Book Review: Beyond Bedlam’s Door by Mark Rubinstein, MD

Ace Atkins is the bestselling author of 21 novels, including The Fallen and now, Little White Lies. Ace has been nominated for every major award in crime fiction, including the Edgar Award. A former newspaper reporter and football player at Auburn, Ace also writes essays and investigative pieces for several national publications including the Wall Street Journal, Garden & Gun, and Men’s Journal.

Little White Lies picks up on Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels for which Ace was selected as the writer by the Parker estate. The story beings with Connie Kelly who thought she found her perfect man on an online dating site. She fell so hard for M. Brooks Welles, she wrote him a check for nearly $300,000 to be invested on her behalf. Soon afterwards, both her money and Welles are gone. When Spenser discovers everything about Welles was phony, it’s just the beginning of a trail leading from Boston to the backroads of Georgia, where deadly surprises await Spenser and his friend Hawk.

Before we talk about Little White Lies, some questions about Ace Atkins. Was there an event or influence in your early years that made you want to become a writer?

The biggest thing for me was I really loved books as a kid. I wasn’t just a causal reader. I really was obsessed with books. In high school, I became a book collector of rare editions and I was very into Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, so it just fed into my wanting to write my own stories.

You obviously have a natural talent for storytelling, but you were also influenced by these early exposures. In your view, is becoming a writer an inborn trait or something one learns? Is it nature or nurture?

I’ve thought about that with my own kids. I think there are kids who tend to have a richer fantasy life than others. They seem to have more imagination and possess a creative tendency.

I think the most valid view is a writer has to have a little bit of both. There must to be talent and innate curiosity, but a writer should hone these abilities to translate what’s inherently in his mind on to the page. So, it’s a bit of DNA coupled with learning the craft.

You were a varsity football player at Auburn and became a journalist. How did that come about?

It wasn’t easy [Laughter]. My biggest motivator was I didn’t want to become a football coach. I majored in mass communications, studying screen writing, and also took English and Southern literature courses.

I had a friend who said ‘It you want to become a writer, the best place to do it is to go into the newsroom.’ I thought about people like Hemingway and Graham Greene and other writers I respected who honed their craft as journalists. I was living in Florida and took a job with the St. Petersburg Times. I was scraping by earning pennies writing stories. I’m not kidding, I was paid thirty bucks per story. If I got fifty bucks, it was a windfall. Eventually, I became a fulltime reporter.

It took a few years before I got my sea legs because I didn’t have a journalism background. It was also a bad time with the recession. Reporters were being laid off, but eventually, I became a staff writer at the Tampa Tribune. That experience was valuable because the editors helped me hone what I was doing and I became a much better writer.

How did your career as a journalist prepare you for writing fiction?

One of the things I see with amateur writers, or those who haven’t been in the news business as print journalists, is a failure to get to the point of a story. As a journalist, you learn that words are cheap, and that everything you put on the page is not magic. Having worked with some very tough news editors, I learned how to get to the point of a story. For instance, in a news story, I might have two-thousand quotes, but I had to decide which were the best quotes to use in a story. I learned the meaning of dialogue and which words had the most impact. I learned how to write good sentences and to write with clarity and color.

Those were the lessons that prepared me to become a fiction writer, drawing on my training and experiences writing news feature stories.

I understand Little White Lies is loosely based on an ex-FOX News pundit’s false CIA claims and other con men you covered as a journalist over the years. Will you talk about that?

I’ve always been fascinated by con men. Let me tell you something, Tampa and the St. Petersburg area of Florida are con man havens. Certain kinds of people who’ve screwed up go there to reinvent their lives.

I was really fascinated by Wayne Simmons. His story is relevant to today’s news cycles where people are debating what is truth versus what is fake news. People who watch news programs on television may not realize that what they’re seeing is programmed more for entertainment than for imparting accurate information.

This guy, Wayne Simmons, was able to work his way onto television shows claiming to have been a CIA analyst and officer. He was eventually ‘outed” by people who had actually worked for the CIA. He conned a woman out of a few hundred thousand dollars in a real estate scam.

I also ran into a story about a man I covered as a reporter. He’d worked a similar kind of scam with women all over Tampa. The CIA scam is the best one these people use. It’s the greatest go-to for con men because the CIA cannot confirm or deny employment. It can’t be verified or disproven. While I was working at the Tampa Tribune, I wrote about this guy and did a three-part series on con men.

Since Spenser never had to go up against a good con man case, I figured Little White Lies would involve this kind of scam. Years ago, I actually met Frank Abagnale, a reformed con man who was about to have a movie made about his exploits. Catch Me If You Can is based on his story. Another con man scam is someone claiming to have been a former Navy SEAL. I know a former SEAL who ‘outs’ about thirty of these guys every single day.

I’ve noticed that in Little White Lies and other books in the Spenser series, Spenser has a cynical and edgy sense of humor. Will you talk about the role of humor in thrillers and mysteries?

There’s humor in Spenser’s world view as originally written by Robert B. Parker. And, it’s somewhat consistent with my own view of things. Spenser is the same as he was in the 1970s. Ironically, I feel I have more in common with Spenser than with my own creation, Quinn Colson.

As for humor in thrillers and mysteries, when I pick up a book that doesn’t have a thread of humor in it, I have very little patience for it. I sense my patience dwindling as I get older. The writers I really respect, and who write with a nice helping of humor—for instance, Carl Hiaasen—do so, even though they write serious stories. I’ve been writing fiction for almost twenty years, and as an older writer, I realize it’s something I enjoy incorporating into my writing. Raymond Chandler wrote about some very dark alleys in LA, but he wrote with humor, as did Bob Parker. Humor made Spenser very special for me.

Little White Lies has some chilling fight scenes. Will you talk about constructing such pulse-pounding scenes?

In his later years, Bob Parker got away from some of the raw violence. In his last few books, the violence was somewhat bloodless. The fight scenes in his early books were really nasty and didn’t feel choreographed. And Spenser did not always win, but he always persevered. I’ve tried to craft Spenser’s fight scenes with realism. Violence is ugly. It’s not a video game. I write it with detail, grit and authenticity.

In Bob Parker’s early books, gritty violence was a hallmark of the series, and fans commented they liked that very much.

You’ve written various series with different protagonists. Which character has been the most compelling for you to write?

The most compelling for me would have to be Quin Colson. I’m vitally invested in watching Quinn grow and evolve. I’ve been writing the Spenser novels for seven years. He’s a fully formed man who knows who he is. He’s well aware of his faults and strengths.

Quinn Colson is more of a work in progress. He’s a younger man who is changing. Like many heroes in legends and myths, he’s gone off to war, has come home and must fight things in his own backyard. It’s interesting for me to see who he will become. When I first created him he was twenty-nine years old. Now, I hope I’m writing him as an older man who’s going through an evolution.

Can you complete the following sentence? Writing novels has taught me____________.

I think it’s taught me to understand people more than I did before. I would like to say that it’s given me empathy, but I don’t think I’m there yet. Writing novels has helped me understand people more than I did before. It’s helped me understand the motivations of people—even the bad guys. It’s allowed me to explore human nature. So, sort of like Quinn Colson, I’m evolving, too.

What’s coming next from Ace Atkins?

The new Quinn Colson book, The Fallen, is next. My foreseeable future involves Spenser and Quinn. I’m very fortunate because I do love these two characters.

Congratulations on writing Little White Lies the latest in a series described by the Associated Press as “Classic Spenser—the Spenser of wry wit, tasty food and drinks, hard workouts and lethal confrontations…once again, Atkins has delivered a thriller that evokes the best of Parker’s Spenser series.” The AP assessment is right on the money!

Mark Rubinstein’s latest non-fiction book is Beyond Bedlam’s Door: True Tales from the Couch and Courtroom, a medical/psychiatric memoir.

John Sandford is the pseudonym for the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Camp. After turning to fiction, he’s written many bestselling books, including twenty-seven Prey novels, his most recent being the just-released Golden Prey. He’s also penned four Kidd novels; nine Virgil Flowers novels; three standalone novels, and three YA novels coauthored with his wife, Michele Cook.

Golden Prey sends Lucas Davenport on a sustained manhunt for Garvin Poole who’s been lying low for years. It’s been rumored he’s dead; but Poole resurfaces in Biloxi, Mississippi where he has masterminded a heist of millions of dollars from a Honduran drug cartel. The operation has left five people dead, including a six-year-old girl. Poole unwittingly left behind some of his DNA, so the authorities know he’s alive and back in the game.

When Lucas, now a U.S. marshal, and his team begin tracking Poole, complications arise as the Honduran cartel has sent its own killers to track Poole, reclaim the money, and exact retribution.

Lucas Davenport is a larger-than-life character. Will you give us a brief description of him?

He’s tall and good-looking in a rugged way. He has a couple of scars on his face and one on his neck, and he’s got a mean smile, but kindly eyes. He likes excitement and intensity, and doesn’t shy away from a fight. When I put him together, I tried constructing a character both men and women would like. He’s a tough guy but really likes smart women. He has a great fashion sense, and wears clothes well.

There are two fascinating villains in Golden Prey: Garvin Poole and Sturgill Darling. Despite their criminality, they’re complex characters with deep commitments to women, and to each other. Will you talk about villains and what makes them interesting?

Many things can make a villain interesting. You know, a typical killer so often described in thrillers is despicable from start to finish: his nose drips, he’s pure evil. These two guys are country people who are out of time. They don’t live in the computer world, even though they have computers. In his spare time, Garvin Poole makes electric guitars. He’s not the kind of guy who’s going to make it in an office or working a nine-to-five job, he’s independent to his core.

Sturgill Darling is a serious farmer, who maintains a well-tended farm and he’s committed to his wife.

I like them both even though they’re bad guys. They’re likable because they were shaped to some extent by forces they couldn’t control—each had a deprived past. I think the most appealing villains are those who act badly but aren’t bad human beings. Interesting villains have more than one dimension and have different facets to their personalities.

Golden Prey features a great deal about technology in tracing and tracking criminals. How have you kept up with these modern techniques?

One thing I realized when I began the book is that it’s impossible to write an old-fashioned crime story like those featured in the sixties and seventies. It doesn’t work well anymore. Those people left clues that can no longer be contested in court. Take DNA for example, it’s impossible to refute if it’s found.

If you write contemporary police procedural novels, it’s tough for anyone to get away with anything.

Consider the iPhone: it tracks every place you’ve been. That means the cops can accurately place you at the crime scene; and it’s the same thing with the GPS navigation system in your car.

For me, technology is almost a character in the book, albeit a very complicated and omnipresent one. Yes, I do research but I’m also struck by how people are so consumed by it and connected to it. You can’t walk down the street without encountering many people on their cellphones texting or talking.

Who do you find more compelling to write about: Virgil Flowers or Lucas Davenport?

I don’t find either one more compelling than the other because they’re totally different from each other. Virgil is a guy who is sort of left in the past. The killings he gets involved with are more mundane than those in which Lucas is involved. The perpetrators are usually the losers in society. They’re not clever criminals. Virgil allows me to use my sense of humor much more than Lucas does.

Lucas Davenport is much more intense and far darker than Virgil Flowers. I like writing both of them. Virgil is very much of a release for me after writing about Davenport because I can have fun with him as opposed to the intensity of Davenport.

Is there anything about your writing process that might surprise our readers?

I don’t think there’s anything about the process itself that might surprise readers; however, perhaps they don’t realize it’s very hard work. I’m sitting at a computer many hours every day. Because the work is so consuming, I have to make an effort to get away from the novels. I have to force myself to take a break to exercise. I didn’t exercise yesterday; I sat at the computer for most of the day, and as a result, today I have a sore back. Writing is actually very hard work. I don’t just type a few words and then go out for a latte. [Laughter]. I know people appreciate when the book is good, but I think they don’t understand how hard it is physically and mentally to write.

When we last talked, you mentioned wanting to “cut back” to one novel a year so you could pursue other interests. But you’re still writing at a torrid pace. Tell us about that.

I’m going to have to cut back sooner or later because the pace really does hurt, and it keeps me from doing other things. I sit at the computer for hours every day, but, even when I’m not actually writing, I’m thinking and talking about it. For instance, last night my wife and I sat down and had a protracted conversation about the possibility of writing two other novels. We discussed all the complications of establishing the plots. When I’m doing two books a year, even when I’m away from the computer, I can’t get away from the writing.

For instance, when I walk around on the street, I look at signs, trucks, and bumper stickers, all of which contribute ideas for the books. Even when I’m in the car just out for a cruise, I’ll see something interesting and make a mental note of it. And it all comes down to the fact that I can’t get away from the writing and find it very hard to relax.

I’d like to be able to pursue other interests, like play a round of golf which I used to enjoy, but writing demands a great deal of my time and soaks up my physical and mental energy.

When you write a YA novel with your wife, how do you switch gears for a very different audience?

That was hard, too. But, I have youngsters in the Davenport books and also in the Virgil Flowers books. The kids in the YA novels and those in Virgil’s are sort of old-fashioned kids. They’re not the type of kids walking down the street with friends where all of them are on their cellphones. They’re from a somewhat earlier era. They’re not sexting on their cellphones. In a way, they’re not truly modern kids. I simply can’t conceive of some of the things kids do today.

I understand you once wrote a non-fiction book about plastic surgery. Will you tell us about that?

I wrote two non-fiction books: one about art, and the other about plastic surgery. When I was a reporter, I became interested in medical reporting. I wrote a few stories out of a hospital emergency room. I became very interested in medical and surgical issues. Then, I saw some patients who’d been severely burned and became aware of the emotional impact burns had on patients. I saw plastic surgery performed on a little girl who’d had all the hair on her head burned off in a mobile home fire. She had terrible scarring on her scalp. I watched a plastic surgeon do reconstructive surgery on this child and he restored all her hair. I interviewed the surgeon, who convinced me that appearance is a critical issue for people. I asked him if we could put together a book detailing a whole series of plastic surgical cases. I compiled a few dozen cases and incorporated them into the book. Some were reconstructive while others were for aesthetic reasons, but all were vitally important for the patients.

What’s coming next from John Sandford?

I’m almost two-thirds of the way through the next Virgil Flowers book.

Congratulations on writing Golden Prey, a blistering addition to the Prey series. The books are so compelling, Stephen King said, ‘If you haven’t read Sandford yet, you have been missing one of the great summer-read novelists of all time.’