The Crime Cafe

My guest for this episode of the Crime Cafe podcast is internationally bestselling crime writer Gregg Hurwitz.

Check out our discussion of his Orphan X series and his other projects.

Download a copy of the transcript here.

Debbi: Hi everyone. It’s my pleasure to have with me today. The New York Times number one internationally best-selling author of 24 thrillers, including the Orphan X Series. His novels have won numerous literary awards and been published in 33 languages. He’s also written screenplays, television scripts, comics, and poetry. He is actively working against polarization in politics and culture, which I think is wonderful, by writing op-eds for the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and other publications. My guest today is Gregg Hurwitz. Hi, Gregg. So happy to see you here.

Gregg: Hi. Good to see you too. Thank you for having me on.

Debbi: It’s my pleasure, believe me. So, tell us about the Orphan X series and your tenth book in particular, Nemesis. What inspired you to write this series?

Gregg: Well, I have a lot of friends who were in the special operations community, and over the years hanging out with them, I did a lot of research with them through the early books, sneaking onto demolition ranges with Navy SEALs to blow up cars, getting on all these different kinds of weapons, and I was always intrigued when they talked about black operations and how they were funded and how they worked. And I had this moment one time of just thinking how amazing would it be if there was a government program that took kids who were unwanted out of foster homes and took them off the radar completely and raised them up and trained them in silos separate from everybody else to be assassins who could do things that America can’t do, who are essentially expendable. And so, that’s what happens to my lead character when he’s 12.

I have a lot of friends who were in the special operations community, and over the years hanging out with them, I did a lot of research with them through the early books …

His name is Evan Smoak. He’s taken out of a foster home in East Baltimore, and he’s raised by a handler, who in fact becomes his father figure and actually loves this kid. His name is Jack Johns. And he tells Evan, “The hard part is not going to be making you a killer. The hard part will be keeping you human.” And so Evan, basically, those are two directives on a collision course. And at some point, those things explode before the series even starts and Evan goes off on his own, flees the program, and basically becomes someone who helps people. He’s like an assassin, a pro bono assassin. He helps people in desperate need who have nowhere else to turn who can call an encrypted phone number, 18552 nowhere, that you can call and you can see who answers. And he picks up the phone and says, “Do you need my help?” And if they need his help, he will go anywhere and do anything to help and protect them.

Debbi: Wow. In some ways it reminds me of the old show, The Saint. He’s a rich person. I don’t know about Evan, but this person is rich, and he uses his wealth to help people out in all sorts of terrible situations, using all sorts of means.

Gregg: There is an aspect like that of Evan. He has a bunch of money still from when he was in the program because he was given a lot of resources that were stashed in non-reporting countries. And so when he fled the program, he had all this hidden cash put away and he can use that, his resources and his highly unusual skill set to help people.

Debbi: Wow. That’s really a remarkable concept. I love it. As I understand it, the series has kind of an overarching plot to it in terms of an arc. Do you have a plan for how many books you’re going to write, and do you have a series Bible?

Gregg: I don’t have a concrete plan, but Nemesis is the tenth. And as much as if you read the books and you’re a series reader, you’ll find all sorts of, I hope, richness and texture throughout the books as Evan grows. But I make sure that in every book is an onboarding point for new readers, so you can read them all as stand-alones and there’s just more to them if you read them together. And I am not sure how many I’m going to write. Right now, I’m enjoying it so much that certainly the next one and the next next one and the next next one are going to be Orphan X books, and that’s about as far ahead as I’ve thought.

I make sure that in every book is an onboarding point for new readers, so you can read them all as stand-alones and there’s just more to them if you read them together.

Debbi: Wow. Well, that’s thinking far ahead and that’s good. Let’s see. Did you come up with the series kind of completely thought out in terms of where you wanted to go, or do you kind of improvise as you go?

Gregg: It’s a weird combination. It’s funny. When I look back on the series, there’s been this very logical progression through the books that I didn’t necessarily plan. I knew I had different stories. Certainly when I sold the series, I had an idea already then that became the premise for the sixth book. I knew once we knew Evan well enough that one day when he gets that phone call and he answers and says, “Do you need my help,” someone’s going to say, “Evan, it’s your mother,” and it’s the mother who he’d never met. So I had sort of these different plots that were put out there, but I didn’t have it all neatly ordered and I’m filling it in because I discover so much when I’m writing. The characters come to life in different ways and I tend to follow the story, the stories themselves, and I’ve learned a lot about him through the writing. And so, it sort of is a combination of both.

Debbi: Yeah,. It’s interesting how that happens. It’s like the best laid plans get ruined when your characters start to come to life and tell you, “No, you want me to do this now.”

Gregg: Yeah.

Debbi: Kind of like that.

Gregg: As I say, no battle plans survives first contact with the enemy.

Debbi: There you go. How did you get into writing comics?

Gregg: Well, I loved comics. I started to read them very intensely when I was in about seventh and eighth grade. And at some point into my career, I’d written I think six books. The executive editor of Marvel, Axel Alonso, who is now a very close friend, had come across some of the books and was a fan, and he basically called and asked me if I wanted to pull a character out of the Marvel Vaults and reinvent them and to do it. And so, it was an amazing call. Writing comics for Marvel is a lot like when you have that rich kid who lives up the street from you, has all the best toys, and you get to go to his house to play with all of his toys. That was what it was like working for Marvel. I wrote Punisher. I wrote Moon Knight. I had Spider-Man swing through Moon Knight at one point. It was amazing. I wrote Wolverine. I got to just write these characters that had meant so much to me. And then later, I crossed over to DC and did a long run on Batman.

Writing comics for Marvel is a lot like when you have that rich kid who lives up the street from you, has all the best toys, and you get to go to his house to play with all of his toys.

Debbi: Oh wow. That is so cool.

Gregg: It was really cool.

Debbi: Have you ever met Michael Uslan?

Gregg: Michael who?

Debbi: Michael Uslan, who bought the rights to Batman.

Gregg: Oh. Yes. Yeah, I do know him. I’ve met him in passing.

Debbi: Yeah. Nice guy.

Gregg: Yeah.

Debbi: I heard him speak once. Really, really nice guy and very interesting.

Gregg: Yes.

Debbi: So now you’re writing op-eds for the Wall Street Journal on polarization and politics and culture, and what a time to be doing it, when the time when it was most needed. What approach do you take in trying to take on this topic?

Gregg: Well, it’s interesting. I’ve had a lot of pretty intense forays into the culture since about 2015 when I noted a lot of increasing signs for polarization and extremism. And I think one of the ways that I’m effective is I’m not actually that interested in politics, though I’ve done a great deal of work in politics, and I’ve built a lot of content. I’ve made commercials and spots, many of them around unity, centrism, and moderation that have multiple hundreds of millions of views. And so, I’ve had quite a robust intervention in the culture. And I think part of what works is that I’m not ideological. I’m not particularly partisan, and I’m not that interested really in politics. What I’m much more interested in is getting to understand different perspectives, and I think being a novelist has helped me in that immensely because, as a novelist, what you’re trying to do is to pull on the mask of a character and to see the world through their eye holes to really inhabit and embody them.

I’ve had a lot of pretty intense forays into the culture since about 2015 when I noted a lot of increasing signs for polarization and extremism.

And so, that’s what my training is much more than trying to be right on the basis of a partisan set of beliefs that are locked. And so, I try to embody and understand different people, people who make meaning in different ways, people who have different belief structures, people who have different political priorities, and then to find those points of connection to bring them together. Because if we have different types of people who make meaning in different ways working together, that’s our best chance to sort of strengthen the country and our system and our institutions and help us navigate complex change. And so, bringing a novelist mindset to this I found is very, very effective.

I try to embody and understand different people, people who make meaning in different ways, people who have different belief structures, people who have different political priorities, and then to find those points of connection to bring them together.

Debbi: That’s great. That’s really great, taking that approach.

Gregg: Thank you.

Debbi: I agree with you completely too. It’s like looking at things from different perspectives, being able to see the way somebody else will perceive something and acknowledge that, simply acknowledge that.

Gregg: Yeah. And to try and engage in reality, whether that’s talking to people or putting forth policies. If they don’t have engagement on the ground… One of the things I’ve learned, I have a refrain that reality is where ideology goes to die. Once you have your feet or your bearings that are engaged in the real world on any initiative, whether it’s messaging or specific policy, when you deal with reality, you quickly lose the ideological moorings that sometimes ossify thoughts and make them more rigid.

I have a refrain that reality is where ideology goes to die. Once you have your feet or your bearings that are engaged in the real world on any initiative … you quickly lose the ideological moorings that sometimes ossify thoughts and make them more rigid.

Debbi: Yeah. So what kind of writing schedule do you keep?

Gregg: I get up. It’s a wonderfully boring life when things are calmer. I get up and I just sort of sit and I write first thing in the morning. I take a lunch break. I write more. I basically write all day every day. I have a lot more meetings now. I do some screen writing. I have other stuff that can kind of interfere. But the biggest thing for me is if I can get a solid four-hour chunk first thing in the morning, everything works out. Then I can come back in the afternoon often for an hour or two, maybe a little bit more time. If I’m under deadline or towards the end of something, I can really push out those days, eight, 10 hours sometimes even.

Debbi: Wow, that’s impressive, especially with all the emphasis on marketing they put on authors.

Gregg: Yeah.

Debbi: I’m telling you. So how much research do you do when you write your novels?

Gregg: I do a great deal actually. I’ve fired every gun Evan Smoke uses. I mentioned earlier, I’ve gone on to demolition ranges with SEALs to blow up cars. I’ve gone-

Debbi: That sounds like fun.

Gregg: It’s really fun. I’ve gone undercover in mind control colts. I’ve swam with sharks. I’ve gone down class four white water rapids in Mexico. I try to go anywhere that the action is because if I experience it firsthand myself and sort of smell the smells and feel the air against my skin, I can convey it often in a different way that brings it to life much better for my audience and my readers, and it helps me avoid tropes. It helps me avoid the sort of cliched reactions to scenes. I did some training in mixed martial arts fighting, which is not to suggest that I’m any good at it, but I did that before I started the Orphan X series just to understand how hand to hand might work, and there’s a particular sensation, for instance, to getting choked out. There’s different sensations that if I experience I can write about and breathe life into differently than if I weren’t willing to put myself on the line.

I’ve gone undercover in mind control colts. I’ve swam with sharks. I’ve gone down class four white water rapids in Mexico. I try to go anywhere that the action is because if I experience it firsthand … I can convey it often in a different way that brings it to life much better for my audience and my readers, and it helps me avoid tropes.

Debbi: Are you more of an outliner or a pantser when it comes to actually writing the books?

Gregg: I’m very oddly kind of right between. I have what I call a rolling outline. It’s a living and breathing outline, and so I have a bunch of plot points, snatches of dialogue. It’s in a big file. It’s filled with bullet points. It’s often 20 pages or so before I start 20 to 30 pages. And as I start to write the book, I shape up out of the clay some of these sort of scenes and themes and whack them into different places. And the whole time I’m writing, that outline is growing and evolving until at some point it shrinks and is consumed into the 400-page manuscript.

Debbi: Yeah. I think a lot of us take the hybrid approach, so to speak. It’s not all pantsing and it’s not all strictly outlined. It’s kind of like you said, bullet points with stuff in between that kind of takes you from one point to another.

Gregg: Yeah. You want to be open to opportunity. I discover a lot writing-

Debbi: Absolutely.

Gregg: … and I’ll think about things that need to change. And so, I have to always make sure it’s flexible that I’m not sort of rigidly filling in and painting by number something that I’ve conceived of at the outset before I’ve got myself up to the elbows and the clay of it.

Debbi: Yeah. Yeah, I hear that. Let’s see. What author has most inspired you to be a writer?

Gregg: Probably Stephen King, who I started reading in fifth grade. I remember I was struck by how amazing it was that this guy who’s typing in Maine could put together a collection of common words in an uncommon manner that could elicit such strong emotion in me. It was like a magical power, and I wanted to do that.

I studied a lot of Shakespeare too. I have a highly practical Masters in Shakespearean tragedy, which is useful because employers were just beating down my door with job offers after I got that. But I was writing my first novel when I did that, and Shakespeare has had a great impact on me in a lot of ways because particularly the tragedies, they’re very close to early commercial thrillers. They’re tales of lust, intrigue, and murder that are highly structured. They’re narrative driven. They’re often based on pre-existing themes and ideas, and they’re designed to put assets and chairs to sell out the Globe Theatre to represent every quadrant of society. And so in a lot of ways, reading those and studying those make logical sense in a certain way for the types of writing that I do, even though it doesn’t on face value seem as logical.

Debbi: I got to agree with you about Shakespeare. Shakespeare is truly a writer who hit all the right emotional points in terms of reaching a reader or a viewer, in the case of watching his plays. When I was in high school, I literally asked… I don’t remember which play it was we did, maybe it was Macbeth that we covered, but afterwards I went to the teacher and said, “Can we do some more Shakespeare?” And he’s like, “What?” He acted like I had just said something really, really weird and bizarre, and like there was something wrong with me. I said, “Can we do it just faster? Because we don’t have to go over every single word. I can figure out what he’s saying.”

Gregg: Yeah, there’s this sort of cadence to his writing, and once you fall into it-

Debbi: Exactly.

Gregg: … You can be swept along. Some people have a hard time entering it, but I think once you get it, if you get the ear for it and you get the rhythm of it, he’s just wonderful.

Debbi: He is wonderful. Absolutely. I got to talk to you about these little parodies that I wrote of Shakespeare plays. I made them hard-boiled mysteries.

Gregg: Wow.

Debbi: Yeah. Hamlet hires a detective to prove that his uncle killed his father, essentially, and the detective asks, “How do you know this?” “Well, my father’s ghost told me.” “Oh, I see.” It’s a little bit cryptic.

Gregg: Not a great chain of evidence.

Debbi: Yeah, yeah. It’s kind of like something like, this guy’s crazy, but okay, he’s got money. I’ll take the case. King of Denmark? Sure, why not? Prince, little Prince. Anyway, now that I’ve gotten off on that track, what advice would you give to anyone who is interested in having a writing career, other than reading Shakespeare?

Gregg: Schedule and discipline. You got to get your ass in the chair time. It’s so important to have it.

Debbi: Absolutely.

Gregg: Don’t be afraid to get down a vomit draft. A lot of people get paralyzed with self-criticism, but if you write anything, even if you just throw it on the page, you can make it better, and you cannot make a blank page better. So if you carve out the time and you move forward no matter what, you can always fix it, and you’ll be learning, however slowly and imperfectly. At least you’re tilted in the direction of starting to produce work that you can assess and criticize and edit and cut and rewrite.

A lot of people get paralyzed with self-criticism, but if you write anything, even if you just throw it on the page, you can make it better, and you cannot make a blank page better.

Debbi: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you have to just get started at some point and be willing to take criticism when it’s given, when it’s given in the proper way, informed, constructive criticism. But you just have to get started and get used to the idea of taking constructive criticism.

Gregg: That’s right.

Debbi: Yeah, for sure. Let’s see. Is there anything else you would like to tell us before we finish up?

Gregg: No, I think we’re good. I’m happy to welcome new readers on board to the Orphan X series. Nemesis is the tenth. In a lot of ways, it’s a big culmination of the book where Evan for the first time finds himself up against one of his closest friends, and so there’s a combative aspect, but there’s a really deep emotional core because what does it mean if you’re up against your closest friend and the stakes are life and death, and it’s the first time he’s really had that in his path to becoming more human, even as somebody who was trained to be an assassin.

Debbi: Well, thank you so much for being here. I just want to thank you and good luck with your op-eds and all those efforts.

Gregg: Thank you so much, Debbi. Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you for having me on.

Debbi: It was my pleasure, believe me. And on that note, I just want to thank all my listeners too. Make sure that you leave a review if you enjoyed this episode. It helps. Also, we do have a Patreon page where we offer perks to Patreon supporters, so do check that out. On that note, we’ll have another episode next week, and until then, just take care, and happy reading.

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