Dan Fesperman

Dan Fesperman’s travels as a writer have taken him to thirty countries and three war zones. Lie in the Dark won the Crime Writers’ Association of Britain’s John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for best first crime novel, The Small Boat of Great Sorrows won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best thriller, and The Prisoner of Guantánamo won the Dashiell Hammett Award from the International Association of Crime Writers.

Dan's latest book, The Cover Wife, was published in July by Head of Zeus and is available to borrow through the Suffolk Libraries catalogue.

Who were your heroes as you were growing up, and when did you first realise that you wanted to write?

As a boy, most of my heroes were baseball players and astronauts. I was consumed by sports, and would spend hours imagining entire line-ups for baseball and basketball games that only I could see or hear. They'd transpire in my parents' driveway as I shot hoops or tossed a rubber baseball off the wall of our house. I'd provide a radio-style play-by-play as these "games" went on -- I'm sure our neighbors must have thought I was kind of nuts. So I guess you could say that's when I first began creating stories, even though I wasn't writing down a word of it. The writing came later, when I became a journalist in college, working at my university’s daily newspaper.

You worked as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun newspaper before you became a novelist. Looking back now, did that help to lay the groundwork for your later career?

Absolutely. Writing as a journalist teaches you the value of clarity, and of paring away the clutter of unneccesary words and insignificant detail. Later I gravitated toward longer, narrative stories, which taught me pacing, setting scenes, presenting characters. As a foreign correspondent, my travels took me to places where I saw people at their best and worst, living in the extremes of war and upheaval. Just by keeping your eyes and ears open you learn so much about human nature, dialog, all of that, and you meet people from all walks of life. If you want to write novels, you can't ask for better preparation.

In 1999, Lie in the Dark was published. How did that change your life?

It showed me I could actually finish a manuscript and, better still, that I could get it published. Once you've cleared those two hurdles, the other ones going forward look a lot smaller.

A number of crime wriers have ex-detectives as contacts, and even ex-Presidents co-write books nowadays. Do you have contacts you draw on for information?

Yes, but the cast tends to change with every book, depending on the era in which it's set. I've spoken to a lot of ex-CIA and OSS people over the years, and a lot of historians, archivists, experts in various fields. Declassified records in the National Archives, and on the CIA's website, are wonderlands of rich material. They trigger ideas for characters, scenes, sub-plots, and give you a feel for the language spoken by spies and scoundrels across different eras.

Your new book, The Cover Wife, is out in the UK now. Can you tell us a little about it?

It begins as a bit of a spy farce, with a female CIA operative assigned to pose as the wife of a nerdy scholar of the Quran, to protect him from death threats during a conference in Hamburg. But it quickly evolves into something deeper, and deadly serious, as she begins investigating the doings of some local Islamic radicals who've come together at a Hamburg mosque in the Fall of 1999, with consequences far beyond everyone's initial expectations.

Is there anything you can share with us about the latest project you're working on?

I've just turned in the first draft of a manuscript set in Berlin in early 1990, four months after the Wall came down. The main character is a Stasi foreign intelligence officer who has retreated to his woodland dacaha after being locked out of the padlocked headquarters. He's about to draw his last paycheck, he's worried about being prosecuted by the West Germans, and he becomes caught up in the deadly competition between the CIA and KGB to take possession of the Stasi's archival secrets. While there's still work left to be done, I can say with assurance that I've never had quite this much fun writing a book.

Is there a book you have read that has changed your life or made you look differently at things?

At the age of fifteen I read Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. It opened my eyes to the idea that fiction could be fresh and wildly fun, even while it taught me some hidden history and exposed me to a few unconventional ideas. But its biggest impact was that it turned me into a binge reader. Suddenly I had to track down and read every other Vonnegut novel, while keeping an eye out for anything new. And that's how I've been ever since -- a reader constantly on the lookout for new authors to discover, while plundering their backlists.

What is on your 'to read' list at the moment?

The novels Razorblade Tears, by S.A. Cosby, and Country, by Michael Hughes; the memoir Greene on Capri, by Shirley Hazzard; and the Cold War non-fiction book, The Free World, by Louis Menand.

What is the best advice you were ever given?

An old journalism professor who I greatly admired, and who knew I was a distance runner who aspired to write novels (but could never seem to get started on one), told me that the only way I'd ever write a book was to make writing a daily habit, just as I'd done with my running. Sit down and write, every day, without fail -- it was the only way forward. Disarmingly simple, I suppose, but only by making writing habitual can you climb your way, step by daily step, to the summit of that first manuscript.

Can you tell us one thing about yourself that your readers may not know?

I once ran a marathon in less than three hours, and even now I try to run every day.