Questions about the Fane story

As I’ve traveled to book signings during the last couple of weeks in Texas, California, and Arizona, and as I’ve talked about Pacific Heights and the other novels in the Fane story, some questions have been asked more than a few times about the new novels. Here are a couple of them, with my answers.

“If Pacific Heights is the first installment of a continuing story in a serial novel (the Marten Fane story), would I be able to understand what I’m reading if I don’t start with the beginning novel?”

The answer is yes. Each novel has a double storyline: one is the storyline that begins and ends in that particular novel, and another one that continues from the previous novel(s) into the next ones. Obviously, if you read all of the novels you will see a bigger picture, a larger storyline. But if you don’t, you will still read a storyline that begins and ends in each volume.

It may sound a little complicated, but it isn’t. (Well, it is a little more complicated from my point of view, but not from the reader’s.)

It’s very much like life itself. Each of us have short-term and long-term relationship, concerns, problems, and opportunities. Some consume years of our lives, others only months or weeks. But we balance them all simultaneously, and when the short-term issues are with us they become a part of our long-term issues as well. Life is complex, and with few exceptions everything we experience becomes a part of our identity, and contributes to the kind of person we are continually becoming.

“You’ve said that one of the reasons you changed your name for these novels is because you wanted to signal your readers that the Marten Fane story is different from your other novels. How is it different?”

As I’ve just discussed, being the first installment of a serial novel is one of the ways Pacific Heights is different from my previous novels. Also, most of my previous novels have been in the crime/detective/thriller genres, genres that are generally associated with fast-paced physical action. I’ve also written several that were considered espionage or spy novels. The Marten Fane story is more closely associated with the latter genres. All genres, of course, are broad and have sub-genres. If comparisons will help: the Fane novels will be closer to the le Carré and Alan Furst end of the spectrum of espionage fiction than toward the Tom Clancy/Daniel Silva end of the spectrum. Less action, more puzzle.

But let me emphasize, this is a generalization, and even making these comparisons can set up false expectations. The point is: it would help if the reader didn’t come to the Marten Fane story with a set of preconceptions about what the novels will be. Here’s why.

The world in which le Carré and Furst set their novels no longer exists…the pre-9/11 world. For espionage and spying everything changed on September 11, 2001.  In the post-9/11 world most of America’s spying is done by private contractors. Over 70% of U.S.’s $75 billion intelligence budget goes to private contractors who are privately held, for-profit companies. Most of our spying is now outsourced to thousands of large and small companies who have very little legal oversight and are subject to very little regulation. Some of them are global, multi-billion dollar corporations, and they answer to very few people.

Today nearly one million people have top secret clearance. That’s extraordinary. It changes the very nature of what secrecy and privacy mean. The marketplace for secrets is now monetized more than ever, and this new world moves at speeds measured in nanoseconds, not days or hours.

This new world has happened so fast that novelists are behind the curve on how to write about it. But all of that is about to change. Not because of my novels, but because fiction writers are waking up to the enormous implications of the vast changes that 9/11 had on the business of global intelligence.

As always some writers will interpret this new world with James Bond-style over-the-top action, some will approach it more realistically, others will use innovative approaches that maybe we haven’t seen before.

Regardless of how it’s done I would encourage you to be open minded. This is a very new world in more ways than we have yet learned to measure.

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I also want to mention two new books that some of you may find shockingly enlightening vis-à-vis the new intelligence world, secrets, privacy, and government contracting. It’s interesting that the two books have nearly identical titles, and both are published by university presses.

One Nation Under Surveillance, Simon Chesterman, Oxford University Press, 2011

One Nation Under Contract, Allison Stanger, Yale University Press, 2011.

The nearly identical titles emphasizes the “completeness” with which these changes have gripped our government and society. Important changes. We should all be better informed about them.

Also, here is a link to the Washington Post series, “Top Secret America: A hidden world, growing out of control,” and to its accompanying website topsecretamerica.com.

And don’t forget, this Fall, PBS television’s Front Line series will air their inside story of the making of the Washington Post series. Here is a link to the website for the PBS Frontline program.

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