Brad Thor on The Last Patriot

from the vault: INTERVIEW WITH AUTHOR BRAD THOR ABOUT DEATH THREATS RELATED TO HIS THRILLER THE LAST PATRIOT 

Brad Thor is not averse to taking risks. He does so with his thriller THE LAST PATRIOT, about a Homeland Security operative named Scot Harvath, who goes on the hunt for a secret final revelation made by the Prophet Mohammed just before his assassination. This revelation, if disclosed, will end radical Islam's violence against non-believers without another bullet or bomb required. Naturally, there are those intent on never leaking this secret, and who are prepared to kill in order to prevent that. In this fictional thriller, and in the tradition of Robert Ludlum, the target includes Harvath, who is also a former Navy SEAL. But in real life, one might ask if the target might include author Brad Thor himself, as a former Homeland Security operative. I asked Thor about this, just before his July book tour.

JONATHAN LOWE: Your new novel is part covert ops political thriller and part "DaVinci Code" mystery. How did it click for you to combine the two?

 

BRAD THOR: My thrillers have always centered around covert/black ops and the domestic political landscape. They are subjects I love to write about. Through my writing, I have gotten to know lots of the players in these two arenas. The more time I spend shadowing them and seeing what their lives are like, the more I fall in love with this subject matter and the more I want to write about it. 

LOWE: Do you have any fears of becoming the next exiled Salman Rushdie for postulating such a volatile story line?

THOR: What a lot of people don’t know about me is that I have spent the last 20 years of my life learning about Islam. It is a fascinating subject, especially in how it promotes violence. What’s also fascinating is that whenever early copies of the Qur’an are discovered in Muslim nations, they are quickly secreted away. Researchers who have attempted to study them have wound up dying in very mysterious “accidents.” Now I have come out with a thriller that suggests the Qur’an is missing a very key text and I am being threatened with death. My book is fiction, but it is based on a handful of fascinating facts and the death threats only seem to support my theory that Islam is hiding a very big secret. Am I afraid of becoming the next Salman Rushdie? Honestly, I don’t relish the idea. Rushdie at one point had a $5 million bounty on his head and supposedly hundreds of Muslim assassins had traveled to London to kill him. Will I change what I have written or somehow recant and beg forgiveness for what is contained within The Last Patriot? Absolutely not. In fact, I find the hypocrisy here fascinating: Islam is a religion of peace and if you say that it isn’t, we’ll kill you. 

LOWE: What kind of research was involved in writing "The Last Patriot"? 

THOR: The idea for this novel was born in part from an Atlantic Monthly cover article by Toby Lester entitled “What is the Koran?”  I had discovered the piece, several years after its January 1999 publication, while doing research on another novel and had tucked it away for future use. Then I came across an article written by Gerard W. Gawalt, formerly of the Library of Congress, entitled “America and the Barbary Pirates: An International Battle Against an Unconventional Foe.” I started wondering if there was a way I could combine the historical relevance of the Quran and Thomas Jefferson’s experience with the Barbary pirates to create a thriller that would be relevant today.

LOWE: Jefferson and Islam. There's a connection? 

THOR: Yes. Thomas Jefferson was the first American president to go to war against radical Islam. The problems Jefferson and America faced over two hundred years ago are incredibly similar to what we as a nation face today and there is much to be learned from them.

LOWE: You once had a show on Public TV called "Traveling Lite." Obviously you're not doing that anymore.

THOR: Traveling has provided me with incredible adventures like running with the bulls “French Style” in the Camargue, paragliding over Geneva, Switzerland, and caving in Austria. Even now, as research, I visit as many of the places I write about as possible. I also read untold numbers of books on the subjects I explore in my novels. I am constantly challenging myself to make my stories as accurate and true-to-life as possible.

LOWE: I wrote a short story whose fictional premise was that someone in the Bush administration suggested bombing Mecca. Then I learned that someone actually had suggested it. Have you had any surprises in your research that affected plotting? 

 

THOR: I have surprises like this happen to me all the time. There are certain suggestions and possibilities that just make sense.  They key is in beating other writers to it. As I wrapped up the first draft of my manuscript, I received a call from my editor. She had just read a story in The Wall Street Journal about a mysterious archive of ancient Qur’anic texts in Germany that was believed to have been destroyed in 1944. It contained 450 rolls of films that supposedly chronicled the evolution of the Qur’an – the Muslim holy book which all Muslims believe was revealed complete, perfect, and inviolate to Islam’s founder Mohammed in the 7th century. The archive, and its subsequent study, had only been handled by three men. The first died in a strange climbing accident in 1933. The second died in a mysterious plane crash in 1941. The third man, wanting to be rid of the entire collection, pretended it had been destroyed and never spoke of it for over sixty years. He died recently at age 93. It seems there is much here worth investigating, and for which men are still willing, even in the case of The Last Patriot, to kill to keep secret. 

 

LOWE: You have an amazing website, and there's an enhanced CD on the audiobook version of "The Last Patriot" with a trailer for the book. Any thoughts on the technology of marketing books? Trailers are a relatively new phenomenon, and also make sense for audiobooks, which are now like audio movies. The one bright spot in publishing these days, with many new players entering the field. For example, I'd never even heard your reader Armand Schultz before. 

THOR: Thank you. I have worked hard to recreate the experience of my novels on the site and my web design team deserves much of the credit. The idea of doing a trailer for The Last Patriot really appealed to me. Trailers are one of my favorite things about watching movies. A trailer can make or break a film and I thought that it would be very interesting to try to market a book in the same fashion. I wrote the script, chose the narrator and then worked with my design team on the soundtrack and images.  Creating a trailer on the web with flash animation is a lot different than creating a film trailer as we had to create most of our images from scratch and we always had to keep in mind perspective by placing objects in the foreground, mid-ground and background. It took a long time, but I am very proud of the results. I also agree that audiobooks are a bright spot in publishing. It is good to see the industry embracing new ways of doing things. About Armand Schultz, I think he's fantastic. He's a Broadway-trained actor and really understands my characters, so he's able to craft different voices and vocal mannerisms for all of them.

Note: The Last Patriot book tour went off without a hitch. His latest book is Deadfall.

Taylor Jenkins Reid

Determination and raw talent and rarely come into alignment, but when they do the results speak for themselves. Take the case of Taylor Jenkins Reid, the 39 year old author of eight novels, several making it to screen. Raised in Boston, Taylor attended Emerson College before moving to Los Angeles to become a casting assistant, where she married a screenwriter and began writing novels. With Alex Reid’s support, she steadily grew her audience as she found her voice, and the result can now be seen on the Amazon Prime show Daisy Jones and the Six, co-produced by Reese Witherspoon. Her latest book, CARRIE SOTO IS BACK, tells the story of a 37 year old tennis star coming out of retirement determined to establish her record against a formidable opponent.

Lowe) One doesn’t have to be a tennis fan to enjoy this book, but I wonder what inspired you to write such a thrilling tennis story? Do you play the game?

REID) I have played tennis once or twice, but the real inspiration came from wanting to write about ambition and human excellence — to write about those few people in any given generation who stand above the rest. What does it mean to be the greatest in the world? And what does it feel like?

Lowe) The father-daughter relationship is strong here. Did your dad inspire you to excel?

REID) Despite having never been an athlete myself, I was very drawn to the specifics of the father/daughter coach/player relationship. It's a complicated one for Carrie and Javier. And I wanted to render something that didn't gloss over the complexity of what can happen when your father is your coach, but also showed the beauty of their connection as father and daughter. 

Lowe) You’ve said your own goals were “embarrassingly big.” What did you mean by that, and what famous women have inspired you to write about people like them in fiction?

REID) I think I've always found my belief in myself to be a little embarrassing. After all, when I was starting out, that's all it was. Belief with no real evidence. But I've read a lot of success stories over the years. Naturally, their themes find their way into my work. Whether it's an actress mid-century like Rita Hayworth, or a 70s rock star like Linda Rondstadt, or an 80s model like Brooke Shields, I'm always reading their stories and trying to glean what I can as both a writer and a person. For Carrie Soto, I looked to women like the Williams sisters and Steffi Graf and Naomi Osaka.

James Patterson on audiobooks

 

From the vault: The name of James Patterson is ubiquitous. Go to any hotel or cruise ship pool in summer, and you’ll see someone reading a Patterson thriller. A former ad man, he is now the reigning king of pop fiction superstars, and for a time lived in Palm Beach, Florida, where Maralago is. I once met Patterson at Book Expo America. One book, written with Bill Clinton, was THE PRESIDENT IS MISSING. Narrator is actors Dennis Quaid, January LaVoy, Mozhan Marno, and Jeremy Davidson. 

JONATHAN LOWE: What led you to writing? Were you a voracious reader?

JAMES PATTERSON: I was a good student in high school, but I didn’t like to read at all. I’m still not a big fan of Silas Marner. Just after I graduated from high school, I got a job working at a famous mental hospital. I had a lot of free time, and I started reading everything I could get my hands on. At this point, I was reading serious fiction, poetry, essays, plays. I still didn’t read any commercial fiction. When I was in my twenties I read two commercial novels that turned it all around for me–Day of the Jackal and The Exorcist. At that point, I decided that I wanted to write a novel that readers would find almost impossible to put down. 

Q: What was your reaction to the success of “Along Came a Spider?” 

A: Long before I had a success with “Along Came A Spider,” I had learned to stop and smell the roses. Consequently, I savored every moment when Along Came A Spider hit the bestseller lists. That included every bookstore I visited on tour, every interview, every kind review. 

Q: Was the Alex Cross character your first choice as protagonist? How and why did you develop him to be who he is? 

A: Actually, when I began “Along Came A Spider,” Alex Cross was a woman. I wrote about fifty pages, and decided to go in another direction. I’ve told the story about where the Cross family came from, but I’m happy to tell it again. When I was a kid growing up in Newburgh, New York, my grandparents owned a small restaurant. The cook was a black woman named Laura. When I was three or four, she was having trouble with her husband and my parents urged her to move in with us. Over the next four years, I spent incredible amounts of time with Laura and her family. I got an incredible feeling for the warmth and good humor that they shared. That certainly influenced my creating the Cross family. 

Q: Did you begin by thinking of Alex as a series character? Coming up with nursery rhymes as titles is obviously good for name recognition, but how much did they influence the actual plotting? 

A: When I wrote “Along Came A Spider” I wasn’t thinking about creating a series. The publisher wanted to make a two-book deal, and the more I thought about writing about Alex again, the more I liked it. I don’t think the nursery rhymes have much to do with the plotting at all. 

Q: Nor do I. One thing which strikes me about your books is your creative use of short chapters for dramatic effect. Knowing when and where to end a chapter which leaves the reader guessing or biting their nails or just staring at the page in shock. Two of your chapters in ROSES ARE RED, for example, are mere one liners, which explains a total of 125 chapters in a relatively short book. When your wife asks how much you’ve written today and you say “two chapters” doesn’t she just stare at you? 

A: The short chapters were kind of an accident. I had written about thirty chapters of The Midnight Club and I expected to flesh them out later. When I read them, however, I liked the pacing a lot. I eventually fleshed the chapters out, but not as much as I planned to. My wife and I never talk about the quantity of work I’ve done on any given day, just the quality.

Q: Please describe your new book. 

A: You get on a roller coaster, it goes on and on, you can’t believe how many twists and turns you’ve experienced, and when the ride finally stops you get off exhausted, shaken, but strangely satisfied. 

Q: Do you listen to audiobooks on the road? 

A: Ever since I moved out of New York City, I’ve been addicted to audiobooks. I listen to one or two a week while I’m driving around town. Generally, I listen to the books that I used to buy, but never get around to reading.

Uneasy Lies the Crown by Tasha Alaxander

The year is 1901 and the death of Britain’s longest-reigning monarch has sent all of the Empire into mourning. But for Lady Emily and her dashing husband Colin, the grieving is cut short as another royal death takes center stage. A body has been found in the Tower of London, posed to look like the murdered medieval king Henry VI. Soon after a second dead man turns up in London’s exclusive Berkeley Square, his mutilated remains staged to evoke the violent demise of Edward II, it becomes evident that the individual behind the crimes plans to kill again and again. The race to find him takes Emily deep into the capital’s underbelly, with its secret gangs, street children, and sleazy brothels. But the clues aren’t adding up, and even more puzzling are the anonymous letters Colin has been receiving since Victoria’s death. Is someone threatening her successor, Edward VII?

Jonathan Lowe) What is your background, and how did you turn to writing?

Tasha Alexander) I am the daughter of two philosophy professors, I grew up surrounded by books. I was convinced from an early age that I was born in the wrong century and spent much of my childhood under the dining room table pretending it was a covered wagon. Even there, I was never without a book in hand and loved reading and history more than anything. I studied English Literature and Medieval History at the University of Notre Dame. Writing is a natural offshoot of reading, and my first novel, And Only to Deceive, was published in 2005. I’m the author of the long-running Lady Emily Series as well as the novel Elizabeth: The Golden Age. One of the best parts of being an author is seeing your books translated, and I’m currently in love with the Japanese editions of the Emily books.

Q) You’re a travel buff, and love to pack light. Where have you lived and traveled?

A) I played nomad for a long time, living in Indiana, Amsterdam, London, Wyoming, Vermont, Connecticut, and Tennessee before settling down. My husband, the brilliant British novelist Andrew Grant. I may be biased but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong! I live in southeastern Wyoming, but still don’t have a covered wagon, yet a log house goes a long way toward fulfilling my pioneer fantasies. Andrew makes sure I get my English characters right, and I make sure his American ones sound American.

Q) What do you like to read?

A) I’ll read pretty much anything I can get my hands on, but some of my favorite authors (in no particular order) are Jane Austen, David Mitchell, Leo Tolstoy, Vikram Seth, Meg Wolitzer, Haruki Murakami, Elizabeth Peters, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Anthony Trollope, William Thackeray, Naguib Mahfouz, Arthur Phillips, Pablo Neruda, Homer, Dorothy L. Sayers, Carol Shields, David Lodge, William Boyd, James Thurber, Margaret George, Pauline Gedge, Mika Waltari, Robert Harris, Jeannette Winterson, Henry James, Evelyn Waugh, Orhan Pamuk, Saki (H.H. Munro)  

Q) In Uneasy Lies the Crown, a thrilling mystery in your bestselling series, Lady Emily and her husband Colin must stop a serial killer whose sights may be set on the new king, Edward VII.  Anecdote?

A) On her deathbed, Queen Victoria asks to speak privately with trusted agent of the Crown Colin Hargreaves, slipping him a letter with her last, parting command: Une sanz pluis. Sapere aude. “One and no more. Dare to know.”

Note: Scott Brick narrates the new Reacher novels which Andrew has taken over. What comes next for Tasha is The Dark Heart of Florence. Since this interview she has done a short story Upon the Midnight Clear, and In the Shadow of Vesuvius. She loves Italy, where I visited just once. She lives on a ranch in the beautiful backcountry of Wyoming where Lee Child is also building a ranch TOO CLOSE TO HOME.