Leighton Gage

Leighton Gage has been a copywriter, an advertising creative director, a magazine editor, and a writer/producer/director of documentary films and industrial videos. Dying Gasp is his third novel in the Chief Inspector Mario Silva series.

From his Q & A with author J. Sydney Jones:

Describe your connection to Brazil. How did you come to live there or become interested in it? And, if you do not live on site, do you make frequent trips there?

In 1973, I was offered a job in Brazil. I’d been working in The Netherlands for five years. I was ready for a change. I was thirty-one years old.

I arrived in São Paulo in the springtime. I fell in love with the country – and a girl. We’ve been married for thirty-two years. The language we use at home is Portuguese. The years have taken us, sometimes for extended periods, to many other places around the world, but Brazil is the place we always think of as home.

What things about Brazil make it unique and a good physical setting in your books?

Wouldn’t you agree that every place, when you come right down to it, is unique? Even small towns in America? On a larger scale, Brazil, like the United States, is a melting pot of many cultures. But there the similarity ends. The mix, for one thing, is entirely different. Six times as many slaves were imported into Brazil than were ever imported into North America. They’ve had a tremendous impact on culture and religion. Brazil, like the United States is immense. (Larger, in fact, than the continental 48.) But, again, the similarity ends there. Brazil is temperate in climate from north to south and from east to west. It hardly ever snows. There are few high mountains and only small deserts. Most people think of it as rural, but it isn’t. It’s highly urban. São Paulo is the largest city in the southern hemisphere. Brazil, like the United States is rich. But the distribution of wealth is an entirely different matter. Brazil is...[read on]

The Page 69 Test: Blood of the Wicked.

My Book, The Movie: Buried Strangers.

The Page 69 Test: Dying Gasp.

J. Sydney Jones is the author of twelve books, including the Viennese Mystery series--The Empty Mirror and Requiem in Vienna--the nonfiction Hitler in Vienna, 1907-1913, the guides Viennawalks and Vienna Inside-Out, and the Vienna-based suspense novel Time of the Wolf.

--Marshal Zeringue