New Year’s countdown of 2018 reader favs: day 3

For day 3 of this countdown to readers’ favorite posts from 2018, here’s one with still spot-on tips on thriller writing from a master of historically-based thrillers, Steve Berry, first published March 23, 2018.

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The thought of attending an author’s book tour talk in a restaurant intrigued me. Add that the author was master thriller writer Steve Berry, speaking at one of my favorite Italian restaurants, and, well, count me in. Berry’s specialty is thrillers with a historical hook, and his latest is The Bishop’s Pawn, a fictionalized analysis of the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968.

It’s both the most immediately pertinent one, debuting in this 50^th anniversary year of King’s murder, and the hardest for Berry to write, “because it’s history I remember,” he told his audience.

That element of personal remembrance led Berry to alter his long-standing habit of writing books in the third person. For the first time ever in The Bishop’s Pawn, long-time Berry sleuth Cotton Malone speaks in his own right, in first person.

But Berry’s switch from third-person to first-person narration didn’t alter his two must-haves for writing historical thrillers: an “ooh” factor and a “so-what” factor. The “ooh” factor is the book’s hook, its defining historical event. The “so-what” factor is the way that historical event changed the world.

The crux of the story in The Bishop’s Pawn – the possibility of a botched coverup of the assassination due to the conflict between King and then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover – occurred to Berry about a decade ago. Other layers accrued around the story during the 18 months – and the reading of hundreds of books – that are Berry’s normal research schedule for each book.

“I can’t make up (the history),” Berry said. “It has to be real.”

The more he read – and watched and listened to the video of King’s last iconic “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech given the night before his death, the more convinced Berry became that King had a presentiment of the end.

Steve Berry & wife Elizabeth

“Listen to it all,” Berry said, noting that King had initially tried to avoid speaking because he was ill, essentially having collapsed after delivering address. “The speech is about mortality. Every word sounds like a man who knew he was about to die.”

“I was very respectful of King and his message. (But) everything went wrong for him in the last year of his life,” Berry said, citing the apparent failure of King’s message of nonviolence in the face of the Vietnam War, and the increasing racial unrest, personal difficulties, and Hoover’s ongoing campaign of persecution.

Following King’s death, Hoover would announce that there had been no conspiracy, and that a drifter named James Earl Ray was the sole killer.

In the present day, when FBI directors seemingly serve only at the whim of a president, it’s difficult to fathom the power Hoover held. Originally appointed as director of the FBI’s predecessor organization in the 1920’s, Hoover helped found the FBI in the following decade. He remained in control of the organization until his death in 1972.

Horrifying allegations against Hoover have surfaced since, many rendered unprovable due to his private secretary’s destruction of Hoover’s secret files.

(Since Hoover’s death, law changes now limit the time an FBI director may serve.)

But to return to Berry’s conspiracy theory. Consider, he said, that James Earl Ray, although untrained, supposedly managed to kill King with a single bullet fired from a rooming house window. “What are the odds?”

Added to the improbable display of marksmanship is the inability to match the badly-fragmented bullet to Ray’s rifle, as well as uncertainty that he was even in the house from which the bullet was supposedly fired. And then there’s Ray’s penchant for both confessing to the killing and endlessly recanting that confession, making him “the perfect guy to (pin) a murder on, because you couldn’t believe anything he said.”

OK, an audience member asked, then who was involved in Berry’s supposed conspiracy against King?

“Can’t tell you,” Berry said with a smile, “because that would give away the book.”

The world's craziest writing contest? Or not

I just did something so completely crazy it will probably destroy any credibility I have as a writer but, oh, what fun it was! I sent in my entry in a contest to be a co-author with James Patterson. I know, I know – bestselling author, gazillions of books sold, co-written by equal gazillions of co-authors foaming at the mouth to get their byline in small print under Patterson’s.

If you’re still reading, here are the details, because the contest, for better or worse, ends at one minute before midnight March 1, 2017, Pacific Time. Contestants must be registered for Patterson’s online writing course at Master Class (more about that later in this post). The course costs $90, which is probably the least expensive writing class I’ve ever taken.

The contest is also limited to residents of the Australia, Canada (excluding, for obscure legal reasons, Quebec), the United Kingdom, and the United States, including District of Columbia, but excluding, again for unfathomable legal reasons, Arizona and my beloved native state of Louisiana (luckily, I’ve actually been a resident of Texas for the last few decades).

Oh, and the writing? Right, you’ve got to submit the opening chapter (1000 words maximum) and a two-sentence logline (100 words maximum) for a mystery or thriller in Patterson’s writing style.

The contest opened February 1, as I wrote in the January 12, 2017, post “Writing contests – there's more here than book reviews,” so some of you may be feeling smug just now, your entries polished within an inch of their lives, pitying the late comers.

Truthfully, I had some initial buyer’s remorse about the class, which was not alleviated by reading the recommended homework, Patterson’s 2005 thriller Honeymoon, co-written with Howard Roughan. Words of every creative writing instructor at whose feet I’ve sat echoed in my mind as I flipped the pages. (Yes, they do practically flip themselves, as Patterson asserts in the windup to the online class.)

No depth of character! Awkward sentences! Shallow, shallow, shallow! But fast, fast, fast!

As Patterson himself notes candidly in the class lectures – “I’m not writing realism.”

I couldn’t even bring myself to open the course until mid-February.

A lot of those qualms were quieted when I actually listened to Patterson. He comes across as such a nice (albeit driven) person, friendly, personable, even funny in a disarmingly nerdy kind of way. I thought, hey, why not enter his contest? What do I have to lose – I’ve already paid for the class.

Of course, as every writer is, I was in the midst of another project. Oh, maybe I could use the opening chapter of that book, which has only been promised to an agent since last summer and which I’ve since entered in another, probably equally crazy contest, as my entry in Patterson’s contest. Uh, no. Reading the fine print, which is always one of my last things to do, I learned that no manuscript entered for anything else is eligible for the Patterson project. So it was the last half of February and I had to come up with something completely new? I couldn’t possibly.

Nothing makes me more determined to do something than being told, even by myself, that I can’t do it. I mulled ideas one night before lights out, pounded out my 1000 words the next morning, begged members of an online critique group for comments, and zapped off the results.

Fast and fun. In the unlikely event I become a semifinalist, Patterson will expect me to outline the whole book. But dang, I’ll outline it anyway. What writer can ever have too many stories?

Wordcraft -- 'You can walk into any bar in the world'

Downfall

by Jeff Abbott

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When Texas thriller writer Jeff Abbott walked into a book signing in Dallas last summer, he brought his entire high school class from the Dallas suburb of Duncanville with him. This time around, the old gang was less in evidence, but the staff at the Lincoln Park Barnes and Noble still had to bring in extra chairs to accommodate fans of Abbott’s Sam Capra series.

The new book, Downfall, is the latest in Abbott’s series featuring Sam Capra, an ex-CIA agent whose enviable cover job is running bars. That’s bars, plural, because Sam’s activities require him to move frequently, escaping old bad guys and confronting new ones all over the world.

Although earlier books in the series were named after Capra’s cover bars. Downfall, is named for a computer file. “The name of the bar is Select,” Abbott said, “which I thought would be the name of the book. But my publisher said, no, we’re going to call it Downfall.” Just as well, Abbott mused, considering the implications of a bar with a name like Downfall.

Taking a page from the Faust legend, Abbott envisioned a network of wealthy business people who’ve made a deal with the devil. And to play the part of the devil in the story, he created a young character, the shadowy opposite of twenty-something Capra himself.

“It’s incredibly important for villains that they are sure they’re the heroes of the story. In the first books, Sam fought society’s outcasts. For this one, I thought, what if I made him fight the popular kids?”

After a nomadic childhood with parents involved with aid to third world countries, Capra yearns for the suburban middle class life he never knew. He’s spent the last two books nearly losing his wife and child. With his family back, he thinks he’s due to live a normal life. “But as soon as somebody’s in trouble, he can’t help stepping in.”

Which involves, of course, finding a new place to set up bar. This time it’s in San Francisco. “My British publisher told me, you have come up with the greatest business research scheme of all time ,” Abbott said to the crowd. “You can go to any bar in any place in the world, and it’s a tax write-off.”

Not that such research is always fun and games. For a previous book set in Amsterdam, “I was having lunch with my Dutch publisher and I said, I need to see a really bad bar.” After some horrified glances, somebody asked, “What was that bar where the girl and the dwarf came in and started punching each other? I spent all the time there that the research demanded -- which I think was about ten minutes.”

With Abbott’s tours for Downfall wrapping up, what’s next in his busy life -- and Sam Capra’s?

The next book in the series, set in Miami and Puerto Rico, is written. All the books have been optioned for movies and there’s also been interest in a television series about Sam Capra. In general, he tries to stay out of the movie ends.

If Capra does get a movie, an audience member asked who Abbott wants to play the lead.

“It‘s a question I never answer,” he said. “I think the real questions will be, will they cast Sam as the twenty-six year old (he is) or will it be somebody older?”

For more about Abbott, his books, and appearances, see www.jeffabbott.com/.