Publisher's Weekly Interview On The Killer Collective

A few weeks ago Publisher’s Weekly interviewed me about The Killer Collective, out on February 1. The interview is called The Killing Business and appears in this week’s issue. These things tend to get trimmed for the magazine, so if you want to read the long-winded version, here you go… :)

Having characters from multiple series cross-over is an endlessly appealing premise…Why did you decide to do it now with John Rain, whom you "retired" years ago, and recent creation Livia Lone?

In some ways it wasn’t hard, because Rain is always trying to retire—to kill his way out of the killing business—and he never seems to make it.

On top of which, Livia and Rain’s partner, former Marine sniper Dox, teamed up in the previous book, The Night Trade, and that turned into an interesting relationship. And I started wondering…what would happen if Livia, in the course of her Seattle PD sex-crime detective duties, uncovered something so big that she was targeted in an attempted hit? Would she call on Dox for help? Would Dox call on Rain?

And what if Rain had earlier been offered the hit himself…?

Once I started playing around with it, the idea became irresistible. The characters from the Rain and Livia universes are all so different—different motivations, different training, different worldviews, different personalities—that the idea of forcing them together, all their tangled histories, and smoldering romantic entanglements and uncertainties and jealousies and doubts, under the relentless pressure of extremely resourceful adversaries…looking back, it seems almost inevitable! And I sure had a lot of fun doing it.

This new novel features state-of-the-art technology, as does so much of your previous work. How do you keep up with the constant developments in these fields?

I follow Edward Snowden on Twitter, and he’s been a terrific resource in bringing attention to the government’s increasingly Orwellian surveillance apparatus. Facial recognition technology combined with vehicle- and officer-mounted video cameras; increasingly miniaturized drones; voiceprint technology; portable cellphone trackers; ubiquitous license-plate readers…the government knows more and more about us while we know less and less about the government, and if you’re writing political thrillers without taking Big Brother into account, you’re missing an important opportunity and probably a degree of realism, as well.

In addition to whistleblowers like Snowden, civil liberties groups like the ACLU and EFF, and the journalists at the Intercept, are also good to follow—for their important work, of course, but also for anyone who wants to stay on top of the deployment of active denial systems, radio-frequency vehicle stoppers, ways of wirelessly hacking a car’s control systems, and the other real-world technologies that make their way into my stories.

This may be the first novel in which a team of assassins are the indisputable heroes. What does that say about the state of our government and our Intelligence community?

I love that nomenclature—intelligence community! It’s so friendly. Like an intelligence club, or an intelligence neighborhood. I think it’s better understood as an intelligence apparatus, which admittedly isn’t quite as soothing!

But anyway, without getting too political, which as you can tell is hard for me, I’ll say that I think trends like Brexit in Europe, the election of Donald Trump in the United States, and the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil demonstrate that more and more people are figuring out that the elites who run society have become fundamentally parasitic, and so in desperation or rage or an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” attitude people are willing to do the electoral equivalent of calling an airstrike in on their own position. As faith in ever-more rotted institutions fades, people search for saviors from outside the institutional framework. That’s great for fiction, but in reality…not so much.

That said, I’m sure Delilah, Dox, Livia, Rain and the rest of the gang could run things better than the cretins currently in charge. On the other hand, 535 citizens chosen at random would be an improvement over Congress and the Senate. How did Cormac McCarthy’s assassin Chigurh put it? “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” So maybe my praise for my characters is mostly of the “land of the blind” variety.

The constant action in this book is leavened by touches of humor, mostly supplied by Dox. Do you employ a different approach now in your writing, compared to fifteen years ago?

Ah, thanks for that…Dox constantly cracks me up, and when I’m writing him, I always feel like I’m taking dictation.

I think my process today is pretty similar to what it’s always been. The biggest change is how much I’ve come to collaborate with my wife, Laura Rennert, who’s also my literary agent. I was much more solitary at the outset, but these days I brainstorm pretty much every step of the way with Laura, read her the manuscript section by section (this is also great practice for doing the audiobook narration), and get a ton of ideas and refinements from her. Probably not a coincidence that I write a lot faster now than I did fifteen years ago!

When your first John Rain novel appeared in 2002, publishing operated in a manner that today would be unrecognizable. How do you feel about what has been left behind, and what has taken its place in the industry over the years?

Publishing has always been run as a cartel for the benefit of publishers and at the expense of authors. I don’t mean to insult anyone in saying that, but come on, it’s right there in the clubby name the publishing giants have bestowed upon themselves: the Big Five! Does that sound like competition, or like a cartel? And if it’s competition, how do you explain the lack of innovation, the lockstep low royalties and other onerous contractual provisions, and a group of companies each of which—in the 21st century!—can only manage to pay its authors twice a year?

So I think that by injecting some real competition into a sclerotic and moribund system, the advent of digital books, self-publishing, and Amazon publishing have on balance been a boon to readers and authors.

It's hard to believe that books as cinematic as yours have not been turned into a film franchise by now. What developments have there been on that front?

There was a Rain TV project with Keanu Reeves attached that came pretty close. The good news is, I got to spend five days in Tokyo, my favorite city, introducing Keanu and others to John Rain’s favorite jazz clubs, whisky bars, and coffee houses. So that was fun.

And I’ve written a Livia pilot that's getting some interest, along with the perennial interest in the Rain rights. We’ll see. It would be nice if it were to happen. But a day job writing books is pretty damn sweet, too.

When Elites Become Parasites: The Panama Papers

I’m deep into the new manuscript, but this week I broke down and watched a documentary I’ve been waiting a long time to see: Alex Winter’s The Panama Papers. It was superb: gripping, fascinating, and most of all, given the breadth of institutional corruption it examines, outrage-inducing. I think it’s Winter’s best work yet, which is saying a lot.

The title refers to an enormous archive of criminality turned over to journalists in 2016 by a still-anonymous whistleblower—the internal records of Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, which, it turns out, was a key nexus for money laundering and tax evasion by prominent politicians, narcotics kingpins, and other criminals. Winters follows both the substance of the story and the unprecedented manner in which it was reported, with over 300 journalists collaborating to make sense of the massive amount of data while also seeking safety in numbers to protect themselves from the extremely powerful people whose secret criminality the Panama Papers threatened to expose.

That last point is in no way hyperbolic: in the course of the film, Winter recounts the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who before her death tirelessly exposed corruption in Malta, and whose son was one of the Panama Papers reporters.

How much elite tax evasion and dirty money was exposed in the Panama Papers?

Not a billion dollars.

Or a hundred billion.

Not even a trillion.

Eight Trillion dollars.

Yes, you read that right.

Winter lays it out in jaw-dropping fashion at the 1:03:45 mark in a recent interview with Intercepted:

“The thing that the film really that we set out to show because it was kind of the lightbulb moment that I think happened to every journalist that I interviewed—everybody. Other than say, you know, tax investigators who have been working for 50 years. But every investigator came onto the story and thought: 'Well, offshore whatever, you know, so the rich hide their money like down in the Caymans. Big deal.' But each one of them a light bulb went off and they realized that it really was a systemic level of corruption. That you’re dealing with such an enormous amount of money that it renders ideas like the federal deficit completely meaningless. The idea of having to argue how much goes into defense as to how much goes into having clean water, and national health, and education. I mean, all of those problems would be immediately solved if you didn’t have this level of kleptocracy. So, you are dealing with that scale of theft, essentially.

"And the amount of work that we all have to do as public citizens to try to claw whatever money we can for public services, and infrastructure, and the ability to not die of some, you know, even minor disease because you can’t afford the medication, all of that would be meaningless if this system was not in place. And so, we wanted to show that, but we also wanted to show complicity. That it isn’t just, you wouldn’t have this problem if it wasn’t for the legal tax dodging mechanisms that we have in the U.K. and the U.S., if you didn’t have complicity on the part of every major bank in the world, you know, that are all taking part in upholding this system. So, it isn’t just Assad. It isn’t just Putin. It isn’t just these people that we label as the bad guys. It’s like the whole damn system is basically complicit."

Journalism based on the Panama Paper led to the resignation and imprisonment of prime ministers, changes in laws, and a broader understanding of the breadth and depth of the institutionalized scam being perpetrated by global elites on the rest of us. Prosecutions are ongoing. Obviously much good has come out of the reporting the film explores.

But we have a long, long way to go in correcting the essential parasitism of a class of people who have created and exploited a system that enables them to hide eight trillion dollars in assets while the rest of us pay taxes and start GoFundMe campaigns when we need medical treatment.

Watching the film, I remembered this exchange from my novel Inside Out, published in 2010:

Hort took another bite of steak and washed it down with some wine. “The most important thing is this. America is ruled by an oligarchy. If you want to understand America, you have to understand the oligarchy. And if you don’t understand the oligarchy, you can’t understand America.”

Ben thought of what Larison had said. “You’re talking about a conspiracy?”

“Not at all. Conspiracies are hidden…Most of the people who are part of the oligarchy don’t even recognize its existence. If they recognize it at all, they think of it as just a benevolent, informal establishment. They tell themselves it selflessly serves the country’s interests rather than selfishly serving its own…You see, when the oligarchy looks in the mirror and says, ‘The State is me,’ it’s not inaccurate. It’s not hubris. They’re just describing reality…”

“You’re saying it can’t be beaten?”

Hort laughed. “You can’t beat the oligarchy. You can’t beat it because the oligarchy has already won. The establishment is like a virus that’s taken over the organs of the host. Now it acts as a kind of life support system, and if you remove it, the patient it battens on will die. Remember the scene in that movie Alien? Where the creature attaches itself to John Hurt’s face, runs a tentacle down his throat, and puts him in a coma, but if they cut it off, it’ll kill him? That’s the oligarchy. The establishment is a creature whose first priority is ensuring that if you try to remove it, you’ll wind up killing the host.”

I hope Hort was wrong. If he was, the Panama Papers whistleblower, the courageous journalists who reported on the underlying documents, and Winter’s fine film will be instrumental in making it so.