Mark T. Sullivan
BIO
Mark T. Sullivan has written seven mystery and suspense novels that have thrilled readers around the world, but he took a circuitous route to becoming a best-selling author.
Mark grew up outside of Boston and says the best job he's ever had was selling souvenirs at Fenway Park during his high school summers. He attended Hamilton College, graduating in 1980 with a BA in English. Two weeks later, he boarded a plane bound for Niger, West Africa, where he worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Agades, an oasis and trading center on the ancient caravan route between Tripoli and Timbuctu. Mark rode with Tuareg nomads deep into the Sahara, immersed himself in their culture and taught their children English in a regional high school.
Upon Mark’s return to the United States in 1982, he attended the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He worked at Reuters, Ltd., as a financial correspondent covering the Chicago Commodities Markets from 1983-1984. He left to become a political reporter in Washington D.C., at a small wire service called States News Service where his role was backup reporter to the D.C. bureaus of the New York Times, Newsday and the New York Daily News. He also began to make a name for himself in the tough world of investigative reporting, breaking a series of stories about a financial scandal that almost toppled the nation's mortgage brokerage business.
In 1986, Mark joined the San Diego Tribune as a full-time investigative reporter. Still profoundly influenced by the experience of total cultural immersion he had experienced in West Africa, he began to develop a journalistic style that focused on the cultures of the things he was investigating. His award-winning work included a series that examined the culture of children living with addicts, and another that drew back the curtain on the culture of corporate funeral home conglomerates.
As a young boy, Mark had been an avid reader who’d dreamed of becoming a novelist. At the age of 30, he panicked at the thought that he might not follow through on his childhood dream. So he began writing fiction in his little spare time and soon had short stories published in various literary journals.
In the winter of 1990, he took a leave from his investigative duties at the newspaper and moved to Utah and Wyoming to live among extreme skiers. That experience yielded his first novel, THE FALL LINE (1994), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the year, a rare honor for a debut author.
The following year, he published HARD NEWS (1995), a mystery that exposed the underbelly of modern newspapers. The book garnered widespread critical acclaim and has become something of a cult classic among journalists.
But it was not until 1996, with publication of THE PURIFICATION CEREMONY, that Mark’s career broke out. The novel, told in the voice of a woman who is an expert tracker, has been published and on best-seller’s lists all over the world. It was a finalist for the Edgar Allen Poe award for best novel, won the W.H. Smith Award for best “new talent” author, and was named one of the best books of the year by the Los Angeles Times. THE PURIFICATION CEREMONY has been translated into fourteen languages and optioned numerous times for film, though sadly it has not yet been made.
Mark published GHOST DANCE in 1999 again to widespread praise and commercial success, especially in Europe, where many of his fans live.
LABYRINTH (2001) marked another turning point for Mark’s career. A thriller set in the world of endurance cavers, LABYRINTH was bought for film by Scott Rudin and Paramount Pictures even before the literary rights sold. The book was an international hit and expanded the number of countries and languages where Mark’s novels have been published.
In 2003, Mark published THE SERPENT'S KISS, a mystery novel set in the world of Appalachian snake handlers. BookSense 76 named the book one of the best mysteries of the year, and it became a run-away hit in German-language countries, where it sat on best-seller’s lists for almost twelve months.
TRIPLE CROSS, Mark’s newest, about an attack on a ski resort for the super-rich and powerful, has already been published in Germany where it is a best-seller under the title LIMIT. St. Martin’s Press will launch the U.S. edition of the novel in April.
Mark lives in southwest Montana with his wife, Betsy, and two teenage sons, Connor and Bridger. An avid skier, sportsman, martial artist and devotee of CrossFit training, Mark is also an entrepreneur with a start-up company that builds green eco-roads as an alternative to asphalt.
First and foremost, however, he remains a writer. He’s hard at work on a new novel set in the world of professional thieves, the CIA and international crime lords. It is tentatively entitled THE EIGHTEENTH RULE.
AUTHOR TALK
April 17, 2009
Inspired by both a ski vacation and the earliest indicators of the current U.S. economic crisis, Mark T. Sullivan's TRIPLE CROSS centers on the wealthy patrons of an exclusive resort who are taken hostage by terrorists and put on trial for crimes against humanity. In this interview, Sullivan discusses the kind of research he performed to create the very realistic financial scenarios portrayed in the book, and sheds light on his decision to make three teenage triplets the heroes of the story. He also describes how his previous career as an investigative reporter helped to hone his skills as a novelist, explains why mysteries and thrillers are his genre of choice, and shares details about two projects currently in the works.
Question: How did you come up with the idea for TRIPLE CROSS?
Mark T. Sullivan: Near my home in Southwest Montana, set high in the mountains, there’s a gated, high-security, ultra-private ski and golf club for the super-rich and powerful. They’re the only ones who can afford it; at one time you had to have a liquid net worth of three million dollars to even be considered for membership.
Some of the wealthiest people in the world have homes in the club. And sports legends. And celebrities. Until recently, the place was owned and run by something of a slippery character, a master of self-promotion, and, it turns out, financial subterfuge, all of which made him and the club interesting enough to someone like me.
But it wasn’t until a few years ago, when I was skiing at Big Sky, which abuts the private resort, that I had the first inkling of the story that would become TRIPLE CROSS. I was high up on Lone Peak, looking down into the club, and the suspense writer in me thought, What if a place like that was attacked? Why? The questions excited me (always a good thing), but I had no immediate answers, so I stuck the idea on the back burner.
At the same time, on the basis of articles I was reading in the foreign press and discussions I was having with friends who work on Wall Street, I was becoming convinced that there was a lot of shady activity going on in the U.S. financial markets. Specifically, I came to believe that not only was it possible to manipulate the markets, but that they were being manipulated on a regular basis by everything from the terrorist attacks on 9/11 to leveraged betting on questionable mortgage-backed securities to the rising price of oil. It seemed an interesting premise for another thriller, but I could not put the pieces together in a way that satisfied me. So I put it aside too and set about researching a true story of World War II for a possible book project.
Two months later, I was on a flight back from Italy, exhausted from two weeks of interviews and travel. I was half asleep, trying to imagine the ways I’d tell the war story, when the attack on the private ski resort just sort of barged its way into my subconscious, quickly followed by the realization that an attack on such a club stocked with some of the world’s wealthiest people would undoubtedly have an immediate, harsh effect on the stock markets.
I came fully awake and started writing right then. By the time I landed in Montana twelve hours later, I had the gist of TRIPLE CROSS down on paper.
Q: The capitalists take it hard in the story. Are you anti-capitalist? Anti-rich?
MTS: Far from it. I work for myself. I believe in taking risks, in personal responsibility and in America as a place where you can forge your own dreams and make money doing it, as long as you do it legally and ethically.
In the story, however, the self-proclaimed anti-globalists who attack the club are most certainly against capitalism. The negative portraits of the men who are put on trial in the novel I’m sad to say were drawn from real events and trends in American business during the first eight years of this century. I’m even sadder to say that most of the illegal activity described in the novel pales in comparison to the scandals, swindles and market manipulations that have come to light after the 2008 stock market crash.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that there are several noble capitalists in the story, Paul Doore and Aaron Grant in particular. They are examples of wealthy businessmen who have earned their fortunes legally and ethically.
Q: Why did you make fourteen-year-old triplets the heroes of the story?
MTS: There are actually five “heroes” in TRIPLE CROSS: Mickey Hennessy, the Jefferson Club’s security director; his two sons, Connor and Bridger, and his daughter, Hailey; and Cheyenne O’Neil, an FBI financial crimes specialist. They each have an important role in unraveling the deep mystery behind TRIPLE CROSS.
But certainly the triplets, in effect, steal the show. I think it’s because I enjoyed writing about them so much. At the time I was first drafting the novel, I had three boys living in my house, my own two sons, and my nephew. Two were fourteen, and I spent the year listening to their banter and the way they thought, sometimes terribly naïve, sometimes very wise, and too often impetuous. So, in my mind, there had to be some countervailing force to two fourteen-year-old boys in the book, so I added a sister. I was also lucky that one of my closest friends has triplets and I was able to pick his brain as to how they would likely interact in given situations.
That said, I was shocked when the triplets started doing what they wanted in the novel, and floored when they started fighting back against the terrorists. It was completely unexpected and unplanned for. I was like a dad arguing with his teenagers and getting nowhere when they first picked up the guns.
Q: The stock markets and investment instruments are very much part of the plot of TRIPLE CROSS. What kind of research did you do to create the financial scenarios described in the novel?
MTS: I’m lucky that two of my closest friends from childhood grew up to be very smart guys with a combined forty years of experience in high finance. They and some other smart guys, including one who had a Ph.D. from Princeton in econometrics and math theory, helped “game” the story, including the likely effect the trials would have on the equities and futures markets.
Any mistakes or leaps of logic in the story line are purely mine.
Q: Mickey Hennessy is a complicated guy.
MTS: Really? I see him more as someone with simple needs and extraordinary skills who is thrust into a very complicated and dangerous situation. Mickey’s really one of the good guys, someone who had a hard fall in life but managed to lift himself up from it, and go on. By the time we meet him, he’s pretty much trimmed his desires in life to maintaining the safety of his children and his relationship with them, performing his job to the best of his abilities and, someday, to meet a woman he can fall in love with. Everything he does in the novel are based on those three overriding desires. Oh, and he does want to be rich. Or at least, rich enough to retire someday.
Q: The FBI is a big presence in the novel.
MTS: It is as it would be in a case like this.
For the most part, the FBI agents I spoke to about TRIPLE CROSS were helpful in making me understand the size and scope of law enforcement’s response to a take-over of a place like the Jefferson Club. I got very little help, however, from the National Hostage Rescue Team, which would be the first responder in a case like the Jefferson Club. For that I had to track down former members of the team, and they spoke with me only reluctantly.
Special Agent Cheyenne O’Neil is based on several FBI agents I’ve known over the years, and a business reporter I used to work with in San Diego who was remarkable in her ability to ferret out and expose white-collar crime. She’s one of my favorite characters in the novel and is really the one who figures out the nefarious double- and triple dealings behind the attack.
Q: The anti-globalist guerillas put seven of the wealthiest men in the world on trial for crimes against humanity in the book, and broadcasts them over the Internet. Where did that come from?
MTS: Isolation. When I thought about the Jefferson Club I always thought of it as this remote place that gets cut off from the world. But at the same time, I knew that General Anarchy and the Third Position Army had reasons to want to be in contact with the outer world without going through the filters of law enforcement and the media. They wanted to take their case directly to the people, where it would have the greatest effect.
A Podcast seemed the venue and I went with it, as well as the idea that everyone watching on the Internet would decide the fate of the men on trial. I wanted the reader to have the same uncomfortable experience as the characters in the book watching the trials. I wanted readers to have to decide for themselves whether they’d vote guilty or not.
Q: Some real left-leaning organizations such as the ACLU and the People For the American Way appear to be linked to the anti-globalist guerillas in the novel, or at least they seem to benefit from the attack.
MTS: Do they? TRIPLE CROSS is a multi-layered story of intrigue, disinformation and betrayal. By design, first appearances can be deceiving.
Q: Did you really sell all your equities after researching and writing the novel?
MTS: I did. I became convinced for a number of reasons that the markets were going to tank and I sold everything I had in my retirement and college education funds and went to U.S. Treasury Bonds long before the crash.
Q: Did you always want to be a writer?
MTS: Pretty much. My mother instilled in me a love of reading and writing at an early age. She always told me that being a writer was a noble calling. Then I won a school-wide writing contest when I was in the second grade and another in the fifth grade. I tried to convince myself over the years that I could do something else more practical with my life, but inventing stories and writing them down was the only thing I was ever good at. After a lot of soul searching I finally gave in and accepted it as my fate. I became a much happier person once I did.
Q: What are you reading these days?
MTS: Everything I can get my hands on, novels, books, magazine articles, poetry, screenplays, and many, many websites. The novels I’ve read and been impressed with lately include Dennis Lehane’s THE GIVEN DAY, Robert Crais’s CHASING DARKNESS, Gregg Hurwitz’s THE CRIME WRITER, and Tana French’s IN THE WOODS. I’m currently reading IN THE FALL by Jeffery Lent, an absolute masterpiece, devastating in its power. I’m in awe of it.
Q: What's your work schedule like?
MTS: Every book’s different. I wrote TRIPLE CROSS five to six days a week from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., producing five to ten pages a day. It took about a year to complete.
Q: TRIPLE CROSS would make a great movie.
MTS: Tell Clint.
Q: What’s going on with your true World War II story?
MTS: I’m finally putting the book proposal together. TRIPLE CROSS got in the way.
Q: How did your experience as an investigative reporter influence your work?
MTS: It taught me a lot about the way the world works and the thought process of people who break the law. I learned that no matter how heinous someone's actions might be, they always have a rationale for their deeds. They think they're doing the right thing. Being a reporter also taught me the importance of research and how to talk to people in a way that makes them comfortable enough to open up to me. I do a lot of reporting before I write, often immersing myself physically in a culture, but I try to follow E.L. Doctorow's advice to know enough about a subject to fire the imagination, but not so much that it throttles possibility. In the end writing fiction is a pack of lies well told. I try not to lose sight of that.
Q: In almost all of your novels you've got strong female characters, either as the heroine or in powerful supporting roles. Why and how do you manage to write so convincingly from a feminine point of view?
MTS: There are more women alive than men, so it's always made sense to me to have women play a prominent role in my books. As a narrative artist it's also liberating to write from a woman's perspective. I have to really think and go for the less obvious plot turns when a woman is the protagonist. THE PURIFICATION CEREMONY would have been a yawner if it had been written with a male hero. LABYRINTH would have suffered if much of the book had not been told from Whitney and Cricket Burke's point of view. And TRIPLE CROSS would have been a lesser book without the character of Hailey. As far as writing convincingly as a woman, I tend to believe that men and women are more alike than Oprah would like us to think. Women just tend to take their emotions into account much more often than men. I'm constantly reminding myself of that. And when I can't figure out what a woman would do in a given situation, I ask the opinion of the important person in my life, my wife, Betsy.
Q: Why thrillers and mysteries?
MTS: Those were the stories that came out of me when I sat down to write. I don't mean to be flip about it, but I think you're only capable of writing what naturally comes out of you. I'm an adventure freak in my personal life and because of that I'm attracted to stories where characters are pushed to their limits. Like Hemingway, I tend to think that people only reveal who they are and what they are capable of when they are forced to confront their greatest fears. Almost by definition that puts you in the realm of thrillers.
Q: What’s next?
MTS: I’m almost done with the first draft of THE EIGHTEENTH RULE, a new novel set in the world of high class thieves, the CIA and international crime lords. And I’m putting together a proposal for THE FORGOTTEN FRONT, a book based on an incredible true story that unfolded in the last days of World War II in northern Italy.
© Copyright 2009, Mark T. Sullivan. All rights reserved.
• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
AUTHOR TALK: THE SERPENT'S KISS
June 27, 2003
Before becoming a novelist, Mark T. Sullivan was a successful investigative reporter. While working for the San Diego Tribune, he was nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting. Sullivan's memories of his days as a reporter in San Diego inspired him to do something he had never done before: write a series of books based on recurring characters. THE SERPENT'S KISS is the first in what will be a series of books featuring San Diego homicide detective Seamus Moynihan. Learn more about the birth of Sullivan's latest thriller and the creation of his protagonist in his own words.
For many years I have written stand alone mystery-suspense novels. Until quite recently, I'd believed I would always write stand-alones. The form suited my temperament, which thrives on having different adventures during the course of research for each book.
More to the point, I could never come up a character I thought would be able to engage and sustain my personal interest over the course of many novels.
Then one day, about two years ago, I recalled from my days as an investigative reporter in San Diego that the police department in the nation's sixth-largest city investigates homicide differently than any other major metropolitan law enforcement agency. Where New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and most other big city police departments assign two detectives whenever an unexplained body turns up, San Diego rolls in with a team of five: a supervising sergeant and four supporting homicide detectives.
This unorthodox, swarming approach to death investigations works. San Diego often boasts the highest solve rate in the nation. Why not base a series on one of those teams? I asked myself.
I began to doodle on a piece of paper at my desk, and, to my surprise, very quickly the character of Seamus Moynihan, the supervising sergeant took shape as an ex-major league pitcher, a second generation cop, a beleaguered but loving father, a divorced, heart-worn womanizer and brilliant homicide detective.
As I took more notes, and grew more excited, Moynihan literally began to speak in my head, telling me about his childhood, about playing for the Boston Red Sox, about being the son of a murdered police officer whose slaying was never solved, about the scars that that loss had inflicted upon him.
Only one other time has this sort of disconcerting experience happened in my writing career: During the early drafts of THE PURIFICATION CEREMONY, Diana Jackman, an expert tracker and the story's heroine, began to speak to me in much the same way. Having someone else's voice start barking in your head is a bizarre experience. For the majority of people, it would be cause for a one-way ticket to the funny farm.
But as a writer I've found that it's an energizing, almost ecstatic phenomenom, one that occurs only once in a great while, and when it does, you're smart to go with it. So I did, in effect, taking dictation from Moynihan over the course of two weeks as he told me his life story leading up to his promotion to homicide sergeant.
I wrote ten to fifteen hours a day, and by the end of the first week, it was if I'd known the man for years. Moynihan played ball in Fenway Park, where I worked summers as a kid selling souvenirs. As a homicide detective, he has an unorthodox style coupled with strong investigative instincts, yet he was not a prima-donna. He cares about the people who work for him, indeed believes that in many ways that they are better cops than he is. His relationship with his son, his mother, his sister, his ex-wife are all seriously flawed, mostly due to his actions. But the thing about the guy is he is genuinely trying to be a better man. Always. He doesn't always succeeds, but he's always trying.
Here at last, I thought, was a character who I could hang with as a writer for years and not be bored.
Now about two years prior to all this babbling in the head stuff, I was fooling around with some files I keep filled with notes that might somehow be developed into future novels. It's something I often do late in the day, after the serious writing on the project of the moment is complete and I can relax a bit and let my mind play.
Anyway, just as dusk came on that night, a phrase forced its way into my thoughts: "The second woman."
I had no idea what it meant, but I wrote the words down and stared at them. There in the shadowy light a series of vivid images flashed through me. Some were frankly erotic, others were frankly frightening, all of them sparking off in my noggin as a result of those three words: the second woman.
But what did they mean?
It occurred to me that we all know who the first woman was: Eve, at least according to Judeo-Christian thought.
But who was the second woman? I trotted over to my handy King James and discovered this reference: "And Cain went out and lived in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden, and Cain knew his wife. . ."
"This can't be the only reference to her," I thought. "She's not even named."
I tracked down a man named Jonathan Kirsch, an attorney and author of several books about the Bible. When I asked him about the second woman, he said, "No one knows who she is, where she came from. She's the oldest mystery in the Bible."
Saying something like that to someone like me is like waving the red cape in front of the bull. Hanging up the phone, I was pounding forward at the cape, knowing with certainty that I'd write a mystery about the oldest mystery in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
For nearly two years I gathered string about the second woman, reading different theories about her identity, reading about her history in literature and philosophy. But try as I might I could not figure how her story fit in a modern setting.
Then Sergeant Moynihan saw the file and THE SERPENT'S KISS was born.
© Copyright 2003, Mark T. Sullivan. All rights reserved.
Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
AUTHOR TALK: LABYRINTH
Q: Did you always want to be a writer?
MTS: Pretty much. My mother has been reading a book a day since I was a little kid. She instilled in me a love of reading and writing at an early age. She always told me that being a writer was a noble calling. Then I won a school-wide writing contest when I was in the second grade and another in the fifth grade. I tried to convince myself over the years that I could do something else more practical with my life, but inventing stories and writing them down was the only thing I was ever good at. After a lot of soul searching I finally gave in and accepted it as my fate. I became a much happier person once I did.
Q: What do you read?
MTS: I'm interested in other cultures, so I read quite a bit of anthropology and world history. I also enjoy non-fiction adventure. THE PERFECT STORM, books like that. In fiction, I'm a big fan of Jim Harrison, the novelist and poet. He's got this remarkable ability to paint entire worlds in a few swift sentences. He was the first modern writer to make me believe you could be someone in love with language while being a passionate story teller. In the thriller/mystery genre I'm a big fan of Dennis Lehane. I grew up outside of Boston and worked in the streets around Fenway Park as a teenager. Lehane completely captures the gritty side of the people and the city in a way that makes both the characters and the locale compelling and morally complex. I'm jealous of him.
Q: What's your work schedule like?
MTS: I write five to six days a week, usually between 10 AM. and 6 PM. Early in my career I worked as a reporter and those were my hours. When I started writing novels, I tried to do what other novelists do - get up early and write first thing. It just never worked for me. So I finally abandoned that approach and returned to my old newspaper schedule. I work out early in the morning, usually climbing with my dogs in the mountains near my home in Montana. During the climb I think about the writing from the day before and the writing to come. I usually try to produce between five and seven pages a day.
Q: How did your experience as an investigative reporter influence your work?
MTS: Working for a newspaper as an investigator taught me a lot about the way the world works and the thought process of people who break the law. I learned that no matter how heinous someone's actions might be, they always have a rationale for their deeds. They think they're doing the right thing. Being a reporter also taught me the importance of research and how to talk to people in a way that makes them comfortable enough to open up to me. I do a lot of reporting before I write, often immersing myself physically in a subject, but I try to follow E.L. Doctorow's advice to know enough about a subject to fire the imagination, but not so much that it throttles possibility. In the end writing fiction is a pack of lies well told. Despite the lengths I go to when researching my novels, I try not to lose sight of that.
Q: The outdoors has obviously been a big influence in your life and writing.
MTS: Yeah. It's why I live in Montana. Ever since serving in the Peace Corps in West Africa, I've been an adventure junkie. I love seeing new places and pushing myself to the limit, whether it's heli-skiing in Alaska or tracking in remote areas populated by grizzlies and wolves or caving in Kentucky. These kinds of extreme experiences push me to write about the edge of human experience. These are the kinds of things that really interest me and seem to spur my imagination.
Q: In almost all of your novels you've got strong female characters, either as the heroine or in powerful supporting roles. Why and how do you manage to write so convincingly from a feminine point of view?
MTS: There are more women alive than men, so it's always made sense to me to have women play a prominent role in my books. As a narrative artist it's also liberating to write from a woman's perspective. I have to really think and go for the less obvious plot turns when a women is the protagonist. THE PURIFICATION CEREMONY would have been a yawner if it had been written with a male hero. And the LABYRINTH would have suffered if much of the book had not been told from Whitney and Cricket Burke's point of view. As far as writing convincingly as a woman, I tend to believe that men and women are more alike than Oprah would like us to think. Women just tend to take their emotions into account much more often than men. I'm constantly reminding myself of that. And when I can't figure out what a woman would do in a given situation, I ask the opinion of the important women in my life - my wife, Betsy, and my agents, Jo and Linda.
Q: Cricket Burke, one of the heroines of LABYRINTH, is such an accurate depiction of a teenage girl - who was the inspiration for her?
MTS: Cricket was based on the daughter of one of my best friends. Pandi was fourteen at the time I started writing LABYRINTH. She was extremely bright but not doing as well in school as her parents might have wished. She was a great athlete, very tough in competition, yet unsure of herself off the field or track. In many ways she was wise beyond her years, yet naïve about how tough life can become in the blink of an eye. I interviewed her several times during the early stages of crafting the novel and started to get a general idea about what it's like to be a fourteen-year-old girl. But it wasn't until I talked with her about what it might be like to have a mother so traumatized that she'd retreated into herself that the character of Cricket became clear to me. Pandi thought about my question and said she'd feel sorry for her mother, yet she'd also feel cheated at not having her there for guidance when she really needed it. Right then I realized what a difficult thing it is to be fourteen and female - no longer a girl, but not yet a woman. And the arc of Cricket's journey instantly crystallized for me.
Q: All your books are so different. Where do you get your ideas?
MTS: In each novel I've started with a setting that I just found interesting or had experience with, then tried to twist it into the most intense experience possible. I've been a skier since I was a kid, which led to THE FALL LINE. My years as an investigative reporter gave me the background to write HARD NEWS. I grew up in a deer hunting family, so I had the personal experience necessary to understand the mind of a tracker in THE PURIFICATION CEREMONY. I got interested in 19th century spiritualists because I lived down the street from the houses where the Eddys once lived and that gave rise to GHOST DANCE. Caves have always struck me as terribly scary, dangerous and yet alluring. I think LABYRINTH came out of that fear.
Q: Despite the fact that your books are different they seem to share common themes.
MTS: True. From a global perspective I think I write about interesting cultures and the people who inhabit them. Extreme skiers. Reporters. Deer trackers. Cavers. And in the future, homicide detectives. On a more micro scale, I write about characters who are recovering from some kind of physical or psychological wound that forces them to face the past in a spiritual way. There's also the theme of isolation, of characters having to separate physically in order to recover psychologically. I really believe that the worst situations bring out the best in people.
Q: Why thrillers and mysteries?
MTS: Those were the stories that came out of me when I sat down to write. I don't mean to be flip about it, but I think you're only capable of writing what naturally comes out of you. I'm an adventure freak in my personal life and because of that I'm attracted to stories where characters are pushed to their limits. Like Hemingway, I tend to think that people only reveal who they are and what they are capable of when they are forced to confront their greatest fears. Almost by definition that puts you in the realm of thrillers.
Q: You write about so many horrifying, bone-chilling scenarios and you try to live them yourself before you write - what are you scared of?
MTS: Lots of stuff. Flying in airplanes. Roller coasters scare the crap out of me. So does riding on the back of motorcycles where other people are driving. I know if it was me driving the plane or the motorcycle I wouldn't have a problem because I'd be in control. But anytime I have to rely on other people's skills in dangerous situations, I get nervous. And any hint of threat to children frightens me to my core. I can't take reading about kids who get cancer or get kidnapped or molested. I have two young boys and it just hits too close to home.
Q: You've been practicing Aikido, the Japanese martial art of self-defense for twenty years. How does that influence your writing?
MTS: On a practical level, I suppose Aikido has helped me to choreograph some pretty solid fight scenes in my novels. On a more spiritual plain, Aikido influences my writing in the same ways being a deep powder skier and a deer tracker have. Writing, Aikido, skiing, tracking, these are crafts that are best learned and mastered over long periods of time. You learn to be patient being a martial artist. You learn to work at it every day, honing your abilities, forgetting about goals, focusing on process. You learn to accept the fact that you won't get figure it out in one year or even ten. Writing and Aikido are life-long paths and that's the point. I know I've got a lot of books in me and with luck and God's help I'll get better with each one.
Q: Which book would you love to see made into a movie?
MTS: I think I write viscerally enough that all my books could be adapted to film. But only two of them have been bought so far. Scott Rudin, the great producer, is going to make LABYRINTH into a movie. Caves and cavers have intrigued him for years and I think he'll do a great job of bringing the intense world of the underground to the screen. And we recently finished negotiations with Remstar, a Canadian film company, to do a film version of The Purification Ceremony. The deal calls for me to be on the set during production as a technical advisor to make sure the deer tracking scenes are shot correct.
Q: What's next?
MTS: A different turn for me: a series of novels based on the homicide unit at the San Diego Police Department. Each novel will force the detectives to confront and understand a different culture in order to solve the mystery. I'm very excited about it. The first book is done and will be published in August 2003. I'm hard at work on the second installment.
© Copyright 2002, Mark T. Sullivan. All rights reserved.
Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
