HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I was talking to another author the other day-–he writes under a pseudonym. And his nom de plume books are far more successful than the books he wrote under his real name.
Why do you think that is? I asked.
He said he’d really thought about it, and decided that when he was someone else, he felt–free. Beyond judgement. That he was powerful and confident enough to write whatever he wanted, and no one would know who he was.
Whoa.
Which brings me to the fabulous debut author Connor Martin. Who, as he so tantalizingly describes, became "someone else” as part of his job.
Whose Life Is It, Anyway?
Double lives are the heart of all great mysteries, but that’s especially true of spy thrillers. Maybe it’s the hero, running from something or someone, or maybe it’s the villain, tricking the innocent – but show me a character pretending to be someone they’re not, and I’ll show you instant plot tension.
This theme of double lives runs throughout my debut novel THE SILVER FISH, published this April by Mysterious Press. THE SILVER FISH is an espionage thriller about Danielle “Dani” Moreau, an American journalist in Ghana, who gets caught in a U.S.-China spy battle over the fiber optic cables that power the global internet. There are four primary characters in the book, and each of them lives some version of a double life (one of them is literally called The Double!). As one character says: “Your life; another person’s life. They were right next to each other all along... All you had to do was step sideways.”
The theme resonated with me because I, too, lived a double life for a while. For several years, I had a job I couldn’t really talk about. Sure, I could tell people my job title (Deputy Director in the Office of Investment Security) and give a vague description – I worked in a secure office space in Washington, D.C., reviewing national security risks connected with financial transactions – but I couldn’t discuss the contents of my days, not even with my wife.
It was funny kind of double life, because it felt so ordinary. My wife knew where I was, and at the end of the day it was still just a job: we wrote memos and emails, we had meetings and phone calls. But the fact that I couldn’t talk about any of it outside the office left me feeling strangely bifurcated. You got used to it, but it never felt normal.
Those are the kinds of tensions that I wanted to explore in writing THE SILVER FISH (and am continuing to explore in the sequel, which I’m writing this summer!) And whether spy thrillers are your jam or you prefer murder mystery, psychological suspense, detective puzzles, or any other genre, I’m guessing that you’ve come across the narrative power of the character with a double life in your reading.
But really, don’t all of us have multiple versions of ourselves? You don’t have to be a spy to act differently at work than you do at home, or to emphasize some aspects of your personality with one group of friends, but not with another.
And don’t we read crazy real-life stories in the news that bear this out? The creepy New York City architect is really the Gilgo Beach serial killer – or, more happily, the mild-mannered insurance lawyer is really a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet.
Nowadays my double life is in the past. I don’t work for the government anymore. But even so, my vocation as a novelist means I’m still living different lives every day – my characters’ lives. When I get up from my desk and stop writing for the day, I get to leave my double lives on the page. But they’re constantly running through my head.
So here’s what I want to know, Reds and readers – have you ever felt as if you were living a double life? What’s the version of you that nobody else would believe? I’ll be in the comments!
HANK: Ooooh, what a good question! I have gone undercover and in disguise for my TV stories, and it is weirdly...freeing. I think all of the expectations that people might have for “me” are gone, and I can truly be someone else. And now I sitting at my desk in baggy jeans with my hair on top of my head and no makeup–that, Reds and leaders you will never see. But I think, actually, that you believe it.
Living a double life, though? Who has stories? Anyone know anyone who may not be who they seem?
(And Connor, can we also have a blog from your wife? I'm so curious to know how she feels/felt about this....)
(And I want to know if that's really your photo below...)
photo credit Jeremy Varner
Connor Martin is a writer and former senior US national security official, most recently serving as Deputy Director on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) at the Treasury Department. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations and he splits his time between Washington and Brooklyn. The Silver Fish is his first novel.
www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Silver-Fish/Connor-Martin/9781613167359
www.instagram.com/connor.martin.author/
In this thrilling espionage fiction debut, an American journalist in Ghana is pulled into a dangerous struggle for control of the world's fiber optic cables.
Journalist Danielle "Dani" Moreau has spent a lifetime trying to outrun the privilege she was born into. Fresh off a personal tragedy, she lands in Ghana to uncover corruption in the local oil industry. But when she crosses paths with James Aidoo, an idealistic young Ghanaian whose father is a local populist politician, Dani remembers what drew her to journalism in the first place: you go looking for a story, but when the real story appears, it's never the one you expected.
Dani soon finds herself chasing a scoop that involves an American operative with a violent past, a Ghanaian double agent, and a fight between the United States and China over one of the world's most dangerous and least-known technologies: fiber optic cables. Underwater tubes as thick as a garden hose, the cables snake along the seafloor carrying the world’s information at the speed of light from one continent to another, and the fight to control them is increasingly visible on the world's front pages. Amidst this world-changing struggle, Dani and her new associates will be forced to make deadly choices that impact each other and their own lives in ways nobody expects.
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