A New Beginning

by David Lindsey | June 18th, 2011

It’s not easy to explain to readers why, after thirteen novels, I dropped out of sight for seven years. The reasons were varied and complex, but I’ll try to satisfy a reasonable curiosity about the seven years of silence.

I should say at the beginning of this explanation, however, that my remarks are made with a certain group of readers in mind, those fans who, over the course of seven years, continued to e-mail me at my website (which was growing woefully out of date with each passing year) and to whom I seldom responded. Your loyalty to a seemingly disloyal author, was, and is, deeply humbling…and very much appreciated. I am most grateful to all of you.
So, why the long absence?

The reasons that compel a writer to tell a particular story are infinitely variable, of course, but for me the motivation has always held one key ingredient: curiosity, about a situation, or a person, or the why and how of something, or, that mother of all curiosities for fiction writers: What if…? I had begun my writing career with a series of mystery novels, and then moved into variations of suspense, thriller, and spy novels. In all of these genres I followed my curiosity.

But after publishing The Face of the Assassin in 2004, I was feeling a need to reinvigorate my approach to this genre. I could say that I was burnt out, but that’s too easy and, actually, not quite true. What I needed was to be “taken” by a new idea, a new curiosity. While I was looking for something that would satisfy my restless imagination, I came across two subjects that, surprisingly, guided me away from writing fiction, something that I could not have imagined until then.

One was a multi-platform, near future television series that a friend and I had been tinkering with for a number of years. ORBIS is an international thriller that entangles a CIA officer and a research scientist in the investigation of a secret project called ORBIS at the laboratories of a global research giant. The CIA officer is recruited to join OCULOUS, a clandestine intelligence agency loyal to a secret alliance of the G20 countries. OCULOUS is monitoring a series of strange events that are happening all over the world, and which they fear are signs that experiments with extreme technologies may be causing the unraveling of biological existence as we know it. It’s a rollicking story that has kept me engaged for years.

Another project was a documentary about an architectural project. The “tallest building in the world” was in the planning stages to be built in Las Vegas, a staggering project that would surpass the mammoth architectural wonders in Dubai. Many of the same architects and construction companies involved in the Dubai skyscrapers were involved in this project. By a strange quirk of fortune a friend and I acquired the rights to film and document the entire multi-year process from the building’s design concept to its completion and opening day. A television series was also tied to this project, and the storyline would center around the trials and triumphs of operating a behemoth of this size that would contain multiple hotels.

For the next several years both of these projects consumed all of my time. I was traveling a lot between Chicago, L.A., and Las Vegas for the documentary, excited to be working on a long-term project that was enthusiastically supported by my agents in Los Angeles. But their excitement for the project was no match for the faltering economy. In the end the grisly economic conditions affecting the entire country shuttered the architecture project in Las Vegas.

ORBIS, however, is still alive. And, as we all know, hope springs eternal for everyone who has anything at all to do with a “Hollywood” project.

During these years, I also worked on screenplay adaptations for some of my novels, which I had been wanting to do for a long time.

Marten Fane
Then in late 2007 my curiosity found another fascination in a subject that seemed tailor-made for long form fiction: the astonishing rise of the government’s outsourcing of national intelligence. Silently, and out of sight, privatized spying had become a multi-billion dollar industry. The growth of this industry has been so explosive that private contractors now command over 70% of the nation’s intelligence budget. Some of the corporations getting these government contracts have become information industry giants with billions of dollars in revenues annually. Private contractors now suck up $42 billion annually of our national security budget, and the regulatory oversight of these corporate contractors is woefully lacking.

For me this was an incredible discovery, and the implications of this sea-change for the nation—and for individual citizens—seemed immensely important.

Again, I had found a subject that engaged my curiosity in a way that could only be satisfied by “playing it out.” I’ve always done a lot of research for my novels, and this idea was no exception. Eventually, I “met” Marten Fane whose story, I soon realized, was much too large to be encompassed in a single volume.

From the beginning I imagined Fane as a series character, and constructed his background with that in mind. His experience in the Special Investigations Division of the San Francisco Police Department (now renamed) and his connections in the CIA and other intelligence entities, will be needed to help him meet the challenges he’ll face with the giant private international intelligence corporation, Vector Strategies.

I intend the first Fane novel, Pacific Heights, to be the opening gambit in a story arc that will span the entire series. Of course, each novel will be its own discrete story, with its own story arc, complete in and of itself. But there will be characters, threads, and themes that will carry over into subsequent novels, all contributing to one larger story arc that will span and connect all the novels. In this sense, the Marten Fane series is really more of a serial novel, rather than a novel series.

I know that readers, and publishers, like to know what genre they are dealing with when they pick up a novel. But the Marten Fane novels aren’t just cop stories. Or mysteries, or thrillers, or spy stories. They will be all of those, but none of those exclusively. In the nervous new world of privatized global intelligence corporations, all of those things are wrapped into a new era of secrecy. It’s a hidden world in which the threats are infinite because the players have personal, global, corporate, national, international, and criminal agendas. There are no neat categories as we used to understand them during the cold war years. Today’s intelligence world has no boundaries, and it is more complex, and hidden in darker shadows than ever before.

One last thing. The long hiatus between my last novel and Pacific Heights has encompassed a lot of changes. I have acquired a new agent, a new publisher, a new protagonist for a new series, and because this series was a clear break from my past work, not only in time but also in approach, a pseudonym seemed a natural new beginning for me as well.

I hope Paul Harper’s Marten Fane novels will become your reading enthusiasm for many years to come.

| Category: etcetera |