Featured Interview With David Tindell
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was an only child, born in a big city to wealthy parents who were gunned down before my eyes when I was…Wait, that’s someone else. Actually, I was born in Germany, where my parents were living while Dad served in the Army. I grew up in small towns in southern Wisconsin, graduating high school in Potosi, a bucolic town on the banks of the Mississippi, and got my bachelor’s degree at nearby UW-Platteville, my parents’ alma mater. For the next twenty years I worked as a radio broadcaster, winding up in Rice Lake, a town in the northwest corner of the state, where I met my wife, Sue. I left radio in 1999 and now work for the US Government by day, and by night I train in the martial arts and write thriller novels, often with my Yorkie, Sophie, on my lap. We also have a Siamese cat, Indigo, and we’re blessed to live in a log home on a picturesque lake. You can see our view of the lake on the landing page of my blog, www.djtindellauthor.com. I have two great kids from my first marriage: my daughter Kim and her husband live in Boston, where she manages an upscale jewelry boutique, and son Jim lives in Milwaukee, where he works for the state and makes movies. He produced the book trailers for my first two books.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I learned to read in kindergarten and it just grew from there. In middle and high school I was fortunate to have great English teachers who opened up the world of literature to me. Thanks, Mrs. Millman and Mrs. Leonard. I also had a fine geography teacher, Mr. Peake, who showed me how fascinating other countries can be. In college I won some creative writing contests but never got serious about writing till I left radio. My first novel, “Revived,” was published in 2000. I put the keyboard aside for a few years to begin my martial arts training, then got back into the writing with “The White Vixen” and then “Quest for Honor.” My training has really opened up a world that is dedicated to discipline and honor, and since those are the kinds of stories I like to read, those are the ones I write. What does it mean to be a warrior in today’s world? And do we need them? As to the former question, I think it means being willing to stand up for others and defend those who can’t defend themselves, to be the sheepdog who isn’t afraid to take on the wolf. As to the second question, the answer is a definite, you’d-better-believe-it yes.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
The books that most influenced me in school were the Sherlock Holmes novels of Arthur Conan Doyle and the novel “Alas, Babylon,” by Pat Frank. Another one was “Costigan’s Needle,” by Jerry Stohl. These two books, written in the 1950s, were examples of what today we call dystopian fiction, putting ordinary people into extraordinary, world-shattering situations. Some people rise to the occasion and become leaders, others fail. Those situations really raise the question: What really makes someone a hero? Is it an inherent sense of discipline and self-sacrifice? Does it require intense training in something like martial arts or the military? Those books opened up those possibilities for me, to ask those questions and try to answer them. In the last couple decades I’ve discovered a lot of great thriller and mystery writers, and I’d have to list these as the most influential: Tom Clancy, Vince Flynn, Robert Ludlum, Stephen Hunter, David Poyer, Brad Thor and William Kent Krueger.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
“The Red Wolf” is the sequel to “The White Vixen.” The first book is set in 1981-82, and my protagonist is Jo Ann Geary, an Air Force Special Operations officer who is an expert martial artist and linguist. The book opens as she joins a platoon of UK Royal Marines in the rescue of a British agent held captive on a Chinese island. Later, she is once again tapped by MI6, this time to go undercover inside Argentina, to find the man behind the Argentines’ move to take the Falklands from Britain. She discovers a plot that is much more than a power grab for some sparsely-populated islands, and has to confront a terror thought long dead. In “The Red Wolf,” it is five years later, and Jo is helping to form up a new cover operations team. Their first mission comes from the president himself: Jo and her team are to go behind the Iron Curtain into communist Hungary, to prevent the assassination of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev by a rogue Spetsnaz operative, the Red Wolf. But there are influential men inside the US government who don’t want her to succeed, so Jo and her team have to stay one step ahead of their own people and stay out of the hands of Soviet and Hungarian security forces at the same time they are hunting the most dangerous man on the planet.
It takes about three years from the time I put the first thoughts about a book on paper until it’s ready to hit the bookshelves and e-readers. Fortunately, I belong to a very good critique group, composed of four ladies and myself. We exchange our latest chapters by email and meet biweekly to critique them. They’ve been extremely helpful and their suggestions have made the books a lot better than they would’ve been otherwise. So my thanks go out to Donna White Glaser, Marjorie Swift Doering, Jodie Swanson and Helen Block, all fine writers themselves.
Since I still have one of those day job things, I do my writing on evenings and weekends, occasionally early mornings. I work out a lot, and find that some of my best ideas come when I’m in the pool or on the rowing machine at the gym. Then I have to make sure I write them down or type a note into my phone. My wife owns and operates a travel agency, which is great for a writer because it allows me to do a lot of research in the field. This spring we are heading to China and will spend time in the foothills of the Himalayas. Next year we’re going to Africa to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, which by the wildest coincidence is what Jo Ann Geary will be doing in her next adventure, “The Bronze Leopard.”
“Quest for Honor” is unrelated to the Vixen series. My protagonist is Jim Hayes, a widower who lives in a small Wisconsin town. His wife was murdered in front of him several years before, so he has trained in the martial arts, because the next time someone needs his help, he is determined not to fail again. His younger brother Mark, an Army officer commanding a base in Afghanistan, is about to retire from the service and wonders if civilian life will bring him as much honor as he has found in the military. And in Somalia, a terrorist chieftain has decided to defect, bringing with him intelligence about an imminent, large-scale attack on the American heartland. But he will turn himself in only to the one American he has ever known who could be trusted, his old college friend Jim Hayes. Jim’s time has come.
The sequel, “Quest for Vengeance,” is my work in progress. It picks up the Hayes brothers’ story a year after the events in the first book, and they are newly married and vacationing in Italy with their brides. While the women are shopping in a city south of Rome, they are attacked and Mark’s wife is kidnapped. The man behind the attack is Darko Novak, head of a large security firm in Belgrade, Serbia. Back in 1999 in Kosovo, Novak’s Yugoslav Army unit engaged in a firefight with a force of US peacekeepers led by a young officer named Mark Hayes, and Novak’s younger brother was killed. Now, the Serb is going to get his revenge by using Mark’s wife as the bait.
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