1.
For
starters can you tell us something about your book The Reckless Engineer?
The series lead, Jeremy Aiden Stone, is
and electrical engineer. He is very
versatile and adventurous like MacGyver.
He is courageous, cerebral, and highly skilled like Barney in Mission
Impossible.
The first story in the series is also
about an engineer, Jack Connor, who is a brilliant and charismatic guy whose character
fault is that he is weak in love, someone like John F. Kennedy. Then I built the characters of the four very
different women who are in his life who pull him in different directions. Jack is weak in character and very confused. He gets drawn into different conflicting and
rather irresponsible actions as he is pulled by these women in different directions. The resulting intense conflict has come to a
head with one of the women getting killed, and Jack getting arrested for her murder. Jeremy had lost his job working beside Jack
in Portsmouth and had returned to London.
The story begins with a call to Jeremy from Jack from the police
station.
Jeremy returns to Portsmouth with a top London attorney to
handle his best friend's defence.
In Portsmouth nothing
is what it seems at first sight. Everybody
has secrets. Who is the bald man with
the tattoo of a skull seen entering the victim's house? Who is "KC" who Caitlin makes
secret calls to from a untraceable mobile?
Has powerful Douglas McAllen already killed his daughter's first partner
and is he capable of killing again? Is
Caitlin's brother Ronnie McAllen's power struggle with Jack for the control of
McAllen Industries so intense that he is prepared to kill and frame his brother-in-law? Is the divorce from Jack's first wife as
amicable on her part as they believe it to be?
Are his sons prepared to kill for their vast inheritance? Who are the ghosts from Caitlin's past in
Aberdeen, Scotland haunting the marriage?
What is the involvement of Jack's manager at Marine Electronics?
The cast of characters is made even more colorful by the
supporting entourage: the big Scott and his gang, Hosé and Heineken, who carry
out Douglas McAllen’s “troubleshooting;” McAllens' bumbling solicitors McKinley
and Magnus Laird; Caitlin McAllen’s handymen, Cossack and Levent; and Jeremy’s
sidekick, the gay black actor working in the London West End.
While Jack is charged and his murder trial proceeds in the
Crown Court under barrister Harry Stavers’ expert care, Jeremy runs a race
against time to find the real killer and save his friend's life, if he is in
fact innocent, in a tense saga of love, desire, power, and ambition.
2. From
the blurb we can see that there are some mysteries around the whole story. Was
it hard to connect all the dots and still keep a mysterious?
Actually weaving the plot and connecting
the dots was great fun for me. I can
guarantee you will never guess who the committed the crime until the final
chapters that reveal the person. I had
to plot it very tightly and I admit it wasn't easy blalancing the conflicting
interests of different characters, but when it did finally come together it was
worth the work. It was very rewarding.
3. Also
it easy to notice that there is big spectar of different characters from
different layers of society. I’m sure it adds to the story. Which one is your
favorite?
Many
of the characters are from the educated middle class. I include the Scottish aristocratic upper
class family, the McAllens – Jack Connor's wife, Caitlin McAllen, his
father-in-law, Douglas McAllen, and his borother-in-law, Ronnie. I then have the lower working class
characters in Aberdeen, Scotland. I have
included European immigrant workers and tourists from Australia. The book has a cross-section of today's British
society.
Strangely
enough my favourites are two of the supporting characters.
The
first one is Magnus Laird, a bumbling solicitor. He is definitely a loveable Dickensian
character who I created specially as a tribute to Charles Dickens whose writing
inspired me early on in life.
The second character is Otter, the gay
half-black actor working in the London West End. I develop him further as Jeremy’s sidekick in
the second book in the series, “Buy, Sell, Murder.”
4. There
is some romance in the story too and from the blurb I can see that mostly all
situations are realistic. Was was easier to create for you - romance or mystery?
The romance was much harder for me. I have been a suspense, mystery, and thriller
reader and viewer all my life. I had not
read many romances other than the classics.
I am also from a very conservative family in which the rule is “one does
not speak of such things.“
The main romance in the story is the one
that Caitlin is in which resolves in a fairy-tale fashion in the end. (I'm trying not to give away any spoilers
here.)
And then I have the personal life of my
series lead which evolves in the background through the book. This story will continue into the next book
and through the series.
5. If
I’m correct you plan to make this a series. How many books can we expect?
The second book in the series – Buy,
Sell, Murder – set in the London branch of an American Investment Bank,
is half written.
I have a second book in my short fiction
collection, Summerset Tales, titled The Bank Job is alo half written to
accompany Buy, Sell, Murder. Both
of these will be published in 2014.
6. What
inspired you to become an author? Do you have a favorite author or book?
I have loved
English literature since my mother enrolled me in weekend Speech & Drama
classes when I was 3 years old. My
mother had this rack full of books like The
Pickwick papers, The Tale of Two Cities, Lorna Doone, The Animal Farm etc.
stacked on it along with piles of Readers’
Digests. My mother used to read to me from them when I was too young to
read; and soon I was reading them myself.
That sparked my interest as a reader and a spectator very early.
I started writing seriously when I took my Freshman English class
during the first year at Stanford, and then I kept writing over the years. I first thought about presenting my work for
publication only from about 2007.
I have
always been a writer because of my upbringing.
However I thought of it as merely a hobby for a long time. My primary education has been in engineering
and I thought of myself as an electronic engineer only by profession. There
was one aspect of the culture and education at Stanford University when I was a
student there – the idea that you need not be pigeonholed into just one area of
talent – that liberated me. You can be a “Renaissance man” who can excel
at many things that are considered the opposites of each other. I started writing seriously when I took my Freshman English
course during the first year at Stanford, and then I kept writing over the
years.
I first thought
about presenting my work for publication only from about 2008. One needs a level of maturity and life
experience to write with impact for a large audience. One also needs to bridge that mental gap to
want to go through that lengthy process of publishing the work. I reached that state of mind about 2007 or 2008.
If I had to give a
short answer to this question I would say that my mother's love of reading she
instilled in me and Stanford's humanities education program inspired me.
7. I
tend to finish my interviews with author’s favorite quote. So can we hear
yours?
Seize the day. “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of
the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” - Buddha
