Mystery & Suspense Archives | Page 116 of 119 | BookPage

by Savanna Walker

When rookie reporter Irene Glasson stumbles onto the scene of a grisly murder at Oliver Ward's glamorous hotel, the pair find themselves thrown together in a race to catch a vicious killer in our May Top Pick in Romance, The Girl Who Knew Too Much. Irene and Oliver's suspects include Old Hollywood hearthrobs and East Coast hitmen, and Irene is hiding some secrets of her own that could spoil her and Oliver's growing attraction for good. We talked to Jayne Ann Krentz, the bestselling romance author who writes historical mysteries under the name Amanda Quick, about leaving the Victorian era, plotting out a web of killer twists and more!

Describe your latest book in one sentence.
A failed magician, a gossip magazine reporter and a hired killer walk into a 1930s Hollywood bar.

As Amanda Quick, you’ve written a number of historical mysteries set in Victorian England. What made you decide to set The Girl Who Knew Too Much in 1930s Hollywood instead?
I was looking for a fresh fictional landscape. Talked it over with my editor and she said those fatal words: “Well, what about the 1930s?” I had never even considered that particular decade. But the minute I sat down to write the first sentence I got that wonderful jolt of recognition that zaps an author when she knows she has found a world that is ideal for her kinds of characters, plots and voice.

There are so many intriguing aspects and angles to The Girl Who Knew Too Much’s mystery. How do you plot all of them out? Do you make an initial, detailed outline and stick to it, or were there some elements that sprang up midprocess and made you change your plans?
I began with a rough outline, but as soon as I started writing, everything started to change. That’s how it always goes with me. It would be great to know exactly where I’m headed when I go into a book, but sadly, I don’t get my best ideas until I actually start writing. Something about the creative process drives the creative process.

I’m a huge Old Hollywood fan, and I had a great time trying to draw comparisons between the characters of The Girl Who Knew Too Much and real celebrities. Were there any specific figures or scandals that inspired you?
So many scandals, so little time! Those Hollywood fixers could cover up just about anything, including murder, if the star was worth it. That means the plot potential is unlimited.

What is your favorite thing about your reporter heroine, Irene?
I love to write about characters who are in the process of reinventing themselves. That takes grit and determination. Irene’s got plenty of both. I like that about her. I like it a lot.

Irene and Oliver make a great team, and they’re surrounded by intriguing side characters. Would you ever write a sequel and give them another case?
Amazing that you ask! I’m not doing a sequel, exactly, but I am writing another book set in the Burning Cove world. Readers will definitely meet Irene and Oliver again as well as many of the side characters. I love this new world, and I’m hoping to hang around here for a while.

What books do you find yourself turning to for escapism or comfort after a bad day?
I’m always up for escaping into a good book. On good days or bad I’ll read anything by Christina Dodd or Susan Elizabeth Phillips, and I’m a huge fan of Deanna Raybourn’s new Veronica Speedwell mysteries.

What’s next for you?
I just finished my new novel of contemporary romantic-suspense, Promise Not to Tell. It will be out January 2nd under my Jayne Ann Krentz name. I’m really excited about this one. It’s a sequel to When All the Girls Have Gone. For those who read that book, this is Cabot’s story.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Girl Who Knew Too Much.

Author photo copyright Marc von Borstel.

When rookie reporter Irene Glasson stumbles onto the scene of a grisly murder at Oliver Ward's glamorous hotel, the pair find themselves thrown together in a race to catch a vicious killer in our May Top Pick in Romance, The Girl Who Knew Too Much. Irene and Oliver's suspects include Old Hollywood hearthrobs and East Coast hitmen, and Irene is hiding some secrets of her own that could spoil her and Oliver's growing attraction for good. We talked to Jayne Ann Krentz, the best-selling romance author who uses the name Amanda Quick for her historical mysteries, about leaving the Victorian era, plotting out a web of killer twists and more!

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Thriller

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Thriller

Dean Koontz

Interview by Hilli Levin

by Hilli Levin

Bestselling author Dean Koontz's new thriller, The Silent Corner, introduces a tough-as-hell heroine with a very big heart. Respected young FBI agent Jane Hawk sets off on a harrowing search for justice after her beloved husband mysteriously dies by suicide. But Jane is convinced there's a shadowy, powerful global tech company at the root of it all, and she goes on the lam, tracking down leads and dodging mercenaries, in order to prove that her husband's hand was forced.

We caught up with Koontz to ask a few questions about his bold new heroine, the implications of developing technologies, the upcoming TV adaptation and more.

Can you describe your new novel in one sentence?
When Jane Hawk, an FBI agent, determines to prove her much-loved husband didn’t kill himself, she’s targeted by powerful people with a terrible secret agenda, becomes the most wanted fugitive in the nation—and proceeds to give me the most pleasure I’ve ever had at the keyboard!

What do you love most about rogue agent Jane Hawk?
Her indomitable spirit and her intelligence appeal to me, but I’m most fascinated by how tough she can be when necessary, in spite of an essential tenderness. She’d be a generous and loving friend, but if she were coming after me, I’d be terrified.

You so rarely write series, what is it about Jane that has inspired you to continue expanding her story?
I just finished the third book, and Jane surprised me with ever greater depths. I have a long way to go before I fully know her. And though each book is a standalone, I realize I’ve fallen into an epic tale.

Technology’s ability to influence behavior plays a central role in this story. Were you inspired by any real-world stories or technological advances?
All the tech in the book exists or is pending, though it’s not a story about technology. It’s about the human heart. But I did just see that Elon Musk is starting a company to develop brain implants to “help us think better.” Uh-oh.

Are you an eager adopter of new tech, or do you prefer to limit yourself?
I understand it all—but I adopt a minimum. The simpler life, the better. An hour of conversation with my wife or a walk with my dog is more interesting than a lifetime on Twitter.

In many thrillers, the protagonists can seem a bit cold and cut off from humanity. Why was it important for you to show Jane’s compassionate, human side?
The best FBI agents and cops I’ve known have profound compassion for the suffering of innocents. I wanted to capture that. Jane’s good heart is what empowers her to be so tough when she has to be. She realizes how others will suffer if she fails.

We’re excited about the upcoming TV adaptation of The Silent Corner! Will you be involved at all? Do you plan to watch?
I have certain approvals. Otherwise, I’ll just write books about Jane. If the show is as good as I hope, I’ll watch and be buried with DVDs of it, but only after the 40th and final season!

In honor of Private Eye July, what’s one mystery or thriller you think everyone should read?
James. M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. I’ve read it 6 or 7 times, and I’m always chilled.

Aside from Jane, who’s your favorite fictional female investigator?
There are so many good ones, but I have to say Thursday Next in Jasper Fforde’s wildly inventive series.

What’s next for you?
I’ve just started the fourth Jane Hawk, and at the end of each day I regret having to stop. I’ve got to know what happens next.

Author photo © Thomas Engstrom.

A portion of this article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It’s Private Eye July at BookPage! All month long, we’re celebrating the sinister side of fiction with the year’s best mysteries and thrillers. Look for the Private Eye July magnifying glass for a daily dose of murder, espionage and all those creepy neighbors with even creepier secrets.

Bestselling author Dean Koontz's new thriller, The Silent Corner, introduces a tough-as-hell heroine with a very big heart.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Thriller

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Thriller

Meg Gardiner

Interview by Jay MacDonald

by Jay MacDonald

As a young girl, Edgar-winning mystery writer Meg Gardiner lay awake nights wondering if the headline-seizing San Francisco killer known as the Zodiac might one day drift south to her Santa Barbara neighborhood. Years later, her childhood fears became reality when two neighborhood couples were murdered by another notorious serial killer, the Night Stalker.

“By the time they announced this, it was just a deep, sick feeling that you couldn’t believe you’d been so close to something this dark and massive,” Gardiner says.

“The killings were 18 months apart, so they weren’t immediately connected like he went from one house to the next, but it just echoes and reverberates. Then you start thinking, did this guy literally walk by the bedroom where my sister was sleeping? Did he walk up the creek where I used to play and catch tadpoles before he climbed the bank and broke the back window of these peoples’ houses? It does knock down your sense of security.”

What’s a bestselling author to do with such a gut punch from the past? In Gardiner’s case, she harnessed her personal horror into UNSUB (FBI shorthand for “unknown subject”), a gripping, Zodiac-inspired thrill ride guaranteed to turn nighttime readers into daytime readers. It’s so visceral, CBS has already bought the rights to adapt it into a TV series.

Set in the Bay Area where Gardiner spent seven years earning her undergraduate and law degrees from Stanford University, UNSUB centers on newbie detective Caitlin Hendrix, herself a victim of a similar childhood trauma. Caitlin’s father, Detective Mack Hendrix, spent years as the lead investigator in pursuit of a brazen, cryptic serial killer known as the Prophet, wrecking himself and his family in the process. As the book opens, the Prophet’s trademark symbol is found carved into a new set of victims 20 years later.

For Caitlin, the suddenly red-hot cold case poses an irresistible opportunity to vindicate her father, but at what price? Mack’s entreaties to steer clear are no match for Caitlin’s resolve to capture the killer who stole her childhood.

Gardiner welcomed the opportunity to dive into a new world with a female detective at the helm, a nice fit alongside her other two successful series featuring feisty freelance journalist Evan Delaney (China Lake) and forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett (The Dirty Secrets Club). In addition to researching unsolved murder cases and speaking with psychiatrists and investigators, Gardiner had to take a journey back in time to put herself in Caitlin’s shoes.

“It is fiction, but I’m drawing from the idea of how a case would have been handled 20 years ago versus how it would be handled today, with greater coordination and crisis response,” Gardiner says. “You can find all the original files for so many of these real-life UNSUB cold cases and read through them and see how the investigations ran and the frustrations and the dedication of the law enforcement officers. It affected them terribly. I know that some retired cops every year still go to the cemetery on the anniversary of one of the Zodiac attacks and leave flowers on the victims’ graves.”

Bringing Caitlin’s broken, bitter father to life as a central character proved something of a balancing act.

“He is the person who has taken on all of the pain, and that aspect comes out in his character throughout the story. But it’s also got to be a story of him as a father. That’s as much a part of everything as the killer in the story,” she says.

"The Zodiac was the first modern serial killer who really lusted for publicity and wanted to invoke terror and bring it all back to feed his own ego, really."

Conversations with actual law enforcement officers proved crucial to presenting a realistic picture of a family driven to the brink by a psychotic killer.

“It just trickles down to every level. For cops, being able to draw the line between work and home so they can turn off, that becomes difficult,” Gardiner explains. “I’ve spoken to cops who needed to switch from night shift to day shift because the cases they were getting were bleeding over to the breakfast table with their first graders. How do you take care of yourself when you’re responsible for taking care of the community?”

While it would have been accurate to cast a fellow cop as Caitlin’s love interest, Gardiner added a humorous twist in creating Sean Rawlins, an FBI-trained federal explosives expert who shares custody of a young daughter with his ex.

“It is true that female police officers often do end up in relationships with male officers or another policewoman because it’s so unusual for them to be in this world that they find it easier to deal with someone who understands the job and why they are doing it,” Gardiner says. “And their relationship is fun as well; he’s a bomb explosives specialist, not a botanist.”

While it’s often Sean who helps Caitlin unwind, Gardiner has beaucoup experience conjuring fully formed, flawed and funny female protagonists.

“I’m glad you think she’s fun!” the author cheers when I ask about Caitlin’s humorous side. “She takes her work seriously but she doesn’t take herself that seriously. I write thrillers that are supposed to make you gasp and hold your breath and bite your nails out of concern for the characters, but the thing I would never, ever want to write is something that anyone would describe as bleak. If a character can’t laugh at themselves, then I want them to leave.”

It wouldn’t be a Gardiner book without at least one child in the mix. The author and her husband raised three, and she considers it a must to invoke the joys of family life when writing thrillers.

“People do enjoy families, and you want to have a sense that it’s just a little beyond the tunnel focus of whatever is going on out on the crime scene,” she explains. “You want there to be a larger life that people find rewarding and want to preserve and nurture. I like writing about kids, too. My [grown] daughter doesn’t play with My Little Pony anymore, so I have to find some way to slip that in!”

She grants no such levity to the Prophet however. His sick mind-games to baffle law enforcement prove as disturbing in UNSUB as it was in real life for those who remember the Zodiac.

“That’s part of the intrigue of both reading and writing a novel, to give readers what they want but not in the way they expect it,” Gardiner explains. “The Zodiac was the first modern serial killer who really lusted for publicity and wanted to invoke terror and bring it all back to feed his own ego, really. That still horrifies and fascinates me, that somebody would try to gain self-importance in that way, and I tried to give the Prophet something mysteriously similar to that.

“Certainly, with the Zodiac, who wanted people to think perhaps that he was smarter and deeper than he actually is or was, the cops were all over every possible connection, because there were all these cyphers, cryptograms and references to the afterlife; all these symbols. The Zodiac symbol itself, what does it mean? Did it have to do with astrology? Astronomy? Devil worship? Everybody was starting to pull at every possible thread. In a mystery novel, you want people to wonder what’s going on, and you want to offer ambiguous signposts that let them try to figure it out for themselves.”

Odds are we’ll once again be day reading and signpost heeding in January when Gardiner’s Ted Bundy-based second UNSUB thriller, Into the Black Nowhere, hits bookstores.

This article was originally published in the July 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo credit Stuart Boreham.

Meg Gardiner has harnessed her personal horror into UNSUB (FBI shorthand for “unknown subject”), a gripping, Zodiac-inspired thrill ride guaranteed to turn nighttime readers into daytime readers. It’s so visceral, CBS has already bought the rights to adapt it into a TV series.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

Jordan Harper

Interview by Hilli Levin

by Hilli Levin

Jordan Harper’s debut, She Rides Shotgun, is a visceral noir that will at turns shock, delight and completely subvert readers’ expectations. Conflicted ex-con Nate McClusky is forced to go on the run for his past mistakes, but he’s determined to finally become the father that his 11-year-old daughter, Polly, longs for. The result is an emotionally resonant road story that puts the pedal to the medal.

Harper answered a few questions about subverting genre tropes, writing compelling criminals, the upcoming film adaptation and more.

Nate and Polly are such a captivating pair with a relationship that drastically changes over the course of this story. What made you decide to write a hardboiled, often violent noir with a father-daughter relationship at its core?
The book is part of a small niche genre, that of the criminal and child on the run stories such as Lone Wolf and Cub, Paper Moon, The Professional, etc. I’ve always loved these kinds of stories and wanted to contribute. In my fiction I’ve always tried to create a world of criminals with human cores, and there are few more human cores than that of father and daughter.

The effects of toxic masculinity are often on full display in this story. But instead of leaning into the bravado and celebrating it, as is common in noir, Polly is allowed to take center stage and grows into the kind of tough, nuanced female character that is often absent from the genre. Was this a conscious decision?
It was. To me, this is a book about anxiety, and to me toxic masculinity is about anxiety, about voices in your head that control you and keep you behind certain invisible walls. Nate is saddled with his brother’s voice in his head, which is essentially that toxic masculinity given a human persona. Nate’s somewhat powerless against it, and much of his violence springs from being trapped by this voice. On the other hand, Polly is repressed in other ways, and hers is a much more righteous violence.

You’re originally from the Ozarks, but you moved to L.A. many years ago. How have your experiences with these very different places—and with what I’d wager to be very different people—informed this novel?
My misspent youth in the Ozarks taught me about what I call in the Ozarks “dirty white boys.” Skinhead gangs were pretty common in the Ozarks back then (and, I imagine, today as well), and I’ve always used them as the main villains of my writing. Dirty white boys are sort of the same all over, and so I was able to transfer my knowledge of them to the setting of Fontana, California, also known as “Fontucky.” But the larger L.A. area has a much wider pool of criminals to draw from, and out here there are much larger gangs like La Eme who dwarf the white power gangs. I’m always obsessed with criminal fraternities, and I was glad to get several of them into the book.

Who were some writers that really captivated you early in life that you still look to for inspiration?
The first adult novels that I read in my life were Stephen King books, and I still own most of them and re-read them from time to time. King loves story, and he made me love story in a way that kept me from ever indulging in too much literary aimlessness. Reading The Secret History when I was in high school certainly taught me that you could write a thrilling story without sacrificing any of the pleasures of great writing. And I spent much of my youth obsessed with Hunter S. Thompson where I learned the pleasures of brutal and fearless prose.

The movie rights for She Rides Shotgun have already been sold! I know you’ve written for television for some time—has writing the adaptation felt much more natural to you than writing this novel? Any unexpected challenges?
It turns out to be very difficult to adapt oneself. The key to adaptation is to know what is essential to a story and what can be thrown out or changed to better fit the new medium. But to the author of the work, everything is essential. It’s very hard to cut up one’s own work, but I think I’ve finally made some headway in that painful art.

What mysteries and thrillers do you think everyone must read?
The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Grifters, L.A. Confidential and American Tabloid, You Will Know Me, the aforementioned The Secret History, Tapping the Source, Wild at Heart and Winter’s Bone.

What’s next for you?
I was just in New York and had a great lunch with my agent, the amazing Nat Sobel, and we talked about the famous problems of writing the second novel. I think I’ve worked out the kinks in it that have had been stuck for the past year, so I’m hoping to get that done soon enough. I don’t want to say too much, but the current working title is Watch the Fire Burn, and it’s about a young criminal who tries to solve a murder the police won’t solve.

I also have a pitch for a television show that I am getting ready to take out in Hollywood. It’s called "Rat Kings," and it’s an epic crime story. I also have a few screenplays I keep threatening to write if I can find the time.

Author photo by Brian Hennigan.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of She Rides Shotgun.

Fiction, Thriller

Fiction Thriller

John Grisham

Interview by Jay MacDonald

by Jay MacDonald

John Grisham’s fans await his annual legal thriller the way a starved jury anticipates free donuts in the break room. Through 30 novels, the master behind such big-screen bestsellers as The Firm and The Pelican Brief has kept us guessing about the fate of lawyers in love and peril.

Still, even the seasoned author was surprised to find the plotlines of his latest thriller popping up in the news as he was bringing them to life in his arresting new tort-ture tale, The Rooster Bar.

As the book opens, the suicide of third-year law school student Gordy shocks friends Mark, Todd and Zola into realizing that they’ve been suckered into acquiring six-figure student loan debt to attend the third-tier, for-profit Foggy Bottom Law School in Washington, D.C. Not only is the school so mediocre that its graduates stand only a 50-50 chance of passing the bar exam, but according to Gordy’s parting notes, it’s one of a chain owned by Hinds Rackley, a New York hedge-fund manager who also happens to own the very bank that will collect on their student loans.

Disheartened and desperate, the trio forgo their last semester of law school, assume false identities and form the bogus law firm Upshaw, Parker & Lane (short for Unlicensed Practice of Law), a high-stakes gamble designed to sustain them until they can win back their futures by exposing Rackley’s scam. To complicate matters, Zola’s immigrant family is simultaneously being deported to Senegal.

Student debt? For-profit schools? Brazen billionaires? Immigration issues? Grisham had no inkling when he started the book that its themes would soon play out on MSNBC.

“This story goes back two or three years when I read an article in the Atlantic called ‘The Law-School Scam’ that I was fascinated by, because I was not aware that we had such institutions as for-profit law schools in this country,” Grisham says by phone from his office in Charlottesville, Virginia. “I was stunned and became captivated by the issue.”

Intrigued, the former lawyer visited a few law schools. In one public law school, every third-year student carried debt, the average being $75,000. In another top-tier school, a third of students graduated without debt, but for the two-thirds who had debt, the average was $260,000.

“It’s astonishing, and the amounts were even greater when you combine grad school and undergrad,” he says. “Once they’re out, they can’t afford to start a family . . . to buy a house or a car. They’re mired into this unbelievable debt that’s choking them.”

While rare, some debt-strapped students choose the risky track Grisham’s fictional trio takes and hustle clients without a license in hospital and court waiting rooms.

“I always worry about the story as I’m writing it—how much of this can I make plausible and believable—and it’s probably a bit implausible that they would go to this extreme to actually set up a law firm with business cards and fake names,” Grisham admits. “But if you’ve ever been through the suicide of a friend, it really can knock you off your stride; it’s not something that you can deal with easily. That’s why I introduced the tragedy of Gordy’s death, to kind of push these guys over the edge.”

Grisham targets sky-high student debt in an intriguing thriller that parallels real-life events.

He had no such challenge bringing Hinds Rackley to life; news reports did that for him. “Trump loves these for-profit schools. He couldn’t make one go. . . . He tried . . . and it crashed,” Grisham says. “But with the Department of Education now, you can’t walk in Congress for all the lobbyists hired by the for-profit college industry. They have tons of money, and they’re getting whatever they want because they have all the money. It’s a rotten system.”

Likewise, Zola’s DACA-esque immigration battle parallels real-life events. “The more I wrote about Zola and her family, the more I really enjoyed that subplot,” he says. “And then I had the benefit of Trump taking office in January, and with all the anti-immigration stuff and the ramped-up ICE raids, that just fell into my lap.”

Grisham was a practicing lawyer when he attained superstardom with the release of The Firm, which became the bestselling novel of 1991. He now has more than 300 million books in print worldwide, including novels, short stories, nonfiction and a children’s series.

Though he was taken with the cutting-edge storylines he rather presciently wove together in The Rooster Bar, Grisham says he felt compelled to make one adjustment.

“I set the book in 2014 and not 2017, because the bubble is bursting with these for-profit law schools because they’re too expensive, they’re not any good, you can’t pass the bar, and you can’t find a job,” he says. “It’s not sustainable because of the job market. That’s why we’re watching it blow up.”

Without revealing the book’s ingenious ending, suffice it to say that Mark, Todd and Zola ironically reveal themselves to be exactly the kind of creative, caring problem-solvers and risk-takers that the best lawyers are made of.

“Well, that’s the beauty of fiction!” Grisham chuckles. “At some point, you suspend disbelief and you make them a whole lot smarter and a whole lot luckier than they really should be. That’s when storytelling kicks in. Of course, they’re your heroes and you want them to succeed. Even though they’re doing some bad things and breaking a bunch of laws, you’re on their side. Let’s just say they’re smart and they’re lucky.”

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

(Author photo by Billy Hunt.)

John Grisham’s fans await his annual legal thriller the way a starved jury anticipates free donuts in the break room. Still, even the seasoned author was surprised to find the plotlines of his latest thriller popping up in the news as he was bringing them to life in his arresting new tort-ture tale, The Rooster Bar.

Debut Fiction, Fiction, Thriller

Fiction Thriller Debut Fiction

A.J. Finn

Interview by Jay MacDonald

by Jay MacDonald

In suspense fiction, as in life, things aren’t always as they appear. We view events through similar, although by no means identical, lenses. And therein lies the fun, both between the covers of The Woman in the Window, the new year’s most audacious psychological suspense debut, and in the intriguing, real-life turn of the table by its pseudonymous author, A.J. Finn.

As The Woman in the Window opens, we meet Dr. Anna Fox, a New York child psychologist turned thoroughly modern mess following her unexplained separation from her husband and daughter 11 months prior. Now an agoraphobic, voyeuristic shut-in, Anna whiles away the days within her Manhattan brownstone, wineglass in hand, monitoring her park-side neighbors through her digital camera, binge-watching classic movies (Rear Window, anyone?) and counseling other agoraphobics online.

Then Anna observes and reports to police a shocking act of violence at the residence of a new neighbor. Did she imagine it? Can police (and the reader) trust her interpretation of the event? Suffice to say, the plot twists that follow blow the roof off her carefully insulated world.

While fans of Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train and Alfred Hitchcock’s films will feel right at home in Anna’s wine-addled reality, the unusual backstory behind its provenance bears a touch of suspense fiction as well.

A.J. Finn is actually Dan Mallory, a 38-year-old senior vice president and editor for William Morrow who studied literature,* inspired by his love of Agatha Christie, Ruth Ware and his dissertation subject, Patricia Highsmith. Like many in publishing, Mallory admits he’d fantasized about tasting life on the other side of the editing desk. Unfortunately, timing was an issue.

“It was a flicker in my mind for some time—this idea that I could write something—but [it wasn’t something] that I pursued with any intent whatsoever,” Mallory says by phone from his Manhattan office. “I never wrote so much as a poem as an adult, in part because, for the longest time—probably since 1988 when The Silence of the Lambs was published—the market was dominated by serial killer thrillers by the likes of Thomas Harris, James Patterson and Patricia Cornwell. I enjoyed the serial killer thriller as much as the next reader; I just didn’t have one in me.”

That changed dramatically in 2012 with the publication of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which ushered in a new era of psychological suspense. "This was the sort of book that I had read and studied, that I might try to write,” Mallory says. “It was only after the market seemed propitious and readers demonstrated an appetite for this sort of literature that I thought to myself, right—if I come up with a story, perhaps now is the time to strike. And lo and behold, this character strolled into my head, dragging her story behind her.”

As Anna made herself at home, Mallory found her overactive, incessantly introspective mind to be a “comfortable fit.” Like Anna, the author has struggled with severe depression, and explains that Anna’s experience with agoraphobia closely matches his own. “Since I wrote the book, I’ve been in a much better place psychologically than I was for over a decade,” Mallory says. “At the same time, I developed a pretty keen sense of empathy. That’s the silver lining of depression, or at least it was in my case. So I felt for this character.”

“‘Is this really plausible? Wouldn’t people shut their blinds?’ NO! No one in New York shuts their blinds!”

As easy as it was to channel Anna, Mallory also effortlessly accessed the inner voyeur of his readers.

“I wrote the book in my flat in Chelsea, and my desk is right beside the window in my living room. Across the street is a pair of beautiful brownstones, and the windows are never shuttered, the curtains never drawn,” he says. “A few readers, on finishing or even getting a couple chapters into the book, have said to me, ‘Is this really plausible? Wouldn’t people shut their blinds?’ NO! No one in New York shuts their blinds!”

But why the pseudonym? This is where Mallory performed his own third-act twist.

“Because I work in publishing, I wanted to hedge my bets when it came time to submit the book,” he explains. “It would have been embarrassing for me had the book not been acquired, which was what I expected. But we submitted the book, and within 36 hours, we were fielding offers. At which point my agent and I said, ‘Right, it’s time for me to come clean and introduce myself as myself, so they know what they’re getting into.’ Happily, no one backed out.”

One thing’s for sure: The format of The Woman in the Window, with exactly 100 chapters, each no more than five or six pages, is a thriller editor’s dream.

“I don’t know that I consciously tapped into much of my [editorial] experience, but then I wouldn’t need to, would I? Because it’s built into me, it’s baked into me by this point!” Mallory chuckles. “Man, I love a short chapter. This is a technique that I admired in James Patterson’s work.”

Mallory’s success with his debut thriller, which sold in September for a rumored seven figures and will be marketed in 38 territories, may have set a record for a newcomer. Having successfully jumped the table from editor to author, Mallory bid farewell to William Morrow in December to craft his next psychological thriller, set in San Francisco.

Until then, we’ll start closing our blinds.

This article was originally published in the January 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

*The original version of this interview stated that Mallory obtained a doctorate at Oxford. A February 2019 article in the New Yorker revealed that this was not true and alleged that several other aspects of Mallory's biography had been falsified.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Walter Mosley

Interview by Jay MacDonald

by Jay MacDonald

Taut, brutal and filled with author Walter Mosley’s trademark mix of imperfect winners and losers, Down the River Unto the Sea introduces a new hero: the complicated and endearing New York detective Joe King Oliver.

It’s a name that may catch the eye of Louis Armstrong fans: Band leader Joe “King” Oliver famously taught the jazz legend. Three pages into this fast-moving jazz solo of a noir, Mosley’s riffs on contemporary life will have you as hooked as Armstrong’s fans were on his mind-bending improvisations a century ago.

“To write about someone who has the name of Louis Armstrong’s mentor is . . . kind of wonderful. That was just fun,” Mosley says. “[Joe] may be around for a while, who knows.”

Sixty-six-year-old Mosley, who began writing at age 34, burst out of the gate with his 1990 Shamus Award-winning debut, Devil in a Blue Dress. Set in the Watts neighborhood in late-1940s Los Angeles and featuring the hard-drinking private eye Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, Devil also became a successful film featuring Denzel Washington as Easy and Don Cheadle as his sidekick, Mouse. The series, now 14 books deep, has worked its way to 1968 with Charcoal Joe, which was released in 2016.

Mosley readily admits his compelling and timeless examination of the African-American experience has benefited as much from timing as technique. “One of the bad things about America, and I benefit from it, is that whenever you’re telling a real story about a black person or a group of black people in America, it probably hasn’t been written,” Mosley says. “Easy Rawlins is that detective.”

However, Mosley says, “It’s not like it hasn’t been done.” He acknowledges his thematic contemporaries, Chester Himes, author of Cotton Comes to Harlem, and Ishmael Reed, author of The Last Days of Louisiana Red. “But Easy Rawlins was a new character, and Mouse was a new character, and Leonid McGill was a new character. It’s so interesting for me, writing these stories.”

And Joe is definitely a new character. On the inspiration behind Joe’s backstory, Mosley says, “There are so many conflicts between authority and people who have been disenfranchised in some way.” Mosley muses that Down the River Unto the Sea reflects a broad view of marginalized Americans. “How does one live in a world where half the people in prison are people of color, and they don’t represent nearly that percentage of the population?”

Recent conversations around racial prejudice in both the justice system and media inspired Mosley to create a character forced to walk between authority, as a detective and former police officer, and guilt, as a man falsely charged with sexual assault.

When we meet Joe King, he is depressed and ruminating on a host of conflicts in his sleepy PI agency. The former detective was one of the NYPD’s top investigators until he was dispatched to arrest an alluring car thief. When, much to Joe’s surprise, his investigation led to a sexual encounter with the woman in question, he found himself framed, arrested and sentenced to Rikers Island, where he spent nine months.

“Joe is a pretty good guy in a world that’s not quite up to his standards.”

In the decade since Joe’s near-fatal stay in Rikers Island, he has had to rebuild his life and reclaim his sexuality after it was used against him. Mosley explains, “For me, there is no conflict between wanting to do what’s right and having a healthy libido.”

The dark cloud surrounding Joe’s past begins to lift when he receives a mysterious card from the woman who ended his career. Suddenly, his worst suspicions are confirmed—the shadowy forces who moved so effectively to frame and nearly kill him intend to complete the job.

Mosley says,“Joe is a pretty good guy in a world that’s not quite up to his standards.” Once he discovers the truth, Joe vows to clear his name with the help of his teenage daughter and office assistant, Aja-Denise.

Long the creator of hard-boiled and hard-loving detectives, Mosley also admits that gender and equality issues have impacted character relationships in Down the River Unto the Sea.

One of those relationships is Joe’s loving—if sometimes misguided—bond with his daughter, who is grappling with her own issues even as Joe does his best to protect her from the cruel realities of the world. Mosley says, “The thing that he does right is, he loves her. And that’s what she needs.”

Joe’s quest for truth also involves his violent yet loyal partner, Melquarth “Mel” Frost, and an unexpected client—Frankie Figures, aka A Free Man, a black militant journalist condemned to death for killing two police officers under similarly suspect circumstances. According to A Free Man’s friends and followers, the journalist had discovered cops trafficking in drugs and prostitution in some of New York’s roughest neighborhoods.

As Joe begins to uncover what really happened, Mosley paints a complex portrait of law and order. “You’re living in a world that’s moving on, it’s leaving most people behind, and the thing to figure out is, what does that mean? Where are we going? And I don’t know.”

Assisted by Aja-Denise, Joe and Mel blaze through the boroughs, collecting clues from Mosley’s fully drawn and delightfully unlikely assemblage of characters, with two lives hanging in the balance.

With all the conspiracies, relationships and self-discovery lining the pages of Down the River Unto the Sea, Mosley admits enjoying a character willing to bend the rules.

“The mystery of it is inside Joe himself: What will he do? How does he solve—and fail to solve—these mysteries that he’s faced with?”

Readers will discover that Joe isn’t afraid to flout the norm. “I think it goes far out of the realm of the expected in the same way that Chester Himes does . . . because we feel trapped by rules. To be able to go beyond that trap is kind of wonderful to me.”

Mosley’s mysteries may belong on a shelf alongside Himes and Reed—but some critics argue differently. Mosley’s work has been drawn into an unlikely debate over whether he qualifies as a Jewish writer.

“There was a big online argument about whether or not I was a Jewish writer,” says Mosley, who explains that he is not religious. “My mother was Jewish, so I’m a Jewish writer. That looks fine. I was never going to get involved in that argument. It’s hard enough to write books. I save that for my novels.”

In addition to his daily writing routine, Mosley spends time in the writers’ room of director John Singleton’s FX series, “Snowfall,” and he’s also working on a new TV series based on his Leonid McGill books and developing a film version of his stand-alone The Man in My Basement with director William Oldroyd. Mosley also continues to tap his passion for jazz as he works on developing a musical based on Devil in a Blue Dress.

All this from a guy who considers himself a man out of time. “I’m very old fashioned,” Mosley muses, “certainly not of this century. . . . The way I approach writing goes back to the 19th century. I’ve published 55 books, and I’m still writing them. I have three yet to come out. That’s what I do. So if you want to know what I think, read the books.”

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Marcia Wilson.

Domestic Suspense, Fiction, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Domestic Suspense

Alafair Burke

Interview by Hilli Levin

by Hilli Levin

How well can you ever really know the love of your life? Bestselling author Alafair Burke (If You Were Here) explores this question in her highly suspenseful new novel, The Wife. Fans of expertly crafted marriage thrillers will no doubt enjoy this timely story of a husband accused of harassment and the wife who chooses to stand behind him. We talked with Burke about how her story relates to the #MeToo movement, how to write the perfect twist-ending and more.

How would you describe your novel in one sentence?
When the wife of a beloved public figure is accused of sexual misconduct, she is forced to take a second look at both the man she married and the women she refuses to believe.

This novel is being published shortly after the #MeToo movement gained international attention. Did this influence your decision to weave workplace assault allegations into your plot?
I finished writing The Wife in early 2017, well before the Harvey Weinstein stories nudged the #MeToo snowball down the mountain. But well before I started the book, we knew that accomplished and respected men had been accused of heinous sexual misconduct. You could probably come up with a list from memory.

And look what inevitably happens when those men are married: Their wives become part of the narrative. To the strangers who wonder how Dr. Huxtable—that nice man with the pudding pops and the voice of Fat Albert—could possibly be a sex offender, his wife is also fair game. What did she know and when did she know it? Her decision to stand by his side is itself an indictment. She condones this. She is complicit.

The man who is currently president of the United States brought a previous president’s female accusers to a presidential debate. The intended target wasn’t the man they claimed had abused them; it was his wife. The implication was clear: She had waived her right to a public life when she made the decision to stand by her man.

I googled Matt Lauer the other day. Half of the recent news items were about his wife. Had she left the country? Had she left him? Did she know he was a “player” even before they were married?

Like most women, I have a #MeToo story, too. But the basis for this book was to move beyond the “he” and the “she” in the usual “he said, she said,” and to look at “his” wife, standing outside the story, trying to live her life and wondering what to believe.

How did you balance having unreliable narrators while being aware of the cultural stigma surrounding sexual assaults?
After a long history of attacking and doubting complainants in sexual harassment and abuse cases, we might be on the cusp of a new response: I believe her. But to believe a woman doesn’t mean that every single aspect of her story will be 100% accurate. Roy Moore’s advocates have tried to discredit a woman’s account by questioning the location of a dumpster near the restaurant where she worked. In one of my favorite scenes from the book, a seasoned sex offense detective says:

The stories never line up. No one’s version is ever a hundred percent accurate. The hard part is figuring out which parts are wrong, and more importantly, why they’re wrong. Bad guys out-and-out lie because they’re trying to protect their asses. But victims? That’s trickier. Some of them almost apologize for the bad guys as they’re reporting the facts, because they’re full of guilt, blaming themselves. Or they mitigate the awfulness of what happened to them, because the full weight of it would kill them if they stopped to absorb it. Or they say they didn’t drink, or didn’t flirt, or didn’t unhook their own bra, because they’re afraid that to admit the truth would be giving him permission for everything that happened after.

Sewing doubts about the reliability of a character’s interior voice is tricky business. Part of the bargain, I think, is that a character should have an understandable reason to withhold, massage or even misremember information.

At the risk of being grossly misunderstood, I’m willing to say that some accusers lie. Not many, but some. And when it happens, it hurts the accused, the women who should be believed, and everyone who thinks that our collective belief-meter is seriously off-kilter. But even in those few cases, it’s worth asking why the allegation was less than reliable. That can be an interesting story.

You have experience working as a prosecutor—how do you balance writing about law enforcement and policing in an authentic way, but still keep it accessible for the average reader?
What’s most important to me is that the law enforcement world be depicted realistically. There’s a rhythm to a precinct and a courthouse—the way people speak to each other. I also want every scenario to be plausible, even if not necessarily typical. I love the ins and outs of policing and courtroom procedure, but I’ve learned over time that most readers don’t. If I find myself writing about the actual process, I stop and ask myself whether it advances plot, character or setting. If not, I move on.

Why do you think readers are so drawn to domestic thrillers that are centered on a marriage, and what do you love most about these types of stories?
I think we enjoy seeing characters in scenarios we can at least imagine ourselves in, and most of us have been in a relationship before. There’s also something terrifying about the idea that you’ve been sharing your life with someone who has been keeping dangerous secrets. Loving someone makes you vulnerable. That vulnerability is a well I’m happy to tap for a story.

As the secrets start to unravel, readers might feel less and less sympathy for these narrators. Is it more fun to write slightly unlikeable characters?
See, that question makes me think that my sympathies aren’t the average bear’s. I often find myself sympathizing, even empathizing, with so-called unlikeable characters, while I’m skeptical of traditional heroes. So I guess that means I’m having fun with characters whom I love and whom everyone else would avoid at a party.

This story has an incredible twist! Without giving it away, can you tell us how you go about crafting that element? What makes a perfect thriller twist?
The best twists I’ve ever written have come to me sideways, and always after I truly know the characters and the events that have brought them to that moment. A good ending can’t be predictable, obviously, but ideally, it should feel inevitable once revealed to the reader. Then it’s magic.

How well can you ever really know the love of your life? Bestselling author Alafair Burke (If You Were Here) explores this very question in her highly suspenseful new novel, The Wife. Fans of expertly crafted marriage thrillers will find a rewarding this timely story of a husband accused of harassment and the wife who chooses to stand behind him. We talked with Burke about how her story relates to the #MeToo movement, how to write the perfect twist-ending and more.

Fiction, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Fiction Suspense

Simone St. James

Interview by Barbara Clark

by Barbara Clark

“Fiction can help us navigate fear, the same way it helps us navigate love and grief and anger and sadness. At least, it does for me.”

In The Broken Girls, author Simone St. James has created an intense, genuinely creepy novel that links the ghostly, gothic strands of a 60-year-old murder with secrets about to be unearthed in the present day.

The past and present stories are linked by Idlewild Hall, a long-abandoned school for troubled teenage girls—those “broken” by circumstance or disrupted family ties. In the 1950s, four roommates at the rural Vermont school share a bond formed from loneliness and a need to survive in the forbidding, eerie landscape at Idlewild, where generations of students have warned schoolmates that the school is haunted by the ghostly presence of a woman named Mary Hand who lurks in the hallways and oppressive gardens. After one of the four girls fails to return after a weekend visit to relatives, the school tags her as a runaway. Her friends, however, are convinced of foul play, and must play a lone hand in order to uncover the grim truth of her murder.

Old ghosts collide with the present more than 60 years later, when the crumbling school is scheduled for renovation. Journalist Fiona Sheridan confronts a haunted presence of her own, as she seeks closure in the murder of her sister, whose body was found 20 years earlier on Idlewild’s grounds.

With a ghostly setting and an addictive plot, St. James’ story is as haunting as it gets—poignant, evocative and difficult to forget.

There are many scenes in The Broken Girls that seem hopeful and bleak at the same time. Did you purposely set out to make the narrative ambiguous in that way?
Well, that’s the way I see life, so I suppose so! I don’t see any situation or any person as any one thing. So I try to portray that in my fiction. It leaves a lot of possibilities.

From the outset, did you have a full-blown concept for this ghost’s enigmatic personality, or did Mary’s motivations take on a life of their own as you wrote?
I had published five ghost stories before this one, so I’d written several kinds of ghosts. With this book, I wanted to write a haunting that was deeply psychological, preying on the characters’ fears. So I sketched out from the beginning what Mary would be like. That one aspect affected a lot of the story on its own.

Do you think all the puzzles surrounding ghostly apparitions in a novel need to be explained, or do you find it legitimate to leave some questions deliberately unanswered?
It’s a fine line to walk. As a ghost story writer you really, really want to avoid the “Scooby Doo” effect, in which everything is explained so thoroughly that it isn’t frightening anymore. At the same time you don’t want it so ambiguous that your reader is lost, and therefore stops caring. The great masters of the genre always leave certain things unexplained.

What do you think makes ghost stories so fascinating to readers?
It’s probably the “what if” aspect of it. Whether you believe or not in real life, in the pages of a novel you can ask yourself: What if it were true? What would happen then? What would the characters do, how would they react? Ghosts are also a manifestation of the past, which we’re always fascinated with, and they’re an idea of what happens after death, which humans have always wanted to know.

Why did you decide to use the plot device of balancing the past with a current-day crime plot? Did one story take precedence for you?
Using both time periods let me explore more than one aspect of the central tragedy of the book: how it unfolds at the time and the effect it continues to have through the years. Grief is one of the themes of the book, and grief is something that continues and changes with time. And it allowed me to show the haunting through generations of girls at Idlewild. Neither took precedence for me—I was equally invested in both.

Were you a fan of ghost stories while growing up? Which ghost “legacies” motivated you?
I’ve always loved ghost stories. I read Stephen King from an early age, and I have several volumes of classic Victorian and early 20th-century ghost stories. I’ve read Dracula countless times. You can’t possibly write a certain kind of book if you don’t enjoy reading it!

What kinds of background information did you seek in order to write this story?
I had to do research to make sure the 1950s era was accurate. I also had to do some World War II research that I won’t give away to avoid spoilers. That part was intense and often upsetting, and as most writers do, I learned much more than I actually put in the book. Trying to pick the most relevant facts is one of the skills of a writer.

The four teenage friends at Idlewild have very distinct personalities in terms of their impact on the story action. Did you have a favorite among them?
I didn’t; I loved writing all of them. Katie was the easiest to write, because her personality was the strongest, but I was rooting for each girl even as I wrote their chapters. I saw them very clearly as I wrote.

Fear seems to be a major factor in The Broken Girls. Did you set out to make fear serve as the main motivation for nearly all the characters in the book?
Fear is one of the themes of every book I write, and what makes me return to ghost stories. Fear is a universal emotion that has been with humankind since the very beginning, and it’s one we don’t often explore. We have lots of different fears in our lives, and not just of the supernatural. Fiction can help us navigate fear, the same way it helps us navigate love and grief and anger and sadness. At least, it does for me.

At what point in your life did you first decide that you wanted to become a writer?
I’ve written all my life; it’s just something I’ve always done, usually to amuse myself. Once I decided to get serious about it, I wrote three whole novels that were rejected everywhere and will live in a drawer forever before I wrote what would become my first published book. I spent years and years getting nothing but rejections as I wrote in all of my spare time. The experience toughened me up, and I learned to write no matter what negative things were happening around me.

Photo credit Adam Hunter

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Max Allan Collins

Interview by Cat, Deputy Editor

by Cat, Deputy Editor

Honoring the centenary of Spillane’s birth, The Last Stand presents something special for fans: one of Spillane’s earliest unpublished novellas, completed by Collins, paired with Spillane’s last completed novel.

How do these two stories encompass Spillane’s career?
The novella, A Bullet for Satisfaction, dates to the early 1950s, the time of his first great success. It represents all the controversial elements that made Mickey such an innovator and superstar, specifically the level of sex and violence, but also his mastery of fast-paced narrative and first-person. Mickey mellowed as he grew older, and the rage and frustrations he brought home from military service in World War II—which were infused in Mike Hammer and his other early protagonists, and are so apparent in Bullet—were muted in The Last Stand. But he remained interested in male bonding, male-female relationships and strength of character. There’s also an element of vengeance, but not coming from the hero this time.

The Last Stand is a very different kind of Spillane novel. It’s quieter, with an emphasis on adventure over mystery. In your introduction to the book, you describe it as a “barely concealed rumination on coming to terms with aging.” How would you describe Spillane at this point in his writing career?
Mickey, I think, viewed himself as semiretired. He only wrote when he felt like it, more for fun than commerce—which I think was always true, though he liked to say his inspiration was “an urgent need for money.” On the other hand, at the same time he wrote The Last Stand, he was working on his final Mike Hammer novel, The Goliath Bone (2008). He portrayed Hammer as an older man preparing to marry his longtime secretary and partner, Velda.

Spillane frequently spun stories of vengeance. Why?
Vengeance is the specific theme of I, the Jury (1947)—Mike Hammer swearing revenge over the corpse of an army buddy who’d saved his life in combat. That so resonated with readers that Mickey realized this theme could separate him from run-of-the-mill mystery writers—he brought emotion into play.

The crime fiction landscape has changed quite a bit since Spillane’s first Mike Hammer novel, I, the Jury, was published. Where do you see Spillane’s (and Hammer’s) legacy in contemporary thrillers?
Lee Child’s Jack Reacher is an obvious descendant, just as in Spillane’s day James Bond and Fleming were his. You see Mickey’s fingerprints all over everybody who followed him and Mike Hammer, from Peter Gunn and Billy Jack to Mack Bolan and Jack Bauer. Shaft was a black Mike Hammer, even initially advertised that way. Fleming was sold as the British Spillane. Any tough hero with emotion who breaks the rules can point back to Mickey and Mike.

This article was originally published in the April 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

For 10 years, Max Allan Collins has skillfully and loyally acted as literary executor for pulp mystery master Mickey Spillane, who left behind a number of unfinished manuscripts after his death in 2006.

Fiction, Popular Fiction, Thriller

Fiction Thriller Popular Fiction

President Bill Clinton and James Patterson

Interview by Roy Neel

by Roy Neel

White House thrillers have been a staple of the suspense genre for decades, and many films and television projects have added to their number. But none have done so with an actual president doing the writing.

Former President Bill Clinton and bestselling novelist James Patterson have collaborated to write The President Is Missing, a political thriller following a president and his team trying to stop a cyberterrorist plot.

When radical mercenary Suliman Cindoruk designs a catastrophic internet virus targeting Americans, the only people standing in the way of its activation are two former allies of the terrorist and President Jonathan Duncan. To make things more stressful, Bach, a cold-blooded assassin, is determined to take out the president.

Author Roy Neel (President Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff) speaks with both remarkable authors about their partnership and the project.

Roy Neel: You’re both storytellers. How did you get started writing The President Is Missing?
James Patterson: We have a mutual agent, who thought it would be a great idea to do a book together. But Mr. President, you should tell the story.

President Bill Clinton: I thought it was a great idea, but I didn’t think Jim needed my help to be a successful writer.

JP: One of the things that was important to me was that it not come across as a James Patterson novel, but a Bill Clinton and James Patterson novel. I can make stuff up. I have a good imagination, but the president has been there. You just can’t find that authenticity in any thrillers or novels today.

People read political thrillers, watch “24” or “Homeland” or some other television show about terrorism and think, “Well, that was entertaining, but it’s unrealistic.”
BC: I like those shows, but one of the things that struck me is that we’ve wound up with the worst of both worlds. When it came to the real threats, when politicians were out killing people, it’s kind of jaded them about everybody who’s in this business, which I think is also misleading.

JP: One of the things we’d like to communicate with the book is just how serious and tense and difficult this job [of president] is. In between “Saturday Night Live” and some of these shows like “House of Cards,” which start getting crazy, we stop taking that job seriously. If we don’t, anything can happen when we start talking about who should be the next president.

The President Is Missing deals realistically with the burden of presidential decision-making. President John Duncan can bring in unlimited advisers during this crisis, but in the end, it’s all on him. Mr. President, you must have channeled that experience in creating the character.
BC: I tried to. I also tried to show how important it is to have the right people helping you in that situation, and how dangerous it is if you don’t. I don’t know how many times you were there, Roy, when Al Gore and I would talk about some security issue, and he’d actually go get the original intelligence data and review what the CIA had written. It matters: what you do and how it affects people.

Mr. President, you faced this issue during your time in office, as cyberterrorist technology was in its infancy. And now, we see almost daily events where corporate and government networks are compromised, with data stolen from millions of consumers. Not to mention the Russian interference into the 2016 election and reports of state-supported computer hacking from North Korea and China.
BC: Roy, you were in the White House with me 21 years ago when I issued the first executive order to set up a special group on cybersecurity. We made a good beginning, but we had no idea then what the almost limitless possibilities were for mischief and trouble. I don’t think we’ve done enough about it. Maybe one of the things that will come out of this book is the heightened interest in the issue.

JP: There are two chapters where Augie [a Suliman protégé] talks to the assembled group about what can happen. I think they are two of the scariest thriller chapters ever written, because they lay out what can happen. And we’re not prepared for it. So as the president said, this is a little bit of a warning shot for the country, because we’re not prepared.

I can recall sessions in the Oval Office that played out a lot like those in The President Is Missing. I heard your voice in so much of the fictional President Duncan. In the opening chapter there’s a great thrashing of an opposition speaker of the House who is a thorn in the president’s side. That must have been fun for you to write.
BC: I got tickled about that.

JP: That was fun. To the point that the reader is going to say, “Come on, this isn’t going to happen.” But we show how it did happen and why it would happen.

BC: We really worked on all that. Not just to be authentic about physical settings and established procedures, but really how the decision-making process really works when it works well, and when it breaks down.

You’ve created many strong women in key roles in this book—Carrie, the chief of staff; Liz, the FBI director; and others. Is there a message there?
BC: Each of these women was qualified. That was really important to me. Intelligent and able. I wanted to make the point that this was an empowerment group. Nothing was given to them—they earned it.

JP: And not afraid to show in a couple cases that they were flawed.

Mr. President, it must have been liberating to write in a fictional medium about so many things you’ve worked on and been concerned about for so long.
BC: Yeah, I loved it. You know, I’m a big fan of mysteries and thrillers. I consume a lot of them, including a large number of Jim’s books. I always wanted to write one, but I never got around to it. I felt a lot of confidence working with Jim. He’s a good storyteller and knows how to get from A to B. I loved the whole process and loved working with him. I loved the fact that he would say we needed more on this or that. And I could say, “It wouldn’t happen that way, it would happen this way.”

JP: What I hoped to do here was to write the best thriller ever written about a president. And I knew I had an advantage because I’d be working with the president, who, as you said, is A) a great storyteller, and B) knows what goes on in that office. I’ll leave it up to readers about whether we compare to Advise and Consent or Seven Days in May or The Manchurian Candidate.

Roy Neel was President Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and longtime chief of staff for Vice President Al Gore. He is the author of the political thriller The Electors.

Author photo credit David Burnett.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Anthony Horowitz

Interview by Jay MacDonald

by Jay MacDonald

Just after 11 a.m. on a bright spring morning, wealthy widow Diana Cowper waltzes into the London funeral home of Cornwallis and Sons to plan her own funeral service. Six hours later, she’s found strangled to death in her terraced Chelsea home.

Who arranges their final bow and then gets killed the same day? Baffled, the police turn to Daniel Hawthorne, a disgraced yet brilliant investigator whose uncanny detective skills are matched only by his mysterious past.

It’s tempting to wade into these first few pages of The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz, author of last year’s bestselling Magpie Murders and a BAFTA-winning screenwriter (“Foyle’s War,” “Midsomer Murders”), thinking that you’re about to enjoy a loving homage to the classic British mysteries of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. Then comes Horowitz’s inventive twist: The inscrutable Hawthorne enlists an author whose name happens to be Anthony Horowitz to join him as he probes the case and then to write a book about it, splitting the profits. And voila: This Holmes has his Watson, this Hastings his Poirot.

This literary technique, known as self-insertion, would prove problematic for most novelists. But for Horowitz, stepping into his own tale as first-person narrator allows him to introduce both an unorthodox reader relationship and an additional storyline—and a fun one at that.

“When my publishers asked me to do a series of murder mysteries, my first thought was, how do I do something that hasn’t been done before?” Horowitz says by phone from London. “I began to consider: Could I change the entire format, not only as another way to explore it but to enhance it? So I suddenly had this idea that if I became the narrator, everything changes. Instead of being on the mountain, seeing everything and knowing everything, I’m now in the valley, seeing nothing and knowing nothing. That suddenly struck me as fun—the author never knowing the ending of his own book.”

Once he found his (own) voice, The Word Is Murder took on the high-velocity twists and turns one would expect from a writer who has been wholly consumed with the conventions of classic murder mysteries since childhood. (As an upper-crust kid, Horowitz battled prep school bullies by reading golden age mysteries aloud.) Looking for suspects with possible motives, our oddly matched detectives visit the English seaside town of Dean, where 10 years prior, Cowper had struck two twin boys with her car, killing one and seriously disabling the other. She was charged but released without penalty, which leads Hawthorne and Horowitz down a trail of suspects, including the boys’ parents. Meanwhile, Cowper’s grown son, Damian, an actor whose rising star prompted a move to Hollywood, provides another lead that bears exploring. As does Raymond Clunes, a theater producer whose recent flop cost Cowper her investment in his theater troupe.

Central throughout is Hawthorne, an enigmatic hero who is also a blunt, brutal hothead. The self-insertion twist allows readers to enjoy Hawthorne and Horowitz as they bicker and brainstorm, but it also keeps this classic tale grounded in the 21st century, thanks to Horowitz’s brief asides on social media, Tintin screen production meetings with Stephen Spielberg and occasional conversations with his wife, Jill Green, who is also the producer of “Foyle’s War” and the upcoming TV adaptation of Magpie Murders.

“The whole business of being a writer is almost as weird as being a detective.”

“I’ve always loved books on writing, like William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade, and I’ve always wanted to do this,” Horowitz says. “I even tried at one point to write a book about writing, but my problem was that it was rather dull and not really worth reading. So this is my attempt to hone in on it and make it part of the narrative. Because the whole business of being a writer is almost as weird as being a detective.”

Horowitz’s mix of personal fact and fiction within his narrative is already paying off in unexpected ways.

“The people in England have been looking on Google to see if they can work out how much of the book is true and how much of it isn’t,” he says. “And that’s exactly what I wanted the readers to do, in a way. That seems like a fun way to approach it.”

However, Horowitz admits it was a little awkward to insert his wife and two sons into a work of fiction.

“My wife and children were, to say the least, alarmed that they would wind up in my new book, and quite wary as to how they should be treated. . . . My wife did insist on a few changes to make her kinder. What a terrible admission about our relationship!” Horowitz laughs. “We’ve been married 30 years, so we know each other pretty well.”

At age 63, when some writers are dialing back their workload, Horowitz finds himself suddenly in high demand. In addition to his popular Alex Rider teen spy series, Horowitz has completed two Sherlock Holmes sequels, The House of Silk (2011) and Moriarty (2014). This November, he’s following up his James Bond spy thriller Trigger Mortis, which was commissioned by the Ian Fleming estate, with Forever and a Day. He’s also 30,000 words into a Hawthorne sequel, and he couldn’t be happier.

“The plan is to write 10 or 11 of these Hawthorne novels,” he says. “I have five books in my head already, so that just shows how quickly the ideas are coming. . . . Having been a kid’s author and a TV writer, now I want to be a murder mystery writer.”

To which I would humbly add: mission accomplished.

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Author photo by Jon Cartwright.

Fiction, Thriller

Fiction Thriller

Paul Tremblay

Interview by G. Robert Frazier

by G. Robert Frazier

It’s Private Eye July at BookPage! This month, we’re celebrating the sinister side of fiction with the year’s best mysteries and thrillers. Look for the Private Eye July magnifying glass for a dose of murder, espionage and all those creepy neighbors with even creepier secrets.

Praised by horrormeister Stephen King, Paul Tremblay’s shocking new novel, The Cabin at the End of the World, is an often graphic account of one family’s ordeal when their vacation is shattered in a cult-like home invasion. We asked Tremblay about the book’s origins, its dark path and his inner fears that helped forge the novel.

How does it feel to receive a compliment from a literary horror master like King?
I was a mathematics major in college and about to go off to a graduate program for two years, and Lisa (my wife) gave me The Stand for my 22nd birthday. It would be a cliché to say that book changed my life, but it did. I haven’t stopped reading King since. I became a reader—never mind a writer—because of Stephen King. That Stephen now reads my books and enjoys them is one of the highlights of my career.

Your previous novel, A Head Full of Ghosts, was a Stoker Award winner for best horror novel in 2015. What is it like to follow up a book that’s been so well received? Did it change your writing process at all?
The response to A Head Full of Ghosts has been amazing and thrilling. I’d be lying if I said I don’t feel a little extra pressure trying to follow it up. Some of that OK, what the heck are you going write now? is natural and healthy. Letting it take over and paralyze the process is not healthy.

Aside from worrying if what I’m working on was as good as AHFoG or not, my writing process hasn’t been changed. Cabin is my seventh novel, and while I still have to push through plenty of doubt and anxiety, I’ve earned a little bit of confidence. I’ve been to the finish line with those other novels, so it’s a bit easier to believe I can get there again with the next one.

A few years ago I was in the midst of gnashing my teeth while working on my novel Disappearance at Devil’s Rock. I sent friend/mentor/genius Stewart O’Nan an email telling him I was worried the book wasn’t as good as the last novel and didn’t know how people would react to it, blah blah blah.

He said, “Eh, not everything you’re going to write is going to be great.” I laughed out loud when I read the email, and it was exactly what I needed to here. I still find his pithy quote oddly comforting, reaffirming and inspiring. Maybe I should put it on a T-shirt.

“Most horror stories feature the reveal of a horrible truth (or potential truth) or some terrible event, ambiguous or not. My favorite stories then focus on the aftermath and on what the characters are going to do next. What decisions are they going to make?”

There are some shocking developments in store for each of the characters in Cabin. Did you ever pause midstream during writing those scenes to ask, “Did I just go too far?”
I never thought or asked that question during the writing of Cabin. But that doesn’t mean there’s not a pause when it comes to the use of violence.

In Cabin the cast is so small and the violence is up close and personal, so my pause was about making sure to take the proper amount of time to figure out how the violence was to be portrayed and how it affected the characters. I did not want those scenes to simply be about titillation or shock, although there’s no denying there are elements of both whenever violence is used in entertainment/art. I hope those scenes are super disturbing in Cabin, and I hope I’m successful in treating the experiences of both the victim and perpetrator(s) of the violent act with authenticity. There are great and terrible consequences to any act of violence, and they reverberate beyond the act itself. The survivors and witnesses are fundamentally changed by what they experienced. There’s no going back for anyone after the horror and transgression of violence.

This story is powerful both emotionally and viscerally. How do you balance the two for the benefit of the reader?
Thank you! I think if you treat all of your characters, even the odious ones, with empathy (not sympathy; there’s a difference), the reader will be willing to follow you into dark places. When you use empathy as a base—the want to understand a character, why she does what she does, says what she says—I think it’s easier to build trust with the reader, particularly in a horror/suspense story. That’s not to say bad things won’t happen or there won’t be surprises, but the reader’s emotional investment is rewarded because that investment was grounded in empathy.

Most horror stories feature the reveal of a horrible truth (or potential truth) or some terrible event, ambiguous or not. My favorite stories then focus on the aftermath and on what the characters are going to do next. What decisions are they going to make? How are they going to live through this? And by proxy, we readers ask, how are we going to live through this?

“There are great and terrible consequences to any act of violence, and they reverberate beyond the act itself.”

Where did the genesis for this novel come from? Is there some inner fear that you have that you’ve incorporated here?
I was on a plane scribbling in one of my notebooks, looking for a new novel/story idea, and I looked down to find I’d randomly drawn a cabin. (An artist I am not, by the way.) I looked at the cabin and drew a few stick figures (again, not an artist) outside the cabin, and I got to thinking about the home-invasion subgenre of horror. It’s a subgenre that I really don’t enjoy all that much. There are some books/films that I like (Wait Until Dark, Ils (Them), Hush), but generally, too many of those stories are mean-spirited, cynical and at times sadistic. With all that in mind, I was excited by the challenge of writing a home-invasion story that I would want to read. So why not a home-invasion-maybe-the-apocalypse-is-happening-too story? Very early in the process, the book became an allegory for our current socio-political predicament, which was another hook for me.

Home-invasion stories scare me for sure, but I think one of my biggest metaphysical fears is represented in the novel, but I can’t really talk about it with spoiling the whole thing. Sorry!

Many writers believe they are their own harshest critic. Is that the case with you as well, and if so, what do you do to silence that inner critic?
I’m harsh on myself. But let’s be honest, I’m not as harsh as the online one-star critic who says, “This book is boring and stupid and smells like poo.” The smell part is the most hurtful.

As much as a pain in the butt as he is, I don’t want to totally silence my inner critic. Generally he’s helpful. When the inner critic’s voice gets too loud, I promise him I’ll deal with him and his concerns, but later, and not until after I write my 500 new words for the day.

What are you working on next?
I just finished a draft of my short story collection Growing Things and Other Stories. It’s due to be published summer 2019. The collection features a few stories that have connections to my novels, including one story that features adult Merry from A Head Full of Ghosts after her tell-all book was published. I’m working on a short screenplay for a secret project, and I need to get off my duff and start the next novel. That, and working on helping my kid visit and apply to colleges. Send help.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Cabin at the End of the World.