I think that we learn from our failures, mistakes and wrong choices.  So often what we think to be a failure shapes our future and makes us stronger; a theme that is explored in various ways throughout the 13th hour.

If there was one thing I would change it would be going back to early September 2001 and making sure the FBI rolled up those men before they ever got near a plane. Think how different our world be: 3,000 lives saved, two wars avoided. I don't think you would find a single American that would disagree with that reach back in time.

I have the ultimate question then: What if, like Nick, you could reach back in time and change a single moment? What would you change?

Last time I checked, I still had a pulse.

Where to end, where to end....Where do you end writing from the beginning. Death evidently. That's where The 13th Hour ends, or begins rather, as the blurb attests:

'The 13th Hour is the story of a man given the chance to go back in time in one-hour increments to prevent a vicious crime from destroying his life.

Nick Quinn is being held in jail, accused of the murder of his beloved wife, Julia. He knows she's dead; he saw her bloody corpse, shot in the head at point-blank range. The police tell him they found the murder weapon with his fingerprints on it in the trunk of his car. Nick is confused, grief-stricken -- and completely innocent.'

But I can't end with death. This is an interview, not a thriller. You might be plummeting twenty stories as you seem to enjoy, but you're not dead. Are you?

I'm a skier, a wreck diver, a triathlete, and a fan of the more riskier sports that get the adrenaline going. When adrenaline is flowing through your veins, for me at least, my senses are heightened. The colors are richer, the sounds more acute, you can smell the wind and time seems to slow. Action scenes flow the easiest for me as all I have to do is tap into some memory whether it be jumping out of a plane, a two hundred foot crane or being in the bowels of dark ship 90 feet below the surface with a nine foot shark between me and the exit.

I have very strong image and sense memory and can translate that into my material. The feeling as your falling through the air with nothing to stop you but a rubber band around your ankle is pretty spectacular and applies to so many thrilling moments in my stories.

Sky diving, bungee jumping, one might think you hope to die early. Why do you do it, and how does thriller writing fit in with someone who gets a whole lot of thrills already?

My inspiration comes from all around. I love when we see humanity at its best: the seldom told individual tales of heroism in the war(s) by people who love this country; the firefighter who runs into a burning building to save a child; the man who dives on the subway tracks pulling a little girl to safety under the train platform as the train races by inches from their heads. I love reading about the lost worlds that exist under our noses, the artifacts whose mythic tales have grown legendary, the conflicts that exist when both sides believe with all their heart that God is on their side. My greatest inspiration though is my wife and how far I would go to protect her, it is what helps me to fill my stories with heart, it is what I draw on to give my characters their emotional weight. The female lead is actually always based around her, I just change her hair color and name. Though I will tell you, it makes her a bit crazy as I am constantly putting her in deadly jeopardy.

So we know where the thrills come from, how about the inspiration?

Life is so short, I learned long ago to budget my time and self motivate. I want to get as much out of this ride as possible. Who wants to get to the end of their life and say they only tasted on flavour?

My first novel was written mostly on the train to and from work and then from 11 till 2 in the morning. Now, without the burden of a commute, and the freedom hard work has afforded me, I find the time to write two hours in the morning, two hours in the late afternoon and two hours late at night. Some people drink to forget, play golf to get away, watch TV to escape, I get all of that plus much more when I sit down to write. I'm very lucky.

You run an investment company, you're involved in commercial real estate, you're an athlete, an accomplished musician...You seem to be living the lives of about six people. How do you find the time write?

There are the rules of society, the rules of man, the rules of God but sometimes, to do the right thing, you have to violate those rules, compromise even your own beliefs. It makes for a richer, more conflicted character who has to not only battle outside forces but the moral compass within himself.

In your series starting with The Thieves of Heaven, your protagonist, Michael St. Pierre, is a reformed thief. In The 13th Hour, Nick Quinn needs to thwart the police. Why are your characters such mavericks?

The clock always imparts the sense of urgency, the dire straights of the character in jeopardy. We all have deadlines in life whether they are work or life related and they affect us in different ways some of us rise to the occasion and some of us crumble.  I love creating that sense of time running out, it heightens the tension, the emotion, the thrill of the ride. I think it is something innate in most thriller writers and something common to the genre, it's part of the thrill.

So, a clock counting up in The 13th Hour. A timer ticking down in The Embassy. You've already mentioned the elixir of life. Is the passage of time a theme you're interested in pursuing or is this a device of the thriller author?

While The 13th Hour takes place over 12... really thirteen chapters, each chapter is broken up into various scenes, natural breaks during the specific hours.  The function of the chapters in this particular book were more a function of the framing of time all of which add to the dire sense of urgency.

Not only did you restrict yourself by telling your story backwards, but you also limited yourself to telling it in 12 chapters, or 12 hours. Given that the average thriller writer has chapter lengths that favor adults with ADHD, what was it like writing such long chapters?

I think most people believe in fate when it fits their mind set, whether optimist or pessimist, you can ascribe luck or disaster as something preordained by fate. Personally I think we make our own fate, our own luck. To quote Sarah Connor from that cinematic time travel story starring Arnie, "Our fate is what we make."

In The 13th Hour Nick says, "Fate is the most powerful force in nature." Do you believe in fate?

I'm actually a great fan of Stephan Hawking, and devour books and articles on quantum mechanics, string theory, worm holes etc. . .

I avoided all talk of physics and the theoretical possibilities of such an event in The 13th Hour.  The suspension of disbelief is a very fine line and sometimes the more info you offer up the more implausible the leap becomes. All of my stories have a very slight bit of fantasy in them while remaining firmly routed in reality. That little bit of the impossible helps to give a bit of a sense of wonder and is part of my signature. 

As to the possibility of time travel, I do tend to agree with string theory and the multiple universe scenario where when one travels back in time a unique branch of existence is created, that travels off along a different time line.

How did you handle the grandfather paradox common to time travel novels? That by changing the past you might change the very reason you travelled into the past in the first place?

I love screenplays, you can read them quickly, the prose, by virtue of the genre, is tight, the dialogue flows and you can get a full three act story read in less than an hour.  I don't think Mike or Derek have anything to worry about. I view myself as a storyteller so any chance I get to put my stories out, I jump on it. While most come out as novels, some are work better as screenplays, while others are more suited to the knew medium that is being called Vook.

To keep my imagination in shape, I write a story outline a day and so the file is rather thick. With such a backlog of ideas, I jumped at the chance to turn my concept Embassy into a Vook. I'm a very visual writer which I think has helped get so many of my stories picked up by Hollywood and the combination of text mixed with video in this new format seemed well suited for my style. I wrote Embassy as a novella over five days in June, it was filmed in July and released in October; a timeline authors and screenwriters never experience.

You've authored bestselling thrillers The Thieves of Heaven and The Thieves of Fate, but you also wrote Embassy for the Vook. What was it like writing for this type of media? Do you naturally write screen based content? Should The 13th Hour screenwriters Brandt and Haas fear for their jobs?

I think we all have a moment in life that we would like to change be it a decision at work, something we said to a girlfriend or boyfriend, or sometime something greater like expressing our true feelings for a friend or family member before they slipped out of our lives. I think it is something universal, something that bridges languages and cultures. How great would it be to act on hindsight?

Hi, Richard, thanks for taking the time to answer a few burning questions. The 13th Hour has taken on a life of its own. The momentum of a major motion picture and multiple foreign rights sales in Germany, China, Japan, Brazil, Russia, etc. have pushed it out before its original publication schedule. To what do you attribute its great thrust?

If I could go back in time, I'd steal the premise of The 13th Hour, and try writing it about six years before Richard did. Failing that, however, I jumped at the present day chance to interview Richard Doetsch, author of international bestselling thrillers The Thieves of Heaven and The Thieves of Fate.

What if you could reach back in time and change a single moment?

Michael F Stewart is the author of several graphic novels published by Oxford University Press Canada. 24 BONES is his debut supernatural thriller. His next novel, HURAKAN, will be released in early 2010. Michael lives and writes in Ottawa, Canada.