John Pearce, Author LAST STOP: PARIS TREASURE OF SAINT-LAZARE |
John
Pearce’s recently-released LAST STOP: PARIS is an international suspense thriller and a sequel to
his previous thriller, TREASURE OF SAINT-LAZARE. Set in Paris, LAST STOP: PARIS
intends to pull the reader into the city as the protagonist works to identify
the black-market seller of anti-aircraft missiles.
A
former journalist for the International Herald Tribune, Pearce knows Europe
well and particularly Paris, where he lives off and on when not in Sarasota, FL.
In addition to writing and traveling, Pearce writes a blog PartTimeParisian.com. He is currently working
on a third novel that will combine the characters from the first two novels.
Q: Reviewers
describe your newest release, LAST STOP: PARIS, as an international mystery,
full of suspense and adventure. What are the elements that make it a mystery?
Or would you describe it as more of an adventure than a mystery? A thriller?
What makes it so?
John Pearce: I was amused
that Kirkus, in its rather fulsome review, had trouble characterizing it. The
first book was clearly a historical mystery (and in fact won a national
“best-of” award for the category). In LAST STOP: PARIS, the mystery is the
identity of the ultimate bad guy, who was responsible for the misery in Eddie
Grant’s life but always seems just out of reach. The thriller part is very
topical – the black-market sale of deadly anti-aircraft missiles known as
manpads, which Eddie and his sidekicks must thwart to prevent the physical and
financial carnage that would result if two loaded airliners were shot down at
De Gaulle Airport.
Q: Why did you
decide to write a sequel to TREASURE OF SAINT-LAZARE: A NOVEL OF PARIS? Did you
leave some loose ends in TREASURE?
John Pearce: I intended to
write one book, but after no more than two or three chapters I realized the
story was bigger than that. It would have been a very large single
volume.
Q: How helpful
is Paris as a setting to create suspense, intrigue, and/or romance? Would these
two stories be different if set in New York, London, or San Francisco?
John Pearce: I write about
Paris because that’s the big city I know best, it’s where I live for part of
each year, and I am a true fan. While I could set similar a story in another
big city, it wouldn’t have the flavor of Paris. Eddie is a dual national, at
home in both the French and American worlds. He distinguished himself as a
military officer in Operation Desert Storm, and proudly wears the ribbons of
both his Bronze Star and his Legion d’Honneur. His father, and all the Grant
men before them, were also military officers, and his father was an American
military spy behind German lines in France and elsewhere in the world (that’s
another book).
Q: How did you create your protagonist,
Eddie? Is he based on someone you knew? Would you describe him as a “hero?”
John Pearce: Like all my
characters, Eddie is an amalgam of people I know and people who live only in my
imagination. I’d be very surprised if there is a person alive who would see
himself clearly in Eddie.
Eddie
would not consider himself a hero, but his friends would. His goal is to be an
ordinary man living an ordinary life, but outside forces make that impossible
and he always rises to the occasion, with a little help from his friends.
Q: Is the
concept of “hero vs villain” relevant to LAST STOP: PARIS? Do you define your
villains clearly, or are they a mixture of good guy/bad guy?
John Pearce: The concept is
very relevant. The villains are the type of people I consider most villainous –
people willing to injure, even kill, simply for financial gain. The true
villains in both my stories are genuinely evil, but be careful jumping to quick
conclusions about any of them. There’s at least one major surprise on the
horizon.
Q: How helpful
was your career as a journalist to develop the plots and characters for your
novels? Were you able to transfer the skills required for writing non-fiction
articles on economics etc. to writing fiction?
John Pearce: Journalism
taught me to gather information and organize it so it can be used to construct
a story. Learning to write in the long form was a challenge, so much so that I
shelved the novel for a year and dug deeply into the art and craft of writing
novels. When I came back to it, the writing went much more smoothly.
Q: How do you
create suspense? Again, what enabled you to write a thriller after a career as
a journalist?
John Pearce: Suspense comes from putting people into difficult situations and watching how
they dig out. Sometimes I have the resolution in mind before I begin to write,
but it’s amazing how many scenes develop themselves organically only after I
start to put words on paper.
Good
journalists, good novelists and good short-story writers have one trait in
common: they are good story-tellers. They can communicate the facts of an event
or a situation in a way that readers can understand. The journalist of the type
I was (just the facts, ma’am) has less freedom of writing style, while the
truly literary novelist is free to create elegant phrases that flow smoothly
across the page. As a novelist, I’m somewhere in between, I think.
Q: Did you
write your PARIS novels strictly to entertain or do you sneak in a few key
messages?
John Pearce: Entertainment
is my main goal, but I also want my readers to feel like they’re physically
present in my scenes. One of the most charming reviews I received for TREASURE
said something like, “I’ve never been to Paris until now.” That reviewer
understood what I was trying to do.
I
didn’t set out to make any political or social points, but several reviewers
thought I had. Of course, it’s the rare writer who can create a story free of
his own experiences and viewpoints. But my stories aren’t tracts of any sort.
Q: What’s next?
John Pearce: I’m about 40%
finished with a third novel, which will reunite the characters I assembled in
the first two books, plus or minus. As I envision it now, it will have more of
an espionage flavor to it.
After
that, I want to write the story of Eddie’s father, Artie, a Harvard-trained
lawyer who FDR lured out of the business world in the 30s to become a military
spy (at a time when it wasn’t done for someone of his class to join the
military). If it works the way my preliminary outline says it should, it will
be a sweeping yarn.
Q: Tell us
about John Pearce. What do you like to do when you’re not writing?
John Pearce: I read quite a
bit. You can’t write novels unless you read them. I like music – my wife Jan
and I live in Sarasota, an arts city on the West Coast of Florida, and we have
a pretty full schedule of concerts through the winter this year. We travel, to
Paris and elsewhere. This year we’ve been to Chattanooga and Knoxville for the
Civil War history, plus New York and Washington. The opening chapter of the
next book takes place in Miami, so we’ve gone there a couple of times,
including a great long weekend at the Miami Book Fair.
And
I look for interesting things to do. In Paris this year, for example, we were
“discovered” by the casting director for a film the Paris Opera Ballet was
producing and wound up playing the part of rather stereotypical American
tourists, with speaking roles, no less. I wrote about the experience and linked
to the film a few weeks ago on my blog, PartTimeParisian.com.
For
someone who’s a fan of music and the arts, the best part of it was the
opportunity to spend an entire day on the stage, in the rehearsal halls, and in
the seats of the Opera Bastille, one of the great houses of the world.
#
About
John Pearce
John Pearce is a part-time Parisian
but lives quite happily most of the year in Sarasota, FL. He worked as a
journalist in Washington and Europe, where he covered economics for the
International Herald Tribune and edited a business magazine. After a business
career in Sarasota, he spends his days working on his future books - The new
one, LAST STOP: PARIS, is a 2015 project. It is a sequel to TREASURE OF SAINT-LAZARE.
For several months each year, he and
his wife Jan live in Paris, walk its streets, and chase down interesting
settings for future books and his blog, PartTimeParisian.com. They lived
earlier in Frankfurt, Germany, which gave him valuable insights for several of
the scenes in Last Stop: Paris.
Summary
of LAST STOP: PARIS (from Kirkus)
When readers last saw
Eddie Grant in Treasure of Saint-Lazare (2012), he was hot on the
trail of Nazi war loot in the company of his on-again, off-again lover,
Jen. As readers return to Eddie’s shadowy world of undercover deals and
thugs in the employ of crime bosses, they find a quieter, more mature Eddie,
now married to Aurélie, a scholar of some note, and living in pleasant domestic
bliss. Onto this romantic scene come several of Eddie’s friends, who alert him
to suspicious activity within his social circle, involving a man with criminal
intentions and an interest in gold. Shortly afterward, a mysterious murder
implicates another character from Eddie’s past. As he looks into the
matter, Aurélie soon finds herself in danger; at the same time, Jen reappears
in Eddie’s life, and he’s simultaneously drawn to her and eager to avoid
falling into bed with her again. Soon, he and his comrades must track down
another ring of criminals and protect themselves from fatal
retribution. Although sequels often suffer by having less energy than
first installments, Pearce’s second foray into Eddie’s world has no such
trouble. The pacing races from chapter to chapter as characters become
more fully fleshed-out—particularly those in Eddie’s ring of friends. Jen
provides a nice foil as an engaging modern woman who can take care of herself. Pearce
again accomplishes every thriller writer’s aim: creating characters that the
readers can root for and a believable, fast-paced storyline. The climax
and denouement bring the storylines together neatly, but fans will see that
there may yet be room for another book in the series.
An exhilarating journey
that will satisfy the most avid thriller reader.
-Kirkus Reviews
Extract
from LAST STOP: PARIS (Ch. 8)
Aurélie ran for the métro, certain she could lose Max in the maze
of tunnels that connected three subway lines.
“Help me!” she called out, as loudly as she could. “He’s trying to
kill me!” Heads turned, first toward her and then toward Max, who hesitated for
only an instant.
Two steps at a time, she ran down the stairs to the platform, only
to see the red lights of a departing train recede down the tracks ahead. The
sign above the platform told her the next wouldn’t arrive for two minutes. She
calculated quickly that she could run the length of the platform to the
complicated system of transfer tunnels that make up the station, but after
twenty yards the heel of her left shoe broke. In the few seconds it took to
remove both of them, Max caught her arm in a viselike grip.
“End of the line, lady,” he gasped. He was panting hard from the
run.
As people arrived for the next train they started to gather around
the curious sight. Most backed away when they saw the knife in Max’s hand —
except for one shabbily dressed young man who had been asleep behind the row of
chairs lining the station wall.
Aurélie was strong and in better condition than Max was, from
lifting weights and the long runs she and Eddie made frequently along the
Seine, but she knew she could not beat him in a knife fight, so she played for
time. She grabbed Max’s wrist with both hands and pushed the knife away while
the young man moved in with his backpack. She flexed her toes and gripped the
rubber buttons of the warning strip, pushing hard to keep Max off balance until
she felt the cold wind that every arriving train pushes ahead of it, then heard
the sound of brakes as the train entered the station. The sound rose an octave
as the driver saw the fight and began a full panic stop.
A second before the train passed, she planted her foot behind
Max’s ankle and pushed him with the last of her strength. He dropped the knife
so he could hold her with both hands, but it was too late — by then she had
tipped him beyond the point of no return. She released her death grip on his
right wrist and he tumbled headlong in front of the hundred-ton train. His
anguished scream died abruptly as the first car rolled over him.
The young man grabbed Aurélie tightly around the waist to pull her
out of the way, but even with his help they bounced a dozen feet along the side
of the slowing train.
She turned to look at him. “You are a brave man. Thank you.”
“I am a soldier, or at least I was. Where did you learn to fight
like that?”
She picked one of the blue plastic chairs lining the station wall
and sat down. “It’s the second time I’ve been threatened by a man with a
knife,” she said. “After the first I swore I’d never be the victim again, so I
made my fiancé teach me. He was also a soldier.”
“It worked. What did you say to that man just as you pushed him in
front of the train?”
“I told him to tell his friends in hell that I sent him.”
Links
Purchase Links
LAST STOP, PARIS
TREASURE OF SAINT-LAZARE
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