Hello everyone, I hope you’re enjoying a wonderful and safe Memorial
Day! Boy do I have an interesting post for you today. Fun authors, thriller
mysteries and an awesome giveaway.
I have the pleasure of welcoming not one, but two acclaimed
mystery/thriller writers here to talk about their latest releases. Both are
answering questions about their books. In addition, thanks to the lovely Emily
and the great folks at Tor/Forge, I have
three print copies of each of these books to giveaway. Please see the end of
the post for more details.
Visiting today are Ward Larsen with his release ASSASSIN’S SILENCE
and Max Allan Collins with BETTER DEAD.
This post will be a bit longer than the usual post, but oh so worth the read.
Ward Larsen has experienced war firsthand as a former U.S. Air
Force fighter pilot who flew more than twenty missions in Operation Desert
Storm. An award-winning author whose true gift for storytelling and the
superb quality of his writing led to his breakout success with his assassin
David Slaton series (The Perfect Assassin and Assassin's
Game). Slaton returns for another breathless adventure in Assassin's Silence (5/3/16), the latest
installment in the assassin series.
Max Allan
Collins, award-winning author of the critically acclaimed
Nathan Heller series (Bye Bye, Baby, Target Lancer, and Ask
Not) as well as The Road to Perdition, returns with Better
Dead, a taut mystery-thriller featuring
controversial figures Senator Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn and the aftermath of
the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Publishers Weekly calls
Max Allan Collins “a new breed of writer,” and Andrew Vacchss says that
"Collins combines the historical and the hard-boiled thriller into a new
genre—uniquely American, and uniquely his own."
Forge Books, an imprint of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC, is
thrilled to announce the on-sale availability of a thrilling new hardcover and eBook
title, ASSASSIN’S SILENCE (ISBN 978-0-7653-8577-2; $25.99; May 3, 2016),
by USA TODAY bestselling author WARD LARSEN. In this new David
Slaton novel, a terrorism plot unfolds that threatens to throw the entire world
into chaos.
When
it comes to disappearing, David Slaton has few equals. After all, he is a
former kidon, the most lethal
Israeli assassin ever created. Police in three countries have written off
trying to find him. His old employer, Mossad, keeps no forwarding address. Even
his wife and son are convinced he is dead. So when an assault team strikes,
Slaton is taken by surprise. He kills one man and manages to escape, going on
the run.
Half
a world away, in the baleful heat of the Amazon, an obscure air cargo company
purchases a derelict airliner. Teams of mechanics work feverishly to make the
craft airworthy. On the first flight, the jet plunges toward the ocean.
The
CIA assesses the two spectacles: a practiced killer leaving a trail of bodies
across Europe, and a large airplane disappearing without a trace. The two
affairs are increasingly seen to be intertwined. Langley realizes the killer is
a man long thought to be dead, and the lost airliner has been highly modified
into a tool of unimaginable terror and destruction. When their worst fears are
realized, Langley must trust the one man who can save them: David Slaton, the
perfect assassin.
While
ASSASSIN’S SILENCE is the third in the David Slaton series, it can also
be enjoyed by new readers as a standalone. Larsen takes readers across oceans
and continents from Malta to the Middle East, to Europe, to the United States,
and to South America on a wild and thrilling race against time.
ASSASSIN’S
SILENCE | Ward Larsen
Forge
Hardcover | 978-0-7653-8577-2| $25.99 | 400 pages
EBook |
978-0-7653-8579-6 | $12.99
Please welcome Ward as he answers
the age-old question. Welcome, Ward.
How did you come up with that (referring to the
story)?
Ward:
It’s undoubtedly the most common
question authors are asked: Where do you get the ideas for your stories? Others
writers might answer differently, but for me there is one clear answer: I get them
from the real world.
It is often said that there’s
nothing stranger than the truth, and as a thriller writer I subscribe to a
corollary of that idea—there is nothing more thrilling than the truth. We live
in a world where fanatical terrorists create videos of beheadings, and where
nations build sandbars in oceans so that they can claim sovereign territory. Cameras
seem to record everything in our daily lives, and corruption is rampant in many
quarters of the world. Not a day goes by without a headline that lends itself
to a story. The inspiration for my most recent book, Assassin’s Silence, is a bit of recent history involving a
decades-old radiological accident.
The small city in Brazil named Goiânia
is virtually unknown outside that country, but any health physicist knows it
well. Of all the world’s nuclear accidents, what occurred in Goiânia ranks
sixth in terms of released radiation. But the tragedy is unique in one
way—among the top ten most damaging radiological events, it is the only one to
not involve either the generation of nuclear power or the weaponization of
fissile materials.
On September 13, 1987, two men broke
into a closed and partially demolished hospital whose ownership had been tied
up in court. Knowing security on the site had fallen lax, the pair of
opportunists raided the building and came upon an abandoned radiotherapy
machine. They had no idea what they’d found, but thinking the heavy source
assembly might be valuable as scrap, they separated it and hauled it in a
wheelbarrow to one of their homes.
There the men began to disassemble a
containment vessel holding 93 grams of radioactive cesium-137. Over the course
of the next two days, they hammered away at the metal container until it
finally surrendered what looked like glowing blue grains of rice. It was on the
second day that one of the scrap-hounds began feeling poorly. Suffering from
diarrhea and dizziness, he went to a local clinic, only to be told he was likely
suffering the effects of something he’d eaten.
His undeterred partner kept working.
Thinking the glowing material might be some kind of gunpowder, he tried unsuccessfully
to ignite it. Frustrated, and not sure what to do with his find, the man began
sharing the material with family and friends. They were every bit as intrigued.
The lustrous blue grains were soon turned into jewelry, deemed to be mystical,
and heralded as having medicinal powers. For two weeks the cesium was ingested
as a cure-all, rubbed on aching joints, and it leached into the kitchens of a
number of homes. With radiation being spread unwittingly across the city, a
steady stream of people began arriving at clinics with curiously similar, but
unexplainable symptoms. Finally, a visiting medical physicist with a
scintillation counter recognized what was happening and raised the alarm.
In the weeks after the story broke, over
130,000 people presented themselves to overwhelmed hospitals. Two hundred and
fifty people were eventually found to have suffered radiation poisoning. Of
those, four died. Contamination was found on three buses, fourteen cars, and
inside forty-two homes. Among other oddities, fifty thousand rolls of toilet
paper had to be destroyed. In the subsequent cleanup effort, tons of topsoil were
scraped away from affected sites. Even so, pockets of radiation continued to be
discovered for years afterward.
When I read about Goiânia, I recognized
the makings of a story. Unlike the more serious accidents at Chernobyl and
Fukushima, it did not involve a nuclear power plant, but a far more common and
often ignored radioactive source material. Cesium-137 is used across the world
for medical and industrial purposes, as are a vast array of equally hazardous
isotopes. Some countries do a good job of tracking and regulating these
materials. Others do not. I also found it intriguing that the individuals who
precipitated the Goiânia tragedy were not rogue governments or elite soldiers,
but ordinary people trying to scrape out a living, in concert with a typical bungling
bureaucracy. So I did what writers do—I began with a real life scenario, and
built a tale around it.
My version of Goiânia is titled Assassin’s Silence.
 |
| Author Ward Larsen, photo credit Rose Larsen |
His first thriller, The Perfect Assassin, is currently
being adapted into a major motion picture by Amber Entertainment. For more
information, visit http://www.wardlarsen.com/.
Forge Books is proud to announce the newest addition to the
Nate Heller mysteries, BETTER DEAD
(ISBN 978-0-7653-7828-6; $26.99; May 3, 2016) by Max Allan Collins. He is the author of the acclaimed graphic novel
Road to Perdition and recipient of “The Eye” award from the Private Eye
Writers of America in recognition of his lifetime achievements.
It’s the early 1950's, and the
fear of communism runs rampant. At the heart of this is Senator Joe McCarthy
who campaigns to rid America of the Red Menace. Working for McCarthy is our
hero, Nate Heller, though he is disheartened by McCarthy's witch-hunting
tactics.
Along the way, he makes friends
with a young staffer, a certain Bobby Kennedy, and also trades barbs with a
potential but certainly powerful enemy, the attorney Roy Cohn. The clock is
ticking for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, as Cohn successfully prosecutes the
so-called Atomic Bomb spies. Heller is then embroiled in a last-minute attempt
to save them, a plot involving famous mystery writer Dashiell Hammett and a
group of showbiz and literary leftists.
Known for his taut
mystery-thrillers, Max Allan Collins has done it again. Tackling issues
of government surveillance and national safety versus personal freedom, BETTER
DEAD is a shock to the system as readers are reminded of today’s resonant
political issues. An intelligent and suspenseful exploration into the Second
Red Scare, BETTER DEAD is also a detective novel at heart and true to
the genre.
BETTER
DEAD
| Max Allan Collins
Forge
Hardcover | 978-0-7653-7828-6| $26.99 | 336 pages
EBook |
978-1-4668-6078-0 | $12.99
Please join me in welcoming Max as he talks about ‘the love
life of a fictional private eye’. Welcome, Max.
The publication of my latest novel, Better Dead, from “the memoirs of Nathan Heller,” renews a moral
concern and narrative dilemma that’s been with the saga from the beginning.
The Heller
novels are noir detective novels in
the tradition of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. Hammett in The Maltese Falcon created the prototypical private eye with
cynical Sam Spade. Chandler in The Big Sleep and the other Phillip
Marlowe novels gave his weary, quietly idealistic hero the voice of an urban
poet. Spillane in I, the Jury accelerated the sex and violence of the genre as a
reaction to the loss of innocence experienced by returning WW II G.I.’s like his vengeful detective, Mike
Hammer.
But the Heller
memoirs are also historical novels in tradition of Alexandre Dumas, Samuel
Shellabarger and George MacDonald Fraser.
Dumas in The Three Musketeers
and its sequels used real historical figures in his cast, treating them rather
cavalierly. Samuel Shellabarger,
unfairly forgotten today, in his Captain
from Castille and Prince of Foxes,
inserted a swashbuckling fictional hero into well-researched history. MacDonald somewhat satirically placed his
anti-hero, Flashman, into numerous famous events in “memoirs” that may reflect
an untrustworthy narrator.
Nathan Heller
is a tattered modern knight in the Spade/Marlowe/Hammer mode, and all of the
classic elements of tough private eye fiction – violence and sex included – are
present.
But my M.O. has
been to put Heller at the center of rigorously researched historical novels
focusing on various unsolved (or controversially resolved) crimes of the 20th
Century. Among the real cases he’s
tackled are the Lindbergh kidnapping (Stolen
Away), the disappearance of Amelia Earhart (Flying Blind), the assassination of Huey Long (Blood and Thunder), the Roswell Incident (Majic Man), the mysterious death of Marilyn Monroe (Bye Bye, Baby), and the JFK
assassination (Target Lancer and Ask Not).
Since the
Heller memoirs are at heart a mystery series, the unlikelihood of one detective
being involved in so many famous cases is something of a moot point. No mystery series – from Nero Wolfe to
Hercule Poirot, from Miss Marple to Perry Mason – can be enjoyed if readers
allow themselves to be crushed under the improbability of so many murders being
solved by so few detectives.
The moral
concern and the narrative dilemma are tied up in my depiction of real
people. Unlike historical novelists who
came before me, I am writing about relatively recent events. In the thirty-some years I’ve been writing
about Heller, I have heard from a number of relatives and friends of real
people who I’ve had the temerity to write about as if they were fictional
characters; often I’ve been complimented on how well I’ve done. I even once heard from a major character in
one of the novels (who liked the book).
My approach is
to research the crime/mystery in depth, preparing to write what could be the
definitive work on the subject. Then I
write a private eye novel instead. In
doing so, having familiarized myself with the major historical figures at hand,
and many minor ones, I treat them like fictional characters I’ve created. Otherwise I would be intimidated – by the
force of their reputations and by history itself. First and foremost, I must entertain.
The most
controversial aspect of this approach has to do with Heller’s love life. There are occasional fictional characters in
the novels, and a fair number of composite characters, which means that some of
the women my somewhat randy detective encounters are as fictional as he is.
Let me take a
moment to explain – not to defend exactly – the strong elements of sex and
violence in the Heller novels. I grew up
on Hammett, Chandler and especially Spillane, who broke many taboos. I also, at a tender age, devoured Ian
Fleming’s James Bond novels. These
writers created protagonists who slept with women. They didn’t always marry them. Some of their affairs ended tragically. Some did not, though the women tended to
disappear between novels. That DNA is in
the Heller novels (although my protagonist does marry).
This is not
cheap pandering, in my opinion. Sex is
life and violence is death, and those are the two big topics. If you can think of bigger, more overriding
ones, let me know. I’ve noticed that
some members of the most recent couple of generations seem squeamish where “sex
scenes” are concerned. Some reviews in
very recent years have complained about such content. I would remind these folks that there’s a
difference between sex and sexism. Without the former, none of us would be
here.
So if we can
agree, for the sake of argument at least, that Nate Heller is free to make love
to other fictional characters, what about real flesh-and-blood women? There (so to speak) is the rub. Nate has a number of affairs with famous
women, among them Sally Rand, Amelia Earhart, Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn
Monroe. In Better Dead, which is a Red Scare 1950s novel, he gets to know
Bettie Page.
Here’s the
thing. I know this approach makes some
people uncomfortable. This practice of
mine (and Heller’s) even makes some people mad.
I got more than one death threat for depicting Amelia Earhart as a
bisexual as well as a Heller love interest.
Recently a reviewer found it “awkward” for Heller to have sexual
relations with real-life, famous women.
On occasion, when I hear from a reader who objects to Heller making love
with, say, Marilyn Monroe, I point out that he didn’t really. Nate Heller is a fictional character.
The women in
question have all been extensively researched.
The way Bettie Page is depicted in Better
Dead comes not only from the several biographies about her, but a
documentary that featured extensive audio interview with the famous pin-up
queen. I would not suggest that any of
these well-known women might have sex with the likes of Nathan Heller unless
the research made it feel possible. I
promise Nathan Heller will leave Mother Teresa alone.
I do understand
that some people are offended by the real women who become, in my hands, my own
fictional creations. As for those who
don’t like sex scenes, my suggestion is not to read them – skim and get to
where you’re comfortable. Those scenes
make up a small portion of the narrative.
Because after
all, narrative is the thing. I have one
overriding principle: that a novel has its own integrity and I have to respect
it. People can be offended, if they
like, but the story will go where the story wants and needs to go.
 |
| Author Max Allan Collins |
Collins also wrote the Dick Tracy comic strip for fifteen
years, and is an independent filmmaker. For more information, visit http://www.maxallancollins.com/.
Ward and Max, thank you both for visiting with us today.
As I mentioned earlier, this is an awesome giveaway. Thanks to
the lovely Emily and the great folks at Tor/Forge,
I have three print copies of each of these books to giveaway. The giveaway is
open to residents of the U.S. and Canada only and will end at 12 a.m.
(EST) on Tuesday, June 7.
To enter the giveaways, just click on the Rafflecopter widgets
below and follow the instructions. The widgets may take a few seconds to load
so please be patient. A winner will be selected by each of the Rafflecopter
widget and I’ll send an email with the subject line “Thoughts in Progress Giveaway.” The winners will have 72 hours to
reply to the email or another winner will be selected. PLEASE be sure to check your spam folder from time to time after
the giveaway ends to make sure the notification email doesn’t end up there. If
you win and you’ve already won the book somewhere else or you just decided for
whatever reason you don’t want to win (which is fine), once again PLEASE let me know. There will be up to
six winners in this giveaway. However, those entering who won a copy of each
book if the Rafflecopter widget selects them.
Thanks so much for stopping by today during this holiday while
these two amazing authors visit. I appreciate your time. What are your thoughts
on today’s post?
