Chris Pavone is author of the New York Times bestsellers The Accident and The Expats, which won both the Edgar and Anthony awards, has been translated into twenty languages, and is being developed for film, and the brand-new thriller The Travelers, which is already under option at DreamWorks. Pavone was a book editor for nearly two decades before moving to Luxembourg, where he started writing The Expats. He now lives again in New York City with his wife and kids.From Pavone's Q&A with Mark Rubinstein at the Huffington Post:
The Travelers takes readers from the beaches of France, to Barcelona, New York, Argentina and to Iceland, all places hiding a dark story of surveillance, lies and espionage. How did you acquire so much knowledge about clandestine espionage operations?Visit Chris Pavone's website.
[Laughter] I don’t think I’ve acquired much knowledge about espionage.
I imagined this novel as a story about people who don’t really know for whom they work. We all live in a universe in which we’re either asked to or are forced to accept certain premises about our employment without having the opportunity to verify them. There are some types of employment where it’s perfectly clear for whom you’re working: for instance, teaching in a public school, your boss is the principal, who works for the Board of Education which is publicly funded, it’s very clear.
It’s less clear in the private sector. We go to work every day and often don’t know who owns the company or what their real agenda may be. We don’t truly know what kind of contribution we’re making to some hidden end-game. It took me a decade of working for a large company before I had the curiosity to find out who actually owned that company.
That experience became the premise of this novel. Espionage is somewhat incidental to the story I wanted to tell.
In most espionage novels, the characters risk their lives trying to save somebody, or while protecting a nation from some threat. In The Travelers, that’s not what’s going on. I used espionage as a device to heighten the characters’ personal dramas.
Self-interest thrusts the characters into conflict with one another. Deceit in both personal and business relationships results in...[read on]
See: Chris Pavone: five books that changed me.
Coffee with a Canine: Chris Pavone & Charlie Brown.
The Page 69 Test: The Expats.
The Page 69 Test: The Accident.
The Page 69 Test: The Travelers.
--Marshal Zeringue