think reality hits and, at a certain age, that's harder and harder to do."

Would Winslow consider another outing with Trevanian's charismatic spy Nicholai Hel?

"It was a blast to do but I don't know; we'll see," he says. "I've got three or four books of my own that I want to do right now. It was a lot of fun but one's enough."

Don Winslow knows a thing or two about riding waves. Not the lazy SoCal curls that buoy San Diego's surfing private eye Boone Daniels and the colorful supporting cast in The Dawn Patrol and its new sequel, The Gentlemen's Hour, but the swells of incipient fame that have inexplicably failed to yield Oprah-level notoriety for […]
MemoirArts & Culture

Stephen Sondheim

Interview by Jay MacDonald

It is well-nigh impossible to take composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim out of the theater or the theater out of Stephen Sondheim.

At 81, the august talent behind such indelible Broadway musicals as A Little Night Music, Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum has just completed Look, I Made a Hat (Collected Lyrics 1981-2011), his second and final compendium of reflections, digressions and harangues that began with last year’s bestseller, Finishing the Hat (Collected Lyrics 1954-1981).

Neither conforms to the conventions of memoir. Instead, ever the showman, Sondheim places his lyrics center-stage, preferring to confine his comments and observations to expansive play introductions, boxed marginalia and occasional carping from the cheap seats. It’s a wonderfully theatrical way of describing his artistic process without revealing overly much about the personal life of a very private artist.

“If I’d wanted to write a memoir, I would have, but I don’t, and I didn’t,” Sondheim teases in what he calls volume two’s “reintroduction.” Later in the same chapter, he warns us, “Writing is a form of mischief.”

Having just completed what he admits was an arduous and sometimes uncomfortable diversion into introspective prose, how does it feel to be free of it?

“Funny you should ask; curiously enough, very depressing!” he replies in a voice that sounds half its age. “No, I’m suffering; I’m having post-partum. I didn’t expect it but there it is. I guess I enjoyed it more than I thought.”
Sondheim’s journey to Broadway began at age 10, when he became best friends with Jamie Hammerstein, son of Broadway musical legend Oscar Hammerstein II (South Pacific, The King & I, Carousel, The Sound of Music). In high school, Sondheim began writing musicals and would ask the elder Hammerstein to critique them. His big break came when he was hired to write the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein’s score that became West Side Story.

He was 27 when the Jets and the Sharks rumbled onto the Great White Way in 1957. What was it like to be a Broadway rage at such a tender age?

“I wasn’t ‘a rage’ after West Side Story; I was strictly treated like a minor player,” Sondheim recalls, speaking by phone from his home in New York City. “I wasn’t ‘a rage’ until Company [1970]. Prior to that, I got terrible reviews and was dismissed and condescended to.”

Ironically, West Side Story, perhaps his best-known musical, remains an embarrassment for its lyricist.
“I liked the show, but my own work is very self-conscious and florid,” he says. “It’s the kind of lyric writing I don’t cotton to; it’s so written with a capital W. It’s what Lenny [Bernstein] wanted; he wanted poetry with a capital P, and his idea of poetry and mine were just two different things. But I was 25 years old and I wanted everybody to be happy.”

Sondheim became the toast of Broadway in the 1970s as a result of hit collaborations with producer/
director Harold “Hal” Prince, including Company, Follies, A Little Night Music (which produced 1975’s Grammy Song of the Year, “Send in the Clowns”) and Sweeney Todd, Tony winners all. In 1981—the dividing point between his two volumes—Sondheim broke from his own traditions to embark on more experimental fare, beginning with the breakthrough Sunday in the Park with George, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1985.

When asked to name his favorite musicals, Sondheim says, “If I had to choose one to take on a desert island, it would be Forum because I never failed to have a good time at it. I could see that every night if I were on a desert island.” As for those he’s proudest of, Sondheim expresses a preference for his more experimental works.
“Sunday in the Park with George is one. Assassins is another, which is Americana, which I never thought I could really get my arms around. And Pacific Overtures, which is one I was sure I couldn’t do. The more exotic ones are the ones that I was surprised that I was able to do.”

With an embarrassment of industry honors that includes eight Grammys, eight Tonys, a Pulitzer and an Academy Award for Best Song, Sondheim would seem, in the words of his boyhood idol, to have climbed every mountain. Might retirement be tempting at 81?

“No. At the moment, I’m not working on anything, but now that the book is finished as of three weeks ago, I’m getting restless and I’ve got to get to work,” he admits. “Work is part of life. The important thing is to get to the piano. That’s the important thing.”

It is well-nigh impossible to take composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim out of the theater or the theater out of Stephen Sondheim. At 81, the august talent behind such indelible Broadway musicals as A Little Night Music, Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum has just completed Look, I […]
Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

Chris Pavone

Interview by Jay MacDonald

How well do you know your spouse? Or your best friends? Even if the thought never occurred to you, it will by the time you’re halfway through The Expats, Chris Pavone’s clever debut spy novel that’s suspenseful enough for a man yet introspective enough for a woman.

Here’s the setup: Kate Moore has been working undercover for the CIA for 15 years, the last five as a working mother with two young boys. The problem is, she never quite got around to telling her computer geek husband Dexter about it. All these years, he assumed she was working overtime at a mundane administrative job when she was actually begging off social engagements in order to dispatch drug lords in Central America.

When Dexter lands a lucrative consulting job in data security for an unnamed bank in Luxembourg, Kate jumps at the chance to quit the Agency, leave her double life behind and start anew as a stay-at-home expat mom. The Moores soon hit it off with charismatic expat couple Bill and Julia, whose past strikes Kate as suspiciously homogenized. Now that Dexter is traveling more, Kate begins to sense something different about him as well. Or is it just her? It turns out you can take the girl out of the spy game but you can’t take the spy out of the girl.

The result is that rarity in the genre: a spy novel virtually devoid of espionage (unless you count the domestic variety) and violence (save for flashbacks to Kate’s previous wet work). Instead, the suspense, and an endearing humor that spouses will appreciate, builds almost entirely from Kate’s internal dialogue as she slowly peels back the layers of artifice in her life.

The funny thing is, Pavone didn’t set out to write a spy novel.

Like Kate, he’d jumped at the chance to experience the expat life. After working half his life as a nonfiction book editor and ghostwriter in New York, Pavone welcomed the news when his wife took a job offer in Luxembourg.

“I thought, this is great! I’d never lived anywhere else except New York and I felt a little disappointed in myself; I didn’t even do a junior year abroad,” he recalls. “I was turning 40, our marriage was turning 10, and I thought, this is a great thing to do, let’s do it.”

"I think most people have no idea what their spouses do all day long."

After a lifetime smothered in manuscripts, Pavone was suddenly Mr. Mom to their twin four-year-old boys in a leafy foreign park filled almost exclusively with expat moms. Having never written or edited fiction before, he began distilling this rich new life into a novel. And it was going nowhere.

“As I was writing that book, it bored me,” he says. “I really liked the setup and the characters I was constructing but I just didn’t like the story I found myself telling. There was not enough that I could imagine happening that was going to make it into a satisfying read to me.”

Then one day he was sitting on a park bench beside an expat housewife who made very clear that she had no intention of discussing her past.

“I got to thinking, what if this woman did something horrible?” Pavone recalls. “I moved abroad because my wife got a job and I was bored and that’s the standard reason, but there could be lots of other reasons to move abroad, to change your life entirely. And it amused me to think that maybe this woman used to be a spy. Which led me to, what if my main character actually was this person with this secret that she was keeping, not only from all of her new friends but also her husband?”

As a result of that chance meeting, Pavone revised his work in progress. Changing Kate into an ex-spy both amped up the plot of The Expats and added layers of meaning to her journey. After all, once her past was a well-guarded secret, the same could apply to her friends and husband as well.

“Part of the theme that I hope comes through in the book is that marriage is a continuum of honesty and deception, and the reality of people’s relationships is not something that outsiders can understand,” Pavone says.

“I don’t mean to sound dire or dour about marriage; I enjoy mine immensely. But the truth is, I only know what my wife does all day long because we work in the same business. I think most people have no idea what their spouses do all day long. It’s not a question of adultery I’m talking about, but just the reality that you live this life of 40, 50, 60 hours a week doing something completely divorced from your family and it’s possible that it’s just completely not what the other person thought it would be.”

Once he’d cracked open the plot, did he consider changing Kate’s gender?

“The reason I didn’t want it to be a male was because, if I made the protagonist a male in this book populated by women, then that’s what the book would be about in a lot of readers’ eyes,” he explains. “The whole thing would be about a guy in this women’s world and I didn’t really want that to be what the book is about. It would have appeared overtly political, either a joke or something too earnest, and I didn’t want it to be either of those things. I wanted it to be a much more universal story.”

Pavone says that while Kate will return one day, she won’t be in the follow-up.

For now, he’s satisfied to have produced a genre rarity: The Spy Who Came in From the Park.

“It is a woman’s spy book in a lot of ways. It’s got a woman on the cover and I hope that women will come to it. I hope that men will read it too because men read the bulk of spy books, but I think that this is a book for women as well.”

How well do you know your spouse? Or your best friends? Even if the thought never occurred to you, it will by the time you’re halfway through The Expats, Chris Pavone’s clever debut spy novel that’s suspenseful enough for a man yet introspective enough for a woman. Here’s the setup: Kate Moore has been working […]
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Julia Keller

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Julia Keller loathed the assignment. What editor in his right mind would send her, cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune, to cover the aftermath of a tornado two hours west in Utica that had already been thoroughly chronicled by the paper’s own news staff? Did they need an emergency book review?

But it turns out there was one angle the news crew had overlooked, one that only a small-town West Virginia girl who at age nine once ran her own Encyclopedia Brown-inspired detective agency could have sleuthed out.

“What impressed me immediately was, how do you deal with the randomness of catastrophe? How do you wrap your mind around this?” Keller recalls. “Small towns are where there are many, many overlapping lives constantly rubbing up against each other; you’re constantly bumping up against other people’s joys and sorrows. It wasn’t my spiritual journey, but instead my journey to understand how the human spirit deals with the randomness of fate. As I got deeper into that idea, it propelled me back and back to Utica.”

Keller not only won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for her moving three-part Tribune series about the town’s resurrection, she also came away inspired to create a mystery series set in the fictional West Virginia hamlet of Acker’s Gap that would explore what she calls “Appalachian fatalism.”

The series debut, A Killing in the Hills, kicks off with just such random carnage: A gunman ducks into the town’s coffee shop just long enough to fire three shots, killing three senior regulars. Waitress Carly Elkins, the teenage daughter of county prosecuting attorney Belfa “Bell” Elkins, not only witnesses the shooting but recognizes the killer.

"Are you going to leave or are you going to stay? That is the essential question, the ground beneath your feet."

To varying degrees, the central characters—including aging sheriff Nick Fogelsong, Bell’s BFFs Ruthie and Tom Cox and even Charlie Sowards, aka “Chill,” the ne’er-do-well killer—are all victims of a mountain dysphoria that keeps expectations of life in these hills well in check. Bell, whose own horrific past is revealed as she hunts down the mastermind behind the murders, represents the rare few who escaped Appalachia and returned to help improve its fortunes.

“In S.E. Hinton’s wonderful novel, The Outsiders, she has a great line that those characters are very much about who will go and who will stay,” Keller says. “That’s the question, almost more than who you marry or whether you have a family or what your profession will be: Are you going to leave or are you going to stay? And if you stay, will it be with this ever-growing crust of bitterness, or do you stay for the best of reasons? That is the essential question, the ground beneath your feet.”

Don’t misunderstand: Keller’s upbringing in Huntington, West Virginia, was far from hardscrabble. Her father, a math professor at Marshall University, and her mother, a high school English teacher, imbued their daughter with a love of learning and a gift for storytelling. She went on to work as an intern for syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, earned a doctoral degree in English and was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard.

But what looks great on a resume doesn’t always resonate in the heart.

“There’s a line that a character uses in my next book, which is called Bitter River, that says, ‘The only way out is up,’” Keller says. “That’s a line I’ve heard my whole life and it’s so evocative, certainly in a physical and geographical sense but also in a spiritual sense. You have to overcome barriers even to get somewhere else.”

Keller does a masterful job of leaving spooky little unexplained blanks in each of her characters that prompt the reader to second-guess what they think they know about this slightly inchoate cast. For a central character, Bell remains the most elusive of all, by design.

“As I was writing, it occurred to me that there were these vast gaps where we don’t know a lot about the horrific crucibles she went through. Of course, the town’s name is Acker’s Gap, so you know there is more there,” Keller says.

Like Bell, Keller fled these hills to explore the world, yet finds herself drawn back now that time has sanded off the rougher memories. She recently left the Tribune to accept a teaching position at Ohio University in Athens, just up the road from her hometown in the heart of Appalachia. It’s the perfect vantage point from which to survey the peculiar fatalism of the area.

“A friend of mine who remained in Huntington as an ophthalmologist tells me that the biggest thing she faces in her patients isn’t that they’re lazy or have no willpower, it’s that they will look at her and say, ‘Oh, it doesn’t much matter. My father died in his 40s, my mother died in her 40s, it doesn’t much matter.’ It’s this fatalism, which is very different from cynicism. I thought if I could somehow show that in fiction, it would be a terrific way to address that feeling.”

Julia Keller loathed the assignment. What editor in his right mind would send her, cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune, to cover the aftermath of a tornado two hours west in Utica that had already been thoroughly chronicled by the paper’s own news staff? Did they need an emergency book review? But it turns out […]
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Stephen Hunter

Interview by Jay MacDonald

It seems inevitable that Bob Lee Swagger, thriller writer Stephen Hunter’s retired Marine sniper, would one day find a place in the November 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Swagger isn’t the rumored second gunman, mind you, favored by conspiracy theorists as a more plausible presidential assassin than Lee Harvey Oswald. Quite the contrary; in his latest outing, The Third Bullet, the nation’s top fictional ballistics expert takes his best shot at solving America’s most baffling murder mystery—the assassination that marks its 50th anniversary this year.

As The Third Bullet kicks off, the widow of a prominent thriller writer very much like Hunter tracks Swagger down to his Idaho home to ask him to investigate the death of her husband, who was killed in a late-night hit-and-run that may have had links to the Kennedy assassination. Swagger heads to Dealey Plaza, connects with the JFK conspiracy underground, tracks the author’s killer to Moscow and eventually encounters a CIA operative named Hugh Meachum who provides a shockingly plausible alternate answer to the age-old question: Who killed JFK?

By Hunter’s own admission, The Third Bullet was a tough slog between a mountain of hard evidence and a valley of public doubt about what actually happened on that long-ago Dallas afternoon. To flesh out his storyline, the author immersed himself in the Warren Commission Report, took inventory of the various conspiracy theories, then set off like Swagger for Dealey Plaza to have a look for himself.

Fictional ballistics expert Bob Lee Swagger takes a shot at an age-old question: Who killed JFK?

“What I tried to do from the very beginning was establish hard data points, things that everyone knew and all investigators agreed had happened,” he says. “Then I tried to plot between and around them.”

As he looked down from the famous sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, then sat on the park bench directly below it facing the 90-degree turn that the Kennedy motorcade negotiated before the fatal shot, Hunter’s own hunter’s instinct interceded. The motorcade had slowed to a near-stop for the turn, offering a fish-in-the-barrel shot that even a mediocre marksman like Oswald could have made, compared to the much longer, extremely difficult shot at a moving target as the motorcade pulled away.

“I was stunned,” he recalls. “I looked up and saw the window was about 75 feet away and I thought to myself, good God, why did he not take the easy shot?”

That epiphany unlocked the central mystery of The Third Bullet: If not Oswald, who?

To find a plausible explanation, Hunter recalled a book written by ballistics expert Howard Donahue that theorized Kennedy had been killed by a rogue Secret Service agent shooting from a trailing car.

“It was a thoroughly absurd book and was immediately condemned to purgatory by sentient people, but he understood the science of what happens when a bullet is fired at a man,” Hunter says. In the case of the Kennedy assassination, the third bullet, unlike the previous two, exploded on impact when it hit and killed the president. How could that happen if all three bullets came from the same rifle?

To answer that question, Hunter introduces us to Meachum, a vainglorious Yale-educated veteran of the CIA’s Plans Division with his own secret plans. As frighteningly cold and calculating as Meachum’s story is, Hunter challenged himself by presenting it as excerpts from the man’s diary, his first foray into first-person narrative.

“I wrote that first and I really enjoyed that but there were all kinds of problems,” he admits. “A lot of the effects I get come from cutting and juxtaposing points of view, and it frightened me to get away from those points of view and be stuck in a single head, and yet I found the voice right away. In the end, my problem was shutting Hugh up, not getting him to talk. I discovered a lot of the plotting around Hugh while writing him.”

Hunter, who lives in Baltimore, wrote for the Baltimore Sun for more than 25 years before moving to the Washington Post, where he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for film criticism. He launched the Bob Lee Swagger series in 1993 with Point of Impact, incorporating an encyclopedic knowledge of guns and ballistics, and has gone on to write 17 thrillers.

Did conducting his own investigation into the Kennedy assassination change his view on what happened that dark day in Dallas?

“I suppose I confirmed my suspicions,” Hunter allows. “My theory of the world is that nothing works the way it’s supposed to work, so if anyone argues for perfection, they’re barking up the wrong tree. I wanted my Kennedy assassination conspiracy to be small and adept, but at the same time, mistakes were made, improvisations were made, the whole thing is thrown together on the fly and everybody happens to have a very good day on that day. To me, that was far more realistic than a theory that involves the CIA, Czechoslovakian intelligence and the Mattel toy company and their headquarters is under a volcano. You just don’t believe that.”

Does he agree with Stephen King, who concludes in his JFK speculative novel 11/22/63 that there’s a 99-percent chance Oswald did it?

“That’s how I felt when I started, but now I feel that figure is more like 95 percent,” Hunter says. “There’s a much larger chance than we know that something like [what] I came up with actually happened.”

It seems inevitable that Bob Lee Swagger, thriller writer Stephen Hunter’s retired Marine sniper, would one day find a place in the November 22, 1963, assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Swagger isn’t the rumored second gunman, mind you, favored by conspiracy theorists as a more plausible presidential assassin than Lee Harvey Oswald. Quite the […]
NonfictionMemoir

Pat Conroy

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Long before Augusten Burroughs was running with scissors, a big-hearted Southern whirlwind of a writer named Pat Conroy served as America’s unofficial poster boy for family dysfunction.

The eldest of seven siblings raised under the violent iron fist of a cele­brated Marine Corps fighter pilot, Conroy sought refuge and revenge by channeling his nightmarish upbringing and its aftereffects into such gut-wrenching, cinema-ready novels as The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline and The Prince of Tides. The success of his prose on page and screen didn’t prevent the real-life marriage meltdowns and numerous personal breakdowns that come with having the devil himself as your muse.

More than a decade in the writing, his new memoir The Death of Santini marks Conroy’s coming to terms with his “Chicago Irish” father, Don (nicknamed the Great Santini, after the trapeze artist, for his aerial prowess); his indefatigable Southern belle mother, Peg; his unsinkable grandmother, Stanny; sister Carol, the prickly family poet; and brother Tom, whose suicide plunge at 34 from a 14-story building came to manifest the malignant memories that haunt his siblings.

Conroy was inspired to undertake his memoir in 1998 after writing the eulogy for his father, which he uses to close this book, both literally and figuratively.

“I needed some kind of summing-up, a wrap-up for the direction that my career has taken me,” Conroy says. “I’ve been so family-obsessed that I wanted to try to figure out what it all means and come to some conclusions.”

Despite the book’s dark subject matter, readers may be surprised to find The Death of Santini uplifting, and at times downright funny, as the author casts off punch lines and personal demons with every page. Conroy approves but takes no credit for this reader-friendly chiaroscuro.

"I've been so family-obsessed that I wanted to try to figure out what it all means."

“When you say it goes from light to darkness, that sounds like it should be, but I’m never very good at that,” he admits. “I had good editing, good people reading the book from the very beginning and arranging it.”

One of those clever souls was Conroy’s wife, the novelist Cassandra King (Moonrise), who helped steel the author through his father’s final days. The couple married a week after Don Conroy’s death.

“My father adored her,” Conroy says. “Dad used to say, ‘What does Sandra see in you, son?’ And now, poor Cassandra has been marinated in the Conroy family madness.”

Fiction provided a means for Conroy to process the constant belittling, badgering and physical and mental abuse the family suffered at the hands of his larger-and-scarier-than-life father. But when the budding author dared to expose the family secrets in the guise of the Bull Meecham brood in his 1976 debut novel, The Great Santini, the family was horrified.

“One of the things my brothers and sisters have had to ask ourselves is, did this all happen? What was the result of it happening to us? How do we relate it to our children or our wives or husbands?” Conroy says. “We’re all screwed up, coming through Mom and Dad. That was a difficult country to travel in, but we traveled it, we made it through, and somehow we survived it.”

That fragile illusion would be destroyed years later when Tom, who’d had a minor role in the film version of The Great Santini, ended his life in Columbia, South Carolina.

“But Tom did not survive it,” Conroy continues, choking up. “Tom can bring us to our knees. We all feel we failed him, left him behind. We were not watchful or vigilant enough with Tom to help him survive.”

Conroy’s mother, who tirelessly encouraged him to pursue a writing career, was in her glory when the film premiered in her hometown of Beaufort, South Carolina, where it was filmed. She would later submit the novel into evidence in her divorce from Don.

As for Don, the best-selling novel and the film that followed sparked a love affair that knew no bounds.

“With my father, it wasn’t a flirtation with Hollywood, it was a marriage,” Conroy recalls. “When he finally realized that I had killed him in the movie, he was furious for a couple of weeks. I couldn’t figure out why until he said, ‘You f__ked up the sequel!’ He did take that role utterly seriously. There were license plates of the Great Santini, hats of the Great Santini. Going to Dad’s apartment was like going to the county fair, only the county fair was based entirely on him and all the rides were Santini rides and all the clowns were Santini clowns. He could not get enough of it.”

The family uproar over The Great Santini and his subsequent novels continues to this day. When his siblings got wind that big brother had a memoir in the works, Conroy couldn’t help having a little fun at their expense.

“They always said, ‘You won’t be able to write this, Pat, because no one will believe it.’ My brothers and sisters are terrified of this book,” he says. “Of course, I was telling my brothers that I was giving them sex-change operations and my sisters that I was going to have them marry monsters and their children were going to be the devil’s spawn. But now that it’s coming out, I’m worried about their judgment.”

Having exorcised his demons, Conroy is working on a new novel and his first young adult book, neither of which involves family ghosts.

“I’m going to try to leave the family in peace,” he vows. “There are other things to write about. Of course, I’m ashamed that I didn’t think of this until I was 90 years old!” (Conroy is slightly inflating his age: He turns 68 just before his memoir’s October 29 publication.)

But his dark journey did lead him to a surprising conclusion about the family that fueled much of his career.

“Being born into this family was the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” he says. “It just took me a long time to realize it and 40 years to write about it.”

Long before Augusten Burroughs was running with scissors, a big-hearted Southern whirlwind of a writer named Pat Conroy served as America’s unofficial poster boy for family dysfunction. The eldest of seven siblings raised under the violent iron fist of a cele­brated Marine Corps fighter pilot, Conroy sought refuge and revenge by channeling his nightmarish upbringing […]
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Dean Koontz

Interview by Jay MacDonald

There are three things you may not know about free-range thriller writer Dean Koontz, who has sold hundreds of millions of books during his rise to the publishing stratosphere:

1. His new thriller, Innocence, a paean to nonviolence, was inspired by a dream about a long-dead best-selling author;

2. His abusive alcoholic father tried to cut short his literary career with a homemade switchblade; and

3. The night before the attempt on his life, his mother called from beyond the grave.

And true to the one-man genre that is Koontz, the mild-mannered 68-year-old golden-retriever fancier manages to find wonder, humor and hope in all of it.

Few authors have managed to produce so many novels (I lost count at 120) under so many pen names (10 that I know of) across so many genres with as much success as Koontz. Since breaking in as a science fiction writer with 1968’s Star Quest, the one-time Pennsylvania English teacher has turned out as many as eight titles a year by cross-pollinating suspense, horror, romance, fantasy, space opera and even comedy. Along the way, he became one of only a handful of authors to top the New York Times bestseller list 14 times.

Genre? Koontz don’t need no steenking genre!

“I started out sneaking comedy into my suspense novels, and as I moved around genres, I realized that I have a low boredom threshold,” he says by phone from his home in Newport Beach, California. “If I’d had to write the same thing book after book, I would have quit long ago.”

Case in point: Innocence, a ­fantasy/thriller/love story about star-crossed outliers, has something for everybody. What sets Innocence apart from his past works is its poetic use of language and the fact that Koontz dreamed up the story—literally.

“For years, fans have asked me if I get a lot of ideas from dreams and I always said no, I’ve never had an idea from a dream,” Koontz recalls. “But early last year, I sat up in bed at 4:00 in the morning from a very odd and vivid dream. I was having lunch with [actor-turned-best-selling author] Thomas Tryon [The Other]. I never knew him but I’d read a few of his books. It was a celebratory lunch because he had a new novel coming out. Some of the moments were very vivid and in color, and I don’t dream in color ordinarily. I couldn’t wait to start putting the story on paper.”

The resulting chase-packed love story between societal outcast Addison and fugitive Gwyneth is just the sort of left-brain/right-brain head-scratcher that Koontz fans love to tackle.

Growing up in Everett, Pennsylvania (pop: 4,000), was anything but a dream for Koontz, who suffered beatings and abuse from his alcoholic father, Ray. The author credits his knack for horror and suspense, as well as the unapologetic optimism in his fiction, to his early exposure to the dark side.

“If my father hadn’t been a violent alcoholic who held 44 jobs in 34 years, I might not have the career I have,” he says. “I’m not thankful that that was my childhood, but it wasn’t a bleak one by any means because I was determined that it wouldn’t be.”

Unfortunately, Koontz’s dark past followed him west. Shortly after he and his wife, Gerda, relocated to California in 1976, circumstances brought his father into their care. The couple supported Ray in psychiatric care facilities for the remaining 14 years of his life. He was ultimately diagnosed as a sociopath.

That kind turn almost cost Koontz his life—twice in one day.

“The care center called one morning because [Ray] was down on the lobby floor shouting at people,” Koontz recalls. “I found out later he had developed a tolerance to his anti-psychotic medication and had honed his fishing knife into essentially a switchblade.”

Koontz talked his father back to his room, but Ray’s agitation worsened.

“He kept pacing the room, opening and closing a dresser drawer, until finally he pulled out his knife. We struggled into the hallway, where all these people were returning from lunch. I managed to get the knife away from him without being cut and asked staff to call 911,” Koontz recalls.

It turns out the staff had already called the police. Unfortunately, when they arrived, it was Koontz who was holding the knife.

“The police yelled, ‘Drop the knife!’ and I said, ‘No, it’s not me, it’s him; I took the knife away from him!’ They both drew their guns and yelled, ‘DROP THE KNIFE!’ I finally realized I was going to get shot and dropped the knife. They made me lay face-down on the floor until they got the situation straightened out. It was a memorable day.”

As was the day before, when Koontz encountered one of only two unexplainable experiences in his life (the second he’s saving for full novel treatment).

“The night before my father pulled a knife on me, the phone rang. I picked it up, and this woman’s voice said, ‘Be careful of your father,’ and I swear it was my [late] mother; I recognized the voice. She said that twice and was gone,” he says. “The very next day, if I had gone in there unaware instead of edgy about that call, he probably would have succeeded. I often wonder about that.”

Reconciliation was not in the cards for this father and son. “A sociopath is never going to change and they’re not going to see that any of the problems in their life have been of their own making,” Koontz says. “It’s a very sad thing to never have a relationship with your father, but there was no way to have one.”

As for happiness? Well, that’s another matter.

“Happiness is a choice,” Koontz insists. “That sounds Pollyanna-ish, but it’s not; you can make it or not. Readers over the years say what they love about my books is that they’re full of hope, and that’s the way I see life. If you always dwell on what went wrong in the past, it’s almost hopeless. So I just don’t dwell.”

There are three things you may not know about free-range thriller writer Dean Koontz, who has sold hundreds of millions of books during his rise to the publishing stratosphere: 1. His new thriller, Innocence, a paean to nonviolence, was inspired by a dream about a long-dead best-selling author; 2. His abusive alcoholic father tried to […]
Mystery & SuspenseFictionSuspense

Greg Iles

Interview by Jay MacDonald

On March 8, 2011, shortly before his life took an unexpected turn, Mississippi novelist Greg Iles was stopped at an intersection, lost in creative thought as he debated what to do with his new thriller about unsolved civil rights murders—a subject that was too big for one book, or maybe even two. Most writers would consider that a great problem to have. But for Iles, being forced to choose between art and commerce always sends him into a desultory funk. In such moments, he readily admits, he should not be driving.

“I pulled onto Highway 61, and a 19-year-old girl in a pickup hit my driver’s door going 70,” Iles says. “I have no memory whatsoever. I woke up nine days later with no right leg, a torn aorta, as close to dying as you can come.”

Natchez Burning, the first installment of his incendiary new trilogy featuring former prosecutor turned Natchez Mayor Penn Cage, is the book that almost killed him. It is also, not coincidentally, the book that helped save his life.

“When you don’t know if you’re ever going to get up, you’ve got to find some way back,” Iles recalls. “There’s nothing better than realizing that you’re shepherding this narrative along, and that if you don’t do it, it’s never going to exist.”

The Natchez native credits a journalist friend with sharing the real-life cold cases that inspired Natchez Burning, in which Cage’s physician father, Dr. Tom Cage, is accused of murdering an African-​American nurse who worked beside him during the racial unrest of the 1960s. Penn Cage’s search for the truth leads him into a dark chapter in Natchez history involving a murderous offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan under the direction of some of Mississippi’s most wealthy and powerful men.

“I’m not pulling a single punch when I write this book. Life’s too short; I’m not going to play that game.”

For Iles, whose flagrant genre-hopping has embraced Gothic World War II thrillers (Spandau Phoenix), supernatural ghost stories (Sleep No More) and even apocalyptic sci-fi (The Footprints of God), this was clearly a story only the Cages could tell, even if it meant temporarily bending his own rule: no series. In each previous Penn Cage outing—The Quiet Game (2000), Turning Angel (2005) and The Devil’s Punchbowl (2009)—Iles had thought one-and-done.

But events, including his accident and the 2010 death of his father, a physician who inspired the Dr. Tom character, conspired to send the author into new territory: the “thrillogy.”

“This really came in the wake of my father dying, and then, as I got going, me being in that car wreck, which was the biggest transformative experience in my life,” he recalls. “That’s what made me say, you know what? I’m not pulling a single punch when I write this book. Life’s too short; I’m not going to play that game. I’m just going to put it down.”

He broke another longstanding vow by placing a real-life KKK offshoot called the Silver Dollar group (which he renames the Double Eagles) at the center of Natchez Burning.

“Despite being considered a Southern novelist, I have always fought off any temptation to use the Ku Klux Klan as antagonists, because in real life, by 1967-68, they were pretty much irrelevant, and had long been totally penetrated by the FBI,” he says. “But in this case, when I found out about the real-life Silver Dollar group and how that worked and how none of those murders had been solved, I realized, OK, this is the story; this really is scary stuff.”

That Iles manages to sustain the suspense in Natchez Burning for 800 pages bodes well for the trilogy’s future installments, The Bone Tree and Unwritten Laws, to be published in spring 2015 and 2016.

Simply put, this is Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County for the “Breaking Bad” generation: life’s rich pageant, delivered unharnessed and uncensored by a writer at the peak of his powers who is mad as hell, and just as heartbroken.

“I think what makes people accept this book is that so much of it is meticulously based on things that really happened, so when you get to things that might strain credulity, you think, wow, did that actually happen or is he making that up?” Iles says.

The author admits the timing of a certain popular HBO TV series may work in his favor.

“I think I’m fortunate that ‘True Detective’ came along when it did,” he says. “It’s like all of a sudden, Southern noir has gotten to where I’ve always been, which is pretty dark and pretty violent.”

Helping Iles through his long rehabilitation were his band mates in the Rock Bottom Remainders, the legendary literary rock band that includes Dave Barry, Stephen King, Ridley Pearson, Scott Turow and Amy Tan. For Iles, who years ago left his post as front man for the ’80s rock band Frankly Scarlett to try his hand at prose, the Remainders are his equivalent of literary Paris in the 1920s.

“You can’t help but absorb from the people you’re around,” Iles says. “To have Scott Turow and Steve [King] in the band, guys who I had read along the way before I started writing and was so profoundly influenced by, to be able to sit on the bus or in the hotel and just talk to those guys is just unbelievable.”

Iles, now 53, shares a special bond with King, who survived his own near-death experience at a similar age in 1999 when he was struck by a van while walking near his home in Maine.

“Steve and I talked about it during our gig last fall in Miami,” he recalls. “I told him about wondering, what am I going to do with one leg? And how I realized, man, I’m the luckiest SOB in the world because I don’t dig ditches anymore; I write books, and I don’t need my leg! I know Steve wrote at least one book out of his own agony. But I’m good now. I’m walking erect. And as Steve said in The Shawshank Redemption: ‘Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’, man.’”

 

This article was originally published in the May 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

On March 8, 2011, shortly before his life took an unexpected turn, Mississippi novelist Greg Iles was stopped at an intersection, lost in creative thought as he debated what to do with his new thriller about unsolved civil rights murders—a subject that was too big for one book, or maybe even two. Most writers would consider that a great problem to have. But for Iles, being forced to choose between art and commerce always sends him into a desultory funk. In such moments, he readily admits, he should not be driving.

Mystery & SuspenseFictionMystery

Karin Slaughter

Interview by Jay MacDonald

In a meteoric career that has produced two series and 13 crime novels in as many years, Georgia native Karin Slaughter rocketed to international bestseller status by granting women their rightful place at murder scenes and morgues.

Yet while her growing fan base eagerly awaits each new installment of her Atlanta series featuring Georgia Bureau of Investigation special agent Will Trent (Triptych, Fractured, Broken) and its country cousin starring Grant County medical examiner Sara Linton (Faithless, Indelible, Blindsighted), the restless Slaughter has kept busy crafting her new novel, exploring time travel—and bracing herself for space flight.

What!? Time travel? Space flight? Whose genre is this, anyway?

Slaughter admits her unquenchable thirst to break new ground has prompted a mid-career interest in exploring neighboring galaxies, literary and otherwise.

How did a small-town Southern girl wind up doing weightless somersaults aboard the infamous suborbital “vomit comet,” much less set her sights on a future space flight aboard the Virgin Galactic?

More about that later, though in a way, the process accelerated with Cop Town, her first standalone novel, which takes place back in mid-1970s Atlanta when cops were men and women weren’t welcome. Slaughter first wrote about the period in Criminal (2012), in which she united characters from her two series.

“I had so much fun that I wanted to visit that time period again,” she explains.

Just one problem: “I couldn’t come up with a good reason to put my characters Will and Sara back there, mainly because they would have been children then,” she says. Slaughter herself was only 3 years old at the time.

So she created two very different protagonists: veteran patrolwoman Maggie Lawson, whose brother and uncle are part of the all-male good-ol’-boy network on the Atlanta force, and her new rookie partner Kate Murphy, a Jewish neophyte from a privileged background whose husband was killed in Vietnam. Together, they battle the blatant racism, sexism and cultural ostracism of the day, while working their way into the search for a serial killer who is targeting their ranks.

Slaughter called upon the best possible resource to bring her characters to life.

“I talked to six female police officers who are now retired and in their 60s. If you want to get the truth about something, talk to a 60-year-old retired woman!” she chuckles.

“I thought it would be really interesting to explore the lives of patrol officers, because that’s something I haven’t really done before; normally, they’re detectives. And because there was so little structure to Atlanta policing at the time, a lot of patrol officers did detective work. Sometimes they had to, because the detectives were passed out drunk in their cars. Honestly, that was a real problem!”

To prepare for her immersion into the disco era, Slaughter chose her bedside reading accordingly.

“One of the books I was reading while working on Cop Town was Fear of Flying by Erica Jong,” she says. “Reading it now, this line stuck out to me: ‘An unmarried woman is taking a vow of poverty.’ And for a lot of women today, that’s true. When you combine households and you have someone—a spouse or partner—it makes things easier. If you look at the number of single mothers who are trapped in poverty, it really resonated for me.”

So did the changes America was facing back then.

“It definitely mirrors what we’re going through today: coming out of a very disastrous war, the economy was in the toilet, women’s pay equality, homophobia, racism. It’s easier to talk about these things in the past, because if you talk about them in the present, then you’re kind of a whiny bitch. But if you say, hey, look how bad it was in the ’70s, then you can let people draw their own conclusions,” she says.

She was shocked to hear first-hand accounts of the outright sexism of the day, which was slowly crumbling, in large part due to federal intervention.

“It was a huge change, and like any change, most of the guys didn’t want it to happen,” she says. “In Atlanta, they were also dealing with the fact that the good-ol’-boy network wasn’t white anymore; it was black, and [women] were excluded from it. As Maggie says in the book, ‘The good-ol’-boy network is fine as long as you’re one of the good old boys.’ They didn’t like being left out.”

Why did the women pursue crime fighting? “I asked every woman I talked to why they did it when no one wanted them to, and every single one of them said they did it because someone told them they shouldn’t,” Slaughter says.

A similar instinct may have inspired the author’s interest in space flight. How in the world did she wind up on the vomit comet?

“I was talking to the people at Virgin Galactic about doing the space flight, but my dad said I would have to let a hundred people go up before I go up,” she chuckles. “But one of the things they sponsored was letting us go on the vomit comet. It was really wonderful! If you plan to do it, do it with somebody you know or make friends with somebody, because you can do stuff together in weightlessness, roll people in circles and all that. I had a really great time.”

Slaughter hopes to not only go up in space, but back to the future as well with sequels to Cop Town.

“Maybe every two or three [series] books, I could do one of these, and maybe take Kate and Maggie into the Atlanta child murders in the late ’70s,” she says. “A lot of women worked on the Atlanta child murders. Although they were still plainclothes officers at that point and weren’t really called detectives, they were given what were called ‘vagina crimes,’ so if it came into or went out of a vagina, a woman was the investigator.” After a series of child murders terrified the city, “Women were the ones who started to put the pieces together, and then, of course, the men said, ‘Oh, we need to take this over because it’s a serial killer.’”

Would she one day take the leap into that final frontier, science fiction?

“Oh yeah, absolutely,” she readily admits. “The Centers for Disease Control are right up the street from me, and my neighbors are doctors there, so I’d like to do something, maybe about a virus and some horrible mishap happens. I’d love to do that.”

 

This article was originally published in the July 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In a meteoric career that has produced two series and 13 crime novels in as many years, Georgia native Karin Slaughter rocketed to international bestseller status by granting women their rightful place at murder scenes and morgues.
Mystery & SuspenseFictionMystery

Mathew Prichard and Sophie Hannah

Interview by Jay MacDonald

Agatha Christie's grandson, Mathew Prichard (left), gives the family seal of approval to the new Poirot mystery by writer Sophie Hannah (right).

Question: How does one possibly attempt to add to the crime canon of Agatha Christie, whose 80 mystery novels and short story collections have sold more than two billion copies, trailing only the Bible and her countryman William Shakespeare?

Answer: Very. Very. Carefully.

In fact, since Christie’s death in 1976, Mathew Prichard, the only child of the only child of the queen of crime fiction, who has overseen her literary estate for decades, was dead set against the idea of any author attempting a Christie continuation novel.

But through “a very happy string of coincidences,” the literary world—including those diehard Christie enthusiasts who were “a bit nervous” about the prospect—is poised to fall in love with Dame Agatha all over again, thanks to The Monogram Murders, a darkly twisted new Hercule Poirot mystery crafted by best-selling psychological thriller writer Sophie Hannah (Kind of Cruel).

The Monogram Murders transports us to a coffeehouse in 1920s London, where the idiosyncratic Belgian detective’s supper has been interrupted by a woman who fears for her life. Poirot soon learns why: Three guests at a nearby hotel have been murdered by poison and carefully laid out with a single monogrammed cufflink tucked in their mouths. With Scotland Yard investigating officer and doubting-Thomas apprentice Edward Catchpool at his side, Poirot once again calls upon his “little grey cells” to suss the meaning of every delicious twist in the bizarre case.

Noted suspense writer Sophie Hannah puts her own spin on Christie's quirky Belgian crime-solver, Hercule Poirot.

Throughout, Hannah’s pitch- perfect dialogue and mastery of misdirection combine to weave a tangled tapestry that delights with its period detail, flashes of humor and grim glimpses into our darker nature.

The novel’s birth took an equally circuitous course, dating back several years to when Prichard was editing his grandmother’s letters and photographs for The Grand Tour, a travelogue of Christie’s 1922 yearlong tour of the British Empire.

“I suppose that editing those wonderful, charming letters of my grandmother that had never been published before drew my attention back and did have the effect of thinking about Agatha Christie anew,” he admits.

Slowly, his resolve against authorizing further works under the Christie imprimatur gave way to the realities of modern publishing.

“Our advice was that if we took our courage in both hands and allowed a new Poirot to be written and published, one of the big spinoffs would be a renewal of interest in the real Poirot books,” Prichard says. “So I think in some ways, this is a double event. Obviously, the publication of a new Poirot by Sophie Hannah is an event all on its own, but we also hope it will help renew interest in the real Poirot stories.”

As luck would have it, Hannah’s agent was speaking over lunch with a HarperCollins representative who mentioned in passing that the Christie estate was mulling over a continuation project.

“My agent knew I’d had a couple ideas in mind that I’d always thought of as Agatha Christie-ish, but I’d never quite gotten them to work in my regular titles,” says Hannah. “So when my agent suggested that I write a historical, that’s what won me.”

The happenstance sent Hannah back to the Christie collection that had inspired her own career trajectory. She knew she wanted to set half the book in London, the other half in a rural English village, with Poirot on the case rather than Christie’s venerable Miss Marple.

Prichard could not have been happier with the results.

“I think it’s her portrait of Poirot that is certainly one of my favorite parts of the book,” he says. “I think Sophie got Poirot exactly right; there is the humanity, the flashes of humor—and maybe, although she might deny this, even the occasional moment of irritation, which I think is very much a part of Poirot. Her great sensitivity to the various settings in the book, the hotel and the towns outside of London, are very like Agatha Christie. But some of my favorite bits are pure Sophie Hannah as well.”

The process of re-reading the Christie novels to prepare for the daunting task of filling the shoes of the queen of crime fiction left Hannah a changed person.

“It definitely made me realize afresh what a brilliant writer she is, and it helped change my attitude toward my own life,” she says. “If you do something very different from what you usually do, when you go back to what you usually do, you think about it more consciously. It’s been really good in that sense.”

One question weighs on everyone’s mind: Is the world ready for more Agatha Christie?

“We have promised ourselves to give the first one time to get launched and get a reaction, not only from critics but from the real fans as well, before making up our minds on what we’re going to do,” Prichard explains. “It would surprise me if, occasionally, we didn’t do something like this again, but don’t worry; it won’t be every year or anything like that. I don’t think that would be right.”

How would his famous grandmother have felt about The Monogram Murders?

“My grandmother was a very intelligent person, and I think if you had asked her five years ago whether she wanted someone to write more Poirot stories, she would unquestionably have said no,” Prichard admits. “But if you had told her that if she wanted to prolong the enjoyment that her readers still have for the stories she herself wrote, and that one of the modern ways of doing this was to publish a new version of her character by somebody who is a great fan and admirer of hers, I think that at the very least she would have understood the reasoning.”

So, somewhere Dame Agatha is smiling?

“I’m sure she’s doing that,” he chuckles. “She was very good at smiling.”

 

This article was originally published in the September 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Question: How does one possibly attempt to add to the crime canon of Agatha Christie, whose 80 mystery novels and short story collections have sold more than two billion copies, trailing only the Bible and her countryman William Shakespeare? Answer: Very. Very. Carefully.
FictionPopular Fiction

David Nicholls

Interview by Jay MacDonald

In his 2009 bestseller One Day, British actor-turned-screenwriter-turned-novelist David Nicholls traced the inevitable romantic collision of star-crossed college acquaintances via snapshots, taken on the same calendar date each year, over their 20-year journey to togetherness. 

In his equally nimble follow-up, Us, Nicholls reverses course to chronicle the gradual disintegration of the 30-year marriage of a well-intentioned if hopelessly mismatched London couple who never quite recovered from the death of their infant firstborn daughter.

“One Day is a very classic will-they-or-won’t-they-get-together love story; over 20 years, how do they change and how are they finally drawn to one another and finally make a life together?” Nicholls says from his home in London. “Us is sort of what comes next, I suppose. The questions are: Will they stay together? Do they belong together? Is this going to last? It’s not a sequel to One Day in any specific way. It’s more of a companion piece, I suppose.”

Narrator Douglas Petersen is a buttoned-up, left-brained biochemist who’s still baffled that his free-spirited, right-brained artist wife Connie chose to marry him. When Connie wakes him in the middle of the night to suggest that their 30-year marriage may have run its course, the scientist in Douglas cooks up a logical solution: a Grand Tour of the continent’s art masterpieces with their moody, artistic teenage son Albie.

In the course of this Griswold-​esque forced march, Douglas is rescued from a biker beating by a prostitute in Amsterdam, Albie bails to Italy with an accordion-​playing female busker, and Connie retreats home, there to hover via smartphone as the determined father fumbles to find and emotionally connect with their wayward son.

Love, loss, laughter and tears are the primary colors to which Nicholls adds subtle shades of wit and wisdom that enable his characters to transcend the page. Little wonder that Us was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize even before it hit U.S. bookshelves.

Nicholls admits he took his own roundabout journey to fiction writing, having spent the better part of the 1990s as a struggling actor, including three years with the Royal National Theater. That apprenticeship morphed into script reading for BBC Radio Drama, script editing for London Weekend Television, script adaptation (Much Ado About Nothing; Tess of the D’Urbervilles) and eventually scriptwriting for TV (“Waiting”; “I Saw You”) and film (One Day; Starter for Ten).

“Sadly, I wasn’t an accomplished actor at all. I realized it wasn’t acting that I enjoyed; it was the characters and stories,” he says. “I do regret the fact that I wasted eight years of my life pursuing something that I couldn’t do, but I think I learned a lot from it. It was good training.”

The breakout success of One Day and the book tour that followed found its way into the comedic framework of Us.

“When One Day came out, I went on something of a grand tour myself, visiting a lot of the cities I’d read about but never seen, and I thought it would be a funny idea to set someone out on that kind of journey, but in middle age,” he says. “It also was a chance for me to write about travel, which I love, but not in the hokey glories-of-Venice, splendors-of-Rome way. I wanted to write about it more as it’s experienced—the coffee stains, missed trains, bad breath and cheap hotels.”

Readers couldn’t have asked for a better traveler-without-a-clue than Douglas, whose command of the minutiae of train schedules and hotel check-in times borders on the obsessive. How did a biochemist stumble into this rom-com?

“My novels had always been about the arts, books and TV and films, things I understand. I thought it would be interesting to write about things that I didn’t really understand, like science and the visual arts,” Nicholls explains. “Douglas doesn’t really believe in fiction; he’s rather repressed and buttoned-up. There’s a key line where he says, ‘I love my wife more than I could say, and so I never said it.’ That’s sort of what I love about him, the deep well of emotion and passion that lies just beneath the surface.”

Nicholls and Douglas do share one memorable moment: the Amsterdam scene in which the scientist accidentally topples a line of expensive motorcycles, nearly sparking a riot. “That happened to me pretty much as written three years ago,” Nicholls chuckles. “I managed to escape, but it was pretty horrific.”

If One Day explored the adage that opposites attract, Us tests its staying power.

“Douglas and Connie’s marriage is a bit like a lot of relationships: the differences initially intrigue you. It’s only when children become involved that the different attitudes you have and different outlooks on life can become a problem,” Nicholls says.

Speaking of problems, how does one craft a happy ending to a marriage falling apart?

“That’s a tricky one,” he admits. “I still think of Us as a love story; it has a lot in it that’s romantic. But it’s probably a little more grown up, a little darker, a little more ambiguous, and I think that all of those things are good. Hopefully, in the same way that people saw themselves in One Day, they will see themselves in Us.”

"Hopefully, in the same way that people saw themselves in One Day, they will see themselves in Us."

The film adaptation of One Day opened shortly after the book’s publication, with Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess starring in Nicholls’ screenplay—but the author has other plans for Us.

“I really want it to have a proper life as a book first. Also, I think it’s a very, very hard book to adapt, which is why I won’t adapt it. Someone else will have to take it on.”

 

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In his 2009 bestseller One Day, British actor-turned-screenwriter-turned-novelist David Nicholls traced the inevitable romantic collision of star-crossed college acquaintances via snapshots, taken on the same calendar date each year, over their 20-year journey to togetherness.
Mystery & SuspenseThriller

Christopher Reich

Interview by Jay MacDonald

International thriller writer Christopher Reich admits his new standalone nail-biter, Invasion of Privacy, lacks the globetrotting savoir faire of his bestsellers Numbered Account, The Patriot’s Club and The Prince of Risk. But what it so deliciously serves up instead is a visceral fear feast centered on a simple premise: What if your iPhone turned against you?

Forty miles west of Austin on the dusty doorstep of the Texas Hill Country, FBI special agent Joe Grant is gunned down along with an informant in a shootout with parties unknown. Minutes before his wife, Mary, becomes a widow, she receives a cryptic voicemail from Joe that will lead her to question the FBI’s version of his death. To vindicate her husband, she’ll ultimately be forced to confront Ian Prince, the ruthless telecom billionaire behind a terrifying top-secret surveillance system every bit as plausible in our hyper-connected age as George Orwell’s Big Brother was during his.

Reich hatched the premise for Invasion of Privacy while watching news coverage of British media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s celebrity phone-hacking scandal. The topic hit close to home for the father of two teenage girls whose hands are rarely free of a phone, tablet or laptop.

“It’s a completely different kind of book for me—more of a family-oriented, inside-the-home thriller,” Reich says. “I wanted to write this David and Goliath story to show that it’s still personal grit and family love that ends up overcoming sheer megalomania and greed.”

To dial up the domestic dynamics, Reich set his tale in Austin, where his daughters were born and where he earned his MBA at the University of Texas. However, his research into the lexicon and subtleties of computer surveillance and phone hacking, which included meeting with an electronic payments expert, friends in the FBI and a reporter for Wired, was specifically intended to spare his readers geek overload.

“Once a story starts getting all technical and cyber-geeky, I just shut the book,” Reich admits.

He didn’t have to search far for a prototype of mega-mogul Ian Prince, however.

“He’s an amalgam of the leading brains and business personalities in Silicon Valley and around the world,” he says. “Apple’s founder Steve Jobs was elevated to this position of something more than a man but less than a god, and we all worshipped this guy and absolutely forgave all of his failings because he was able to design an amazing iPod and iPhones. We worshiped him, but when you get down to nuts and bolts, he was not the nicest human being to his family. I think on any other scorecard, he would get very low marks.”

For an additional twist, Reich places Ian and the National Security Agency on the verge of a lucrative, game-changing partnership with chilling implications for privacy in America. The reader is left guessing as to whose side the FBI is on until the final pages.

“How much would our nation allow some of these leading tech companies to get away with in the interest of furthering our own national security?” he wonders. “We live in an era where we’re made to be so afraid of even the slightest risk that we allow the government to take extraordinary measures regarding our privacy in the name of national security.”

The more he learned about cutting-edge surveillance technology, the less convinced Reich became that lawmakers can effectively restrict its use.

“The NSA, with their computers, are just being spies, and the whole point of spying is to collect information. You don’t tell a spy, ‘Only get half of the information you can.’ You tell them, ‘Get everything you can!’ That’s the whole point of having a spy agency.”

Ultimately, Reich came to a very Orwellian conclusion about the intrusion of cyber-surveillance into the American home.

“I’m a big believer in what President Dwight Eisenhower said in his farewell speech: ‘Beware the military-industrial complex.’ This is a whole sector of society that needs adversaries, needs conflict, and really requires even armed conflict in wars to drive their bottom line and become successful,” he says. “I don’t really think that the issues they’re screaming about are as life-threatening or endangering to our national security as they say. The more I research the various government military and intelligence sectors, I feel we really don’t need to be so heavily involved in a lot of these areas.”

To inject a little levity, Reich borrowed one of his daughters’ favorite pastimes: watching pet videos on YouTube.

“My daughters were always looking at a video about this sloth trying to pull itself out of a cradle, so as I was writing the book, it worked into kind of a MacGuffin [plot twist] in the book,” he recalls.

Invasion of Privacy marks the start of a busy year ahead for Reich, a one-time Swiss banker and watch company CEO who launched his writing career with the million-selling 1998 debut Numbered Account (and an assist from James Patterson, an enthusiastic early reader of the manuscript).

Reich’s Rules of Deception series featuring mountaineering surgeon Dr. Jonathan Ransom has been optioned for three 12-episode seasons by Paramount Television and Skydance Productions (Terminator, Mission: Impossible); he’s halfway through writing a fourth book in that series. And next summer, he’ll launch a new series called The Amateur’s Hour, about a cynical government contractor whose predictions about upcoming world events prove a little too close for some people’s comfort.

“I’ll be doing the David Baldacci two-books-a-year thing,” quips Reich. “I’m a little bit scared, but I’m happy to have that problem!”

Does the author fear his own phone may be hacked in the near future?

“I don’t really feel so vulnerable, because I don’t think I’m interesting enough for someone to want to look into what I’m doing,” he chuckles. 

But he does worry about consumers who share so freely on social media. 

“Most Americans put more stuff about themselves on Facebook than they would probably tell anybody. They don’t realize that that information is so readily accessible. We’re already very open with our information in this society. It’s all right out there,” he says.

As for the reception of Invasion of Privacy, the author says he’s already won over two very important new readers.

“This is the first one of my books that both of my daughters have read, and they both just loved it; they just disappeared into it with the teenage characters and the mom,” he says proudly. “Having tried to give my kids my other books, they would go, ‘This is so boring!’ When I saw my daughter disappear and read my book for four hours straight, that was like, OK, I wrote a good book.”

 

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

International thriller writer Christopher Reich admits his new standalone nail-biter, Invasion of Privacy, lacks the globetrotting savoir faire of his bestsellers Numbered Account, The Patriot’s Club and The Prince of Risk. But what it so deliciously serves up instead is a visceral fear feast centered on a simple premise: What if your iPhone turned against you?

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