INTERVIEW
1. Tell us a little about yourself.
Aside from a few brief stints in the Chicago area, I’ve lived in Southeastern Michigan all my life. I’m an avid reader, I love to draw, and I am fanatical about puzzles of all kinds. I think it’s these traits that drew me to architecture and writing novels.
2. But how does an architect become a writer?
The mindsets for architecture and writing are actually very similar. Both endeavors require imaginative problem solving skills and the ability to articulately communicate. I think the real key to becoming a writer is being a reader first. You can couple that trait with any profession, as so many best selling authors have shown. In my case, I am particularly fortunate because I have two jobs where I start with a blank piece of paper and I’m paid to use my imagination to fill them.
3. Your writing is very visual, why is that?
It goes back to my being an architect. The environments my characters inhabit are important to me, so I actually storyboard major scenes, designing the spaces and choreographing the action. This is very similar to the process I go through when designing a laboratory or any other kind of space for a complex activity. It’s just how I think.
4. Can you tell us about your protagonist, Nolan Kilkenny?
Nolan is the descendant of an Irish Catholic family from Michigan. He is a graduate of Annapolis and MIT, served a six-year hitch in the navy as a SEAL, and, when we first met him in Spyder Web, had just returned to Ann Arbor to start work on his PhD. Over the course of my novels, he’s become a venture capitalist, shepherding new technologies out of academic research labs and into the economy. Nolan exists at the cusp of change, providing a steady hand on the rudder in some very turbulent waters. He’s a hero in the mold of Jack Ryan and Dirk Pitt—an honest, decent guy who does the right thing and is true to the people around him.
5. Where did you get the idea for Spyder Web?
There were two things that formed the basis of that book. The first was an FBI sting in the 1980s that caught a Japanese computer company trying to acquire new computer technology from IBM. The second was a CIA report on the illegal trade in supercomputers with rogue nations like Iraq and North Korea. I just thought: What if the CIA allowed a rogue nation to acquire a supercomputer that was equipped with a device that could report on every bit of information that supercomputer came into contact with, and what if this espionage device fell into the hands of industrial spies? I later learned that the CIA actually developed something similar to my Spyder.
6. What about Quantum?
Quantum is based on a sort of Zen question: If a genius died before his time, would the world know what it missed? I went to high school and college with a guy who is best described as a Renaissance man. John Rosowski was a gifted engineer, talented artist and photographer, and a self-taught musician—and he died tragically just a few months after we graduated from college. I still wonder what he would have accomplished, and the idea of the lost genius is the theme of Quantum.
7. Are there really lakes under the ice in Antarctica?
Dozens of lakes, and as described in Twisted Web, the largest of these lakes is directly under the Russian Vostok research station. Lake Vostok is roughly the size of Lake Ontario and twice as deep, and it lies under more than two miles of solid ice. The relatively recent discovery of exotic life teeming around volcanic vents at the bottom oceans rewrote our understanding of the conditions required for life and provided the unique chemistry that has fueled the biotech revolution and activities like the human genome project. Lake Vostok has everything required to sustain exotic microbes, and it has been bottled up like a test tube for over two million years. The Russians are slowly drilling down into the lake, and every biotech company in the world is eager to discover what may be living in such an extreme environment.
8. Did you travel to Antarctica for Twisted Web?
No, but I did connect a geophysicist who spent several Antarctic summer at the Vostok Station and I ended up on the glaciers of Greenland with him, just a few hundred miles of the north pole. He swears the ice at both poles looks pretty much the same.
9. How did Bird of Prey come about?
I am fascinated with space and the technology that puts people and satellites into orbit. Unfortunately, we are moving from an era of peaceful activity in orbit to one involving space-based weapons. Ground-based anti satellite weapons have already been tested and it is only a matter of time before some form of killer satellite is placed in orbit. The questions Nolan has to answer in Bird of Prey is who did it first and why?
10. How does The Secret Cardinal differ from the previous Nolan Kilkenny thrillers?
The crux of the conflict in each of my first four novels was either a scientific discovery or a piece of technology that had great value. The Secret Cardinal deals with the impasse between China and the Vatican, and the heart of the conflict here is the long imprisoned Roman Catholic bishop of Shanghai. In scope, this novel covers the ultimate church-state conflict, one that in some way touches over two billion people. The story is based on Cardinal Kung Pin-Mei, who was a real secret cardinal for over a decade and who endured 35 years in prison in China for refusing to renounce his faith.
11. And the diplomatic situation between China and the Vatican is real?
This is one of those cases where truth is stranger than fiction, and I document the factual underpinning of The Secret Cardinal in the back of the book. The state sponsored persecution of unsanctioned religious groups in China reads like something out of pagan Rome, and I believe the last time the word excommunication appeared in the diplomatic correspondence between nations was when Henry VIII established the Church of England. And just a few weeks after my novel went to print, two new events occurred. On September 1, 2007, China enacted an absurd law prohibiting the reincarnation of Buddhist lamas outside of China, and without approval of the state. A few weeks later, a Roman Catholic bishop who had endured 35 years of incarceration since 1960 died during his most recent two-year stint in police custody. Bishop Han’s body was cremated and interred within a few hours of his death, all before dawn, leaving many to speculate the reason for such haste.
12. How would you describe The Secret Cardinal?
The Secret Cardinal is a jailbreak thriller, and a tale of loyalty, honor and faith.
