The premise of Dean Koontz’s mesmerizing new psychological thriller, Ashley Bell, is compelling but not complex: When doctors inform 22-year-old Southern California surfer girl and budding novelist Bibi Blair that inoperable brain cancer will shorten her life to a matter of months, she replies, “We’ll see.”

Bibi’s fate seems sealed until a mystery man with a golden retriever (Koontz and his beloved Trixie?) appears at her hospital bedside in the middle of the night and quotes a snippet of Henry David Thoreau in passing: “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

The incident sparks a miraculous recovery. Bibi’s subsequent meeting with a fortune-telling masseuse convinces her that she’s been spared specifically to save the life of someone else, someone named Ashley Bell. Strap in and hold on as this determined surfer “walks the board” to suss out the whos, hows and whys of her improbable reprieve. 

Readers will savor the most stunning experience yet from a writer who specializes in surprises.

So far, all that sounds like classic Koontz, right? But through an equally unlikely turn of events in the crafting of Ashley Bell, what readers can now savor is arguably the most stunning, flat-out crazy reading experience yet from a writer who specializes in surprises.

If you’ve ever wondered how much fun it would be to feel a book unfold in real time along with its characters, you need to read Ashley Bell right now.

Koontz’s wild ride began with a friend who had been diagnosed with gliomatosis cerebri, a rare, fatal brain cancer. After reading a letter from his pal, who had already outlived his doctor’s one-year prediction by a year, Koontz wondered, “Wouldn’t it be nice to write a story in which somebody is doomed to this but isn’t doomed to it after all?” To take his personal feelings out of play, he cast a surfer girl in the lead, while setting the story in his hometown of Newport Beach.

“The moment I heard her character say, ‘We’ll see’ in my head, Bibi became nearly complete to me,” Koontz recalls. “I realized she would be somebody who almost likes the sharp edges of life and leans into them.”

Koontz was initially stumped by the tougher task of figuring out how Bibi might escape the medically inevitable until the answer absolutely “hammered and prosecuted” him, to use surfer speak.

“The big reveal in the book came to me, and I was like a child; I was basically jumping up and down in my chair!” Koontz says. “And I thought, this is going to be a wonderful thing for people to get to, but how do you make it real? I couldn’t wait to start it.”

It’s no big reveal that there will be no big reveal here. When a writer has managed to catch this kind of lightning in a bottle, every reader should experience the full jolt.

Chapter by chapter, Koontz watched as Ashley Bell coalesced around an existential, philosophical difference between Bibi and her hippie parents, Murph and Nancy. 

“It’s the idea of free will versus fate; Bibi believes she will make her own life, and her parents believe that fate determines what happens. Then it becomes perfectly natural for her to use her free will to find her way through this,” he says. “But I also realized that it was going to be about deception, self-deception and imagination.”

Especially imagination. Along the way, Koontz salts Bibi’s journey with a sweeping assortment of characters, some of whom threaten to shoplift the narrative and take it home. They include Bibi’s fiancé, Pax, a Navy SEAL on his last covert mission; her childhood bestie Pogo, who’s something of a surfer Yoda; hospital security guard Chubb Coy, a stalking Mr. Toad menace who quotes Jack London and Thornton Wilder; and a parade of horrific Wrong People who threaten to end her journey at every turn.

Koontz takes particular delight in skewering literary academia with the character of Solange St. Croix, a spiteful doyenne whose utter disdain for Bibi’s writing gifts makes her the meanest witch in the faculty lounge. For Koontz, who wrote his own way out of a career as a Pennsylvania English teacher decades ago, it’s not academia per se that’s troubling; it’s the limiting perspective.

“I’m not sure it’s a good thing that so many writers are going to school to become writers. When I became a writer, people like John D. MacDonald and a lot of writers I admired never went to school to be writers; it was just something they wanted to do because they loved books. I’ve often wondered if, over time, the writing programs will lead to a homogenous kind of fiction that isn’t very healthy,” he explains.

His own love of wordplay is apparent in Koontz’s clever twist on the fortune-teller trope. His muddled medium, a loopy New Age masseuse named Calida Butterfly, uses a divination technique called Scrabblemancy, in which Bibi draws Scrabble tiles from a silver bowl. Naturally, one of the phrases they spell out is “Ashley Bell.”

“I didn’t want Calida to have a Ouija board or a crystal ball or anything we’ve seen before. Then it occurred to me that all magic and all forms of belief are based on words—the idea that words have power and were at the root of everything that came to be,” he recalls. “Scrabblemancy makes more sense than having a little pointer on a board full of letters.”

To ground firmly in the here-and-now what might otherwise seem an ethereal journey, Koontz conjured one Birkenau Terezin, a neo-Nazi cult leader whose corporate minions terrorize Bibi.

“In my lifetime, I’m watching anti-Semitism return to the world stage in a major, very spooky way. I think it’s a bigger issue now in many places in the world than it was in the 1930s or ’40s,” Koontz says. “So it seemed logical, if you were going to reach for a villain in a book like this, Terezin would be the guy who is very suitable to our time. And the book wants to be very contemporary. I made every effort to keep everything in it very much of this period we’re living through without beating a lot of drums about it.”

Once Koontz caught a whiff of the uncharted magical reality he was creating in Ashley Bell, the question of the big twist began to weigh on him. Was he concerned that some readers wouldn’t make the leap to the third act?

“In any story where there are big surprises, I always feel the reader has to be able to go back and say, my God, it was right in front of me all the time! But in this case, I realized that’s not going to be enough.”

“In any story where there are big surprises, I always feel the reader has to be able to go back and say, my God, it was right in front of me all the time! That makes it fair. But in this case, I realized that’s not going to be enough,” he says. “With this book, the reveal is not just an intellectual thing; it’s an emotional thing. That way, when the reader starts reading it and is trying to get their head around it, they have a feeling that it makes sense. The two together make this thing go down in a way I don’t know that it would have otherwise.”

For once, Koontz, as the author, is sharing a surprise usually reserved for his readers.

“This book is about imagination; I think that’s what allows it to feel like it’s almost unfolding in real time as you’re reading it,” he says. “Bringing those many threads together gradually came easier than I would have ever imagined. The characters allowed me to do it. They showed me the way and it was exhilarating.”

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

You’ve cited To Kill a Mockingbird as inspiration for this novel, but you began writing it before Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman came out. How did Lee’s “found” manuscript affect how you felt about this book? How do you think it will affect future Harper Lee-inspired novels?
My book was well under way when the discovery of Watchman was announced, so I shrugged and said to myself, “Keep going.” I don’t think Watchman is a game-changer for anyone who wants to revisit Mockingbird. In fact, I think it gives people more license to rethink the book.

What was the process of writing this novel and building the contrast between attitudes in past and present? Did the 1980s narrative come first, or did you initially place yourself in present-day Lu’s world?
When I’m playing with time, I usually dabble in both the past and present to get a feel for what’s going on, then opt for a straight-forward chronological approach. So the sections about the past were written first, then I followed the events of 2015. But I had a pretty clear idea of what was going on in 2015.

What do you admire most about Lu?
Her loyalty to her family.

What was most personal about this novel for you? What was the furthest away from yourself?
Lu’s decision to follow her father, professionally, and her desire to protect him and his reputation—that was very personal for me. Her extracurricular life, if you will, is not something I would do.

What mysteries and thrillers do you think everyone must read?
People should read what they love. That said, I wish people would read with a heightened awareness of sexism and racism.

What do you love most about writing thrillers?
I love being engaged in a form of writing that can work on so many levels. The best, best thrillers—bear in mind, I’m not saying I write them—should be able to entertain the person just trying to survive a plane ride, but also engage a person looking for something more serious. They are layered, capable of being many things to many readers.

What’s next?
A novel set in the pre-internet year of 1995, when disappearing was a little bit easier.

Author photo credit Lesley Unruh.

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.

What was your inspiration for the Orphan Program?
I have a great Roladex filled with guys who have operated in all sorts of fields under all sorts of cover. I’ve built up enough trust for them to talk to me on and off the record. I never know where the germ of an idea will come from—sometimes while talking to them over a beer, sometimes from an article I might stumble over. A lot of times they’ve discussed different black operations or programs they’ve been involved in. When I struck on the idea of the Orphan Program—a deep-black government program that pulls kids from foster homes and trains them up to be assassins—I used my contacts to make sure that the training, infrastructure and process felt genuine.

“I didn’t want anything to feel like bullshit Hollywood training, where Evan was running around catching flies with chopsticks.”

Smoak has some good reasons to be paranoid. Does researching for a character like this up your own paranoia? (Are you building a panic room?)
Yeah, sometimes you stumble into some creepy stuff on the web that you can’t unsee. I went down a black hole researching ISIS at one point and it got pretty sketchy. But there’s a lot of cool stuff, too. The idea for ingested GPS nanochips in Orphan X came from an article I read about a medical product that doctors use to track insulin levels in diabetic patients. I thought: Wouldn’t that be cool if Evan used it instead as a secret GPS transmitter?

My favorite research though is out in the field. I didn’t want anything to feel like bullshit Hollywood training, where Evan was running around catching flies with chopsticks. So once I had a handle on who he was, I spent months doing research. I went to Vegas to visit one of my consultants, a world-renowed sniper and armorer, who got me onto every gun I write about, from Benelli combat shotguns to custom 1911 pistols. I trained—badly—in mixed martial arts, familiarizing my face with the training mat. I talked to guys who led operations that you’ve seen on CNN, who have gone into hostile territory, under deep cover, or played offense in some of the most dangerous theaters in the world. I’d say that now and then, depending on who I’m talking to and how deep the conversation goes, topics come up that pull back the veil on what we view as ordinary life, and that can have me looking over my shoulder a bit.

Talk of an Orphan X movie began almost immediately, with plans for Bradley Cooper to produce and possibly play the character of Smoak. Does this affect your vision of the character in any way?
It sounds odd to say, but it really doesn’t. I chose to submit the manuscript exclusively to Bradley Cooper because I thought he was the perfect actor to play Evan Smoak. But until the moment I pow-wowed with my film agents about how we were going to approach the film rights, I didn’t put an actor’s face to Evan. I saw him as I do in my head. Even after working on the adaptation, that’s still the only way I see him.

What was most personal about this novel for you? What was the furthest away from yourself?
The key line in the book for me is when Jack (Evan’s handler) tells him, “The hard part isn’t making you a killer. The hard part is keeping you human.” And I think what hits closest to home for me is Evan’s struggle between intimacy and perfection. It’s very difficult to have both. But even in the face of being a perfectionist, Evan strives for human contact. That’s the heart of what I connected with when I found this character—the conflict deep within Evan. Because everybody, no matter how tough, no matter what training they’ve received, has a need for human relationships in the real world. And one thing we never get to see? Is James Bond going home. Or Jason Bourne having an awkward moment with a single mom in the elevator of his condo. What would that really be like? What’s personal about that for me is that I struggle sometimes coming out of my work life and the fictional world that I’m creating (and can control) into the real world with all its messy and wonderful complications.

The furthest away from me is probably 1. That I’m not a top-tier assassin (sad-face emoticon). And 2. That Evan’s drink of drinks is vodka. And for me? Bourbon wins every time.

What mysteries and thrillers do you think everyone must read?
So many. Red Dragon, Mystic River, Motherless Brooklyn, Demolition Angel, Trust Me, The End of Everything, Blood Work, Manhattan Nocturne, Laguna Heat, The Genius, Case Histories. . . . I could keep going forever.

What do you love most about writing thrillers?
I love when I’m all the way inside an exciting sequence and the world and time cease to exist.

What’s next?
The next Evan Smoak book, The Nowhere Man, comes out in January. And The Book of Henry, from an original screenplay I wrote, comes out this year from Focus/Universal.

Author photo credit Nancy Rose.

Once again you focus your crime fiction on events in the news that concern Muslims worldwide—this time, present-day Islamophobia and the war on terrorism. In what ways does the novel medium allow for you to best explore these issues?
I think the value of using the novel as a medium to write about jihadism and Islamophobia is that it allowed me to explore all points of view without judgment. I was attempting to tell this story with more nuance than the typically black-and-white constructions of “Us vs. Them” that we often see.

In these constructions, “we” are always superior and on the side of right, while “their” actions are brutally senseless. But when you’re writing a novel and creating characters who have these different sides to them, it allows for the humanization of those whose humanity we aren’t prepared to accept. And it also allows for an examination of a problem that’s occupied me a great deal of late, which is guilt by association. With a character like Esa Khattak, how dogmatically can one cling to the idea that Islam and terrorism are synonymous? Everything about Esa flies in the face of that. So in a way, the novel form allows us to examine our judgments and preconceptions.

“When you’re writing a novel and creating characters who have these different sides to them, it allows for the humanization of those whose humanity we aren’t prepared to accept.”

One element of the story is based on the foiled 2006 plot to blow up Canadian Parliament. Why did you decide to reference this real event?
When the news of the plot became public, it was painful to realize that jihadist ideology could be exported anywhere. There are disenfranchised individuals vulnerable to ideological predators even in places as welcoming and inclusive as Toronto. I wanted to explore how individuals could arrive at a place where they would accept violence in the name of faith, given those circumstances. What were they running from or to, and did they really see salvation in it? Putting Esa Khattak in charge of the investigation was a way of making those questions personal and familiar.

What do you admire most about Esa Khattak? About Rachel Getty?
I admire Esa for being a man who knows who he is and what he stands for, without believing himself superior to anyone else. He’s open to the world, and he finds beauty and value in diversity—he’s willing to question himself, and he confesses his doubts without shame. People who think in ideologically rigid terms are either terrifying or deadly dull—Esa is neither: His faith has taught him to reserve judgment in pursuit of a deeper understanding.

With Rachel, I admire her compassion, and her confidence in her skills as a police officer. She’s a flawed person, but she’s grown from the challenges she’s faced, and she has a great deal of natural courage because of her compassion. The idea that only hard, cold logic can lead you to the truth is absolutely foreign to Rachel, who tends to lead with her heart, and I think that’s what makes her interesting as a character.

What was most personal about this novel for you? What was the furthest away from yourself?
The first few pages of Chapter 15 describe Esa’s thoughts as he wrestles with the question of what it means to be Muslim in a world that’s largely hostile to Muslim identity. That’s very personal to me, particularly in the years since the September 11th attacks, where we’re consistently seeing political debates framed in terms of “Islam vs. the West.” As a Muslim born and raised in the West, and of the West, I find identity has become increasingly difficult to navigate. I often hear my entire community described in terms that are nightmarishly exaggerated and untrue. I was able to have Esa reflect on that, and search for his footing from firsthand knowledge.

Furthest away from myself? The family relationships for both Esa and Rachel are quite dysfunctional, whereas I come from a large, close-knit family where my siblings are my closest friends in the world, and my parents are my enduring role models. We’re always in each other’s business, and I’ve come to the conclusion we like it that way.

What mysteries and thrillers do you think everyone must read?
For psychological suspense and incredibly impressive plot construction, Reginald Hill’s pair of novels: Dialogues of the Dead and Death’s Jest-Book. For unvarnished kindness and fantastic immersion in the history of Quebec, Louise Penny’s Bury Your Dead. For place and atmosphere, Peter May’s The Blackhouse, is a heartbreaking book set in the Scottish Hebrides. And for a series that steadily probes, ponders and grows, anything in the Duncan Kincaid-Gemma James series by Deborah Crombie, though Dreaming of the Bones is an old and dear favorite. For a character I wish was my best friend, Alan Bradley’s Flavia de Luce who stars in The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie.

What do you love most about writing thrillers?
The chance to tell stories that don’t often see the light of day. My books are centered around contemporary human rights issues. To have the opportunity to shape suspenseful stories where the reader has to know what’s coming next, in the context of these issues, is a great gift.

What’s next?
I’m currently at work on my third Khattak-Getty novel which is partially set in Iran, and centers on the story of an Iranian political prisoner. And I’m deeply immersed in my new fantasy series about a female warrior-scholar who must reclaim a sacred text to save her people from enslavement. The Bloodprint, the first book in the series, will be published by Harper Voyager in Fall 2017. In the meantime, I’ll leap at any opportunity to travel in the name of research!

Author photo credit Alan Klehr.

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.

You’re clearly fascinated by criminal fugitives and the fugitive narrative, as your dissertation on the subject became the book On the Lam. You’ve described fugitive stories as “sister to the Western” or to the American road story. What is it about the fugitive narrative that fascinates you? Why do they seem to be an American tradition, and how does Dodgers contribute to that tradition?
I lucked into my dissertation topic about June 17, 1994, the day that O.J. Simpson rode his white Bronco across Los Angeles. It was a hell of a day to watch TV—I’d gathered a houseful of friends to watch the first day of the World Cup, or so I’d planned. We ended up eating the food, drinking the beer, sending out for more, staying up halfway to dawn watching.

There’s nothing uniquely American about crime novels. Seems to me that most novels are about crimes—or breaking the law, at least. What we in the U.S. do more consistently, more reliably, is to link the run from the police with other tales of movement and self-refashioning—the pioneers, imagining themselves anew in what they call virgin land. Slaves, ripped from Africa, then from each other, and then finding a way out of the South. The cross-country move, the spring break road trip, the exhausting family vacation, the SUV commercial. Each argues that crossing the American distance is transformative. And that transformation is especially relevant to criminals, to characters on the run. More thrillingly so than Raskolnikov’s years in a prison.

Dodgers sure belongs to that tradition—Huckleberry Finn, Thelma and Louise. What does it contribute? That’s a grand question, a little grander than I’d trust an author to answer. Let me volunteer just that white Americans have traveled the landscape, at least the landscape that genocide emptied out for the last century of cars and roads, differently than people of color have traveled it. Maybe East reminds us how that mythic landscape isn’t quite the same for all of us.

Your narrator, East, is a tough kid—but he’s still just a kid. How did his 15-year-old perspective shape this story?
Right. I can only say that it’s central, it’s essential. He’s an unusual 15-year-old: quiet, wary, sharp-eyed, suspicious. His toughness is tangled up with fear. He hasn’t had the luxury of much of a childhood. At the same time, he’s on that cusp between boyhood and manhood, where his capabilities and his innocence and his ambition and his awkwardness can’t be sorted out from each other.

You’ve said that you want readers to take away from this novel “maybe a thought or two about compassion,” especially in respect to East. And our reviewer indeed said Dodgers “will upend your notions of the sort of character with whom you might empathize.” Is this something that drives you as a writer, to seek out and humanize the types of characters that someone else might overlook?
It seems like a noble project, doesn’t it—but I think that really describes fiction in the last century too. Bayard Sartoris, Pecola Breedlove, Olive Kitteridge. The fiction we write, and the fiction we choose to reread and reteach, has helped shape how we think about and empathize with other people.

What was most personal about this novel for you? What was the furthest away from yourself?
I was 15 and very wary, very observant. But I’ve never lived through quite the dark nights that East has.

What mysteries and thrillers do you think everyone must read?
One thing I’ve been saving for myself later this summer is the pleasure of going back and reading Stephen King’s Night Shift. I treasured that book as a teenager, and teenagers are usually right about books, more right than adults.

I am a fan of midcentury pulp: Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, Chester Himes, Steve Fisher’s I Wake Up Screaming. I always forget to acknowledge Native Son. Native Son is a remarkable book. P.D. James’ The Children of Men. I’m fond of stories about the end of the world.

What do you love most about writing thrillers?
Thriller readers want pace. By temperament I’m a little slow. So the genre is corrective. It shuts me up.

What’s next?
Hopefully a summer of good reading and writing. I have a two-foot stack of books on my nightstand at the moment. And I’ve done some work on another piece involving these characters. I did not write Dodgers imagining that there would ever be anything like a sequel. But there’s a door standing open at the book’s end. It’s intriguing to see what might lie beyond it.

Author photo credit Olive Beverly.

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.

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.

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.

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.