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BIO
Except for three years in Lancaster, PA, Sullivan was born and raised outside of Boston in the towns of Framingham and Medfield. He was an avid skier and deer hunter as a child. He attended Hamilton College, graduating in 1980 with a BA in English. Two weeks after commencement, he boarded a plane bound for Niger, West Africa. There he worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Agades, an oasis and trading center on the ancient caravan route between Tripoli and Timbuctu. Sullivan rode with nomads deep into the Sahara, immersed himself in their culture and taught their children.
Upon his return to the United States in 1982, he attended the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, graduating with the highest honors. During that time he met his wife, Betsy, who was also attending the university as a graduate student. Sullivan 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. His role was backup reporter to the D.C. bureaus of the New York Times, Newsday and the New York Daily News. He was also introduced to the field of investigative reporting, breaking a series of stories about a financial scandal that almost toppled the nation's mortgage brokerage business. At this time he was also introduced to the Japanese martial art of Aikido.
In 1986, Sullivan joined the San Diego Tribune as an 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. Twice in the next five years Sullivan was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, once for a series that examined the lives and culture of children living with addicts, and a second time for a series that drew back the curtain on the culture and practices of corporate funeral home conglomerates. During these five years, he was lucky enough to become the personal student of Kazuo Chiba, one of the world's foremost Aikido masters.
Sullivan 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, (Kensington, 1994). Two years prior to the novel's publication, he quit the newspaper and moved to Vermont with his wife and young son.
In the next five years his family grew with the arrival of his son, Bridger. In an old converted barn where we lived, he wrote HARD NEWS, (Kensington, 1995), a mystery that exposes the underbelly of modern newspapers; THE PURIFICATION CEREMONY, (Avon, 1997), a suspense novel set in the world of tracking deer hunters; and GHOST DANCE, (Avon, 1999), a mystery set in Vermont.
That same year Sullivan moved to southwest Montana and began researching and writing LABYRINTH. He was recently awarded his fourth degree black belt in Aikido and teaches the art in Bozeman, MT.
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AUTHOR TALK: THE SERPENT'S KISS
 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.
(c) Copyright 2003, Mark T. Sullivan. All rights reserved.
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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.
(c) Copyright 2002, Mark T. Sullivan. All rights reserved.
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