Why I wrote "The Son Thief": a tale of anxiety and escape.
Global warming is turning me into a crime writer, evidently.
Today, August 2, 2022, my new novel The Son Thief, an international crime thriller, has just released on Amazon in Kindle and paperback versions. You can get the book here, and the e-book is only 99 cents. This is my second crime book in ten months. My previous book, In Deadly Mirrors (to which The Son Thief is a loose sequel, though you don’t have to have read the previous one first), came out October 29, 2021, and on that occasion I wrote an article explaining how and why I came to write the book. I’ve written fiction for a long time, but I’m relatively new to the field of crime thrillers; my most popular novel, which came out in 2012, was a vaguely comedic “historical horror” romp called Zombies of Byzantium (now out of print). So what changed, and why I am I now writing globetrotting thrillers involving con artists, private eyes and Mafia enforcers instead of emperors and zombies? That answer—which has to do with subjects I often write about on this blog—is coming in a little bit, but first, let’s talk about The Son Thief itself.
Although The Son Thief begins with the story of a no-nonsense private investigator, Sarah Brinson, and her mission to track down a client’s long-lost son who is believed to be working as a missionary in Africa, the bulk of the book is the story of the villain, Marcus Holcomb, whose early criminal career was chronicled In Deadly Mirrors. It’s the early 2000s and Marcus has assumed the identity of Evan Tyler, a Catholic priest who runs a mission school in the tiny town of Tondoro, Namibia. On the surface, Marcus/Evan appears to be an angel of mercy to this remote village in the Okovango region. In reality he’s running a sinister and sophisticated money laundering operation funded by cash stolen from organized crime—but more than that, Marcus/Evan is stealing not merely the identities but the souls of various young men who have the misfortune to cross his path. The chase given Marcus by his pursuers, including Sarah and a Mafia-connected accountant representing the Vatican Bank, quickly branches out from Africa into various parts of the world, thus giving The Son Thief a fast-paced international flavor.
In advance of the release of The Son Thief, I was interviewed by the website Crime Fiction Lover, where I talked about the origins of the book and of In Deadly Mirrors. Here is the full interview, but this is what I said about why I got into the business of writing crime:
You’ve written sci-fi, romance and zombie novels. What made you shift to crime fiction or detective fiction and what’s your take on the genre?
This is going to sound strange, but honestly I started writing crime fiction for my mental health. I suffer from anxiety, and I began writing In Deadly Mirrors at a very dark moment when I needed one or two hours a day where I could escape into an alternate reality and forget about the things that were making me anxious. I chose crime because imagining the world of career criminals means processing the world through a completely different way of thinking than I do in my real life. When I do something I usually think first about whether it’s the right thing to do. A career criminal, like Marcus Holcomb, would think first, how does this benefit me, then what are the risks, and finally how do I get away with it? This is why I prefer to write about criminals as opposed to cops. Police in detective fiction are often constrained by sets of rules and procedures. A criminal has no such constraints. If they want something, they just take it, and the rest of the show is about figuring out how to get away with it. I liked putting myself in this unfamiliar head-space, and as it turned out I was good at it. So maybe I’ve found my niche!
The causes of my anxiety are well-known to those of you who read this blog. The collapse of society as a result of global warming and its ever-increasing onslaught of disasters is a major stressor; it’s now also clear to me that the United States will soon be either in civil war or under fascist dictatorship. I can’t stop either of these things, but neither am I burying my head in the sand; I am, as I hope others are, taking steps in my own life to try to prepare for a radically changed world. But I’ve found, to an extent I never realized before, that writing—and especially writing in the world of crime and criminals—really does help. That one or two hours I spend a day in that world is a welcome escape from this one.
While climate change is not mentioned in The Son Thief, there are some subtle clues in the story and its characters that are probably there as a direct result of the anxieties I’m seeking to escape from. The Son Thief takes place in the past, during the year 2002, in the strange ominous pause between the 9/11 attacks and the Iraq War. Though they never voice it, the characters, especially Mafia banker Giuseppe Colvino, seem to be palpably aware that the world is changing radically around them and that the old rules of how the world works will shortly no longer apply. Colvino and others owe their ostensible loyalty to institutions that profess to stand for good and righteousness, such as the Catholic Church, but which they understand and accept are riven with institutional flaws, ulterior motives and relationships with nefarious criminal organizations. Colvino, for instance, a lifelong banker, simply accepts that financial institutions are driven primarily by money laundering. Few of the businesses that any of the characters in The Son Thief engage in are legitimate. That is modern capitalism. There are few “legitimate” businesses left in the world today, where our entire global economy is essentially a grift, benefiting the wealthy few while chewing the planet and its people into particles of smoke.
The subtle art of mind control is also a theme in The Son Thief. Marcus’s ultimate scam appears to be a “school for troubled youth,” conducted aboard a sailing ship, the Global Redeemer, aboard which much of the book’s second half takes place. Earlier in the book Marcus is seen reading books like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, a classic blueprint of psychological manipulation, as well as a biography of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard (who also ran his cult, at least in its early years, aboard a ship). The sons that Marcus “steals,” like the unfortunate Moses Mbwele back in Tondoro, wind up with heads full of bizarre ideas and an unhealthy reverence for the man who put them there. The hint of authoritarianism—such as when Marcus orders a wayward student lashed on the deck of his ship, like a scene out of the Napoleonic-era Royal Navy—is deliberate. Today in 2022 authoritarianism is on the rise, and the cult-like thinking that supports it, propping up political charlatans from Putin to Bolsonaro to Trump, is a common tide in many parts of the world. I don’t know how to break people out of that spell. Neither do the characters in The Son Thief.
The Son Thief is a work of fiction, and it was written primarily as a balm to my own mental health. I hope readers out there do enjoy it, and as I become more familiar with the genre of crime and the wonderfully interesting and quirky writers who work in it, I’d like to think my profile will increase. But no work of art springs into the world without some connection to the circumstances in which it was created. The triggers of my own anxiety have not abated. This is perhaps why, as of this moment, another crime book sits nearly finished in a haphazard stack next to my antique typewriter. You’ll hear about that one (Daniel Vanished) in due course. For now, enjoy The Son Thief, and maybe it’ll help you escape from your own anxieties for a few hours.
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