Patricia Gussin

Patricia Gussin is an author, physician, medical researcher and mother.

Her novels include Shadow of Death, Twisted Justice, and The Test, all thrillers, reflect her dual passions for family and medicine. From a Q & A about the latest:

How did you get the idea for The Test?

My husband and I were heading toward the beach one fine summer day when we came upon a neighbor who seemed agitated, so we stopped to chat. Acting like amateur psychologists, we let him rant and rave about how fanatical he was about what to leave his children in his will. He wanted to be fair, but also wanted to reward
them according to his perception of admirable behavior. He ended up by saying, “I guess, what I want is to rule from the grave.” That statement served as the framework for The Test. What would happen if a very wealthy man created a will designed to rule from the grave?

Which part of the writing process did you enjoy most? Why?

I enjoyed creating the Parnell family. I love large, complicated families and find them the perfect stage to play out the range of human emotions.

Which part of the writing process was most difficult? Why?

The most difficult challenge in writing The Test was...[read on]

Visit Patricia Gussin's website.

The Page 69 Test: Shadow of Death.

My Book, The Movie: Twisted Justice.

--Marshal Zeringue

Philip Kerr

At the Independent, some what Arifa Akbar found out from one minute with Philip Kerr, author of the "Bernhard Gunther" novels and other books:

Choose a favourite author, and say why you like her/him:

If I could choose her, I'd pick my wife, Jane Thynne, who writes thinking man's thrillers. But if that is too nepotistic, I'd say Raymond Chandler. He is a dark sort of PG Wodehouse, a great prose stylist whose descriptions are like perfect ice-cream sundaes. He has real firecracker descriptions of people.

* * *
Which fictional character most resembles you?

Jack Torrance from [Stephen King's] The Shining. He has that writer's obsessive compulsiveness to sit in front of a computer no matter what. It touches so many nerves for authors.

* * *
Who is your hero/heroine from outside literature?

David Hockney. I like his...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Victor Lodato

Victor Lodato is a playwright and poet. He is the recipient of Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, and has won numerous awards for his plays, including one from the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays. His newly released debut novel is Mathilda Savitch.

From his Q & A with Lauren Mechling at the Wall Street Journal:

The Wall Street Journal: How did you capture the voice of a teenage girl?

Mr. Lodato: That's the voice that came to me. For a long time I felt more like a secretary than a writer, I just let her babble and I wrote everything down that I heard. It's almost musical; she's clearly a pretty idiosyncratic child. I knew parts of the story within a few months, but there were aspects that I didn't know till I'd made it halfway through. That was what kept it fun and that is why I set the book in present tense. There is an aspect to Mathilda that feels alive and nervous and dangerous.

What do you find is the biggest difference between writing plays and writing fiction?

When you write a play you have to draw the...[read on]

Watch the video trailer for Mathilda Savitch and learn more about the book at the Farrar, Straus and Giroux website.

The Page 69 Test: Mathilda Savitch.

--Marshal Zeringue

Iain Banks

Iain Banks' mainstream fiction includes The Wasp Factory (1984), Walking on Glass (1985), The Bridge (1986), Espedair Street (1987), Canal Dreams (1989), The Crow Road (1992), Complicity (1993), Whit (1995), A Song of Stone (1997), The Business (1999), Dead Air (2002) and The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007). His new mainstream novel is Transition.

Banks' science fiction includes seven novels based around The Culture, a massive interstellar civilization. These novels are: Consider Phlebas (1987), The Player of Games (1988), Use of Weapons (1990), Excession (1996), Inversions (1998), Look to Windward (2000) and Matter (2008). His non-Culture science fiction novels are Against a Dark Background (1993), Feersum Endjinn (1994) and The Algebraist (2004), which was nominated for the Hugo Award. A collection of short fiction, The State of the Art (1989), contains both Culture and non-Culture work.

From his Q & A with Anna Metcalfe at the Financial Times:

Who is your perfect reader?

Probably me, with slightly better taste.

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What book changed your life?

The Wasp Factory.

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What is the strangest thing you’ve done when researching a book?

Using the equation e=mc2 to work out the explosive yield of very small quantities of antimatter, to determine how small an effective nano-missile could be.

Read the complete Q & A.

--Marshal Zeringue

Randa Jarrar

Jessica Lee Jernigan queried Randa Jarrar about her critically acclaimed debut novel, A Map of Home. Part of the interview:

One of the things I admired most about your book was how—without melodrama, and without allowing your heroine excessive self-pity—you make the political personal. At 13, Nidali isn’t upset about the invasion of Kuwait because it’s an abrogation of international law; she’s upset about it because it screws up her social life. This is something that a lot of readers will, I think, understand in a way that they might not understand, say, the feeling of having bombs dropped near one’s home.

Randa Jarrar: Thank you. Well, I made a conscious choice early on in the process for Nidali to have a fresh perspective—that the things that would upset or anger her should surprise the reader. For example, a reader might expect the family to leave Kuwait because of the danger or the imminent arrival of American forces, but they leave because they run out of za’tar spice. I just think it’s funnier and more interesting that way.

There’s a moment in your novel when Nidali’s father remarks on the constantly shifting borders of Palestine and says, “There’s no telling where home starts and where it ends.” For him, this is tragic, but, for Nidali, it’s liberating. Is Nidali’s reaction an accurate reflection of your own feelings about the idea of home?

RJ: Nidali’s dad has suffered so much partly because he lost his home, and also because he’s spent so much time and energy trying to regain it, even psychologically. Nidali has a different take, a different way to adapt to displacement. She can either find it tragic, the way her baba does, or she can find or cling to a new home, or she can realize that she is a borderless person; someone who can belong anywhere. Of course, the last option is the most...[read on]

My Book, The Movie: A Map of Home.

--Marshal Zeringue

Libby Fischer Hellmann

Last spring, thriller writer CJ Lyons talked with fellow author Libby Hellmann about her writing.

Part of the Q & A:

CJ: Tell us about your background and how you broke into fiction.


LH: Writing books was never in my master plan. I was going to be a film-maker. In fact, I planned to become the Lina Wertmuller of the US and dance into the sunset with Ingmar Bergman.

Funny about that.

I got an MFA in film production but started working in broadcast news. Aside from loving film, I had acquired a healthy news jones. It’s understandable – I was raised in Washington DC, and when you’re gossiping about the neighbors, you’re usually talking politics. After a while I moved to Chicago and worked for a PR firm where I produced industrial films and videos, wrote speeches, and coached executives in communication skills.

I didn’t start writing until the 1996, after my father passed away, but it took five years and three “practice” novels before I mastered the craft of fiction well enough to be published. I remember writing an article about getting published called “Doing it By the Book”… because that’s pretty much what happened. I did what they say you’re supposed to: I went to conferences, I volunteered, I sent out query letters, I revised, and ultimately I got an agent. She sold what became An Eye for Murder to Berkley Prime Crime for a three book deal. The unusual part ...[read on]

Read an excerpt from Doubleback, Hellmann's new novel, and watch the video trailer.

My Book, The Movie: A Shot To Die For.

The Page 69 Test: Easy Innocence.

My Book, The Movie: Easy Innocence.

Visit Libby Fischer Hellmann's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Ellroy

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. His L.A. Quartet novels—The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz—were international best sellers. His novel American Tabloid was Time magazine’s Best Book (fiction) of 1995; his memoir, My Dark Places, was a Time Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable Book for 1996. His novel The Cold Six Thousand was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book for 2001. Ellroy lives in Los Angeles.

From a Q & A about his latest novel, Blood's A Rover:

Q: How does this book differ from the other two books in the Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy? The plot is quite complex, and there are tons of characters. How did you keep all the story lines straight?

A: Truth be told, it’s markedly less complex than The Cold Six Thousand and slightly more complex than American Tabloid. The historical period–1968-1972–is less iconic than the periods covered in the first two books; thus, I had greater latitude to fictionalize. Again, this is a novel of outward revolution and revolution of the soul. There is greater dialectic in this novel than in my previous twelve novels combined. How did I keep the storyline straight? I wrote a 397-page outline, that laid out the action, down to the most minute detail. Meticulousness, diligence, profoundly rigorous work habits all contributed to the greatness of this novel. During the odd moments that my super-human resolve faltered, I stared at the numerous portraits of Beethoven that adorn my pad and at the photo of Joan that I keep on my nightstand (the left side, of course).

Q: As in the first two books, readers will recognize a lot of the names in Blood’s A Rover–Howard Hughes, J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard Nixon to name a few. So how much of the story is really true?

A: Yeah, Gay Edgar Hoover, Howard “Dracula” Hughes, and Tricky Dick Nixon appear...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue

Peter Maass

One of the six questions Ken Silverstein asked Peter Maass about his new book, Crude World...and Maass' answer:

The discovery of oil in poor countries seems very seldom to result in general prosperity. What accounts for this so-called “resource curse”?

It’s an odd thing–you’d think every country with a lot of oil would be lucky. And many are. The United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Brunei have so much oil and such small populations that it would be impossible for them to not prosper. Canada certainly benefits, thanks to a diversified economy that saves it from the downsides of depending on a sole resource. Norway is in great shape because its institutions were solid when its North Sea tap was opened, enabling it to withstand the pressures and temptations of oil dependency (hence the lesson that it’s best to find democracy before finding oil).

But in poor countries, dependence on exports of a single resource or just a few resources can lead to destabilizing booms and busts. Without good oversight and management, resource revenues can be siphoned off through corruption and waste. When oil dominates an economy, the farming and manufacturing sectors can suffer from neglect as well as exchange-rate imbalances. That’s a bigger problem than you’d think, because the oil industry is capital intensive, creating few jobs. Even Saudi Arabia, which has more oil than any other country, has high unemployment. And research from Paul Collier and other scholars shows that a dependence on resource revenues can lead to less democracy and higher risks of violence, due to struggles for access to state-owned resources. Resources are central elements in the violence that afflicts countries like Nigeria, Congo and Iraq.

I think “curse” might be too strong a word, because it implies a fate that is inescapable or that operates like an economic law. Better to think of it as a peril. And it’s good to remember the advice of J. Paul Getty, the legendary oilman who did a good job of summing up the underlying problem. As he is credited with saying, “The meek shall inherit the Earth, but not the mineral rights.”

Read the other five Q & As.

--Marshal Zeringue

Michelle Huneven

Michelle Huneven is the author of the novels Round Rock and Jamesland. She has received a General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Writers and a Whiting Writers’ Award for fiction.

Her new novel is Blame, the story of a woman who believes she accidentally killed a mother and daughter during a drunken blackout.

From Huneven's Q & A with Hilary S. Kayle at Publishers Weekly:

Where'd you get the idea for your plot?

I heard a man tell a story that he was arrested for killing his ex-wife. Because he'd been in an alcoholic blackout, he assumed he was guilty; the motive was there, and he had no memory of it. Luckily, he had an alibi in spite of himself, and that story stuck with me for about 20 years. I also wanted to write a book about somebody who didn't feel like she was a good person. What if you don't know if you're owned by darkness or not? Finally, I was really interested in a life spent pursuing goodness and atonement, and then finding out that maybe you weren't as bad as you thought you were.

Your main character, Patsy MacLemoore, spends time in prison. What kind of research did you do to make those scenes feel real?

I knew an older woman who'd...[read on]

Read an excerpt from Blame, and learn more about the author and her work at Michelle Huneven's website.

The Page 69 Test: Blame.

--Marshal Zeringue

Deborah Tannen

Deborah Tannen's latest book is You Were Always Mom's Favorite!: Sisters in Conversation Throughout Their Lives. From her Q & A with Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Magazine:

As a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and the author of many popular books on the language of relationships, what did you learn about the current state of sisterhood from researching your new book, “You Were Always Mom’s Favorite!”?

Sister relationships span a huge range, from best friends to worst enemies. From “I adore her; I talk to her five times a day” to “I decided to cut her out of my life.” For most women, it’s in between.

Would you say that literature has overemphasized the darker side of sisterhood? I am thinking of Cordelia and her abusive sisters in “King Lear.”
In Cordelia and the Cinderella stories, there are three sisters, but it’s really two against one. The two baddies are...[read on]

Visit Deborah Tannen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue