Katherine Neville

Fifteen years
ago I wrote a book called THE EIGHT. It is the story of a 200-year quest
for a jeweled chess set containing a secret of mysterious power that
almost destroyed Charlemagne. Though THE EIGHT is now called a cult
classic, the real mystery is how it ever got published in the first
place, because no one, including reviewers and publishers, could begin
to describe it when it first came out.

Part historical, part modern, part puzzle novel, and part swashbuckling
adventure story, THE EIGHT mingles mystery, fantasy, romance, science,
and science fiction, and continues to remain a book that defies easy
categorization. Over the years I have been compared to Alexandre Dumas,
Umberto Eco, and even Stephen Spielberg.

I'm credited by some with inventing a new genre, but actually it was
invented by Scheherazade. It seems to me, though, that this sense of
uniqueness is probably the biggest reason for THE EIGHT's success and
endurance ‹ it has sold millions of copies and is still in print
in 22 countries. Recently the book rebounded onto world bestseller lists
‹ in some nations for the second or third time. It will soon be
translated into 5 more languages ‹ Dutch, Russian, Greek, Norwegian,
and Thai.

Though it wasn't the first book I wrote, THE EIGHT was my first published
novel. When Ballantine bought it in 1988 along with A CALCULATED RISK,
THE EIGHT was only half-finished. Ballantine planned it to be the first
hardback fiction they had ever published, but because it was impossible
to compare with other books, they knew they had to be creative about
pulling together an audience who read a variety of genres. Everything
from jacket design to marketing and distribution was very hands-on,
a family operation.

When the time came for me to deliver the final pages, I told Robert
Byron Wyatt, Ballantine's Editor-in-Chief, that he could choose from
three possible endings revealing what becomes of the chess pieces. To
everyone's surprise, Bob (not a big mystery buff) chose the one that
opened the door to a sequel.

As far as I was concerned, however, the story was over. The secret
of the fabulous fictional Montglane chess set had been revealed. FINIS.
It was not until five years after the book was published that the idea
for the sequel hit me over the head ‹ literally. While in Switzerland
doing research at Carl Jung's Eranos Center, I took a wrong turn down
the darkened corridor of a local restaurant and fell headfirst down
a flight of stairs. I was a wreck of contusions and bruises.

The next day brought a 16-hour train ride to Prague, where I had to
keep pacing the length of the train to prevent my body from getting
any stiffer. That's when and how I conceived the sequel to THE EIGHT
and what will happen to the characters and the chess pieces more than
20 years later. (Anyone interested in a spellbinding account of how
I fell on my head can read more about it in I SHOULD HAVE STAYED HOME:
THE WORST TRIPS OF THE GREAT WRITERS, edited by Roger Rapoport and Marguerita
Castanera, Book Passage Press, 1994).

Ten years later, I have nearly finished writing the sequel to THE EIGHT.

But since it takes me five years from the moment I sit down at my desk
and begin to actually work on the story and, from inception to completion,
even 20, this is par for the course. And surprisingly, no one, including
my agents, editors, publishers or even my readers, EVER asked me to
speed up the process, to write more quickly. Ballantine has changed
management, even ownership, three times since my first book was published,
and each group has been as supportive as the previous one about letting
me "do my own thing." This is not as unusual as it may seem.

Years ago, I had dinner with a publisher who asked whether I'd rather
be rich or immortal. "Does it have to be a choice?" I asked,
and he said that it did. I said, if it's either-or, I would choose immortality.
Many of the writers I most enjoy reading took a long, long time to write
their books, and those books are still in print today. Though it may
sound immodest, I hope people will still be reading what I wrote 50
or even 100 years from now.

The challenge of writing a sequel to THE EIGHT has not been to top
myself in writing another bestseller. I honestly never expected to write
bestsellers. The challenge for me has been to continue to write books
that are unique. While there's no 'formula' for that, I'm quite sure
about the process ‹ it takes time and an understanding group of
agents, editors, and publishers. Luckily, I have both.

© 2005 Katherine Neville

 

For twenty years, Katherine
Neville was an international consultant and computer executive.
THE EIGHT, her first novel, remains a bestseller in more than twenty
languages and was voted one of the top ten books of all time in Spain.
A CALCULATED RISK was also a NEW YORK TIMES Notable Book. Her third
novel, THE MAGIC CIRCLE, a USA TODAY bestseller, was among the top ten
books in France, Spain, and Australia. She lives in Washington D.C.
and Virginia.

[Editor's Note: This article first appeared in THE 3RD DEGREE, the
official newsletter of the Mystery Writers of America, 2004]

lynds.jpgNoted book reviewer and critic Tom Nolan quietly broke a story in May 2004 in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL in which he described two important publishing trends in espionage thrillers that have escaped the notice of some literary pundits: The form is thriving, and female authors bought new trenchcoats, belted them on, and infiltrated.



Take it from me, both pieces of information are subversive.



Once the globe's top reading choice, with tens of millions of copies sold annually, this male-dominated, reliable genre collapsed with the end of the Cold War. As NEW YORK TIMES critic Walter Goodman announced funereally in November 1989, the same month the Berlin Wall crumbled: "The future looks dismal for the trenchcoat set."



In the short term, he was prophetic. Sales of bestselling thriller authors plummeted, while new authors seldom found publishing homes. (This was when my first one was released. More about that shortly.) By 1998, two thriller icons, Frederick Forsyth and John le Carré, had declared it was time to accept reality: The black business of espionage no longer interested readers. Both men fled to fresh literary turf.



The gloomy forecasts in the TIMES have continued unabated for some fifteen years, right up to as recently as February 2004, when Charles ("Chip") McGrath worried: "What's odd is that most of our thriller writers - the people who in the past have taught us most of what we know about intelligence gathering and intelligence failure ' don't seem to be interested in the post-9/11 landscape.... [T]hey're writing instead about corporate espionage and theological cover-ups in the Middle Ages. To understand what's going on in the world, ... we readers now have to turn to nonfiction...."



Ouch. Still, with some 160,000 books published annually, it's perhaps forgivable that even the august TIMES occasionally misses a trend here or there. However, other news media have not.



The capitalist truth is that the spy form is thriving. In fact, according to PW NEWSLINE, the "espionage/thriller" category jumped a whopping 34 percent in sales in 2003.



There's a lesson to be learned from a closely aligned genre, the mystery: Let's take a quick trip down mystery'''s memory lane to 1977, when Marcia Muller's first book, EDWIN OF THE IRON SHOES, was published to resounding silence. It was a tiny printing by a soon-to-be defunct publisher, who was nevertheless willing to take a risk on a woman who had written a serious detective novel about a smart, strong, realistic female private investigator (P.I.), Sharon McCone.



No one noticed, including Ms. Muller, that the book was not only ground-breaking, it dealt a roundhouse blow to the old boys' stranglehold on P.I. fiction. (Note: The thirtieth in the Sharon McCone series, THE DANGEROUS HOUR, was published in July 2004 by Mysterious Press.)



For five long years after her debut, Ms. Muller could find no new publisher, but then neither could any other woman. In fact, the entire genre was foundering --- much as spy thrillers later would do in the 1990s. The problem: Mysteries had fallen victim to too much of the same for nearly a half century.



Finally, in 1982, within months of one another, the fresh voices of Sara Paretsky (INDEMNITY ONLY) and Sue Grafton (A IS FOR ALIBI) burst onto the publishing scene, soon followed by Ms. Muller's return plus a flood of other female authors. Because a majority of the newcomers were fine writers creating interesting, relevant books, they reinvigorated the P.I. form, and the doors swung open wider, welcoming new male authors.

Readers and booksellers and publishers were happy. Cash registers sang.



Since I am concerned about the continuing invisibility attached by some to the future of new writers --- both male and female --- welcomed into the spy thriller field at last, and since I am weary of these endless death notices for our reinvigorated form because they insult not only us but readers, I am now going to serve myself up as evidence.



Consider me the sacrificial literary goat.



As Mr. Nolan documents in his WALL STREET JOURNAL piece, I finished my first spy thriller, my debut, MASQUERADE, in 1994. My agent sent it to the president of one of the top New York houses. She told my agent, "I love this book. I want to buy it. But no woman could’ve written it, so I’m not going to make an offer."



Blatant sexism, it appears, although maybe not so. It was also a low period in the thriller market.



Steve Rubin of Doubleday, who is rightly considered a visionary publisher, saw it differently. Doubleday published MASQUERADE in hardcover in 1996, and Berkley sold so many copies in paperback in 1997 that it hit THE NEW YORK TIMES extended list. Some 20 countries also published MASQUERADE, while PEOPLE magazine named it "Page-turner of the Week."



Although MASQUERADE sold well and received many glowing reviews, there was a taint to it, an odor of "she doesn’t belong; she's writing the wrong thing." In fact, the nadir for me was when the male reviewer of a large metropolitan newspaper stopped me in the bar at a writers’ conference and asked why I wanted to cut off the private parts of male authors and readers, because that’s what I was doing by working in the genre.



Another version was delivered in print by the reviewer of a publishing industry magazine, who complimented me for so admirably "aping" my male betters.



Was it really because I was a woman, or was it because the field was deemed dead, which meant that if I were actually rather good at what I did, and readers enjoyed it, I was a threat to the shared wisdom?



For perspective, let's fast-forward to today. I’m now at St. Martin’s Press with Keith Kahla, such a terrific editor he could make Maxwell Perkins snap to, and my first novel with St. Martin’s was released last April. Called THE COIL, it’s the sequel to MASQUERADE.



BOOKPAGE not only named THE COIL one of its notable new titles, it also called MASQUERADE, a "tour-de-force." Book critic Paul Goat Allen explained, "With the release of MASQUERADE in 1996, Gayle Lynds joined the deified ranks of spy thriller authors like Robert Ludlum and John le Carré."



Interestingly, Mr. Allen was not the first to heap glory on MASQUERADE. At publication some eight years before, a few reviewers had also called it a tour-de-force, but their voices never rose above the suffocating confines of the genre's mass entombment.



After that, Pocket Books brought out my next two spy thrillers, MOSAIC and MESMERIZED, again highly political and again dealing with the post–Cold War world.



Yes, Mr. McGrath, many of us continued to not only write but publish those books for which you yearned but somehow missed.



In his insistent TIMES essay, he also noted wistfully, "[Nonfiction books aren’t] as much fun as novels, though, and they also lack the sulfurous whiff of cynicism and conspiracy that makes good thrillers so satisfying."



The man was obviously fond of vintage spy stories. But then, many of us were and are while also liking our cynicism and conspiracy delivered in contemporary tales.



Another journalist who obviously enjoyed them, too --- renowned reviewer Dick Adler of THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE --- wrote two months later, "Where are the new Robert Ludlums and Tom Clancys coming from?" He so believed in the thriller's future that he answered his own question: "Here's one excellent candidate: the tough-minded and talented Gayle Lynds, who co-wrote several books with Ludlum and introduced us to Liz Sansborough – a psychology professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara and an ex-CIA agent – in the gripping MASQUERADE."



Within days of those comments, book critic David Montgomery observed astutely In JANUARY magazine, "The thriller genre has been pronounced dead so many times that it would seemingly take a miracle even to get it on life-support." Mr. Montgomery also reviews for THE CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, USA TODAY, and THE BOSTON GLOBE. Thoroughly steeped in the field, he, too, disagrees with the TIMES's nay-saying Mr. McGrath: "[Y]ou can't believe everything you read these days, for not only is the thriller not dead, but it is alive and well and safe in the hands of outstanding authors such as Gayle Lynds."



As Mr. McGrath noted, 9/11 happened. His view is that it changed nothing.



Wrong. After those horrifying attacks, Americans abruptly shook off their post–Cold War exhaustion and resumed a vigorous interest in the world at large, searching for information and, ultimately, understanding of what had happened, why it had happened, and what to do about it. We are a nation of readers, so of course we turned to books, but not only to nonfiction, which Mr. McGrath claims.



One of our favored resources is through the lens of good political fiction, which is what the best spy novels are (and which helps account for the surge of sales in 2003.)



Which is also what I write about, passionately, stubbornly, cloaked in what I hope is rousing adventure, as do many other authors who entered print after the Iron Curtain crashed — Daniel Silva, Jenny Siler, Francine Mathews, Robert Cullen, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, Brian Haig, Raelynn Hillhouse --- to name only a few.



It’s time for Mr. McGrath and other bespectacled dinosaurs to look realistically at espionage thrillers again. They’re not only alive, readers are excited about them. And as Mr. Nolan observes in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, an industry sea change is occurring just as it did in mysteries 20 years ago: Authors are infusing new life and much-needed sensibilities into a much-beloved form that had been not only at risk of becoming disconnected but of becoming a caricature of itself.



The best political fiction is so relevant that it’s predictive, a quality we can claim. Mr. McGrath’s insult that "most of our thriller writers don’t seem to be interested in the post-9/11 landscape" refers more to his narrow reading habits than it does to our work, nor does it apply to the recent books of Frederick Forsyth and John le Carré, who have rejoined us: They’re back in print with very contemporary spy tales.



But then, there’s so much to write about, proving again what J. Edgar Hoover said many years ago, "There’s something about a secret that’s addicting." When you read our books, you’ll know why.

© 2004 Gayle Lynds

Gayle Lynds is the NEW YORK TIMES best-selling author of THE COIL, MASQUERADE, MOSAIC, and MESMERIZED. With Robert Ludlum, she wrote THE HADES FACTOR, THE PARIS OPTION, and THE ALTMAN CODE. A former newspaper reporter and magazine editor, she was also an editor at a think tank where she had Top Secret security clearance.

Eric Van Lustbader



When I was about nine, my father got very sick and had to stay
home from work. My parents decided that they didn't want to me to see
him like that, so they shipped me off to summer camp. I hated it. I
hated living in a bunk with other boys, I hated having to get up at
a certain time, eat at a certain time, join in team sports at a certain
time, well, you get the idea.



But the thing I hated most of all was feeling as if I had to join the
idiotic and often humiliating male-bonding rituals devised by the bunk
bully. In fact, I didn't. And though this act of defiance earned me
nothing but ridicule from my bunkmates and threats from the bully, I
never backed down. The fact was I couldn't. Being alone -- being my
own person -- was so precious to me that I risked everything for it,
even being called "The Outsider."



One of the questions I'm asked over and over (and it's a
good one) is how I'm able to write in both the thriller and the
fantasy genres. It seems to me the proper way to answer is to ask instead
what drew me to these genres in the first place.



Not surprisingly, I suppose, these were the two forms of novels I read
as a teenager, and since I was a voracious reader I consumed tons of
them, good, bad and ugly. On the surface there wouldn't seem to
be any similarity between a spy story and a fantasy saga, but the fact
is there must have been ­ and there is ­ for me to have
been attracted to both.



To begin at the beginning, as the Red Queen said, I was never a joiner.
Already fascinated by psychology and sociology, I read all about peer
pressure and the havoc it wreaked on teens. I found this peculiar because
I myself never responded to peer pressure. Only years later did I recognize
the price I paid for not being a hale fellow well-met.



I was always on the outside of society looking in, and even though that
was where I'd chosen to be, it was a lonely existence. I grew
up with a tangible fear of being "normal" ­ of marrying,
moving to the suburbs, having 2.5 kids and a dog, spending my time with
other couples talking about every minute phase of our children's
development from poop to verbalization skills.



In fact, I was so terrified of "normalcy" that during my
wedding I took off my suit jacket and put on a black satin baseball-style
jacket that had "Don't Fear the Reaper" emblazoned
across its back that I'd designed for Blue Oyster Cult during
my days working at CBS Records.



Okay, so now we know how it all ties together, right? The common thread
running through my two favorite genres was "the outsider."
The protagonists in both thrillers and fantasies are misfits, those
people who because of their special skills are outside the mainstream
of society. In both genres, the protagonists struggle mightily both
to control their gifts and the terrible forms of loneliness they must
endure. And, too, there is a larger, even more fascinating problem that
both genres address: the struggle of the outsider to find oneself and
to come to terms with who one is.



As a Sociology major at Columbia College, this problem was the one that
engaged me most fully, and it was when I came to understand my own nature
and, eventually, to recognize the burning desire inside me to write
about the special nature of the outsider.


Of course, I had help with this. The seminal moment in my outsider epiphany
was when I picked up a book appropriately titled THE OUTSIDER, a nonfiction
treatise on the alienation of modern man, written by a brilliant English
writer by the name of Colin Wilson. Soon thereafter, I read his astonishing
A CASEBOOK OF MURDER, a horrifying and mesmerizing compendium of the
world's most macabre murder cases. Then I discovered that he was
a novelist as well: THE BLACK ROOM, LINGARD, and NECESSARY DOUBT.



What drew me to Wilson's subject matter was exactly what drew
me to thrillers and fantasy: I wanted to read about people who were
outsiders, who felt themselves to be at the borders of society ­
both those like me, who live a moral life, as well as the terrifying
others, at the extreme fringes of "otherness," who consider
themselves to be beyond the law.



Though I had been writing in one form or another virtually since the
moment I had learned to spell, once I understood the truth of who I
was, there was no getting around it. It was time to create the novels
of outsiders that were firing inside me.

© 2005 Eric Van Lustbader

Eric Van
Lustbader was born and raised in Greenwich Village. He is the author
of more than twenty five best-selling novels including THE NINJA in
which he introduced Nicholas Linnear, one of modern fiction's most beloved
and enduring heroes. For the last several years, he has devoted himself
to writing THE PEARL fantasy series. His novels have been translated
into over twenty languages and are bestsellers worldwide. They are so
popular whole sections of bookstores from Bangkok to Dublin are devoted
to them. His latest bestseller is THE BOURNE LEGACY.

Gregg Hurwitz

High-stakes­ a ticking clock­ violence on the page­
the audience's being aware of the villain's plotting‹odds are
you're already familiar with the elements that define a thriller if
you've found your way to this website. You've also likely stumbled over
the classic blurb and jacket-copy catch-phrases that these fundamentals,
when well executed, give rise to: "breakneck pacing," "white-knuckle
action," "roller-coaster ride," "better than CATS."
Okay, so maybe not the last one.

The bottom line is, thrillers are often badder, meaner, and bigger
than other forms of crime fiction. Think Thomas Harris over Agatha Christie,
or, in other mediums, 24 over MURDER, SHE WROTE, or IN THE LINE OF FIRE
over SLEUTH. In a thriller, you're more likely to find Dr. Lecter in
the kitchen with liver and fava beans than Colonel Mustard in the conservatory
with the candlestick. So it goes. Concerned parent groups lobby here.

Having the reader in the pretentiously titled "superior"
position - meaning they're riding shotgun with the good guys AND the
bad guys through various scenes - of course doesn't mean that there
aren't surprises (or, in blurbspeak "more twists and turns than
a.."). I tend to structure my books so that the reader follows
both sides of an impending collision, but the scenes with the antagonists
I write a bit more hazy on specifics, so it's never entirely clear what
they're up to or when the plot is going to reverse itself. Toward the
end of a book, I'll often have my antagonist fall out of the plot for
several chapters, so his or her reappearance is startling - surprising
due to machinations set in motion while the author (poor sod) took his
eye off the ball.

When this balance between what is shown and what is withheld is struck,
readers get to have their cake and eat it too. They get all the excitement
of the Red Dragon planning his next slaughter, yet also all the shock
of Francis Dolarhyde paying a violent visit to Will Graham's house in
the novel's closing pages. We're shown a lot, but we still don't know
what's going to happen next. Great thrillers hook us like that - we
gorge ourselves all the way along, yet our appetite only increases.
When I read RED DRAGON , I was living alone in a two-room apartment.
At one a.m., I set down the book and checked under every bed and in
every closet in the place. At three a.m., behind my locked bedroom door,
I finished it. Still awake at four, I started rereading THE SILENCE
OF THE LAMBS . So go the confessions of a thriller junkie.

As a rule, research seems to play a significant role in thrillers.
Of course, authors of other genres can be brilliant researchers (here
I envision Tom Wolfe bludgeoning me with an ivory-headed cane for my
crass generalization) but thriller writers in particular seem to enjoy
rolling up their sleeves and getting dirt under their fingernails. Maybe
this is because thrillers are rife with bomb-making and forensic trails-try
writing about THOSE convincingly without doing some field work.

I use my books almost as an excuse for continuing education. I've sneaked
onto demolition ranges with Navy SEALs to blow up cars, conducted an
interview with a hospital tech as he carved up a cadaver to deliver
its parts to dissection lab, and most recently for THE PROGRAM , I went
undercover into mind-control cults in Los Angeles so I could create
my own cult (for the novel, that is - or I suppose in real life too
if I ever get bored). Interacting with cult members, witnessing the
effusive testimonials, participating in group exercises, and submitting
to "testing" gave me the background I needed to add the telling
detail to give THE PROGRAM its verisimilitude. I suppose that's what
I love the most about thrillers - it's as much goddamned fun to write
them as to read them.

© 2005 Gregg Hurwitz

Gregg
Hurwitz is the critically acclaimed, bestselling author of THE TOWER,
MINUTES TO BURN, DO NO HARM, THE KILL CLAUSE, and most recently, THE
PROGRAM. He holds a B.A. from Harvard, and a master's degree from Trinity
College, Oxford. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is currently writing
the next Tim Rackley novel and the screen adaptation of THE KILL CLAUSE
for Paramount Pictures.

By Raelynn Hillhouse

The real world of spies is often too far-fetched to make believable fiction. One of my biggest challenges in writing spy thrillers has been to tone-down my own real-life experiences to make "realistic" fiction. You see, I spent many years in the bizarre, shadowy world of smugglers, black-marketers and spies and I know first hand that truth is indeed stranger than fiction.

I've crossed the Iron Curtain hundreds of times. Strange things happened there ‹ things so implausible that they would make a seasoned reader hurl a book across the room. But, it's true that:

• In East Germany, a tiny police car packed with five men screeched to a halt not far from where I was traipsing through the woods. I looked on as a guy with dark glasses, a black leather jacket and an attaché case handcuffed to his arm popped from the car, then disappeared into the brush.

• A man opened up a hollow coin (clandestinely, he thought) to flash a secret badge to the Stasi border guard. He didn't know I saw it.

• In a restaurant in Krakow, Poland, I had a stranger come up and ask to swap chairs with me­not places, but the actual chair, with the explanation that there might not seem to be any difference to me, but there was a big one to him. The chairs looked identical, but we can only guess that one was wired a little differently.

• In Prague, I was once awakened in my hotel room by a sound suddenly coming from the nightstand­that of a reel-to-reel tape recorder automatically rewinding.

Attaché cases handcuffed to the wrist, hollow coins, bugged chairs and nightstands ‹ who would ever believe that? It was this Keystone Cops, B-grade-spy-movie aspect of life out in the cold that kept me entertained and going back for more time and time again. And it's this very facet that is the hardest to portray in a spy thriller. The bottom line is that you really can't. You have to tone down reality down so that it seems "real."

RIFT ZONE opens with scenes in which the East German secret police try to set up a young smuggler from the Ozarks in a sting. They hope to entrap her by convincing her to smuggle a decrepit Western-made computer to the West, then nail her at the border for stealing state property. They even follow her through the Wall into the West.

Sound too far-fetched?

It's not. It happened to me.

I grew up in the rural Ozarks, some 30 miles from the fictional home of the Beverly Hillbillies, where my family had settled 200 years earlier. I yearned to learn more about the outside world beyond the hills. When I was 20, instead of loading up the truck and moving to Beverly, I headed for Europe in search of adventure. Soon I found it in Central and Eastern Europe during the last desperate days of communism.

Over the next six years, East German and Libyan intelligence services attempted to recruit me as a spy. (They failed.) I stared down the barrels of Kalashnikovs and I was tailed by secret police from Uzbekistan to Czechoslovakia. I learned how to slip across borders and talk my way through closed checkpoints. My phones were tapped and my hotel rooms bugged. My friends were asked questions about me. And, once, I was caught in the crossfire of East German border guards. I took one in the arm, but, fortunately, it was the crossfire of a snowball fight. Even communist border guards sometimes played games.

In September 1983, I landed in West Germany, with two suitcases and a dictionary. I knew no one, spoke only broken German and could barely order something to eat. It didn't take too many meals of swine feet to expand my dining vocabulary. In a short time my German was fluent and I spoke without an accent. This meant I now could blend in. Blending in was key to what I would soon find myself doing to help supplement my meager scholarships: smuggling. I had to appear so normal and so ordinary that I would fade into the background and not draw undue attention from the secret police. I had heard wild tales of Americans selling U.S. goods on the black market in Moscow. After selling my first pairs of jeans and sneakers in the East, I realized it wasn't a very smart thing to do. Not only was the transaction highly illegal in the communist system, which forbade any form of free enterprise, it was a money losing venture. Given the price of jeans and sneakers in the West, it was nearly impossible to sell them for a price high enough to turn a profit. I looked to find something that was cheaper that I could sell for a higher markup. Capitalism has its rules.

On one trip to Moscow, Pan Am lost a friend's luggage. We sprinted all over Moscow trying to find decent clothes and shoes for him to wear all summer. At GUM Department Store across from the Kremlin, the only underwear we could find had no visible front or back. The People's Own Underwear was unisex. All of a sudden, I realized there was a huge market for something I could sell at a higher markup than blue jeans: lingerie was the ticket. I didn't go for the enticing styles of Frederick's of Hollywood or even Victoria's Secret. I chose the cheap, considerably less flamboyant and certainly less erotic Kmart variety. So it worked like this: I brought ladies' lingerie into the Soviet Union, sold it for rubles, used the rubles to purchase jewels on the black market, then smuggled the stones to the West. In essence, I was turning Kmart panties into diamonds. (And for those of you who are thinking, "My God, she's a criminal," be aware that I've broken no laws in countries that still exist.)

It was all great fun and adventure ‹ I was young and carefree ‹ until I caught the attention of the Stasi, the East German secret police. Although few Americans were allowed into East Berlin other than as tourists on day visas, I had been awarded a scholarship by the East German government to study at Humboldt University for a year. Now I was sharing a flat with some friends in West Berlin. A few weeks before I was to go to the East, we noticed that our phone started making clicking sounds. My friend, Karim, who had grown up in a repressive military dictatorship in Africa, immediately knew what that meant. So did I. Our phone was bugged.

On one point, my roommates could all agree: I was the cause. In those days we really didn't care that someone was listening to our conversations. We were students and, frankly, the only secret we felt we had to protect was Karim's compulsion to date more than one woman at a time. Still, we speculated a lot over coffee or beer about the bugging. Was it the Americans wanting to know what I was up to in the East? Did the East German secret police, the infamous Stasi, want to check me out before they let me loose to study in their tightly controlled, closely guarded communist fiefdom? Or could it even be the Brits? After all, West Berlin was officially under military occupation and we lived in the British sector of Berlin.

A few weeks later the phone call came. Ominously, it was from the East.

Of course, a call from East Berlin to West Berlin in those dangerous days was rare. At that time, East and West Berlin had a combined population of about 3 million people and there were less than a dozen phone lines between both halves of the city.

The call was from Egon, my point person, my case officer at the League for International Friendship, the Stasi-front organization that was sponsoring me. Egon wanted to discuss my visa for the upcoming year. He also had a favor to ask. I was hoping to hear the good news that my request would be granted and I would be receiving a rare privilege: permission to cross freely between East and West Berlin. I had been told my visa was under consideration ‹ something clearly related to the favor. I steeled myself for what was coming. Egon wanted me to help the League by lugging a broken Xerox machine through Checkpoint Charlie to his special repairman in the West. He wasn't asking me to smuggle it west, but to openly transport it there. After that, he said, he was sure he'd be able to help me with my visa. His request raised more red flags than a May Day parade on Red Square.

The communist regimes were hopelessly paranoid when it came to the idea of a free press. (Fall 1989 proved their paranoia was justified.) They didn't want to risk the idea that anyone could copy and disseminate anti-government propaganda. As a consequence, there weren't many copy machines on the communist side. To use one or even work near one, you had to have a security clearance. Such a clearance would never be granted to an American. In fact, the moment I was around any copying machine ‹ broken or not ‹ I would be in violation of East German laws. It was unthinkable. It was a setup. And I didn't know what to do.

My experiences with the American Embassy had not been positive. My passport, covered in stamps from communist borders, raised as many suspicions with them as Egon did with me. I knew I was on my own. I could either head back to the hills or see how things played out.

At the same time the next afternoon, the phone rang again. It was Egon. My stomach knotted. I tried to excuse myself from the deal because the repairs would be too expensive and I didn't have much Western cash. No problem. Despite the fact that Western currency was forbidden to him, Egon claimed to have plenty in petty cash to foot the bill. Egon had a solution for my every excuse. He even volunteered to write a note to the Stasi border guards, asking to excuse me from the various laws I was violating. Yeah, right.

One gray September day in Berlin, I crossed east to begin my studies. Egon talked to me this time in person about the copier. I hedged. Standing on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall, making excuses to the Stasi, changed drastically what had seemed like a big game to something terrifyingly real. The Wall had that effect on people.

I knew from firsthand experience that the secret police really did make people disappear. A couple of summers earlier, I had studied in Romania. I arrived in Transylvania on the Orient Express and, on the last leg of my journey, met a young Romanian student, Alexander, who studied in my destination city. We conversed in French, discussing the world beyond Romania that he longed to visit someday. I was reminded of myself, growing up in the Ozarks a few years earlier, talking to foreigners at every chance to learn about the outside world. When we arrived in the city of Cluj, Alex helped me find the dorm where I was to stay. I got to know him, his brother and sister, a medical student. I didn't realize that in neo-Stalinist Romania it was illegal for Romanians to have contact with foreigners. Any accidental contacts had to be reported to the police within 24 hours.

One morning, I was supposed to meet Alex for coffee. He didn't show up. I went to the place where he lived. His neighbors wouldn't make eye contact with me. His sister walked away. No one would speak to me. His little brother indicated there had been a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

I have no idea what the secret police did to him ‹ or if he survived.

Now I stood in East Berlin a few years later, trying to avoid cutting a deal with someone I knew worked for one of the world's most notorious secret police organizations. The reality of the spy game was sinking in. I began to wonder what I was getting into or if I would ever get myself out of it.

I did slither out of it. And I lived to tell about it in the opening of my first spy thriller. So when a reviewer at a major paper wrote, "She [my heroine] is pressed into service (somewhat unbelievably) by the East Germans," I understood why truth really is stranger than fiction: truth doesn't have to worry about reviewers.


© 2004 and 2005 Raelynn Hillhouse

Raelynn Hillhouse has been recruited as a spy by both Libyan and East German intelligence. (They failed.) A former professor and Fulbright Fellow, she has run rum, smuggled jewels, and laundered money between East and West. The American Booksellers Association (Book Sense) selected her debut novel, RIFT ZONE, as one of the best books of 2004.

Portions of this article first appeared in SPIRIT OF ALOHA, the inflight magazine of Aloha Airlines.

By James Grippando



Autumn 2004 marked the ten-year anniversary of the publication
of my first novel, THE PARDON. Nine novels later, I suppose it's time
to look back and ask, COULD I DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN?



The answer is a resounding: ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND?



I wrote THE PARDON in seven months, and HarperCollins snatched it up
in just a few days. A snap, right? Wrong. My first PUBLISHED novel was
not my first novel. And its debut came a full six years after I began
my labor of love --- that first misstep in the unending quest for the
Holy Grisham Grail.



In January 1988 I turned thirty, five years into the practice of law.
A trial lawyer is in many ways a storyteller. Still, I had no idea how
to become a novelist. I was on track toward partnership at Steel Hector
& Davis, a prestigious Miami law firm considered by many to be Florida's
finest. Attorney General Janet Reno got her start there. The presidents
of both the American and Florida Bar practiced there. Young lawyers
like me were supposed to follow career paths that might someday lead
us to similar distinction. No one at Steel was on track to becoming
a writer.



So, I set a couple of ground rules. First, I would do my writing on
the sly, nights and weekends, while continuing to bill my obligatory
two thousand hours a year. Second --- and this was by far the most important
rule --- I was determined to keep it fun. With that, I set out on my
adventure, keeping a journal along the way. What follows is a selective
chronology of events. I've kept it light, though many of these things
weren't very funny at the time. But at least there's a happy ending
--- along with the highs and lows, fits and starts, warts and all.



A NOVEL IDEA



LABOR DAY WEEKEND 1988. At a holiday barbecue, friends are knocking
off spare ribs and gushing over Scott Turow's PRESUMED INNOCENT. "And
he wrote it while riding to work on the train," someone says. I
tell no one, but I decide to write a novel.



NOVEMBER 24. My girlfriend thinks my first hundred pages are kind of
interesting, but the x's and y's are driving her crazy. She suggests
I actually NAME my characters so that it reads more like a novel and
less like an algebraic equation. I want the lead lawyer to have an Italian
surname, like me, so I come up with Bianchi. The name nags me a little
--- sounds familiar, but I can't quite place it.



NOVEMBER 25. Bianchi is out. He was the California Hillside Strangler.



JANUARY 1989. I focus my story, and --- surprise! --- it's a legal thriller.
Can't decide whether the lead character should be the young and beautiful
lawyer or her silver-haired mentor. So I make them BOTH lead characters.
Mistake Number One.



MARCH 1. I write my first love scene.



MARCH 2. I cut my first love scene. Check out D.H. Lawrence from the
library.



JULY. After ten months of writing, I print a hard copy. And print, and
print. Twelve hundred pages! Every interesting tidbit I've read in the
newspaper or picked up at cocktail party since Labor Day has somehow
made its way into the story. And it reads more like a family saga than
a legal thriller. Which is it? BOTH, I decide. Mistake Number Two.




HOW TO GET PUBLISHED, NOT EXACTLY BY THE
BOOK



AUGUST-NOVEMBER. I circulate finished drafts to friends for serious
feedback. The operative word here is friends. Kind of like asking my
mother if she thinks I'm handsome.



JANUARY 1991. I go crazy buying "How To" books. But they DO
teach me one thing: I must have a literary agent. I aim right for the
top: Robert Ludlum's agent.



APRIL 26. Success! Ludlum's agent wants to read my manuscript. He is
concerned, however, that the market for lawyer-novels may be getting
over-crowded. No kidding, Sherlock.



JUNE 2. Rejection from Ludlum's agent. Says a first novel should be
about 100,000 words. I run a word count on my computer. Over 250,000
words. I've created a monster.



JUNE 3. There's a new kid on the block, some guy named John Grisham.
I wonder how his agent would feel about a 250,000-word . . . trilogy
--- yeah, that's the ticket. A TRILOGY.



JUNE 27. Still waiting on Grisham's agent, I mail off another query
to Arthur Pine. Pine's listing in THE WRITER'S MARKET says George Burns
is a client. Nice reference. Anybody who represents God must be honest.



JULY 2. A phone call from Artie Pine. Likes my story, but he senses
it probably needs a shave and a haircut. What a diplomat. I think the
diagnosis from Ludlum's agent was "terminally obese." Artie
wants to see the first two chapters and the big climax. Terrific. Now
all I have to do is figure out what's my big climax.



JULY 12. Unable to find it, I write the big climax and FedEx the package
to Artie.



JULY 14. Artie likes it but says no publisher will buy a 250,000-word
manuscript from a no-name author. If I'll agree to cut it to a marketable
length, he'll agree to represent me. That sounds like a fair offer.
I don't tell him it's my ONLY offer.



THE SLIM-FAST DIET FOR BOOKS



AUGUST. Nothing happens. If ever I decide to take over the publishing
industry, it will be in August. No one would suspect a thing until they
all returned from vacation after Labor Day.



NOVEMBER 17. Each November means The Miami International Book Fair,
and I hang on every word as a panel of experts --- a first-time author,
two literary agents and a publisher --- explain how to get published.
During the Q&A session, frustrated writers step up to the microphone
and beg the panelists to PLEASE read their manuscripts. I wonder if
next year I'll be one of the panelists or one of the desperate souls
stepping up to the microphone.



DECEMBER. A trip to NYC to meet my agent on West 57th Street. Simple
offices, but the collage on the wall tells the story. A colorful scattering
of hardcover book jackets --- bestsellers, books-to-movies, and a huge
blow-up of the NEW YORK TIMES list with James Patterson at #1. Patterson
has not yet hit #1. He made the blow-up to help his agent visualize
the goal. "Patterson will be huge someday," says Artie.



MAY 1992. A thousand pages have been whittled down to five hundred and
change. Nearly four years of work may actually pay off. Artie makes
no predictions but thinks it will sell. I'm sure of it: I'M GOING TO
BE AN AUTHOR.



AT LEAST HE GOT KISSED



MAY 21. I have a blind date with Tiffany Russell. She's beautiful
-- and a voracious reader with a degree in English Literature. I tell
her about my novel. She'd love to read it, can't wait to get inside
my head. INSIDE MY HEAD? Suddenly, I feel naked, or at least like my
fly is open.



JULY. Artie calls. We've gotten a few rejections. Not to worry. "It
only takes one."



AUGUST 24. Hurricane Andrew rips through south Florida. The Russell
home is destroyed. Tiff, her mom, dad and grandmother move into my two
bedroom town house for the week. Lucky for them they gave my book a
favorable review.



LABOR DAY WEEKEND. Artie forwards me a two-page letter from a big New
York editor. She's impressed, thinks the characters and story are rich
and fully developed. I read on. My hand begins to shake. Unfortunately,
she writes, we are in an age of minimalist writing. "After a lot
of thought, I've decided against it." My heart sinks. She was our
last shot. We crashed and burned. The book didn't sell. I step outside
and pitch her letter in the mountain of hurricane debris that used to
be my parking space. Writing sucks.



SEPTEMBER. I'm a lawyer. I love practicing law.



MID-SEPTEMBER. Artie calls. I brace myself for something along the lines
of goodbye and good wishes. But Artie the optimist proves true to form:
"Jim, you got the most ENCOURAGING rejection letters I've ever
seen." I figure Artie must have invented the word "spin."
But what the hell. New book. New idea. Am I up for it? Of course. I'm
a writer. I love to write.



September came and went, life after Hurricane Andrew was becoming somewhat
normal, and I had made zero progress on my second book. One night around
one a.m., I needed a break from my computer, so I went for a walk. As
I reached the dimly lit street corner, a squad car appeared out of nowhere.
It came to a halt on the grassy part of the curb, blocking my path.



"Can I see some identification?" the cop said.



I had none --- no wallet, no drivers license, nothing. The lawyer in
me was tempted to explain to this fascist that the Constitution doesn't
require people in this country to carry ID, but he cut me off. Someone
reported a peeping-Tom in the neighborhood. I stood nervously beside
the squad car as he called in on his radio for a description of the
prowler. Our eyes locked in a tense stare, and as the dispatcher recited
the physical description, I could almost see him ticking off similarities
on his mental check list.



"Under six feet," the dispatcher said. CHECK.



"Thirty to thirty-five years old." CHECK.



"Brown hair, brown eyes." DOUBLE CHECK.



"Blue shorts, white T-shirt." HOLY CRAP! I'M GOING TO JAIL!



"And a mustache," the dispatcher finally added.



The cop narrowed his eyes, trying to discern whether someone could have
mistakenly thought I had a mustache. Finally he said, "Go home."



I walked quickly, thankful I wasn't riding downtown in the back of a
squad car. An arrest would have surely put me in the newspaper --- PROMINENT
ATTORNEY CHARGED AS 'PEEPING TOM.' Just being arrested could have ruined
my reputation. When people watch the news at night and see that guy
stuffed into the back of squad car, their first thought usually isn't,
"Oh, look honey, there goes another innocent man off to jail."
It's usually something along the lines of HE DID IT. Or, IF HE WASN'T
DOING THIS, HE WAS PROBABLY DOING SOMETHING. Or even better: IF HE WASN'T
DOING IT THIS TIME, HE'S PROBABLY DONE A WHOLE LOT OF OTHER THINGS.
. . . Your last thought is that this is a totally innocent person. It's
only human nature.



My life had nearly changed forever. And in a way, it had. More than
four years after starting my first novel, I suddenly had an idea for
a second.



OFF TO THE RACES



OCTOBER 4, 3 A.M. Page One, Chapter One. A death row inmate faces
imminent execution for a murder he may not have committed. I call it
THE GOVERNOR'S PARDON.



MARCH 6, 1993. Dinner with Tiff at Lutece in New York. Snow falls on
Saturday morning as we skate at Rockefeller Center. When the right music
finally plays, I chase her around the ice until I can get her to stop
in front of the gold statue of Prometheus. Irving Berlin's I'LL BE LOVING
YOU ... ALWAYS, is in its third chorus by the time I get my glove off
and show her the ring. When she hugs me and accepts, the surrounding
crowd looking down on the rink cheers. Good thing this is real life.
It would make awfully corny fiction.



APRIL 26. After seven months of work, Artie loves my new novel. We're
changing the title to THE PARDON, and he's going to hold an auction.
This concerns me. When I think of auctions, I conjure up distress sales
--- you know, bankruptcy, going out of business. Artie laughs and assures
me that an auction is a good thing that happens only to big books. I'm
appeased for the moment. As I recall, however, they auctioned off Eastern
Airlines, too. THAT was big.



MAY 7. A call from Richard Pine, Artie's son --- the other half of the
dynamic duo. Rick Horgan, a senior editor at HarperCollins, wants to
talk to me on the phone.



MAY 8, 3:10 P.M. Horgan calls. NOW what? He wants to make sure that
I'm open to a few changes. I don't tell him, but he could probably persuade
me to turn it into a comedy. Maybe call it PRESUMED IGNORANT or TO MOCK
A KILLING BIRD. Just BUY the damn thing.



THURSDAY, MAY 13, 10:42 A.M. It's Artie on the phone. My heart stops.
"Congratulations, Jim, you're an author." He jumps to the
bottom line --- the advance. He mentions a modest five figure sum. It's
okay, I say. It's not about the money. I'm smiling and pacing across
the room with the phone against my ear. Artie's explaining hardcover,
paperback, foreign rights. Then he asks, "What did I say your advance
was?" I repeat it. Artie snickers. "Oh, I'm sorry. I left
off a zero." My jaw drops. To think, I probably would have paid
THEM to publish it. Thanks, Artie, for saving me from myself.



Naturally, I dreamed big. Bestseller. Hollywood. At work, where I had
managed to keep my writing a secret, I kidded the entire firm management
committee about appearing in my next novel as hatchet murderers, drug
addicts and prostitutes. They laughed --- NERVOUSLY.



My friends had very high expectations, which stemmed partly from their
faith in me, but mostly from their apparent unawareness that the average
first novel does not sell quite as many copies as, say, THE BIBLE. They
seemed to think that, once you sell the manuscript, all you do is run
it through the spell-check and pick a typeset. Wrong.



ESCAPE TO NEW YORK



JUNE 18. I'm going to New York to meet my editor. I always wanted
to say that. Cool.



JUNE 19, LUNCH. Rick takes me to some Italian place. Tells me they just
sold THE PARDON to the Dutch, which is a nice ice-breaker. I like him.
Good sense of humor. Honest enough to admit that he was one of three
editors given an early look at Grisham's THE FIRM and turned it down.
We get to talking about the American Booksellers Association convention
that just happened in Miami Beach and how everyone thought the hotels
were dreadful. I apologize, as if being from south Florida made the
accommodations my fault. Afterward, Rick takes me around the office.
I meet the Editor-in-Chief and her husband --- HUH? --- the publisher.
They're in the middle of a meeting with an important-looking fellow
who smiles and claims to have signed my check. I figure now isn't the
time to mention I still haven't GOTTEN my check.



JULY 7. The draft contract arrives from HarperCollins for my review.
Being a lawyer, I can't resist making some change, so I get out my red
pen and go for it: I add my middle initial to the signature block.



AUGUST 24. The check arrives. I guess it took six weeks for the publisher's
lawyers to approve that middle initial I added. I wonder if they billed
for all that time.



AUGUST 25, 2 A.M. Panic grips me as I lay awake in bed. Nearly three
months into the editing, and I still don't have the big new ending to
the story my editor wants. I wonder if I should cash the check.



DECEMBER 22. One more meeting with the editor in NYC. Loves my new ending,
but now he's not so sure about the beginning and the middle. Hands me
the full manuscript with his edits. He wants it cleaned up and back
no later than December 28 so the publisher and Editor-in-Chief can read
it. Merry Christmas.



DECEMBER 26. I've edited Rick's edits and fired right back at him with
a thirty-eight page letter justifying my every change. Ten years of
practicing law taught me something about working on holidays. The new
and improved version of THE PARDON is done. Alleluia!



BEYOND THE EDIT



JANUARY. Excitement is buzzing in-house. For the first time,
I hear Rick utter the words national bestseller --- I'm beginning to
think even HE likes it. Sounds beautiful. Oh, one other thing, Jim.
The publisher resigned this week.



FEBRUARY. Time to collect blurbs for the book jacket. Turns out, one
of my law partners grew up in Mississippi and still keeps in touch with
a lawyer in Jackson who considers himself a buddy of another lawyer
in Oxford who is pretty good friends with John Grisham. I pitch this
to Rick. When the laughter stops, he suggests we try Ernest Hemingway
next.



MARCH 4. The script arrives for the audio version of THE PARDON. Script?
I thought they would just hire someone to read MY BOOK. Hardly. My 100,000
words have been whittled down to 27,000 and change. Who the heck do
they have reading this thing, Mike Tyson?



MARCH 23. The artist's jacket design arrives. The first thing I notice
is "By James Grippando" in bold red letters. The second is
the naked woman. She's a dark, shadowy figure, strategically back-lighted
so that her erogenous zones glow in the dark. Among my friends, the
female reaction ranges from a quizzical "Hmmmmmm" to "Her
hips are fat." The men basically want her phone number. I'm not
so sure about this. Rick tells me they'll work on it.



APRIL. Things are still popping. The German rights sell, and THE PARDON
is selected by the Literary Guild, Mystery Guild, and the Doubleday
Book Club --- each of which has just acquired a new member for life,
or perhaps two, if you count me AND my mother. A visit to the bookstore
turns my euphoria to confusion. Book clubs have Selections, Main Selections,
Dual Main Selections, Alternate Selections, Featured Alternate Selections.
Given the stature of the other authors, I figure THE PARDON must have
been a random selection.



SATURDAY, APRIL 16. Fifty million Americans miss the deadline for filing
their income tax returns. The literary world mourns the loss of Ralph
Ellison, award-winning author of THE INVISIBLE MAN, dead at age eight-one.
Tiffany Suzanne Russell marries James Michael Grippando. Says I'm her
Main Selection.



EARLY MAY. My publicist at HarperCollins calls. There's a big push for
THE PARDON, and he's obviously concerned about finding some way ---
ANY way --- to draw attention to a completely unknown, first-time author.
I suggest lighting my hair on fire and running through bookstores naked.
He says he'll think about it.



MID-JUNE. Chills. My editor sends me a few leftover advance reader editions
of THE PARDON. It looks exactly like the real thing, only it's paperback.
But for me, it's my first book. I'm a writer. which of course means
that I never stop dreaming of real success. For me, that will come only
when I get my real first novel published --- that twelve hundred page
labor of love now resting on a shelf in my bedroom closet.



EPILOGUE.



My journal stopped just before THE PARDON was published. I'm
not sure why, but it probably had something to do with my first bad
review. Those things seemed so important back then. Now, my five-year-old
son and I make them into paper hats.



I don't remember everything about my first pub date, but even nine novels
later, there is one thing I know I'll never forget. It was a sunny south
Florida afternoon. I got in my red convertible (which has since been
traded in for two kids, a dog, and an SUV) and drove to a cozy neighborhood
bookstore in the heart of Coral Gables. I'd been going there for years
to browse and dream. This time, however I walked right up to New Fiction,
pulled THE PARDON off the shelf and plopped it on the counter.



"That's my book, you know," I told the sales clerk.



She looked at me quizzically. "Yes, it is once you've paid for
it."



Part of me wanted to pull out my drivers license, tell her to compare
the names, and insist NO, REALLY --- IT'S MY BOOK, I WROTE THIS THING!
Instead, I just chuckled to myself and paid her in cash. "Best
twenty-three dollars I've ever spent," I said.



She pointed with a nod to the book on the counter. "James Gri .
. . Grippa . . . Grippa-na-nando. Never heard of him. Any good?"



"No," I said. "Just lucky."

© 2005 James Grippando

After twelve years as a Miami trial lawyer, James
Grippando is now a national best-selling author of suspenseful thrillers.
GOT THE LOOK, his tenth novel in eleven years and No. 5 in the Jack
Swyteck series, will be published by HarperCollins in 2006. James's
novels are enjoyed worldwide in nineteen languages.

[Editor's
note: This article first appeared in Mystery
Scene Magazine, Summer Issue, No. 85, 2004.]

By Brian Garfield



[Editor's note: In 1994, John Grisham revealed to
NEWSWEEK that he credited the following article by Brian Garfield
with giving him the tools to create his ground-breaking thriller, THE
FIRM , as well as subsequent books. Garfield himself is a noted bestselling
novelist, as well as a screenwriter, producer, and nonfiction writer.
He won the Edgar Award for HOPSCOTCH, which was made into the prize-winning
movie of the same name, starring Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson.
For more of this renowned author's credits, please see his bio
at the end of this article.]

 

The English call
them thrillers, and in our clumsier way we call them novels of
suspense.

They contain elements of mystery, romance and adventure, but they don't
fall into restrictive categories. And they're not circumscribed by artificial
systems of rules like those that govern the whodunit or the gothic romance.

The field is wide enough to include Alistair MacLean, Allen Drury,
Helen Maclnnes, Robert Crichton, Graham Greene, and Donald E. Westlake.
(Now there's a parlay.) The market is not limited by the stigmata of
genre labels, and therefore the potential for success of a novel in
this field is unrestricted: DAY OF THE JACKAL, for instance, was
a first novel.

The game's object: To perch the reader on edge ---
to keep him flipping pages to find out what's going to happen next.

The game's rules are harder to define; they are few, and these are
elastic. The seasoned professional learns the rules mainly in order
to know how to break them to good effect.

But such as they are, the rules can be defined as follows.

Start with action; explain it later.

This is an extension of Raymond Chandler's famous dictum: When things
slow down, bring in a man with a gun. To encourage the reader to turn
to page 2, give him something on page 1--conflict, trouble, fear, violence.

I realize you've got a lot of background that needs to be established,
leading up to the first moments of overt conflict, but you can establish
all that in chapter 2. Flash back to it if you need to. But in
Chapter 1, get the show on the road.

Make it tough for your protagonist.

Give him a worthy antagonist and make things look hopeless. Don't drop
convenient solutions in his lap. The tougher the opposition, the more
everything is stacked against the protagonist, the better.

Plant it early; pay it off later.

Don't bring in new characters or facts at the end to help solve the
protagonist's dilemma. He must work out his own solution based on a
conflict that's established early in the story.

No cavalry to the rescue, and no sudden unearthing of a revealing letter
written before he died by a character who was dispatched way back in
Chapter 3. (Unless, of course, you established in Chapter 4 that
such a letter exists, and followed that revelation with a race between
the protagonist and his enemies to see who'll get the letter first.)
No cavalry to the rescue.

Give the protagonist the initiative.

All good dramatic writing centers on conflict --- interior (alcoholism,
oedipal conflicts) or exterior (a dangerous enemy, an alien secret police
force). Only in poor gothic fiction is the protagonist habitually and
tearfully and hand-wringingly at the mercy of evil opposing forces that
push him or her around at will.

The best story is usually that in which the protagonist takes active
steps to achieve a goal against impossible odds, or to prevent opposing
forces from overcoming him or his loved ones. The protagonist may begin
by reacting, but in the end he must act from his own initiative.

Give the protagonist a personal stake.

No longer is it acceptable for the hero to solve a mystery just because
it presents an interesting puzzle. The more intimate his involvement
in the main conflict of the story, the better.

He himself, or his aims, should be in jeopardy: His own life or those
of his loved ones should be in danger, or his best friend has been murdered,
or he is the kind of character whose values and principles won't let
him sit by and allow injustice to destroy people around him.

Whatever the conflict is, if he loses, it's going to cost him horribly;
that's the essence.

Give the protagonist a tight time limit, and then shorten it.

This doesn't always work because the logic of many stories prohibits
it; don't use it unless you can work it in believably. But when time
is a factor, and when the brief span of time in which the hero must
resolve the conflict is then shortened, you have gone a long way toward
heightening the suspense.

Choose your character according to your own capacities, as
well as his.

Don't use as your protagonist an accomplished professional spy unless
you are prepared to do the research and groundwork necessary to create
such a character convincingly. It is better, particularly when approaching
the early stages of your own professionalism, to stick to the familiar.

Some of the most successful suspense-novel protagonists --- many
of Eric Ambler's, for instance --- are ordinary innocent people
caught up in dangerous webs. The indignant honest idealist makes a good
protagonist because his innocence makes the professional opposition
all the more frightening. Yet a plot-structure for this character is
often difficult to contrive because, in spite of his naiveté,
he has to be clever and resourceful enough (not lucky) to prevail over
his awesome enemies.

The other face of this coin, of course, is the professional-crook-as-protagonist;
he's easy to identify with because he's an outcast, an underdog, one
man using his wits to survive against society's oppressive machinery.
But the pitfalls of this genre are treacherous, and unless you know
criminal procedure and feel comfortable competing with Anthony Burgess
and Richard Stark, it's better to avoid the crook-hero in the beginning.

Know your destination before you set out.

The prevailing weakness of many suspense stories that are otherwise
successful is the letdown the reader experiences at the end ---
the illogical and disappointing anticlimax. It isn't enough to set up
intriguing conflicts and obey all the other rules if you haven't got
an ending that fulfills the promise of the preceding chapters.

It becomes disgustingly obvious when a writer has confronted his hero
with thrilling obstacles only to paint himself into a corner. Presented
with his own unsolvable cliffhanger, he is reduced to bringing in deus
ex machina to solve the hero's problems for him.

It isn't necessary to tie up all loose ends, but the climax should
resolve the principal conflict one way or another. (In recent years,
to avoid the traditional clichés of virtue-triumphant or ironic-downfall,
several talented novelists have resorted to obscure endings that no
reader could possibly decipher. I rather hope the fad is dying out;
whatever the reasons behind it, it demonstrates lazy thinking and infuriates
the reader.)

The best key to a good ending is to know what the ending will be before
you start writing the book.

Whether you write a preliminary outline or not, you should know where
the journey will end, and how.

Don't rush in where angels fear to tread.

I admit this one is a catchall. Essentially I mean that it is wise
to observe not only what the pros do, but also what they avoid doing.
The best writers do not jump on bandwagons; they build new ones.

The pro doesn't write a caper novel about the world's biggest heist
unless he's convinced he can write an unusual story with a unique and
important twist. Otherwise he risks unfavorable comparison with the
classics in that subgenre. "Why bother with it if it's not as taut as
Rififi and not as funny as The Hot Rock?"

Yet this should not be taken to mean every writer must obey faddish
advice, such as "Spy fiction is dead," or "Historical novels are out
this season." There is no such thing as a dead genre because the human
imagination is limitless, and there is never a dearth of new ideas,
new twists, new talents.

The question is, "Is this idea strong enough and important enough to
make the story sufficiently different from its predecessors to merit
publication?" If a novel is good enough, it will find a publisher whether
it is a hard-boiled detective story, a western, a spy novel, a historical
adventure, or a novel about bug-eyed monsters from Mars. If it isn't
good enough, the publisher may reject it by saying that such novels
are out of style, but this is merely a euphemism.

Don't write anything you wouldn't want to read.

This one sounds self-evident, but I've met several young writers who
decided they wanted to start out by hacking their way through gothics
or westerns, just to learn the ropes, because those categories looked
easy to imitate. Nuts. I f you start out that way, you'll end
up a hack.

Now if you like to read westerns, then write a western. But don't write
into a genre for which you have contempt. If you don't like gothics
but insist on writing one, your contempt will show; you can't hide it.
I don't say you can't sell books this way; God knows people do, all
too often. But if you thoroughly enjoy sea stories --- even if
you don't know a thing about nautical life --- you're better off
attempting to write a sea story because you'll go into it with enthusiasm.

© 1973, 1994 Brian Garfield

The award-winning author of some 60 books, Brian
Garfield was a finalist for the American Book Award for WILD TIMES,
which was the basis for the TV miniseries of the same name.
His seminal thriller DEATH WISH defined a crime-writers' genre and gave
rise to a hit series of action movies starring Charles Bronson.
His nonfiction book THE THOUSAND MILE WAR: WORLD WAR II IN ALASKA
AND THE ALEUTIANS is the definitive history of the only campaign
fought in North America during that war . Among his other novels
are KOLCHAK'S GOLD, RECOIL, and LINE OF SUCCESSION.

[Editor's note: This article was published twice by WRITER'S
DIGEST. Its first appearance was in 1973 in the magazine.
The second was in the 1994 WRITER'S YEARBOOK‹"At last: The real
secret behind John Grisham's success."]

Like many fiction writers, when I began trying to write a novel in the mid 1990s, I had no clear notion of genre, much less something called the thriller genre. Of course I did have a clear notion that THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, which I liked, was quite different from THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, which contained a certain genius that even I could discern but, frankly, nevertheless bored me.



We tend to write the kinds of book we enjoy reading, seeking certain familiar touchstones or landmarks, while investing the story with quirks of place, character, or plot that make the work uniquely our own. What I wrote early on was an odd misfit of a manuscript, about which bewildered publishing house editors could say only the dreaded, "We hope you find a home for it." There were of course mutterings that they couldn't figure out how to place it even if they could bring themselves to like it.



Searching for direction, I was told that, "You need to decide where in the store you would look for your book."  Actually, that, too is a bit confusing because thrillers are shelved under numerous categories, and appear in the no-category "general fiction" as well.



At this point I was far from writing a classic thriller although by instinct I continued to try to write a story based on suspense. (I would not have phrased my efforts as "suspense", but a professor of literature advised that I did well with characters who were frightened out of their minds. Suspense books commonly feature such characters, she explained.) At this early stage I remained less-than-blissfully ignorant of genre distinctions. Had you asked me the difference between a mystery and a thriller I would have shrugged.



As I floundered around trying to write something, it dawned on me that some characters are so intriguing that THEY, and not the plot, create the story. Now some of you will harrumph and say that all good fiction requires well-developed characters. Yes, but consider a book where almost nothing happens, and yet it creates a strange and widespread fascination among its readers.



My first experience with such a book was LADDER OF YEARS by Ann Tyler. When the inward intellectual musings of the ivory-tower elite achieve the requisite gravitas to stir wonder akin to childbirth, the book wins a Pulitzer Prize. I've never read a contemporary Pulitzer Prize-winner, and chances are you haven't either. But chances also are that sometime between the age of 6 and your current age, you read a book that you remember to this day simply because of the quality of one of its main characters. Unless you only watched TV, in which case I would call to your attention John Walton if you're older, and Seinfeld if you're younger.

When I realized the potential value of a one-of-a-kind lead character, my next problem with a character-driven story was that I didn't think I could write one. Just going through a personalized list of favorite character-driven novels can be as depressing as it is inspiring: Think of a brilliant literary/mainstream novel (ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST), a literary-quality historical novel (LONESOME DOVE), a brilliant history/mystery combo (SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS), a literary mystery (MYSTIC RIVER), a romance for the ages (BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY or THE NOTEBOOK), an espionage thriller (THE BOURNE IDENTITY or THE DAY OF THE JACKAL), a serial-killer thriller (RED DRAGON), a legal thriller (THE FIRM or PRESUMED INNOCENT), and of course the list goes on. It was a sad day when I realized I had to choose a 'genre' myself.



Please don't misunderstand me: I don't mean that every author has to choose among genres --- your work depends on your natural talent, taste, experience, and will, in a profession with a full complement of aspirants for relatively few slots for literary work, and not so many for thrillers.



If you haven't got my drift: It's tough to get a job in the novel-writing business, and sometimes you take what you can write.



The more perceptive among you have now figured out that in part I'm going to tell you what a thriller is by telling you what it is not. Funny --- that's how I began learning.



As I wandered through my fog of genre uncertainty, I began to focus on those so-called popular writers associated with the thriller genre who had a wonderful talent for writing a character. Thomas Harris with his character Hannibal Lecter in RED DRAGON and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS came to the fore, as he has for many novelists who admire the creation of his cunning, intellectual, sociopath.



Two characters in particular from Dean Koontz's FROM THE CORNER OF HIS EYE stand out for me. Both Junior, the murderer, and Vanadium, the detective, were brilliantly executed and were major elements of the story. As Vanadium plays with Junior's mind, the suspense crackles, and for some God-awful reason we find little people sitting on the back bleachers of our minds rooting for a psychopath. This particular thriller is a tour-de-force of character development, but the plot, I believe, moves more slowly than some other Koontz books --- INTENSITY, for example.



Character is a critical element in many popular works of suspense, but usually the development of character is done in such a way that it magnifies or helps to create the suspense. Others would say that the thriller simply examines character in the crucible of extreme stress more than it USES character for suspense. I'll leave it to you to sort out the semantics. Either way, clearly many of us try to create characters who will enhance the nail-biting aspects of our stories. The methods by which this is accomplished are myriad.



Many classic character pieces in modern literature help us ponder some neurosis, common or strange --- a deep angst in a dark soul. The point is an exploration of human nature, not the creation of suspense per se. This can work in a thriller (think SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW by Peter Hoeg, or the Arkady Renko novels by Martin Cruz Smith), but personally I do not usually make time to consider such deeper meanings in connection with my fiction reading because I'm too busy contemplating something like what really is hidden on Plum Island (I'm not actually accusing Nelson DeMille of writing a thriller here) or whether Dr. David Beck will ever be reunited with his seemingly dead wife, the utter and complete love of his life, in Harlan Coben's TELL NO ONE.



I know some of you will tell me that your favorite thriller characters are every bit as profound as literary characters. A rather famous thriller writer commented that there was no such thing as literary fiction, there was just good and bad fiction, and all the rest was only an excuse for making no money.



I don't know about that; I only know that in thriller stories we don't seem to spend nearly as much time exploring a character's quiet desperation over ordinary things or their meaning, or the character's compulsions and the consequences. In a thriller, when we authors treat readers to a display of a character's insanity, I think we're using it as a device to put readers ever closer to the edges of their seat rather than create a personal epiphany about life or its meaning.



And yet the main characters remain vital. How can we care about someone's peril if we care nothing for them? So goes the truism that has by now become trite. A good story is always made better if the characters grow or change as opposed to merely surviving or winning the race.



So my thesis is that in thrillers we use character development to heighten suspense and make the story more compelling although admittedly we may serve reader interest in other ways as well.



In a thriller, first and foremost, we want a sense of purposeful evil pouring from the antagonist, because the antagonist must drive the story. If the villain has a semi-understandable rationale, enabling a certain degree of empathy from readers, so much the better. The villain's credibility creates interest in readers, enhancing the impact of his or her deeds. And it's only against this negative "value" (by value I mean quantity and magnitude) that the protagonist's positive value can be tested and admired. And of course seeing the blackness of the heart helps advance the suspense. In some cases the nature of the evil is heartless detachment, and in others malevolence, or sometimes both in generous measure.



A softer form of evil comes from gross negligence fueled by blind ambition (Michael Crichton's John Hammond in JURASSIC PARK). Some of the all-time great evil characters include individuals like Hannibal Lecter or groups of people such as the old Soviet empire and its various agents (DeMille's THE CHARM SCHOOL). Never forget to consider giving evil characters a good side or the left-over shadows of a better life. It makes them more interesting.



In some thrillers the evil force may be a natural phenomenon, like a disease, beast, or natural disaster. Take for instance Tess Gerritsen's GRAVITY about a wicked little microbe locked inside a space capsule. How's that for claustrophobic terror? Such black spawn of mother nature or man's invention can accomplish terrible results, but it always serves the novel for the author to put a human face in, on, or around such nebulous threats that normally exist only as a vague apprehension in our minds. The combination of these natural horrors, as heartless as a psychopath with no comprehension of evil or remorse, and human villains who know better, can be potent indeed.



Good thrillers also create lovable or noble characters or very human characters so that we will sweat over their peril --- and of course we tend to lose a sympathetic character to unfortunate and often violent death here and there in order to keep readers profoundly worried about the survivors. Romantic attachments help as well. It's necessary, even if there's a mass threat, that readers live the story through a few surrogates for the general population to make the threat and consequences feel real (Stephen King's classic THE STAND comes to mind). If the surrogates are depicted as flesh-and-blood human beings, we can't help but imagine ourselves facing the same terrible dangers they do.



By now I'm sure you get the idea that good crisp character development in a thriller enhances suspense and makes a page-turning plot even more of a page-turner. TELL NO ONE was a masterpiece in this sense. In the beginning of the book, as I sat through Coben's exposition of the wonderfully altruistic doctor who tended the poor and had not a prejudicial bone in his body, I thought: "Harlan Coben's just trying to make me like this guy so that I'll be worried about whatever worries him and root for him." Guess what? It worked like gangbusters. Character development boosted the suspense even though I saw Coben playing with my mind.



There is always a balance between keeping the action moving and using editorial comment to describe a character for the reader. In thriller fiction it is wise to pick your spots for character information. The writer needs to make certain it doesn't hurt the reader's sense of urgency.



A long talk about the meaning of life can be like intellectual Valium, so that the book no longer feels compelling and instead becomes constipated. The masters of the art can slow the pace and grip us with various action antecedents, and for most of us this is the pinnacle of the art of the thriller. Hallowed are the steps of the writer who can slow the action and increase his grip on our adrenal glands. Nelson DeMille does it as well as anyone.



The most artful way to develop a character is through action (what the character does), next dialogue, and last by the author telling us so. It has been said that we learn the most about people by their deeds. Fiction is no different.



Often though, skilled writers will take a shortcut with a few journalistic paragraphs about character as opposed to exposing us to an entire scene with all of the attendant sights, odors, and visual effects. In the hands of an amateur, this fails; in the hands of a master, who's chosen just the right detail (akin to Gustave Flaubert's famous mot juste, it soars. We are told, for instance, not shown, that Hannibal Lecter plucked out a nurse's eye. This macabre detail is rendered up as a point of history before Clarice pays her first visit, at which point Hannibal's opening words to Clarice grab and rip like steel talons, the dialogue seasoned by our memory of Lecter's hideous act. That stark contrast between Lecter's deeds and his urbane conversation is thrille