“They realize everyone is better than they are and they’re not going to make it. They’re approaching thirty and have no money. I love those stories and I’m going to write one someday.”

In 2012 he published Calico Joe, a novel about a rookie professional ballplayer from Arkansas who just happens to face a fireball-throwing pitcher with tragic consequences, as Grisham did in his younger days. In 2004 a screenplay he’d written called “Mickey” was turned into a film about a baseball player on the run. Even the protagonist in his novel, A Painted House, has dreams of becoming a professional baseball player. And on occasion, he’s written about baseball for Sports Illustrated and other publications.

Back in the 1960s you could find the Arkansas farm boy on a hot summer night kicking the dust at home plate and taking a few practice swings anticipating the first pitch. Everybody did in his world, he recalls. Nearly every summer evening, the powerful transmitter of radio station KMOX out of St. Louis broadcast Cardinals baseball through the humidity of the South and Midwest. Grisham remembers the entire town coming out for little league games carrying transistor radios echoing the play-by-play of Harry Caray and Jack Buck through the stands as the kids played.

“The Cardinals games were our world,” Grisham says. Grisham describes himself as a rabid fan back then and it was generational. His father loved Cardinals great Stan Musial, and his grandfather was a fan of Dizzy Dean and the Gashouse Gang listening on his very first radio back in the 1930s and ‘40s.

Grisham loved baseball but couldn’t hit. “I was a very mediocre high school baseball player.” It wasn’t until college at an intersquad tryout that he gave up his dream to play professionally.

“I saw a fastball one day in a college try out. You know ninety (mph) is nothing these days. It was a big deal back then in college. If you’ve never seen one coming at you at ninety, it’s pretty frightening. I said, ‘that’s it. I’m done,’ and the coach cut me the next day. My dream was over, but I’d gotten farther than my talent should have let me.”

“Until you’ve seen that and experienced that, it’s terrifying…” he told David Rubenstien on CSPAN’s America’s Book Club. “I was kind’a glad to be done with it because I didn’t want to see a fastball again.”

As an adult he still loved the game and journeyed to a couple of Cardinals games a year with his friend (and fellow lawyer) Hall of Fame Manager Tony La Russa. But now, even those trips have ended. The only baseball Grisham watches is college, especially the University of Virginia, which is not only one of the best college baseball teams in the nation, but right next door. He lives just outside of Charlottesville, Virginia and frequently goes into town where he keeps an office away from home.

“We’re huge college baseball fans. Not minor league. Haven’t been to minor league since the Memphis Blues at McCarver Stadium, fifty years ago.”

But professional? “I cannot sit down for three hours and watch a game. I’d rather be reading a book…I just lost the love for the game.”

Grisham still loves baseball history because it mirrors the history of America, he says. He may have lost his love for today’s professional game, but nostalgia for its roots and the way the game was once played in the Arkansas dirt of his childhood, is still very much alive and well with him.

I’m novelist Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

One of the best-known stories about John Grisham is how he got his start. But there’s another story not often talked about of how he lost a fortune.

The young lawyer was turned down by every publisher his agent approached until a startup, Wynwood Press, agreed to publish his first novel, A Time to Kill. The tiny New York publishing house printed 5,000 copies and Grisham bought a thousand. The book didn’t sell.

He had to do something with the books he’d bought. The boxes were swallowing up his house.

“Out of desperation, I went to my local library and said, ‘Hey buddy, I’ll take this show on the road.’” He visited thirty-five Mississippi libraries for book signing parties.

“The smaller the town the bigger the crowd,” he says, because, well, what else are you going to do in a small town?

The local Friends of the Library would make tea and cookies, and they’d have a party. For six weeks he sold A Time to Kill out of the trunk of his car.

“I was trying to unload the books. I finally sold nine hundred. I kept a hundred because I ran out of time. I’m now down to about sixty.”

When his second novel, The Firm, launched a few years later, whenever Grisham walked into a bookstore, he would still see unsold copies of A Time to Kill on the shelf. He’d buy every one of them. And it’s a good thing he did.

He never dreamed those original hardback books Wynwood Press published would today be worth about $3,000 each. “They’re well protected,” Grisham says with a grin.

“At one point I had a thousand copies in my office and Wynwood screwed up and sent me two thousand. I sent a thousand back…For a couple of weeks I had 2,000 copies, worth $6 million today. It wasn’t the first fortune I lost practicing law.”

Share

I’m novelist Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

Bruce DeSilva was working as a reporter at the Hartford Courant—the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper—when the Los Angeles Times purchased it with the goal of competing with the Boston Globe. With the Times’ blessing, DeSilva became a roaming reporter and wrote for the Sunday magazine (back when there were such things at daily newspapers) and began interviewing famous crime writers.

“I always liked crime fiction. I’d probably read 2,000 crime novels,” DeSilva says. “I had a love of the genre.”

He scheduled an interview with Evan Hunter, better known as Ed McBain, one of the godfathers of crime fiction. Hunter had a small office built in his backyard. They met at 9 a.m. for a scheduled half-hour interview. Around noon, Hunter’s wife came out to check on them.

“Will our guest be staying for lunch?”

Six hours later, she returned, “Will he be staying for dinner?”

DeSilva didn’t leave until 9 p.m.––a twelve-hour interview. He had read all of Hunter’s books and “there was so much to talk about.”

Not long after, Hunter wrote DeSilva commenting on a short story DeSilva had published in the Hartford Courant Sunday magazine about a newspaper reporter investigating a government scandal. Hunter suggested DeSilva turn it into a novel. Encouraged that one of America’s most popular crime novelists would be interested in his writing, DeSilva immediately began getting up early each morning to write for an hour and write again late at night.

Years later he recounted his story to Otto Penzler, owner of The Mysterious Book Shop, the nation’s largest crime fiction store. DeSilva read Hunter’s note to Penzler over lunch.

Dear Bruce,

MALICE is a nice little story. In fact, it could serve as the outline for a novel. Have you considered this?

Best,

Evan
Penzler dropped his fork on his plate. “Really?”

“Yes.”

Penzler, who lunched frequently with Hunter, was skeptical. He’d never heard his friend compliment anyone on their writing.

“Evan Hunter sent you that note?”

“Yeah.”

“Well then, you’ve got to finish it,” Penzler said.

“If he hadn’t sent me that note, I never would have thought to write a novel,” DeSilva says. Six months after dinner with Penzler, he finished his draft of Rogue Island and sent it to Penzler. Two weeks later Penzler responded. “Who’s your agent?”

“I don’t have one,” DeSilva emailed him.

“Well, let me take care of that for you.” Penzler introduced him to Susanna Einstein who became his agent.

Like most debut novels, sales were mediocre, but in DeSilva’s case, recognition was not. Rogue Island won an Edgar Award for best debut novel from the Mystery Writers of America and a Macavity Award from Mystery Readers International.

“By the time the Edgars were announced I felt a part of that very supportive community. Not all writing communities are like that. I’ve read stories of the science fiction writers being at each other’s throats, and the romance writers hating each other,” DeSilva says.

Michael Connelly handed him the Edgar. “As someone who is used to being around famous people, I felt starstruck at that moment.”

After his Edgar win, Rogue Island sold out, but his publisher failed to immediately go back to press. By the time it finally did, the awards bump was long over. “My agent is still angry with the publisher.”

Share

I’m novelist Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

She especially enjoyed the work of James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, James Elroy, and Raymond Chandler. “It’s the way I see the world,” she says. “I know people find them to be dark and filled with dread. I don’t see them that way. I sort of said long ago, that’s just the way I see things. I don’t experience them the way others do.”

“The stuff that always fascinated me was forbidden topics, the taboos,” she says. “It always felt most exciting to me. I wish I could give a better answer than that, but if I’m being honest. I just find it exciting.”

Lucky for her, she found New York University’s graduate program, which she describes as “a pretty liberal place and there were classes on crime fiction. They taught Hammett’s Red Harvest and James Elroy’s novels, and I got to teach about gender in noir literature.”

The first hint she might get the itch to write a novel came when she decided to write her PhD thesis on women and femme fatales in 1930s-50s noir fiction. She was interested in male writers’ point of view on the beautiful, manipulative, seductresses who used their charms to ensnare men into dangerous situations.

“When I talked to my advisors, they worried it would be hard for me to get a college faculty position. At that time there was very little scholarship for commercial crime fiction and teaching it in class. They were right. It was hard to find a job.”

She finally landed as an assistant professorship at SUNY, the State University of New York System. “I wasn’t a good teacher,” she says. “I knew that world, but it never felt right for me, but I loved to read books.”

So, she began writing fiction.

“It was just an outlet. It was my first year of tenure track teaching.” It slowly became something, and she realized she’d completed the first draft of a book she never intended to write. She began to seriously rethink her goals.

Her first noir novel, Die a Little, was set in 1950s Los Angeles. She had to use her menacing imagination because, well, she’d never been there. “I really had to find my way…It sold quite poorly. It never went into paperback, but it did get good reviews. I think that’s what saved me. And it got nominated for an Edgar for debut novel.”

Hollywood also optioned it, but as in most cases, never followed through with a movie.

Megan wasn’t familiar with the crime fiction community, so that year she attended Bouchercon, the mystery writers and fan conference, and finally felt at home. “Here’s all these weirdos like me,” she says. “It was incredible. I made so many friends. I didn’t have to explain who James M. Cain was.”

She doesn’t like to think about hitting it big in the publishing world, although she has. “It’s a bad metric for writers to think about.” Success, she says, “is based on the verities of the market,” and not necessarily on talent or the quality of the work. “I just knew once I started writing I couldn’t stop, whether people would publish me or not.”

She remembers one reader’s email for her fifth book. A woman wrote she had finished reading her novel, took it in her backyard, and burned it. “She finished it! How offended could she be?” says Megan.

She’s had bestsellers and not-so-bestsellers. In the publishing world, she says, “A lot has changed but a lot has stayed the same… I’ve seen everything that’s happened in publishing. It’s happened to me. The one thing I can be proud of is my resilience.”

“I feel like the hooker in the lobby. I’m still here.”

Share

I’m novelist Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

Each author was told to write a short story that included a crime and the head of the book club, Dr. Margaret Richter, a “psycho psychiatrist,” as bestselling author Joseph Finder describes her. She lives in a mansion on a hill in the small town of Wellfleet on Cape Cod.

Finder headed up the project and recruited all of the authors.

Each chapter of the audio book is told from a different character’s point of view as a detective works to figure out the entire narrative. This was not one of those books where a writer hands off a chapter to another to continue the same story.

No. This is different.

“None of us had any idea what the others were writing,” says Canadian bestselling author Linwood Barclay, one of the chapter authors.

Tying the chapters together was left to Kim Howe, ITW’s executive director, who wrote connecting chapters, including a beginning, middle and end, to make it all seamless.

Besides Howe and Barclay, the participating authors are Karin Slaughter, Lee Child, B.A. Paris, Caroline Kepnes, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Sarah Pekkanen, Naomi Hirahara, Robert Dugoni, Alison Gaylin, Heather Gudenkauf, Shari Lapena, Clare Mackintosh, and Stacy Willingham.

All of them, Finder says, took the time to create something special. “There isn’t a klunker in the entire book. They’re really good stories.”

In all, it took eighteen months to collect the completed manuscripts, each author working around their individual publishing deadlines and donating their time to the nonprofit association while creating an audio story anywhere from forty-minutes to an hour long.

It came together better than anyone could have imagined. The Twisted Women’s Book Club debuted on Audible April 10, 2025, the 100^th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby, and––believe it or not––sold much better than F. Scott’s Fitzgerald’s novel initially did. The Twisted Women’s Book Club was number one on Audible for four weeks and stayed in the list of top ten Audible Original or exclusive title books for months after. The Great Gatsby, considered today to be the great American novel, struggled to sell its first printing of 5,000 copies.

Finder is so pleased with the success of The Twisted Women’s Book Club, he’s already planning ITW’s next audio book and how he can again shapeshift into something unique. He plans to start lining up bestselling authors in the coming months and hopes to publish a new audio book in 2027.

The question of course is will it continue to be twisted? Will it again include a book club in a strange mansion on a hill? Or instead of the all the usual weapons, will a new literary device be used in commission of a crime?

Joseph Finder’s not telling.

Find The Twisted Women’s Book Club on Audible.

Share

Leave a comment

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer.

Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work and is currently shopping my next crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

Subscribe now

Her writing career thrived in the next four years with four more books in her series with protagonist Even Delany, but still no American publishers showed interest.

Days before the launch of her fifth novel, mega-selling author Stephen King was getting ready for another book launch of his own. He was going through his shelves at home looking for a book to read on a flight to London where one of his European book launches was scheduled.

King shared Gardiner’s British publisher, Hodder & Stoughton, which had been flooding him with free copies of many of their authors’ books in hopes King would review them. King would shelve what he considered the promising ones, keeping them in his “Someday Books” collection––books he might read someday. He chose China Lake and read it on his seven-hour flight to London.

Why hers?

“He thought the type was nice and easy on the eyes,” Meg says. “He thought he would not get eyestrain on the red eye to London.”

“That was the true deciding factor,” King wrote in an Entertainment Weekly column three months later.

After he landed, “My first question to the nice publishing people who met me at the airport was why an American woman writing thrillers set in California was living and working in England?” King wrote in his column. “They didn’t seem to know. I next asked how many of the four Evan Delaney books…had been best-sellers in England. The answer was none. This staggered me. Then I asked who publishes her in the U.S., and the answer was no one. That floored me.”

Three months after her book launch, Megan was on her way to a Colorado family vacation. She had a layover at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington D.C. when her editor called and told her King had just published a column about her book in Entertainment Weekly. She raced around the airport buying every copy she could at newsstands before jumping on her flight.

Once on board she began reading. King urged Americans to go on Amazon and buy China Lake from her British publisher. At first, she was ecstatic. “Then I realized he was writing this because no one in America was interested in my book…The rest of the flight I think my husband was ready to jump out of the plane because I was so antsy…By the end of flight, I just figured keep one foot in front of the other.”

She awoke in her Colorado hotel room the next morning to learn fourteen American publishers suddenly wanted China Lake, the book they didn’t want the day before or for the past four years. She signed with Penguin, which bought American rights to her entire backlist.

“I’m eternally grateful to Stephen King,” Meg says.

Since that day in Colorado, China Lake has won the prestigious Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. It became a Publisher’s Weekly and Barnes & Noble bestseller. And how did it do with American readers? Penguin sold hundreds of thousands of copies of a novel nobody wanted. Go figure. She has since become a New York Times bestselling author.

Meg Gardiner had finally discovered America. But more importantly, America had discovered Meg Gardiner.

Share Idol Talk

Leave a comment

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer.

Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work and is currently shopping my next crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

Subscribe now

No one could figure out where the shots came from. The shooter was incorrectly rumored to be traveling in a white van. Vans were being stopped and searched everywhere. The shootings all took place close to a highway or Interstate so the killer could make his escape before anyone realized what had happened. Area police departments, state police, and the FBI were all involved and sharing information about thirteen sniper attacks, ten of which resulted in death. John Allen Muhammad and Lee Bloyd Malvo, a teenager who accompanied him, terrorized the region for three weeks before finally being caught sleeping at a Maryland highway rest stop.

During much of this time, a young spokeswoman for the Fairfax County Police Department stood before microphones and cameras informing the public while the world’s attention was focused on Washington for something other than politics. Isabella Maldonado had grown up in Fairfax, one of the richest counties in America, where young people often choose to become lawyers, doctors or engineers. She chose to become a cop and was one of a small number of women on the force and one of even fewer Hispanics.

Besides being department spokeswoman, during her more than twenty-year law enforcement career, Maldonado rose to the rank of captain, commanded special investigations and forensics, was a precinct commander, and hostage negotiator.

And although she loved her job, she’d always wanted to write, but working in law enforcement didn’t give her the time. So, after taking early retirement in 2010, she moved to Phoenix where she began a five-year Odyssey to learn the writing craft.

“I read everything I could get my hands on. First, at the library and then buying books online.”

She used her law enforcement experience to a write police procedural with a Latina protagonist. Midnight Ink, a small publisher, gave her a three-book deal but before her third book could be published, it announced it was going out of business. Her agent, Liza Fleissig, quickly moved her to Thomas & Mercer, an imprint of Amazon Publishing, where her books soon became bestsellers.

Isabella Maldonado, once known internationally as a spokeswoman explaining true crime to the world, was now a worldwide bestselling author at the other end of the spectrum writing crime fiction.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer.

Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work and is currently shopping my next crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

It wasn’t until WWII after his death, when the federal government sent 150,000 paperbacks to our fighting troops that it became popular (as did the light weight paperback that fit in their pockets). Its popularity exploded in the following years and because it is short and its themes universal, it became a mainstay of the high school English curriculum. Many Gatsby scholars preach it shouldn’t be taught until college because high schoolers miss so much of what is happening in the novel.

Today it sells about a half million copies a year. Not long ago it went out of copyright so you can pick up any number of versions at your local bookstore.

And remember the green light:

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter––tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther….And one fine morning–––

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

I hope you celebrate today by raising a glass (Fitzgerald would have loved that), or gather with book-loving friends. Tonight, I will celebrate at a Gatsby party with many of my fellow writers and authors. Bring on the flappers and the Roaring 20s. Fitzgerald’s “Jazz Age,” will be borne back again!

Share

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer.

Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work and is currently shopping my next crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.

Leave a comment

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

Subscribe now

He used his mother’s old typewriters to punch out stories in grade school to circulate among his friends––that’s right, grade school. After a few years, he started his own newspaper, the Cochise Courier––named after the cul-de-sac where his family lived––and wrote stories about his neighborhood. He sold it for a nickel a copy.

In high school and college, he edited the student newspapers. He also wrote a thinly disguised, very bad, series of novels based on Simon Templar and The Saint series. His first unpublished novel, The Perfect Sinner, may have been awful, he says, but he learned a lot.

In high school, while living in the San Francisco Bay area, he began freelancing, earning money for college conducting interviews with Hollywood celebrities for various publications. He was maybe sixteen and interviewed them over the phone. Lee used his best anchorman voice, which he’d learned from his father––a local television news anchorman. None of the famous caught on they were talking to a teenager.

Leave a comment

He attended UCLA and was putting himself through college freelancing for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, UPI, Newsweek and American Film magazine. His girlfriend at the time worked at Playgirl magazine and got him a job writing sexually explicit letters-to-the-editor at $25 a clip.

He was interviewing Television Producer Steve Cannell (“The Rockford Files,” “The A Team,” “The Greatest American Hero,” and more), when he let it slip, he was now in Los Angeles. Cannell, who had talked with him previously while Goldberg was living in San Francisco, invited Goldberg to the studio to meet in person.

“Now, he’s going to discover I’m a kid,” Goldberg says. “I was terrified. I knew the moment I walked into his office, he was going to feel deceived. So, I asked him a tough financial question about his independent production company, and we were off and running, and all was fine.”

Years later, after Goldberg and Cannell had become friends, Goldberg asked how he felt when the fledgling interviewer walked into his office. “Oh, I felt sure I’d been conned,” Cannel told him. “I thought you were angling for a job.”

Ironically, when Goldberg became a television producer, he actually hired Cannell to be on one of his television shows.

Share

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer.

Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work and is currently shopping my next crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

It’s call grade school.

Okay, well, nearly everyone has that in common, but you’ve likely never experienced what these two New York Times bestselling authors did when they were youngsters.

For them, thinking they’d screwed up badly turned into a life-changing experience.

Dugoni was in seventh grade.

White was in second.

Both were given class writing assignments. Dugoni on slavery. White on––well, let’s just says she didn’t follow her teacher’s instructions.

Dugoni choose to write about the point of view of an abolitionist. He read his piece before his classmates about how demoralizing and abhorrent slavery was. When he finished, no one clapped. They all just stared at him, and so did his teacher, Sister Kathleen.

In second grade, White’s teacher was returning their completed writing assignments. “I was the only who didn’t get mine back,” Kate says.

Dugoni was anxious. Was his really that bad? Standing alone before them, he felt embarrassed. Then Sister Kathleen pulled him from the classroom with no explanation. Now he was really in trouble. She told him to stand right there, outside his classroom in the hallway. She entered the classroom next door as he stood alone wondering what had gone wrong.

Says Kate: “I thought I was in trouble because I’d written a story about my grandfather, not the assignment.”

Dugoni’s teacher told young Bobby, she wanted him to give his speech to the other seventh grade class.

Kate was scared. “Then the teacher called me up front and made me read it to the entire class. She then hung it up on purple construction paper on the wall for everyone to see.”

“I loved the moment,” Dugoni says. “I realized I could move people with words. That is the moment I decided I wanted to be a writer.”

Share

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer. Currently, I’m working on my next crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.

Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

Subscribe now

While reading her morning newspaper, she came across a story about the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the largest private bank in the world. It was caught in a scandal of international money laundering and self-dealing.

But it wasn’t until several days later that it occurred to her, that story was great material for a novel. In fact, it was exactly what she needed. “I was fascinated, especially with all the links to espionage,” to say nothing of all of the rich and powerful people and international locales. Perfect for a thriller manuscript. 

She looked around the house and realized she’d already thrown out all of her old newspapers. “I realized the newspaper stories would be perfect for Masquerade (her first novel under her name). I never had a lot of shame when it came to good research.”

So, she did what every enterprising young writer does. She went dumpster diving in the Mesa neighborhood of Santa Barbara.

“I got a ladder. I jumped in. It was behind a strip mall, and I began digging for newspapers.”

Her fascination with financial crimes didn’t stop there. A little over a year later she and her husband were in Las Vegas at the poker table when an electronic ticker in the casino announced American investor George Soros had broken the Bank of England, earning himself a billion dollars in a single day. 

“I was winning at seven card stud. It’s bad form to leave a poker table when one is up a lot, but I grabbed my chips and excused myself. Ribbing and boos followed as I hurried off. My brain was afire. I knew I could use the bones of the story somehow in Masquerade, and now I had to figure out how.”

This time, instead of looking for the nearest dumpster, she ran to the nearest newsstand and purchased several papers. She hurried to her hotel room and immediately started reading. “I knew from the get-go that it’d give me what I was looking for.”

Share

And it did. That was the beginning of Masquerade, and her successful writing career. Not only was Masquerade her first thriller, but a New York Times bestseller that put her on the map. And in so doing, she eventually, joined with Rambo’s creator, novelist David Morrell, and started the International Thriller Writers, now the largest writer’s organization of any genre.

Now think about this. Had she not gone dumpster diving that day, which eventually launched her novelist career, would she have ever gotten together with David Morrell? And if not, would ITW exist today?

Subscribe now

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer. Currently, I’m working on my next crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.

Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

Leave a comment

“I can create some pretty complex plots,” he says. “I’m good at writing computer code. When you write the first line of code it impacts the last.” And that’s how he thinks when crafting plots from first chapter to finale––all in his head without notes.

Barker is unlike any author writing today. He starts at the beginning and just plows through the writing process until he’s done while referring to only what’s in his brain. Oh, he takes time off from writing to eat and sleep, and he quits work by three o’clock each day to spend time with his family. But he takes no notes and doesn’t leave reminders scattered about of where he is in his story. And when he sits down to continue to write again, he just picks up where he left off and keeps rolling.

There is no writer’s block. There is little hesitation. He just rocks forward with his manuscripts. Other writers write in fits and starts. They make wholesale changes to their stories because they can’t tie one part of the plot to another and figure out where it is going. But in Barker’s case, all of this is already organized in his head and his mind is planning and fixing ahead before he ever gets to writing the next chapter.

How does he do it?

“It’s all up here,” he says, pointing to his head. No, but really, how do you do it?

Barker’s wife, Danyna, says he has a superpower, but Barker didn’t discover it until he was twenty-two years old. He found his superpower when he worked at a brokerage firm in Florida as compliance officer overlooking the work of stockbrokers. He didn’t get along well with his colleagues and finally got into a big argument with his boss. Rather than fire him (Barker was very good at his job), his boss sent him to a therapist who diagnosed his superpower in twenty minutes.

J.D. Barker is autistic—he has Asperger’s––a neurodivergent disorder that makes interpersonal communication difficult. He is at the top of what many therapists today refer to as the Autism Spectrum. He learned to read at age three, but it wasn’t until age twenty-two that he learned from the therapist he thinks differently than most people. He spent years in therapy and in a recent conversation, the only thing I could discern is that he is a very smart guy. I wouldn’t have known he was Autistic had he not freely talked about it.

Barker sees plot patterns that other writers don’t. He works them out in his head––all of the details––something most other authors can’t do.

He might also be called a savant, because he has not only mastered writing complex plots for his novels in his head, he is super productive and is creating his own publishing empire. He now has his own imprint, Hampton Creek Press and is distributed by Simon & Schuster.

Today, he is an advocate for Autism and frequently speaks publicly about it. He’s come a long way from what he describes in his schoolboy days as “just the weird guy in the corner.”

With a very clean desk.

Share

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer. Currently, I’m working on my next crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.

Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

Leave a comment

On a recent trip to London with my daughters, we stopped in the Sherlock Holmes, St. James’ pub for lunch. Upstairs is a small room that depicts Holmes’ flat in Conan Doyle’s novels. I don’t think it’s changed since the last time I was there decades ago. It includes memorabilia from a Holmes exhibition long ago. But of course, what can be authentic about a fictional character? Certainly not the furniture and décor.

Holmes at home at the Sherlock Holmes, St. James Pub.

That said, the pub is festooned with Victorian decorations. The place was packed when we arrived after one o’clock in the afternoon. The wait for the upstairs dining room was forty-five minutes and there were no empty tables downstairs in the pub. We finally grabbed one in the pub’s front window when a couple left. The food was decent, nothing outstanding, which is saying something for England’s infamous reputation for “fine British dining.” (Being half British, I can attest to that.) But the beer was good.  

The beer was good. The food was British quality. We dined next to the large first floor window on the right.

Decades ago, when I first visited Baker Street in London, I knew what I would find––or rather wouldn’t. There was no 221-B Baker Street, the home of Sherlock Holmes and often that of his friend and sidekick Dr. John Watson. That is precisely why Holmes’ creator picked the address for his protagonist’s home. Holme’s fictional second story flat above his landlady, Mrs. Hudson, existed only between the pages of one of Conan Doyle’s novels and short stories.

But in June 2024, I found the Sherlock Holmes Museum on what is supposed to be 221-B Baker St. Well, let’s put it this way, it’s in the same block. The museum is not a museum but rather a collection of small spaces in a couple of large townhouses decorated to depict different rooms in Holmes’ flat. Nothing is real and there’s very little history save for one room with movie posters and busts of actors who played Holmes—a ploy, no doubt, to attract the masses who know little of Holmes except for what they’ve seen on the big and little screen. Except for the gift shop, it’s a house mostly filled with Victorian Era antiques that calls itself a museum.

The Sherlock Holme’s Museum had lots of Victorian-era recreations like this to depict Holmes’ lifestyle. Note the deerstalker’s and bowler hats, and the Meerschaum pipe on the table.

The gift shop sold lots of Holmes kitsch and maybe a total of six different books on Holmes, and one on Conan Doyle. And it calls itself a museum?

My daughter found me a nice pair of Sherlock Holmes cufflinks in the gift shop but where were all of the books analyzing Holmes, and Conan Doyle’s influence on the detective and mystery genres? Sadly, there is so little there. Any true fan will be disappointed unless you enjoy mannequins dressed in period costume and furniture either replicated or original from that era.

My friend book author Dan Stashower, a true Holmes expert (The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: the Ectoplasmic Man and Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle), told me the museum has struggled through a series of owners. That might explain the lack of a museum experience. Yet there was a long line to get in, so the place is popular.

Share

Prior to visiting London, my daughters booked tickets for Warner Bro.’s “Harry Potter Experience” not far outside the city. Now that was a WOW!, and I’m no Harry Potter fan (but you can guess who is). If they can do something like that for Harry Potter, certainly the English can do better by Sherlock Holmes.

Leave a comment

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer. Currently, I’m working on my next crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.

Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

For me, this was a true literary adventure. I liked the tour so much, I took another with Ellen a week later to follow in the steps of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and the rest of the Lost Generation.

We found many of Hemingway’s haunts in Montparnasse neighbor––his apartments, the site of Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookstore––a gathering spot for the Lost Generation, and the home of Gertrude Stein’s salon, where the literary gentry talked and talked and talked (and Hemingway learned and learned and learned). We sat in cafes where Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Dos Passos and many other literary lights hung out. Fitzgerald and Zelda had so many apartments here we couldn’t visit them all (from the street, of course). This neighborhood is where most of the literary crowd hung out thanks to its low rents, abundance of cafes and creative spirit.

One of Hemingway’s apartments was on the upper floor of this building.

We had lunch at Auberge de Venise, an Italian restaurant at 10 Rue Delambre. Ellen and I sat at the center table in the photo on the restaurant’s home page, (click here) where I enjoyed the tortellini and a glass of wine. Back in the 1920s, the eatery was called the Dingo. It’s where Fitzgerald, then one of the most famous authors in America, went in search of a young Hemingway after he’d read some of Hemingway’s short stories. Fitzgerald found him––where else––at the restaurant’s mahogany bar, which continues today to define the myth and reality of both writers.

Gertrude Stein’s salon where she entertained the Lost Generation was just beyond this courtyard.

Hemingway fascinates me, although his writing doesn’t always. He was disloyal to his friends, petty, backbiting, egotistical, and yet often very human and kind. I’ve always considered him the first author to create his own brand (adventurer, tough guy), but Ellen corrected me. That was Fitzgerald, who defined himself with the Jazz Age. She should know. She was in marketing and advertising until becoming a literary guide. She is from New York but has spent the last 35 years in Paris.

The original Shakespeare and Company owned by Sylvia Beach was shut down during WWII when she refused to sell a copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer. In 1951 George Whitman opened Le Mistral bookstore across the Seine from Notre-Dame. He renamed it Shakespeare and Company in honor of Beach in 1963. The store is a labyrinth of new and used books of all genres. Every morning there is a crowd lined up to enter. Such is the pull of the Lost Generation, even though today’s Shakespeare and Company has nothing to do with that literary era.

A clothing store occupies literary sacred ground where Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookstore thrived until forced to close during World War II when she refused to sell Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer.

Leave a comment

However, the newer version of the bookstore does have a lot to do with the Beat Generation. Our temporary home there, the Relais Hotel Du Vieux Paris, once known as the Beat Hotel, was where the Beat Generation of writers stayed while carousing at the second-generation Shakespeare and Company bookstore. The Beat Generation started in this hotel back when it was cheap and lacked basic amenities such as hot showers, heat, and bathrooms in the rooms. Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs, and Gregory Corso were among many famous writers who stayed there while frequenting Shakespeare and Company. Ginsburg drank a lot to get up the nerve to read Howl at a gathering at the store. Corso read naked there while surrounding by two bodyguards. Burroughs did a reading of a book he was working on at the Beat Hotel. You may have heard of it, Naked Lunch.

If you’re going to be in Paris anytime soon and want to learn more about the Lost Generation, I highly recommend you contact Ellen. Her rates are very reasonable.

Share

In his later years, Dos Passos lived about an hour from me in Virginia in Westmoreland County and is buried in Yeocomico Churchyard in Cople Parish. Fitzgerald, who died in California, is buried next to Zelda in Old Saint Mary’s Catholic Church Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland––about ninety minutes from my home. Hemingway, of course, is buried in Ketchum Cemetery, in Ketchum, Idaho, near family and friends.

While Hemingway and Fitzgerald are the more famous of the three, they burned the candle at both ends and died early. Dos Passos was the most productive and lived to be 74.

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer. Currently, I’m working on my next crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.

Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

“That was one of those epiphany moments in my life,” Dugoni says. “She showed up in a tank top and shorts with a bathing suit underneath saying, ‘I’m really sorry. I was working out and someone said the interviews had been moved up. My interview was now and not two hours from now, so I didn’t have time to get changed and I didn’t want to miss the interview.’”

Bestselling Crime Novelist Robert Dugoni

“The whole time she was sitting there talking to me I was sitting there with my tongue hanging out, going ‘oh my God who is this woman?’ It was just one of those moments.” It’s a pretty good guess he found her attractive, yet they were both dating others at the time.

She joined a rival firm but the two ran into each other several times a year in Seattle legal circles. Dugoni wanted to ask her out, but of all things, he’d forgotten her name. At the same time, she told a female partner in her firm she was thinking about leaving the Seattle area and was frustrated she hadn’t found a nice guy to date.

Leave a comment

Her partner told her there were plenty of guys around and to keep looking. Cristina responded the only local guy she was interested in was Bob Dugoni, the lawyer she’d met on her interview. So, her law partner, who didn’t want her friend to leave Seattle, set the two up without either one knowing it. Dugoni was to work with the law partner from the other firm on a deposition, so at the last minute, she sent Christina to the meeting instead.

There were immediate sparks in the room, and they quickly started dating. Not too long afterward, they married.

Years later Dugoni gave up the law to write bestselling novels. Cristina continued to practice law.

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer. Currently, I’m working on my next crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.

Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

It was every writers’ dream.

Reactions, however, may not have been. His wife Joy couldn’t believe his novel was that good that someone would offer her husband that kind of money, but of course, John wasn’t about to turn it down.

Publishing is one big match game where agents pair the right manuscript with the right editor. It’s that simple, and that difficult. If successful, they just might set off an explosion under a writer’s career. Gilstrap will testify to that. Failing to make the correct match, however, means the same manuscript goes nowhere.

An agent’s biggest fear is taking a pass on what later becomes a bestseller. In Gilstrap’s case, twenty-seven agents suffered that fate. Alas, even the experienced pros can’t always predict success in the subjective book publishing industry.

In Gilstrap’s case, long after his big payday, he ran into one of the twenty-seven who rejected Nathan’s Run. “Okay,” she told him, “you’re my mistake.” She was gracious, which is what agents are in this business. And as awkward as it may be to whiff on a big one, it happens all too often. Yet, no one is looking to leave hard feelings in their path in this relatively small community because, well, you just never know who you’ll be working with next week. Now, more than ever, publishers are churning through their editors at breakneck speed making it more difficult for to lightning to strike. (Ask an agent.)

And then there’s the comical and clueless reaction in this business. Six months after Nathan’s Run was published and became a worldwide bestseller, Gilstrap received his final rejection from an agent living under a rock (or who needed to fire his intern).

Gilstrap’s success gave him entrée into top mystery, crime, and thriller author circles. Yet, no matter how well-earned his fame and fortune, some reactions to his success showed him a side of the business he’d never experienced.

One of the attributes of the crime-writing community is the generosity displayed by those authors who’ve made it big toward those still aspiring. Getting a book published is not a zero-sum game. One success lifts many and helps direct the industry as it feels its way toward the next trend. Visit any writers conference with major players in attendance and you’ll experience how generous they can be. The choppy waters of publishing are not easy to navigate so advice from someone who’s been there can be invaluable.

“The dark side,” Gilstrap says, “is you become very aware––once you’re in the club and start meeting people­­––not everyone embraces your success. Many were expecting me to be an asshole. I really was humbled by it all.”

Share

Gilstrap remembers well one experience where Harlen Coben introduced him to a famous crime author who refused to shake his hand. No explanation given. To this day, the only thing Gilstrap can think of to account for such behavior is jealousy. He’s never talked to that author again.

“There’s lightning strikes and serendipity in everything in this business,” Gilstrap says, “which is encouraging and terrifying at the same time.”

And generosity and jealousy.

Leave a comment

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer. Currently, I’m working on my next crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk. Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

Subscribe now

She’d sold his book on a Wednesday and was calling two days later. “How does it feel to be the most talked about author in New York?” she asked him.

He’d never imagined anything like this.

“What are you doing tonight?” she went on. It was Friday and in the Gilstrap household, it was pizza night and a movie with the family. She told him to stay near the phone. Seven movie studios were bidding on the film rights for Nathan’s Run.

Gilstrap was dumbfounded.

Mathew Snyder, his movie agent with Creative Artists, quickly called to tell him two studios had dropped out of the bidding war. Phone calls volleyed back and forth all evening. Finally, the last studios, Fox, Disney, and Warner Bros., went head-to-head. Snyder called again to tell him Fox was out.

“A ridiculous amount of money was on the table from Disney, but it was good for only ten minutes,” Gilstrap says. Snyder told him he hadn’t heard back from Warner Bros. in the latest round of bids. “Then why are we talking?” Gilstrap responded, worried the Disney bid would expire.

Two minutes were left. Still no call from Warner Bros. And then it came.

They matched Disney’s offer.

“I just want to bounce it back and forth,” Snyder explained over the phone. “Mind if I keep trying?”

“Why would I mind?” Gilstrap couldn’t believe the amount of money on the table.

Subscribe now

Soon, Warner Bros. won the auction. The check cleared and the movie was never made––­­not uncommon in Hollywood. But Gilstrap got the pay day every writer dreams of. The week before, he’d cancelled his subscription to The Washington Post because it was too expensive. Today, he was more than a million dollars richer.

“As my wife Joy said at one point when the numbers were going around, ‘okay, the book is good, but let’s be honest. It’s not that good’,” Gilstrap says. “It’s the nature of the entertainment business.”

“There are really a lot of talented people who don’t’ get the lightning strike…I think I’m good at what I do, but there’s a lot of luck involved.”

Share

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer. Currently, I’m working on my latest crime novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk. Literary Agent Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management represents my work.

Subscribe now

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

Leave a comment

Books were in her blood, literally. He great grandfather, Rupert Hughes, wrote more than 50 and was one of the founders of what is now The Authors Guild. Cameron’s been a lover of books since she was a child.

Subscribe now

The first book she sold to a publisher was a collection of short stories, a notoriously difficult sale. But, she says, she loved the voice of the author. Male of the Species by Alex Mindt, is about family relationships. One of the short stories won the Pushcart Prize, which shows Cameron’s discerning taste­­­­­­­­ and also her diligence and devotion to her clients.

“I must have tried more than 75 publishers over the years,” she says. Finally, she went to the Maui Writers Conference where she met an editor for Delphinium Books who told her they publish books others overlook.

“I exclaimed, have I got a book for you!”

Learn more inside dish about your favorite authors.

Read About More Famous Authors

If you like Idol Talk, please forward to a friend and encourage them to subscribe.

Share

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer. Currently, I’m working on another novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

Leave a comment

While working at the magazine, she met the legendary Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, who in 1971 had taken up residence in a house near Rock Creek Park in D.C. (charging it to the magazine, of course). He was working out of the D.C. bureau along side Ryan and numerous journalists, and was covering the 1972 presidential campaign (an effort that resulted in his blockbuster book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72).

Frank Mankiewicz, campaign manager for Democratic candidate George McGovern, described Thompson’s book on the race as the “most accurate and least factual” of the campaign.

Thompson’s flame-throwing writing style was fueled by narcotics and alcohol. His antics were either legendary or myth, depending on who you believed.

“He was wonderful and charming,” says Ryan, “and a really good friend…His public persona was crazy and wacky. His private side was as a hardworking writer.”

Subscribe now

Few writers took as many chances as Thompson, and Rolling Stone’s Publisher Jann Wenner gave him plenty of leeway to challenge established thinking. And he generously shared his vision of writing with the young Ryan.

“He taught me how to go for it and be brave and let it all out and not to conform to what people thought you should write,” she says.

She went on a speaking tour with Thompson once and, “It was like being on a tour with a rock star.” She says he readily enjoyed the attention and admiration.

While riding with him in his car in the rain in downtown Washington—just as the city was constructing its new Metro System—Thompson’s car began to slide on one of many large steel plates covering the subway construction project deep below the street.

“He was not the safest driver I’ve ever encountered,” Ryan says with a hint of a smile in her voice.

“I hope we don’t get into a crash,” Thompson yelled to her while grabbing the wheel. “If the cops ever find all of the drugs in the trunk, we’ll going to be in trouble.”

“Part of me thought he was kidding and part of me didn’t,” Ryan says. “I never found out the truth.”

He managed to control the car and his secret is safe to this day.

Share

Years after her near-drug experience with Thompson, Ryan left Washington and Rolling Stone in 1975 and applied for her first television reporting job at a station in Indianapolis. She had no broadcast experience but lots of moxie. After her interview concluded, the male manager asked her why he should hire her. Without hesitation she replied, because the station had no female employees, and its broadcast license was up for renewal the following year.

She got the job.

Be brave, let it all hang out, not conform?

Thompson, no doubt, would approve.

Learn more inside dish about your favorite authors.

Read About More Famous Authors

If you like Idol Talk, please forward to a friend and encourage them to subscribe.

Share

I’m Rick Pullen, former investigative reporter, magazine editor, and author of the best selling thriller Naked Ambition, its sequel Naked Truth, and a stand-alone thriller The Apprentice. I’m also a magazine columnist and feature writer. Currently, I’m working on another novel and a non-fiction book about many of the authors who appear in Idol Talk.

Thanks for reading Idol Talk! Subscribe for free or support my work with a paid subscription. — Rick Pullen

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Each month I interview famous authors who tell me the story of how they got their first crime novel published. Everyone has to start somewhere. They weren’t always rich and famous. I track their unique path to fame and fortune.

If you’re an aspiring writer, these stories should give you some insight into your own path ahead. There is no better way to learn than from those who have been there. The biggest difference between those who get published and those who don’t is persistence. These bestselling authors never gave up. (That’s why they’re bestselling authors.)

Yet, David Baldacci hit it out of the park with his first novel, Absolute Power. (Actually, he’d sold the movie rights before it was published.) So did James Grady with Six Days of the Condo. (The movie version cut it down to three days.) But then there’s Steve Berry, who calls himself the poster boy of persistence. For seven years, his agent, Pam Ahearn, submitted his manuscript to publishers and received 85 rejections. The magic number was 86. (By then he had seven other novels written and sitting in a drawer.) It was years in the making, yet almost overnight he had a two-book deal, cash in his pocket, and was making regular treks to the New York Times bestseller list. Today, he lives in a stunning Disney-theme home in Orlando, next to Disney World.

You’ll recognize names and learn some of the inside dish on the likes of Harlan Coben, Tess Gerritsen, Lee Child, Diana Gabaldon, S. A. Cosby, Michael Connelly, Laura Lipman, Gayle Lynds, Robert Dugoni, Lisa Gardner, James Patterson, Walter Mosely, Tosca Lee, Meg Gardiner, and so many more.

Read through the archive and sign up for my newsletter. If you like what you read you may even want to show your support and donate $6 a month to the cause to keep this newsletter going.

Who’s Rick Pullen?

I’ve been a journalist all my life, first as an investigative reporter and then as a magazine editor and publisher. In 2015 I was named to the FOLIO 100—the 100 most important people in magazine publishing. That same year I was runner up for editor of the year. I retired early so I could write novels full-time.

I love a good Padron cigar (look carefully at the hat and room behind me. I was at Padron Headquarters in Little Havana, Miami hanging out with one of the owners who gave me the hat.) I divide my time between Virginia and Florida. Some say I look like Ernest Hemingway and I should enter the annual Key West contest for Hemingway doppelgängers. (Still, others say I look like Rob Reiner.)

In 2011 I started my first novel, Naked Ambition, which was published in the spring of 2016 and rose to number one in thrillers on Amazon. (Steve Berry and I were competing for the top spot at the time.) Since then I’ve written a sequel, Naked Truth (nominated for the Silver Falchion award) and a stand alone, The Apprentice. My agent is currently shopping my fourth novel and I’m getting ready to start on number five. All this while writing my monthly column for CrimeReads.com and this newsletter, Idol Talk.

Share

Please share Idol Talk with a friend and help grow our community.

Leave a comment