It is my pleasure to feature Steven Gore today as he talks about his newest thriller.
ABOUT STEVEN GORE:
Gore is a former private investigator whose international thrillers draw
on his investigations of murder, fraud, money laundering, organized
crime, political corruption, and drug,
sex, and arms trafficking in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The
author of Act of Deceit and
Power Blind, Gore has been featured on 60 Minutes for his
work and has been honored for excellence in his field. He is trained in
forensic science and has lectured to professional organizations on a
wide range of legal and criminal subjects.
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STEVEN GORE'S LATEST THRILLER:
His
latest thriller,
A CRIMINAL DEFENSE, is his second book in his thrilling series featuring ex-SFPD detective, Harlan Donnally.
“Rich,
gritty, and terrifically twisty…crackles with legal and psychological
authenticity.”
—Lou
Berney, author of Whiplash River
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In Steven Gore’s page-turning
second installment, A CRIMINAL DEFENSE
by Steven Gore (Harper Mass Market; July 30, 2013; $9.99; ISBN:
9780062025074), readers find ex-SFPD detective Harlan Donnally
running a small cafe north of San Francisco. But when Mark Hamlin, a criminal defense
lawyer with a slimy reputation, is found murdered underneath the Golden Gate
Bridge, Donnally is drawn back into a twisted and corrupt world he thought he’d
left behind.
Over three decades, Hamlin's
practice devolved into just another racket: intimidating witnesses, suborning
perjury, destroying evidence, laundering money. But is he the victim of
murder—or of a dangerous sexual encounter gone wrong? And when law enforcement
believes justice has already been done, who can be trusted to find out?
Despite a mysterious request left
in the dead man’s hand, Donnally had resolved it wouldn't be him. He had no
desire to immerse himself in the deceit that was Hamlin's career . . . nor
entangle himself in the corrupted loyalties that turned the dead lawyer's
associates into both co-conspirators and suspects . . . nor make himself the
proxy for the hatreds and betrayals Hamlin left behind.
But the presiding judge demanded
otherwise—and that might cost Donnally his life.
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A FEW COMMENTS FROM STEVEN GORE:
Counterintuitive.
If there is
single word that characterizes my encounter with writing crime fiction after
decades as a criminal investigator, it’s counterintuitive.
And it’s part of
the explanation why true crime makes for lousy crime fiction, why so few
career-long law enforcement officers and private investigators succeed in crime
writing and why most of those who do have only worked in the field briefly. In
truth, much of what readers want from investigator protagonists are
characteristics and habits that experienced investigators have to train out of
themselves and train out of young investigators in order for them to succeed.
Readers want
different things from investigators than do law enforcement agencies and private
investigator clients. Readers want to feel increasing tension, while, with the
rarest of exceptions, experienced investigators aim to lower it; readers want to
watch investigators overcome obstacles, while experienced investigators aim to
avoid them; readers want to read about characters who are uniquely qualified, while
in the real world there are only investigators who are especially qualified; readers
want to watch investigators run up against walls and then force their way through
them, while experienced investigators aim how to slip around them; readers want
spontaneity and surprise, while experienced investigators plan and plan in
order to limit surprises; readers want to see investigators try and try again, while
clients want real investigators to get it right the first time; readers are not
troubled by brash, aggressive protagonists injecting conflict into a scene, while
real investigators don’t inject it, they anticipate potential conflict inherent
in a situation and work to mute it.
In the end, in
the real world, doing all these things in these ways is both the criteria of
competence and the conditions for successful investigations.
There is one kind
of law enforcement that matches readers’ expectations: narcotics. But it isn’t
at heart a crime solving assignment. Narcotics cases are generally built from
leaning on people who’ve already been caught dirty—by patrol officers and
street drug task forces and through search warrants and wiretaps--to give up
those above them. It’s less about solving crimes and more about discovering
crimes already in progress or creating crimes by means of informants or
undercover agents. The problem is that since the skills and attitudes that
succeed in narcotics enforcement fail in investigations, few narcotics officers
become first rate homicide detectives. Observe the contrast between the drug
enforcement reality shows and A&E’s The
First 48. In The First 48, at least during
the first few years of the show and before detectives began to play to the
camera, nearly all of the excitement came from the music and the jump cuts. The
detectives themselves were generally low key and methodical.
The problem for
me was to translate the reality of investigation into fiction. That is to say,
there could be no “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in
his hand” of Raymond Chandler or “My way of learning is to heave a wild and
unpredictable monkey-wrench into the machinery” of Dashiell Hammett. Rather,
plots had to be driven internally and conflict had to be exploited from within,
rather than imposed from without and the methods used had to be those that
succeeded in real life.
On the domestic
front, I’m making this effort in the Harlan Donnally novels of which A Criminal Defense is the latest, and on
the international front, in the Graham Gage thrillers of which Power Blind is the latest. In each
series, the central problem I faced was investigative competence: the
protagonists had to apply real world methods and approaches in a realistic way.
That meant applying the techniques of genre fiction to stories whose aim is
realism. And the challenge was to make the stories not only informative about
the real world of crime and investigation, but exciting for readers. In the
end, it’s the readers who will judge whether I have truly bridged the gap
between the real and the fictional.
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TO ORDER THE BOOK:
Contact: Heidi Richter
(212)
207-7478
heidi.richter@harpercollins.com
