Note: This updated blog first appeared here in January of 2011.
We go back a long way. Fourteen years. In those days, I interviewed authors for a daily book show Between the Lines for AP Radio Network, and, honestly, I preferred in-studio interviews to phoners. In a sense, I took a chance on interviewing Brad Meltzer over the phone about his first book, Tenth Justice. And, every time we do an interview, Brad reminds me that I was there with him since the beginning.
Do you hear the call.
Brad Meltzer began his career in a new city for a job that vanished as soon as he moved there, so he wrote his first book. 24-rejections later, he slid that book in to a drawer, and began Tenth Justice. It became a New York Times Bestseller. His research for his subsequent books has included one-on-ones with real Presidents, and visits to the White House, to underground tunnels in Washington DC, secret passageways in ancient American buildings.
Imagine.
Central to the Inner Circle is a secret band of people who served the president since George Washington. It was, Brad says, Washington’s Culper Ring who won the Revolutionary War, with secret codes involving vanishing ink and clotheslines. The secrets have been kept for hundreds of years. An archivist, Beecher White, in this book, happens upon one of the secrets, and several people are murdered around him. History rules. Intelligence rules. And, so does this: Brad tells me the main message of the thriller is “Don’t let anyone tell you no. It takes the power of ordinary people to change the world.”
I’m happy that fourteen years ago, I said Yes to Brad, and helped him in some small way. He tells me that if he can dream big, he would want my readers to take away that you should remember the power you have within.