New York Times bestselling author, Kyle Mills is happiest living in Wyoming, climbing rocks for fun and danger. He started off as a banker, but tried his creative chops at writing and discovered a talent for telling life and death stories about moral ambiguity. With ten books to his credit, he's a force in the thriller world.
And for a thriller writer, there's not a lot of praise higher than what Booklist heaped on him: "Mills does the large scale thriller better than anyone else working the genre today. As a matter of fact, he may do it better than anyone who's ever sent a character out to save the world."
In LORDS OF CORRUPTION, his latest hero, Josh Hagarty, ventures to war-torn Africa in the name of charity, but discovers his exotic employer is part of an international conspiracy that is anything but altruistic.
Here Kyle Mills fields questions about his work and his life:
How is writing a thriller like rock climbing?
They can both be a little scary no matter how many times you do them. There's always that little adrenaline rush before you start climbing a route--not only from the fear of getting hurt, but the fear of failure. I feel the same thing when I sit down to start a novel. Have I finally run out of ideas? Will this be the one I can't pull off?
And for a thriller writer, there's not a lot of praise higher than what Booklist heaped on him: "Mills does the large scale thriller better than anyone else working the genre today. As a matter of fact, he may do it better than anyone who's ever sent a character out to save the world." In LORDS OF CORRUPTION, his latest hero, Josh Hagarty, ventures to war-torn Africa in the name of charity, but discovers his exotic employer is part of an international conspiracy that is anything but altruistic.
Here Kyle Mills fields questions about his work and his life:
How is writing a thriller like rock climbing?
They can both be a little scary no matter how many times you do them. There's always that little adrenaline rush before you start climbing a route--not only from the fear of getting hurt, but the fear of failure. I feel the same thing when I sit down to start a novel. Have I finally run out of ideas? Will this be the one I can't pull off?
Tell us about your path to publication. Did you save your rejection letters or destroy them?
I think it was the same as everybody's--long and soul crushing.
I still have all my rejections in a box somewhere. A really big box. A really big, heavy box. A box that had to be reinforced so it wouldn't burst and severely injure someone. You get the idea...
You joke of being a "bureau kid" because your father was an FBI agent, yet you also quip of being a "crook at heart," how do you balance these two influences?
I think a lot of law enforcement people have great criminal minds that they keep under wraps. Being bad just has an undeniable appeal.
I wrote a book once about stealing a semi-truck load of money being transferred from Las Vegas to the Federal Reserve in San Francisco. I spent days on the road between the two cities, studying potential gas stops and airfields, charting police presence, measuring the time it took to get from one blind turn to another. I even had my wife pose in front of the Fed's loading dock so I could take surreptitious photos of the security. How can you have that much fun being good?
Your novels are set in some exotic locales, the latest Africa, how much travel do you do in the name of research?
It varies but, with regard to Africa, I actually moved there for a while. It's a complicated and fascinating place that I really wanted to capture--the sights, the smells, the interactions between the different people living there. I've always found making things up to be much more difficult and much less compelling than using the truth.
I didn't have the luxury of doing that kind of research for my first book, Rising Phoenix, and to this day I'm unhappy with my descriptions of Columbia and Poland. That was before the Internet, too, and I had to work incredibly hard to turn out something that just never had the gritty feeling of reality to me.
You write of plots with high stakes. Where do you get your inspiration?
I'm an obsessive problem solver at heart. I love the idea of taking a seemingly insurmountable dilemma like the US narcotics trade or the Arab-Israeli conflict and coming up with a quick and effective solution.
Of course, thousands of people generally die carrying out those operations, so they aren't exactly practical. They do make you think about things you normally wouldn't though--like the difference between right and wrong. Would it be worth killing a few thousand drug users by poisoning the drug supply if the payoff was saving tens of thousands of people going forward? Would the US government be justified protecting a murderer if he was the key to developing a missile defense system that could protect millions from attack?
Do you ever sympathize with your villains? Or do they get just what they deserve?
With very few exceptions, I do sympathize with my villains. When I first got into writing someone told me that everyone is the hero of their own novel. Since then, I've tried to stay true to that philosophy.
No matter how bad a person is, they generally feel justified in what they're doing or they'd stop. I like to explore those feelings and make the reader understand what makes that particular villain tick.
It's not to say that you don't always feel a sense of satisfaction when they finally get theirs, but I hope that there is a tiny spark of commiseration in the back of your mind too.
You've worked as a banker. Are you glad you reinvented yourself before this current economic meltdown?
I don't know--the book industry is looking pretty rough and my specialty was working out bad commercial loans!
Seriously, it's hard for me to complain. There are so many incredibly talented authors who haven't been lucky enough to turn writing into a full time career. You're never sure how long it's going to last, but I'm grateful for every day it does.
Any plot ideas churning there?
In the financial industry? No way. How could you top what's happening in the real world? There would have to be zombies and space aliens.
What would you like readers to take away from LORDS OF CORRUPTION?
First, I want them to charge through it in a single sitting and remember what a great time they had.
Beyond that, I hope they learn something about the complexity of Africa and how the simple solutions offered by this celebrity or that have serious potential for blowback. I also hope that it might prompt some people to visit the continent who wouldn't have otherwise. It's a fascinating place to travel and tourism is a great way to help the Africans pull themselves out of their current predicament.
For more about Kyle Mills, visit his website http://www.kylemills.com
Contributing editor Julie Kramer's debut, STALKING SUSAN, is a finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award, Minnesota Book Award, and Best First Mystery for the Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Award. Doubleday will release the sequel, MISSING MARK, July 14. www.juliekramerbooks.com
I think it was the same as everybody's--long and soul crushing.
I still have all my rejections in a box somewhere. A really big box. A really big, heavy box. A box that had to be reinforced so it wouldn't burst and severely injure someone. You get the idea...
You joke of being a "bureau kid" because your father was an FBI agent, yet you also quip of being a "crook at heart," how do you balance these two influences?I think a lot of law enforcement people have great criminal minds that they keep under wraps. Being bad just has an undeniable appeal.
I wrote a book once about stealing a semi-truck load of money being transferred from Las Vegas to the Federal Reserve in San Francisco. I spent days on the road between the two cities, studying potential gas stops and airfields, charting police presence, measuring the time it took to get from one blind turn to another. I even had my wife pose in front of the Fed's loading dock so I could take surreptitious photos of the security. How can you have that much fun being good?
Your novels are set in some exotic locales, the latest Africa, how much travel do you do in the name of research?
It varies but, with regard to Africa, I actually moved there for a while. It's a complicated and fascinating place that I really wanted to capture--the sights, the smells, the interactions between the different people living there. I've always found making things up to be much more difficult and much less compelling than using the truth.
I didn't have the luxury of doing that kind of research for my first book, Rising Phoenix, and to this day I'm unhappy with my descriptions of Columbia and Poland. That was before the Internet, too, and I had to work incredibly hard to turn out something that just never had the gritty feeling of reality to me.
You write of plots with high stakes. Where do you get your inspiration?
I'm an obsessive problem solver at heart. I love the idea of taking a seemingly insurmountable dilemma like the US narcotics trade or the Arab-Israeli conflict and coming up with a quick and effective solution.
Of course, thousands of people generally die carrying out those operations, so they aren't exactly practical. They do make you think about things you normally wouldn't though--like the difference between right and wrong. Would it be worth killing a few thousand drug users by poisoning the drug supply if the payoff was saving tens of thousands of people going forward? Would the US government be justified protecting a murderer if he was the key to developing a missile defense system that could protect millions from attack?
Do you ever sympathize with your villains? Or do they get just what they deserve?
With very few exceptions, I do sympathize with my villains. When I first got into writing someone told me that everyone is the hero of their own novel. Since then, I've tried to stay true to that philosophy.
No matter how bad a person is, they generally feel justified in what they're doing or they'd stop. I like to explore those feelings and make the reader understand what makes that particular villain tick.
It's not to say that you don't always feel a sense of satisfaction when they finally get theirs, but I hope that there is a tiny spark of commiseration in the back of your mind too.
You've worked as a banker. Are you glad you reinvented yourself before this current economic meltdown?
I don't know--the book industry is looking pretty rough and my specialty was working out bad commercial loans!
Seriously, it's hard for me to complain. There are so many incredibly talented authors who haven't been lucky enough to turn writing into a full time career. You're never sure how long it's going to last, but I'm grateful for every day it does.
Any plot ideas churning there?
In the financial industry? No way. How could you top what's happening in the real world? There would have to be zombies and space aliens.
What would you like readers to take away from LORDS OF CORRUPTION?
First, I want them to charge through it in a single sitting and remember what a great time they had.
Beyond that, I hope they learn something about the complexity of Africa and how the simple solutions offered by this celebrity or that have serious potential for blowback. I also hope that it might prompt some people to visit the continent who wouldn't have otherwise. It's a fascinating place to travel and tourism is a great way to help the Africans pull themselves out of their current predicament.
For more about Kyle Mills, visit his website http://www.kylemills.com
Contributing editor Julie Kramer's debut, STALKING SUSAN, is a finalist for the Mary Higgins Clark Award, Minnesota Book Award, and Best First Mystery for the Romantic Times Reviewers Choice Award. Doubleday will release the sequel, MISSING MARK, July 14. www.juliekramerbooks.com
