This Just In: Jungle Reds Swoon over Spencer Quinn

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: We are swooning at Jungle Red today!  You may know our guest as Peter Abrahams, the internationally acclaimed and bestselling thriller writer. (Seriously, one of the best in the world.) Or as Spencer Quinn, the internationally acclaimed and bestseller author of the adorable Chet and Bernie mysteries. And many other terrific books.  (“The Edgar-winning author of 36 novels” as his bio says.)

Yes, I am absolutely unabashedly gushing. He is one of my favorite authors ever.  

And now he (as Spencer Quinn) has a new book out in two days, THE RIGHT SIDE.  It’s a different incredible...well, now I am gushing again.  

HANK:  I'm in the midst of your wonderful book right now (oops, still gushing)--so don't tell me the ending. But I'm fascinated by what you said on your website--how  sometimes a character grabs you and won’t let go. you said: "This character – a figment of your own imagination but not wholly under your power – demands to be brought to life."  So that's what happened with your main character in THE RIGHT SIDE, LeAnne? Tell us about that. who is she, and where did she come from?  

SPENCER QUINN: Publishing - what a crazy business! On the outlet end, it's more and more data and numbers driven all the time, as though the product was sheet steel. We workers back at the inlet end deal in feelings, dreams, emotions, zeitgeist. Strange things go on in that pipeline. LeAnne Hogan came to me suddenly, out of the blue. The Chet and Bernie mysteries - and Bowser and Birdie for kids - which have been occupying me for almost the past 10 years are probably essentially comic in tone. And I love writing them! But what I think happened is that things going on in the world that are not comic came barging in and couldn't be ignored.

 LeAnne lives in this dangerous, baffling, violent world which I must have been grappling with subconsciously and when she popped up in my imagination I knew had to write about her. I'm not saying she's humorless - far from it, I hope - but she's been in terrible situations that brand you forever. In THE RIGHT SIDE, she is forced to solve two mysteries, one macro, one micro.

LeAnne's highly capable of doing that, or at least she was. She's a soldier and a warrior, beloved and respected by her comrades; but then her patrol wanders into a mysterious set-up in an Afghan village, and it all comes undone.

I've explored the idea of a highly capable person forced to carry on with suddenly diminished abilities once before in OBLIVION, but this turned out quite differently. And one of the reasons for the difference is the strange dog who enters LeAnne's life when she really needs her, even if LeAnne doesn't know it at the time.

HANK: But even though you’ve written riveting standalone thrillers, and the smart and (okay, adorable) Chet and Bernie mysteries, and the Bowser and Birdie YAs (and more--I adore your Echo Falls books) --but this book is so different. It has a different tone, and a different...aura. Did it feel different to write it? 

SPENCER QUINN: Good question. That aura thing came up in a conversation with my editor. He said reading the book reminded him of the feeling of getting swept along in a piece of music by Philip Glass. I'm no expert on Philip Glass, but chose to take it as a compliment. There were a lot of technical challenges in the writing - it's part war novel, part mystery, part road book, and moves back and forth in time - but I wasn't really aware of them until I was done. Thank God! Those challenges can be intimidating. Better not to know.

 As for the feeling of writing it - well, I'm not sure. There are always surprises. For example, when I made LeAnne a high-school pole vaulting champion, I had no idea there'd be that scene in Afghanistan where she tries to teach the schoolgirls in their burqas how to pole vault. And how, much later, she tries desperately to remember their names. One thing I do know is that the writing process never gets easier. That seems unfair. After a dentist has filled 1000 cavities or so, autopilot must set in. Why can't we have that?

HANK: Well, it’s good, really, isn’t it? Because to have the joy of a new idea, or a new insight. People have said to me—“After 40 years as a reporter, don’t all stories seem the same? Like how many ways are there to cover a fire?” And that’s so—wrong. Every situation is astonishingly different. In fiction, there are even more possibilities. And having a good idea is the best thing that could ever happen.

Speaking of good ideas...this sense you have about dogs, and their place in the world, and in people’s lives. There’s a dog on the cover of THE RIGHT SIDE—did the dog appear to you when LeAnn did?  (And we won’t tell the dog’s name.)

SQ: Well, I knew from the start that I wanted a dog in the story - but not a narrating dog! THE RIGHT SIDE is all third-person close. And this dog had to have been through something bad - although we never know exactly what - and like LeAnne, bears the scar. And like her, the dog is not in a cuddly mood, at least in the present. As for the future, I hope readers see the ending as an up note.

  

HANK: there’s such a layer of melancholy and sorrow and loss at the beginning of the book. Was that difficult—more difficult than writing always is anyway—to write?

SQ: The truth is the parts of a story with heightened emotions, like the beginning of THE RIGHT SIDE, and heightened action, are easier to write, at least for me. It's the getting to them that's hard, often a slog. In this book, I tried to simply jettison most of that slogging.

HANK: Jettison the slogging! Ah. My new mantra.  Talk about that title—so multi-layered! Did the story come first, or the title?

SQ: The moment I picked the side of LeAnne's face that would be damaged, I had the title; and all the metaphoric ripples got set in motion. 

HANK: And not to bury the lede, but you have reached blurb nirvana. Stephen King said “Brilliant. Deeply felt, but totally under control. I loved it.” Not to be sappy, but okay. How did you feel when you read that? The totally under control part is so fabulous. And, yeah, brilliant is good.

SQ: I was very glad to see this blurb. The implication is so right: simply having the deep feeling is not enough. Someone (and of course it's the same dude!) who's almost stern has to be at the controls. 

HANK:  That’s such a terrific image—flying high, but under control. Have a great time with the new book! So exciting.

 So, Reds and readers, who’s your favorite dog in fiction?  

And a copy of THE RIGHT SIDE to one lucky commenter!      

  

 ****************

Peter Abrahams is the Edgar award winning author of thirty-six novels.  Among his acclaimed crime thrillers are Oblivion and The Fan (filmed starring Robert De Niro). Under the name Spencer Quinn, he writes the New York Times bestselling Chet and Bernie mysteries and the middle-grade Bowser and Birdie series. The Right Side – the story of a wounded female vet – comes out June 27, 2017.

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My Tour Buddy, Nick Petrie

INGRID THOFT

I had lots of fun on my "Duplicity" tour in January, largely because of my tour buddy, Nick Petrie.  Some of you may be familiar with Nick from his debut novel "The Drifter," which is nominated for the Edgar and Barry Awards for Best First Novel and the Hammett Prize for Best Novel.  The second book in the series, "Burning Bright" was released in January, hence the shared tour dates.  Nick's main character, Peter Ash, has been likened to Jack Reacher, by Lee Child himself!  His books are critically acclaimed, thought-provoking thrillers, and I have nothing but acclaim for Nick as a travel companion and friend.  He was recently in Seattle, and we caught up,

INGRID: Tell me about your main character, Peter Ash?  What inspired you to write a character who is a veteran?

NICK: Peter Ash is a highly-trained Marine Corps veteran who signed up to help his country and make a difference.  After eight years of war, he returned home with an unwanted souvenir, what he calls the White Static – an intense claustrophobia caused by post-traumatic stress that makes it hard for him to be indoors for more than a few minutes.  Like many veterans I’ve met, Peter has a deep need to be useful and a profound sense of right and wrong, which combine into a powerful drive to help others out of trouble.

I’m not a veteran myself, and for many years I didn’t think I knew many people who’d served in the military.  But in my day job as a home inspector – I’m that guy you hire to tell you (hopefully) everything wrong with your dream house – I realized during the early stages of the Great Recession that many of my inspection clients were veterans just coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan.  I’m a pretty curious guy, and I found myself having some truly fascinating conversations with my clients.  They really opened my eyes to the challenges our veterans face coming home from war.  I didn’t know I was researching a novel, but as it turned out, I’d already started writing “The Drifter” somewhere in the back of my mind.  Funny how that works.

Anyway, Peter is a lot of fun to write – he gets himself into some fairly crazy situations – and he’s a great excuse to keep learning more about the evolving lives of veterans and anything else that my oddball brain finds interesting.

INGRID: “The Drifter” takes place in Milwaukee, and “Burning Bright” is set on the West Coast, including some heart stopping scenes in a forest of giant redwoods.  Why did you change locations, and can you tell us where the third book is set? 

I love writing about place – I think of the setting of a novel almost as another character – and certain stories lend themselves to certain settings.  Milwaukee, a rust-belt city suffering hard in the Great Recession, was the perfect place for "The Drifter."  With "Burning Bright," I wanted to write about technology, and the west coast was the logical setting for that.  I also lived in Seattle for ten years, have travelled all over the west, and wanted to write about some of the places I truly love.

Another answer, to be completely honest, is that I’m deeply afraid of getting bored, and changing settings feels like a great way to keep a series fresh and evolving.  I can change the subject matter and the scale of the story easily just by dropping Peter in a new town with new characters.  Plus each new setting suggests a new plot – so the truest answer, I suppose, is that I’m kinda lazy.

My third Peter Ash book is called “Light It Up” and is set in Colorado.  Peter gets involved in the new cannabis industry – drugs, guns, and big money.  It was big fun to write, plus it gave me a great reason to go explore Denver and Boulder and spend a few days backpacking in the Rockies.  

INGRID: That's the first I've heard of the title!  Very apropos!  So what do readers think about Peter?  What kind of feedback do you get from them?

NICK: I was really nervous, writing about a veteran when I’m not a veteran myself.  This is a subject I’ve grown to care deeply about, and it was important to me to get things right.  Since “The Drifter” came out, I’ve had many conversations, both in-person and online, with veterans and their family members, telling me how much they appreciate the care I took with the emotional details.  One of my favorite conversations was at a library event.  Two sisters, whose husbands both served in Vietnam, told me the book helped them understand their husbands better.  Honestly, I can’t think of a higher compliment. 

INGRID: What has surprised you most about becoming a published author? 

Frankly, I was surprised I’d ever become a published author to begin with!  I’d written three books I couldn’t get published, and I’d given up on ever publishing anything.  I wrote “The Drifter” just for myself, writing the book I most wanted to read.  To discover not only that a major publisher wanted the book, but that so many people would actually read it and enjoy it and tell their friends about it?  Pretty much blows my mind on a daily basis.   

Another great surprise is how welcoming the crime fiction community has been.  Who’d have thought that people who write about death and dismemberment would be so nice?  (I’m from Wisconsin, so I’m required to be nice.  Otherwise the authorities make you move to Illinois.) 

INGRID: It is an amazingly supportive community.  Is there a wannabe book lurking in the back of your brain, something you would write if you didn’t have to consider agents, editors, and fans?  A romance?  Sci-fi?

Oh, I have a few ticklers in the dark recesses of my demented brain.  I’d like to write about Milwaukee again – it’s a fascinating place, with a lot of layers.  The book would be something gritty and weird and maybe internet-y.  I’d like to try my hand at writing for young adults – maybe Peter Ash’s teenage years?  I’m so impressed by good YA writers.  Those books have to be extremely tight, and I think it must be really difficult to make them look so damn easy.  But those two ideas actually seem fairly reasonable.  The true leap would be some science fiction space opera – I’m a sci-fi geek from waaaay back, so that would be loads of fun.  If I could pull it off. 

If you haven't read "The Drifter" or "Burning Bright," you're missing out on a terrific series.  Nick will be here today to answer your questions, and he's giving away a signed copy of "Burning Bright."  Be sure to include your email in your comment!

BURNING BRIGHT

In the new novel featuring war veteran Peter Ash, “an action hero of the likes of Jack Reacher or Jason Bourne” (Lincoln Journal-Star), Ash has a woman’s life in his hands—and her mystery is stranger than he could ever imagine.

War veteran Peter Ash sought peace and quiet among the towering redwoods of northern California, but the trip isn’t quite the balm he’d hoped for. The dense forest and close fog cause his claustrophobia to buzz and spark, and then he stumbles upon a grizzly, long thought to have vanished from this part of the country. In a fight of man against bear, Peter doesn’t favor his odds, so he makes a strategic retreat up a nearby sapling.

There, he finds something strange: a climbing rope, affixed to a distant branch above. It leads to another, and another, up through the giant tree canopy, and ending at a hanging platform. On the platform is a woman on the run. From below them come the sounds of men and gunshots.

Just days ago, investigative journalist June Cassidy escaped a kidnapping by the men who are still on her trail. She suspects they’re after something belonging to her mother, a prominent software designer who recently died in an accident. June needs time to figure out what’s going on, and help from someone with Peter’s particular set of skills.

Only one step ahead of their pursuers, Peter and June must race to unravel this peculiar mystery. What they find leads them to an eccentric recluse, a shadowy pseudo-military organization, and an extraordinary tool that may change the modern world forever.

 

Nick Petrie received his MFA in fiction from the University of Washington and won a Hopwood Award for short fiction while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan.  His story “At the Laundromat” won the 2006 Short Story Contest in The Seattle Review, a national literary journal.  His first novel, "The Drifter," was nominated for 2016 Edgar and Barry awards for Best First Novel, and the 2016 Hammett Prize for Best Novel. A husband and father, he has worked as a carpenter, remodeling contractor, and building inspector.  He lives in Milwaukee.  "Burning Bright" is his second novel, and the sequel to "The Drifter."

How to Die in a Brewery: a guest blog by Deryn Collier

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: You know those disclaimers you see in blog reviews? Well, I sort of have one. I gave Deryn Collier's debut mystery, Confined Space, an enthusiastic blurb for its upcoming publication this June. But here's the thing: I wasn't the first in my family to read it. The advance reader's copy arrived, and was sitting on top of the mail. Since Confined Space had been shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award, I expected I was going to enjoy it. I picked the ARC up and read the description. 


"Ooo," I said. "The hero is a veteran of the War in Afghanistan. Cool."


Then my husband looked at it. "The heroine works in a BREWERY!" He vanished with the ARC. I didn't see it, or him, for three days.


Which leads me to suspect Deryn's combination of veterans, forensics, the beautiful British Columbia scenery and beer is going to make her a very popular author indeed. So sit back, crack open a cold one, and let Deryn tell you why brewing could be very, very bad for your health.

A closet crime fiction writer should not work in a brewery. I did, and I can tell you - it’s not a good idea.

Take for example the time I was asked to update a compendium of all the safety hazards in the brewery. I was supposed to cross-reference something or other, but was distracted by the siren call of hazards. Words like:

Working Alone…

Extreme Temperatures…

Dust Explosion…

Asphyxia…

…Words like ConfinedSpace.

Do you see what I mean? You don’t? Well, maybe it’s just me then. I read a list like that and I get all excited. To me, each one is a jumping off place for a story. A potential chapter in a book called: How to Die in a Brewery.

Take for example Exposure to Carbon Dioxide. This gas is a by-product of the fermentation process. In many breweries it is recovered and stored until it is added back (as bubbles) to the finished beer. But what if the carbon dioxide escapes?

Not much of a problem, usually. So long as you are upright, you should be fine. Carbon dioxide is heavier than air. It will sink and disperse, and you will just go about your day.

But, say you have a character - say he’s a brewery worker – and he hears a sound. What if he goes to investigate and gets whacked on the back of the head by an unknown antagonist hiding in the brewery? Your character is unconscious on the floor when the CO₂ starts to spill out of an open fermentation tank and sink. Remember - CO₂ is heavier than air. Your guy is in trouble.

Do you see what I mean now?

Part of my job involved counting beer. Every Friday I would put on my steel-toed shoes (slipping hazards) and my safety eyewear (exploding glass) and my hi-vis vest (collisions with internal transport equipment). I would head down the fermentation hallways and the ageing cellars to take an inventory of beer-in-progress.

You might say I’m more of a words person than a numbers person and after a while of adding up all those hectolitres, my mind would start to wander to more interesting questions. Like…

How high does a fermentation tank have to be in order for a person to die when they fall (or are pushed) from it?

How long would a corpse lie on the floor at the back of ageing cellar #8 before it was found?

What would it be like to fall into a malt elevator? (And how long before anyone found the body?)

I became fascinated with those places in the brewing process where people interact with machines. There is so much potential for harm. Workers, it seems, remain alive only by the grace of a thousand precautions.

The question of carelessness could occupy my mind for whole days: What if someone forgot a step? Rushed through a regulated activity? Didn’t feel like taking a precaution one day? Which exact combination of missed safety measures would it take to build a tragedy?

Say you have this character – he’s a brewery worker. He’s working alone. He’s gone into a confined space – a tank – to repair it. Then there’s this other character – we can’t see him, we can only hear him. We know he’s there. He’s come into the same place to clean that same tank…

Do you see now why it is a bad idea for a crime writer to work in a brewery? Beer will go uncounted. Spreadsheets will not be properly cross-referenced. The only thing that will come of it is some crazy story.

What about you? Have you ever had a job worthy of a crime fiction plot? Please tell me I’m not the only one.

Deryn Collier grew up in Ottawa and Montreal and is a graduate of McGill University. After a very short career as a federal bureaucrat she ran away to the mountains of BC where she has been ever since. She has worked in a log yard, a brewery, as a doctor recruiter and a communications consultant. You can find out more about Deryn and Confined Space at her website. You can also read her blog and follow her on Twitter as @DerynCollier.

The many traumas in real life and documentary film maker Michael Burns

JAN BROGAN - I might have mentioned once or twice that I had a debilitating plane phobia for many years. I would hyperventilate during takeoff, my palms would sweat, and once I even broke down crying. I tried just about everything. Drinking - didn't even touch it. Six weeks of hypnosis at Mass General Hospital was completely useless; desensitization tapes - even more useless, and psychiatrist-prescribed drugs - totally freaked me out. Cognitive behavioral therapy helped, but only a little.

Finally, I tried a new therapy called EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), which involved bilateral stimulation (either by eye movement or alternating tones) during treatment. As a health reporter, I'd been assigned to write about this therapy by an editor, and although I first refused, calling it "snake oil," I later learned just how extensively researched and tested this therapy really was and about its tremendous success treating returning combat veterans suffering from Post traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Somewhere in the literature it mentioned it had some success with phobias, so I decided to give it a try.

After being burdened this incredibly resistant phobia for something close to 25 years, I was completely cured in about six sessions. For me, it was a miracle. In subsequent stories I've written on this topic, I've talked to returning veterans, rape victims and child abuse survivors who have told me their own miraculous recovery stories.

So.... in what is definitely outside the box for Jungle Red, but in hopes of reaching the quarter million combat veterans who return with PTSD and other people suffering from other life traumas - whether its loss of a loved one, a divorce or even a minor car accident, I invited filmmaker Michael Burns to JR to talk about his documentary "EMDR, We either transform pain or we transmit it."

Michael is a native of Connecticut, is the producer/director of four films on American politics, Third Party, Preventive Warriors, Majority Rules, and Laban. I asked him how he got from politics to EMDR.

MichaelBurns: It was 2007 and I was completing my doctorate in film at the University of Birmingham in the UK when I had EMDR myself. I had come across it in the late David Servan-Schreiber's best-seller Healing without Freud or Prozac. When I had a breakthrough myself- and this shows you how much I sympathize with skeptics- I chalked it entirely up to coincidence. In other words, I was convinced that the EMDR I had had just activated some psychosomatic reaction on my part. I remember thinking that there's no way something so weird could have helped me. Simply out of curiosity I started to do some research on it and found out that in fact millions of people have had massively life-changing experiences with EMDR. So I ate up everything I could find on the subject, realizing that the catharsis I went through was not so unusual after all.

At about that time, a good friend suggested I make a documentary about EMDR since it still was hardly known at all in the mainstream. Completing my degree, which took a lot out of me, I didn't think I had the energy for a new project, but it kept popping up in the back of my mind as something that needed to be made. In the end, it was the daily bombardment with PTSD stories in the news that made me realize that I wanted to do whatever I could to help spread the word about this amazing therapy. There are so many people out there who believe that they're destined to live with the pain, body sensations, and nightmares that are grounded in things from their pasts. It's just not true. EMDR can help many of them, perhaps most of them.

JAN: How long did it take to produce the documentary and what was the biggest obstacle?

MICHAEL: I worked on it, pretty much with just my cameraman, James Kloter, for a little over three years.

The biggest obstacle was getting people to tell us their personal stories. A friend of mine put it very well the other day when she said that it's hard enough to go to therapy in the first place, relaying those details to yet another person is nearly impossible for most people. I think she's exactly right. What happens in EMDR sessions is both deeply personal and extremely hard to put into words. So, on a low budget, it became tough for us to find compelling, personal success stories to put in the movie. In the end though, we found three that did make it in, and they might just be the best parts of the film.

JAN: Your hopes for this film?

MICHAEL: I sincerely hope that people will watch this film and get in touch with that one person in their lives- maybe it's a husband, a sister, or a friend of a friend- whose ability to reach their full potential is being held back by something that happened in their past, and to tell them about EMDR. Next step is to go to the emdria.org website and to find a therapist nearby or to get in touch with emdrhap.org to talk about sessions they're offering. It's critical that people go see someone with proper training, certified by the main national EMDR professional organization, EMDRIA.

So helping those who are in critical mental condition is one of my key hopes. Having said that, EMDR is not just for the person we might know who's paralyzed by the past. I always say that it would be a miracle if any of us have sailed through life without anything traumatic happening to us. There are things in all of our histories that are holding us back, preventing us from living life the way we want to. Therefore all of us can use EMDR so that we can put disturbing memories to rest, breaking destructive habits we have and living the lives we dream of living.

JAN: In that vein, Michael has generously sent me one free copy of the film, the DVD, to give away to a lucky winner. It's one of the best explanations I've encountered on how the brain processes trauma, why it sticks in the head for years, and why EMDR can shake it free and is very moving.

Enter by posting a comment and/or signing up for our mailing list -- I need an email address to reach the winner. But please, enter only if know someone (and it can be you) who it can help. The winner will also be announced on JR by Tuesday.

For more information about EMDR or the film go to: http://emdrmovie.com