Gary Braver is the best-selling and acclaimed author of ten mysteries and thrillers, including Elixir, Gray Matter, and Flashback, which is the only thriller to have won the acclaimed Massachusetts Book Award. His latest novel is Rumor of Evil, a mystery/thriller novel about a woman’s reported suicide in her backyard. The Strand had the privilege of interviewing Mr. Braver, and we hope you enjoy his illuminating answers as much as we did.
TSM:Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your writing?
GB: I’m a former English professor at Northeastern University, where, for over forty-five years, I taught courses in science fiction, horror fiction, detective fiction, bestsellers, and fiction writing. I also taught, and still teach, fiction-writing workshops at conferences in America and Europe and was the founder of the London Writers Workshop.
Under my pen name, Gary Braver, I write mysteries and medical thrillers, which have been critically acclaimed, including Elixir, Gray Matter, and Flashback, the first thriller to have won a prestigious Massachusetts Book Award. I also co-authored with Tess Gerritsen the international bestselling mystery, Choose Me (2021). My latest is Rumor of Evil, the first of a detective series, which Bookreporter called “a phenomenal thriller.”
My novels have been translated into eighteen languages, and three have been optioned for movies, including Elixir by director Ridley Scott.
My essays on writing and travel have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Writer Magazine, among others. I am also the author of five popular college writing textbooks.
I live in Arlington, MA with my family. My website: www.garybraver.com.
TSM: What inspired you to start writing novels?
GB: As far back as middle school, I wanted to write fiction, but I also loved science and had two uncles who were scientists. Their influence sent me to WPI, where I majored in physics. Back then, I had wanted to manipulate atoms when I grew up. But I discovered that I was better at manipulating words, being the editor of several college publications. So, I decided that the best way to learn how to write fiction was to learn how to read fiction, and the best way to learn how to read fiction was by teaching literature at the college level.
No, I wasn’t illiterate, but as a graduate English major, I developed a lifelong habit of scribbling notes in the margins and underlining key passages, felicitous turns of phrases, character-rendering behavior, and revealing dialogue. And when I began teaching, I realized not only did I have to plumb the depths of authors’ novels, but I also had to have them wired for key lines, passages, plot twists, character-rendering dialogue, and thematic development—stuff that kept me ahead of the students and critical in keeping class discussions flowing.
I also discovered Robert B. Parker, not in books but in the flesh. He was my officemate at Northeastern and my closest friend for the next forty years. At a desk a few feet away, I watched him write his first five Spenser novels, which helped demystify the process—write five pages a day, and in a year, you have a book. Then get an agent to do the ugly stuff.
Having adopted Bob Parker’s books and those of other novelists, I learned to look at another’s writing the way a carpenter looks at a house. In other words, the architecture of novels; the thematic evolution and symmetry; how authors get in and out of scenes; how they economically create characters through action, dialogue, and interior narratives; what characters look like and wear; how they think in their interior narratives; how they express themselves in phrases that distinguish them from other characters; how chapters end in cliffhangers to keep you turning the pages, etc. In short, how novels were written.
I was chomping at the bit to write my own suspense novel. The problem was that I had no story. But I found one.
On a marine archaeological expedition off the island of Mallorca, a diving buddy and I were attacked by modern-day pirates while we were 30 feet below our Zodiac, excavating a second-century BC Roman shipwreck. Unbeknownst to us, our team of six Earthwatch volunteers, led by a marine archeologist, had stumbled upon an international black-marketing operation dealing in stolen antiquities. They had attacked us with pendant anchors pulled from the rear of a speed boat, hoping to gaff us and pull us into the deep. Luckily, they failed, but I swore that if I escaped that experience alive, I’d write a book. I moved the locale to the Aegean island of Santorini, the source of Plato’s Atlantis legend, cranked up the drama, and four years later, that experience became Atlantis Fire.
The next nine books followed over the years, and writing became a fundamental condition of my professional life.
Other influences: I grew up in the south end of Hartford, CT, a few blocks from a movie theater where, every Saturday, my pals and I would catch double features of indistinguishable cowboy flicks, alien invasions, and Roger Corman horrorfests. What art I picked up was structure: story arcs, how the writers got in and out of scenes, how dialogue sounded, the importance of setting, and how justice always won out at the end. And those became part of my psyche from which I constantly draw.
TSM: You received a B.S. in physics from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, followed by an M.A. in English from the University of Connecticut, and a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin. How does the scientific field intersect with creative writing? What made you want to pivot from physics to English? How has that switch influenced your writing?
GB: Having spent four years as a physics major and three summers working in a physics lab at Raytheon, I knew how to do research and how to ask questions of experts in fields I was not familiar with, such as biology, medicine, neurology, guns, psychopathology, police procedures, forensics, etc.—technical matters that I could lace into my stories and sound like I knew what I was talking about.
I should add that my years as a physics student and physicist led directly to my teaching one of the first college-level science fiction courses in America. Not only did it make me better appreciate the genre, but I could relate to the science of science fiction.
I am obsessive about the science in my books being credible. For example, in my novel Flashback, which centers on a cure for Alzheimer’s disease, I wrote a first-date restaurant scene between a female pharmacologist working on nursing home dementia wards and a male neurologist who asks his date to explain how Alzheimer’s destroys the brain. It took me two weeks to write three pages of their dialogue because I was essentially faced with having to come up with a credible explanation of a cure for the disease. The research was daunting, but I sent draft after draft to my sources, a working pharmacologist and a professor of neurology at Harvard. I don’t know if we came up with a breakthrough understanding of the disease, but it was a convincingly good scene.
The next nine published novels and the next to come all contain bio-medical matters that were well-researched and a direct byproduct of my scientific background.
TSM: Because you joined an Earthwatch team, you also have experience with nature. I often find that nature, or at least a love and appreciation for the natural world, has enhanced my own writing. Have you found the same? How have your observations in nature influenced your work?
GB: I have always been in awe of the natural world, whether on land or underwater. And I’ve always had a half-mystical yearning for the sea. Having been a scuba diver for over forty years, I learned how “to see” underwater. That was especially helpful when writing my first novel, Atlantis Fire, much of which takes place in the waters around the Aegean island of Santorini, which I had visited several times. The island is the apparent heart of Plato’s Atlantis legend and an outpost of the Bronze Age Minoan Empire seated on Crete and destroyed in 1500 BC by the seismic and volcanic eruption of Santorini.
My interest in archaeology then led to writing my next novel, The Stone Circle, in which a Celtic-like Stonehenge is found buried on a Boston Harbor island.
From then on, each of my novels included breakthrough scientific discoveries, most of which came with the caveat, “Watch out what you wish for”—the core cautionary message of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a requisite reading in my science fiction course. And each centers on a common yearning that is fraught with danger.
Elixir: Development of an anti-aging drug.
Gray Matter: Boosting the IQs of “slow” children.
Skin Deep: Getting the face you were not born with.
Flashback: Curing Alzheimer’s disease in an aging world.
Tunnel Vision: Scientifically trying to determine if there’s an afterlife.
TSM: With Rumor of Evil, there is an element of horror in that novel since one of the characters is accused of witchcraft. You also taught a horror fiction course during your time at Northeastern. What fostered your love for the horror genre? Who are some horror writers that have inspired you?
GB: Back in the 1970s, I read Stephen King’s The Shining and was very impressed by the literary quality of the writing. I then met him a couple of years later, and he gave me a glorious blurb for Atlantis Fire. I asked him if he would visit my class if I got the English department to let me teach Horror Fiction. The department approved of my course proposal, seventy-five students signed up for the first class, King flew down to Boston, and, no surprise, he was a great success. (He later was a guest author in my London Writers Workshop, along with Bob Parker, P.D. James, and Jack Higgins.)
Over the ensuing months, I searched for short stories and novels that had literary quality. I published a collection of twenty-five short stories from Poe to King and adopted several novels, beginning with Dracula and moving to contemporary authors, including Dean Koontz, Tananarive Due, Alexandra Sokoloff, Shirley Jackson, and others. They all inspired me in some way.
I taught the horror course for forty years and Science Fiction for forty-five, when I retired. They were quite successful, drawing a large number of terrific students, and I loved every minute of the experience.
TSM: To expand on my previous question, what scares you when it comes to fiction? How do you go about scaring/thrilling readers? How do you maintain the suspense in your novels?
GB: What scares me is the human mind. I don’t believe in ghosts, demons, monsters, or any form of the supernatural. Those are all inventions to remind us of our mortality. It’s the monstrous possibilities of people who do evil that interest me.
Without villains, there would be no mystery or thriller tales. Villains give a story its plot. Protagonists give the stories lead characters. However, I believe that dedicated authors should love their villains. In other words, they should try to flesh them out instead of making them cardboard punch-outs of psychopaths.
I think that real-life villains don’t look in the morning mirror and say, “There’s the face of evil.” Most people who do bad feel they have been cheated or that they’re at odds with the world—parents, siblings, neighbors, the police, the economy, society, and nature. And they take out their revenge against those who have done better or who are perceived to have wronged them.
Most of my novels have multiple POVs. So, to create scares and thrills, I try to get into the minds of villains and plot their revenge, creating dramatic tension since my protagonists don’t know the villain’s plans or machinations. That creates an “Oh no!” in readers’ minds since they know what the protagonist doesn’t.
Another strategy is the cliffhanger ending of chapters—an unexpected twist and/or a sudden threat, a surprise epiphany, a dead body, etc.
I maintain the suspense with red herrings—false clues that suggest the bad guy is someone other than the real villain, whose identity is climactically revealed at the book’s end.
TSM: You’ve spoken about your run-in with the black market in the Mediterranean and how that inspired Atlantis Fire. Which of your novels would you say is the closest to a real-life experience that you’ve had, and vice versa?
GB: Each of my books was drawn from real-life experiences. But if I had to choose one that may have been closest, I’d say Gray Matter.
The book focuses on parents of kids who have learning disabilities. Thankfully, my two sons did not have such issues. However, I knew kids who did have learning problems, and as a professor, I was familiar with students who struggled academically.
I was charged by my publisher to write high-concept novels—i.e., those that appealed to a large number of readers’ fantasies and/or fears. At the time I had to deliver the second of a three-book contract (Elixir was the first), CNN conducted a poll asking viewers what they wished they could change in themselves. Some 80 percent said they wished they were smarter—not thinner, taller, stronger, less selfish, more loving, or cuter, but smarter! At the same time, a neuroscientist from Princeton announced that he had created a “Super Mouse” by splicing long-term memory genes into the fetuses of mice. The result was mice that went through mazes as if radar-directed where untreated ones failed. He had enhanced the creatures’ memories.
At about the same time, parents were duped into believing they could make smarter kids by connecting them as toddlers to computer games such as Baby Einstein, Baby Shakespeare, and Baby Bach—even devices that attached to pregnant mothers’ bellies that played classical music to the fetuses, hoping their kids would be little Beethovens. For real!
I knew such parents through our own two sons. And some of those parents bemoaned the fact that their kids were intellectually beneath them and would do anything to have their kids be smarter so they could have all the advantages that they had—better grades, better colleges, better careers, affluence, and all the accouterments of high living.
So, Gray Matter centers on a woman who has everything—health, youth, affluence, a brilliant husband and seemingly good marriage, and a beautiful child, but who is “slow.” And she would do anything. Worse, she is torn with guilt because an experimental drug she took in college had led to her six-year-old son’s malformed brain. When she hears about a clandestine, expensive, and questionable procedure to raise his IQ to genius level, she is tempted. But the caveat: Will tampering with his brain change his personality? And unknown to her, the procedure involves harvesting brain matter from poor genius children who are kidnapped and left brain dead by the transference procedure.
TSM: In their review of Rumor of Evil, Bookreporter writes that “Readers want to see more of Kirk and Mandy.” It seems that you have cracked the code for these two well-loved characters. How did you go about writing this duo? What are some challenges you faced when characterizing them, and how did you overcome those challenges?
GB: Det. Kirk Lucian – Since this was the first of a detective series, I wanted Det. Kirk Lucian to be the main POV character in order to create more sympathy and immediacy with readers. So, I made him a smart but sensitive twenty-one-year veteran of the Cambridge, MA police department. As for baggage, eighteen months before the book opens, he and Olivia lost their fourteen-year-old daughter to a hit-and-run driver who was never caught. That loss created such an annihilating depression in Kirk that he could not address Olivia’s own grief. By profession Kirk is a protector, and, thus, he suffered debilitating guilt which led to their estrangement and eventual separation. So, at the onset of the novel, Kirk is three months separated and desperate to win back Olivia, who is now dating another man.
Det. Mandy Wing – I also wanted his partner to be a rookie detective, and, thus, impulsive and needing guidance in detective work. I also made her a woman who is married to another woman and the mother of a young child. That afforded me some baggage possibilities since she would have to overcome anti-lesbian attitudes from male-dominated law enforcement and society that questions her career choice. I also gave her a terrible childhood, being the product of a rape of her mother who died of a drug overdose and a father who hanged himself in prison. Thus, she decided to become a cop out of outrage over violence against women. Although scarred, Mandy has a conciliatory core, and she encourages Kirk to get out of his grim funk and get a social life, including dating other women. That helps considerably, and eventually, Kirk and Olivia are back together and in marriage counseling at the book’s end. (In the second book, they follow Mandy’s lead and decide to have another child. In the third book in the series, they are now raising a young son.)
So, their personalities complement each other. And Mandy’s strength and conciliatory nature endear her to female readers, as does Kirk’s sensitivity.
TSM: Do you know the endings of your novels before you begin them? How much do you outline before you begin writing, if at all? How would you advise plotting a mystery/thriller?
I usually know who will make it to the end and who won’t. But I no longer outline in getting there. For my first few novels, I outlined but soon discovered that around a third of the way, I took detours that made for a better story. So, I no longer do outlines but make scanty plot points then jump in with, “It was a dark and stormy night” and see where that leads me.
Structurally, I divide my novel into three acts. Universally, the lowest point for the protagonist in a novel is the end of Act II. That is a useful structuring fact, which means the last act is where you wrap up all loose ends and nab the villain—that is, if justice is to prevail in your book.
My usual advice to writing students and work-shoppers goes like this:
- If you’re writing a crime novel, begin with a crime or crime-scene investigation, not an info dump. This will hook readers, promise dangers to come, raise the high stakes of the story and the need to get the perpetrator, and perhaps introduce the villain and/or investigator and hint at his or her baggage and complications to come. Maybe even the book’s core theme. Lace in the biographical stuff later.
- Fictional dialogue is not like real talk with its stops and starts but is compact and artful and should succinctly render characters’ distinct vocabulary, styles of expression, facial and body gestures, wit and humor or lack thereof, dialect, etc.
- Try to create the atmosphere by using physical details of setting. Not only do such set the stage, but they tell you something about the character who picks up on such details—like tastes, prejudices, discomfort, etc.
- Be aware that each novel has two quests—one public (solving the crime), one private (dealing with personal baggage, past failings—e.g., alcohol or drug addictions, estrangement from loved one[s], grief over loved one’s death, guilt over injured or dead former partner, panic attacks, etc.).
- Create drama by showing not telling and creating plot twists; write with energy in action scenes to create a narrative thrust (often short, punchy sentences rather than long ones). Instead of saying Character X is angry, have her throw her coffee mug at the wall.
- Teach us something. Mysteries and thrillers deal with secrets, inside information—e.g., workings of the FBI, CIA, crime scene forensics, medical autopsies, criminal minds, and the best poisons to kill. So, do some research into interesting matters.
- Make your main POV characters underdogs. Why? Because readers emotionally relate to characters who have the most to lose. Readers empathize with characters who are hurting.
- Research details to create credibility. If writing a cop novel, talk to cops about procedures, the law, legal matters, crime scenes, and home life and how they keep from depression and possible suicide, given all the horrors and dangers they face each day.
- Villains give a story plot, and detectives give a story character. But make your villains three-dimensional. That is, give them sweet-smelling reasons why they do bad things.
- Make sure your protagonist changes by the end of their quests—often emerging sadder but wiser. You have put them through tests of fire and sometimes life-changing ordeals, so have them be better by the end of their quests. That may not be realistic, but the difference between life and literature is that literature has to make sense.
I also pass on the often-confused distinction: Mysteries are about crimes that happened and are driven by puzzle-solving; thrillers are about crimes that are about to happen and, thus, are driven by dread.
Mysteries are about puzzle-solving; thrillers are about crimes that are about to happen and, thus, are driven by dread.
My advice: Read those authors you love and, as I said earlier, study them the way a carpenter studies a house. Don’t just read for plot, but be alert to how they alternate dramatic scenes with reflective ones, create character voices in short strips of dialogue, and how each chapter or scene has a rising and falling action and often ends in a cliffhanger.
Also be aware that by the first third of a novel, you should introduce the secondary (personal) quest. And, hopefully, that and the primary professional quest of solving the crime overlap near the end.
Also, know that the lowest point universally in novels is at the end of Act II, which should be a key structural guide.
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