Thriller Writer Steve Berry: Passionate about History and Mystery

Steve Berry

Steve Berry crafts bestselling thrillers that blend actual historical events with his fictional plots of mystery, intrigue, and action.

The Bishop’s Pawn, the recently released 13^th novel in Berry’s Cotton Malone series, centers on the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. while raising questions about what we don’t know about the tragedy.

A trial lawyer for thirty years and a founding member of International Thriller Writers, Berry has a passion for history. He does extensive research and has said in interviews that 90 percent of his Cotton Malone novels retain historical accuracy.

In this latest novel, Berry takes us back to the beginning of Malone’s career as a Justice Department operative. It is written from Malone’s point of view, a departure from Berry's earlier works that include viewpoints from multiple characters. This first-person approach gives the story an immediacy that works well.

The Cotton Malone series began with The Templar Legacy in 2006, a breakout novel for Berry, who has been a bestselling author ever since. His books sell in 51 countries and 40 languages.

In a 2016 interview with The Big Thrill magazine, Berry describes Malone “as a guy with ordinary problems, but he can do extraordinary things when called upon." Berry did not create Malone as a superhero. He is a man who makes mistakes and has flaws.

Complete List of Cotton Malone novels (2006 – 2018)

The Templar Legacy, The Alexandria Link, The Venetian Betrayal, The Charlemagne Pursuit, The Paris Vendetta, The Emperor’s Tomb, The Jefferson Key, The King’s Deception, The Lincoln Myth, The Patriot Threat, The 14^th Colony, The Lost Order and The Bishop’s Pawn.

A Personal Note

I was lucky enough to have a critique session with Steve Berry during a ThrillerFest conference several years ago. His insights and his ability to teach a writer how to edit their own work were beyond outstanding. I found him to be incredibly generous, taking time to coach aspiring novelists like myself.

An Appreciation: Philip Kerr and his Bernie Gunther series

Philip Kerr

Philip Kerr, a prolific writer best known for his Nazi-era-based Bernie Gunther series died March 23, less than two weeks before the release of his latest novel, Greeks Bearing Gifts. His thirteenth book in the series, which received a Kirkus starred review, has Gunther investigating murders in Greece in 1957, which may be tied to Nazi war crimes.

Readers were first introduced to Gunther in Kerr's trilogy Berlin Noir. Gunther, not a member of the Nazi Party, is a detective trying to stay alive and out of a concentration camp while Hitler ruled Germany. Wisecracking and scornful, Gunther is a good cop with a moral compass trapped in the maelstrom of the Nazi era. He is shrewd, cynical and always calculating his chances of survival.

In several interviews, Kerr said the idea for Bernie Gunther came to him when he thought about what Raymond Chandler would have done if Philip Marlowe lived in Berlin and not Los Angeles.

Yes, Kerr's novels are hard-boiled like Chandler's, but Kerr creates stories with moral complexities and crimes that are both personal and political. More than history books, the Gunther novels give readers a visceral feeling for the horrors, atrocities, and evils the Nazis brought to the German people and the world. Along with Gunther, we are drawn into the treacherous world he must navigate to solve crimes for his Nazi bosses and save his own skin.

The three novels comprising Berlin Noir include March Violets (1989), The Pale Criminal (1990) and The German Requiem (1991). Kerr then went on to write other novels and children's books, saying in interviews he needed a break from his time immersed in the Nazi era. He didn’t resume writing about Gunther again until 2006 with the novel, The One for the Other, about the search for a Nazi war criminal.

The novels in the series do not take place in chronological order. Some take place during the war others begin after the war with stories linked to the war years. Always they are historically accurate, and real-life Nazi officers including Reinhard Heydrich, Rudolph Hess, and Hermann Goring make their appearance.

Kerr’s final Bernie Gunther novel, Metropolis, will be published posthumously, according to Kerr’s editor, Marian Wood, quoted in Kerr’s New York Times obituary.

A complete list of Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series:

March Violets (1989), The Pale Criminal (1990),The German Requiem ( 1991), The One for the Other (2006), A Quiet Flame (2008), If the Dead Rise Not (2009), Field Gray (2010), Prague Fatale (2011), A Man Without Breath (2013), The Lady From Zagreb (2015), The Other Side of Silence (2016), Prussian Blue (2017), Greeks Bearing Gifts (2018), Metropolis (2019).

Donna Leon: Creator of Brunetti’s World

Creating memorable characters is essential for crime writers to attract readers to their work. Think Sherlock Holmes and Miss Marple. Among contemporary authors, few have been more successful than Donna Leon with her Venetian Commissario Guido Brunetti. The twenty-seventh novel in the series, The Temptation of Forgiveness, was released March 20.

Donna Leon

Readers have flocked to the Brunetti series as much to spend time with the wise and warm-hearted Commissario as to follow his investigations of crime and corruption in the city of Venice.

Venice, where Leon has lived since 1981, is itself a central character in the stories but we see the city with all its splendor and squalor through Brunetti's perceptive eyes.

What is it about Brunetti that continues to draw readers over decades?

I would suggest Brunetti stands out because he is 360 degrees from the anti-hero, tortured loners of so many contemporary crime novels.

Brunetti is a family man, whose wife and two teenaged children are central to his life. He is a veteran investigator adept at managing and circumventing his dim-witted superiors, and patient with human frailties even among criminals. He is a tenacious investigator who also goes home for lunch, allowing readers to experience the culinary brilliance of Paola, his wife and a professor of American literature.

While the crimes in this series involve the usual suspects, murder, theft, corruption, and the mafia, Leon avoids extreme violence and brutality, again in contrast to other crime and thriller novels. In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald in 2016, Leon said she prefers the ancient Greek approach to drama, showing the results of a crime, rather than depicting the crime itself.

Her deft choices have created the indelible world of Guido Brunetti, which continues to delight readers in thirty-five countries.

Fun Facts

Among the fans of Leon’s Brunetti series are UK Prime Minister Theresa May and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

The idea for the first Brunetti novel resulted from a joking discussion Leon had with friends about how to kill a world-renowned conductor. The conversation took place during a performance at the opera house La Fenice. Result: the novel, Death at La Fenice, published in 1992.

The Brunetti series has not been translated into Italian at Leon’s insistence so that she can maintain privacy where she lives.

Complete List of the Commissario Brunetti series

Death at La Fenice, 1992

Death in a Strange Country, 1993

The Anonymous Venetian, 1994

A Venetian Reckoning, 1995

Acqua Alta, 1996

The Death of Faith, 1997

A Noble Radiance, 1997

Fatal Remedies, 1999

Friends in High Places, 2000

A Sea of Troubles, 2001

Willful Behavior, 2002

Uniform Justice, 2003

Doctored Evidence, 2004

Blood from a Stone, 2005

Through a Glass Darkly, 2006

Suffer the Little Children, 2007

The Girl of His Dreams, 2008

About Face, 2009

A Question of Belief, 2010

Drawing Conclusions, 2011

Beastly Things, 2012

The Golden Egg, 2013

By Its Cover, 2014

Falling in Love, 2015

The Waters of Eternal Youth, 2016

Earthly Remains, 2017

The Temptation of Forgiveness, 2018

Quotable Quotes

Donna Leon

Donna Leon, author, Commissario Brunetti series

"I find the idea of vigilante justice very attractive. I like the idea that the murderer decides that this person has gone too far, and nothing will happen to him unless she does something to stop him."

Trailblazing Crime Writers in the Spotlight

Agatha Christie has the honor of being the bestselling mystery author in the world, but before she began her forty-year literary career back in 1920, women had been writing crime fiction for some seventy years.

In his anthology, “In the Shadow of Agatha Christie,” Editor Leslie S. Klinger showcases trailblazing women, who published crime stories between 1850 and 1917. Mostly unknown to today’s readers, these writers deserve recognition for their contribution to the crime and mystery genre. And thanks to Klinger, sixteen authors step out into the spotlight once again.

Many of the short stories in this anthology are out-of-print. However, a few names might be familiar to readers of classic mysteries. Elizabeth Gaskell, Carolyn Wells, and Baroness Orczy are still read. Baroness Orczy, whose contribution in this volume is “The Regent’s Park Murder,” is the author of the adventure novel “The Scarlet Pimpernel” which also enjoyed success as a play as well as two motion pictures, one produced in 1934 and a remake in 1982.

Here is a complete list of short stories in the anthology

Catherine Crowe – “The Advocate's Wedding Day”
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell – “The Squire's Story”
Mary Fortune – “Traces of Crime”
Harriet Prescott Spofford –“ Mr. Furbush”
Ellen Wood – “Mrs. Todhetley's Earrings”
Elizabeth Corbett – “Catching A Burglar”
C. L. Pirkis – “The Ghost of Fountain Lane”
Geraldine Bonner – “The Statement of Jared Johnson”
Ellen Glasgow – “Point in Morals”
L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace – “The Blood-Red Cross”
Baroness Orczy – “The Regent's Park Murder”
Augusta Groner – “The Case of the Registered Letter”
M. E. Braddon – “The Winning Sequence”
Anna Katherine Green – “Missing: Page Thirteen”
Carolyn Wells – “The Adventure of the Clothes-Line”
Susan Glaspell – “Jury of Her Peers”

Klinger, an authority on Sherlock Holmes, has also edited “In the Shadow of Sherlock Holmes” and “In the Shadow of Dracula.” Both feature authors whose works predate their more famous successors.

Quotable Quotes

Raymond Chandler

"If in doubt, have two guys come through the door

with guns."
RAYMOND CHANDLER

"It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York
City. New York City is itself a detective story."
AGATHA CHRISTIE

Ross MacDonald

"The detective isn't your main character, and neither is 

your villain. The main character is the corpse. The detective's
job is to seek justice for the corpse. It's the corpse's story,
first and foremost."
ROSS MACDONALD

Sue Grafton: A Grand Master Lives on in her Novels

Sue Grafton belonged to an elite group of writers who created gutsy, independent, smart, and sassy female protagonists who knew how to solve crimes.

Sadly, Grafton left us in 2017 before completing the last book in her Alphabet series, but her iconic private investigator Kinsey Millhone, the thirty-something, twice-divorced Californian, lives on.

It is no accident that Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series first became a smash hit in the 1980s. Kinsey was the right protagonist at the right time. The eighties were an era in which women were not only entering the workforce in large numbers but also breaking into nontraditional roles in law, medicine, law enforcement, and finance.

Women were smashing old stereotypes, and Grafton's Kinsey crashed into the once male-dominated detective genre. Kinsey showed women and men that she could handle herself on the street, outsmart the bad guys and cope with whatever adversity life threw at her.

In an interview with the New York Times in 1985, Grafton said: “Most of the hard-boiled male detectives go through murder and mayhem, and it has absolutely no impact on their personalities. I find it more interesting to see what the constant exposure to violence and death really does to a human being.” In the first novel in the series, A is for Alibi, Kinsey tells readers: “The day before yesterday I killed someone and the fact weighs heavily on my mind.”

In her Kinsey Millhone series, Grafton dealt with the ramifications of violent crime, giving Millhone the complexity of a real woman. And she gave her readers a character that they savored throughout the 25-book series and which they can come back to again and again well into the future.

For her work, Grafton was honored in her lifetime with the title of Grand Master from the Mystery Writers of America. She once wrote to readers on her website: “These novels take incredible focus, ingenuity, energy and imagination.”

And she managed to sustain all those qualities for more than thirty-five years of writing. Brava.