Behind the Scenes: The Craft of Writing Political Thrillers

Anyone who has been reading my novels from the beginning will notice that Marcus Ryker is a very different lead character from all the rest.

My first series of five novels, which began with The Last Jihad, featured a guy named Jon Bennett. He was a highly successful Wall Street strategist who gets recruited by an old friend, the former governor of Colorado who is now the president of the United States, to serve as a senior White House advisor tasked with turning a lucrative oil and gas deal in Israel into an Arab-Israeli peace treaty.

My next series, a trilogy which began with The Twelfth Imam, was focused on David Shirazi, an Iranian-born American citizen who gets recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency. Shirazi is ordered to serve as a deep cover operative inside the Islamic Republic of Iran to figure out how close Tehran is to building nuclear weapons, but he stumbles across a plot more bizarre and dangerous than anyone back in Washington could possibly believe.

After that, I wrote a trilogy that began with The Third Target. It centered on a New York Times foreign correspondent named J. B. Collins, who is trying to track down the leader of the Islamic State. At first, he simply wants to interview and profile him. But as ISIS tries to assassinate the leaders of the United States, Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, Collins finds himself less interested in journalism and more interested in bringing him to justice.

I loved writing all of those novels—as well as a stand-alone historical novel, The Auschwitz Escape—and I wouldn’t go back and do it differently for anything. Those were the stories I wanted to tell, and I’m still astonished anyone paid me to do it.

But none of those were really classic heroes upon which I could build a thriller franchise. David Shirazi was probably the closest because he was recruited and trained and deployed by the CIA. But generally speaking, Wall Street strategists and journalists are not ideal franchise characters—in part because they don’t have the skill sets that make thrillers so exciting. They’re not designed to risk everything for the sake of their country. They’re not trained for close quarters combat. They may be willing to take life-threatening risks from time to time, but it’s not what they were born to do. It’s not what they really want to do.

Not like Marcus Ryker.

When I started to sketch out a new series, I wasn’t interested in writing merely a trilogy. I wanted to create a character that might keep challenging me and stretching me for many years to come.

I really only had two clear thoughts about Ryker when I got started.

First, I wanted him to have served in the U.S. Marines on combat tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq and to have served in the United States Secret Service on the Presidential Protective Detail. That is, I wanted him to have incredible skills, a willingness and capacity to take unbelievable risks, but I didn’t want him to be an assassin. I wanted him to be someone highly trained to protect his country and his country’s leaders. I wanted him to be willing to take a bullet for the president, regardless of whether he liked the president or voted for him. That said, I wanted him to a be a “former,” someone who used to do these things but was now out of the game—and suddenly pulled back into government service against his will.

Second, I wanted Ryker to be a widower. My greatest fear in life is losing my wife, Lynn, because I love her so much and appreciate her more than I can possibly express. The thought of losing her is horrifying to me. So, I thought, what if I create a character who is marked by the deepest, most profound sense of loss? And not only has Ryker lost his wife, but he has lost his only son. How does a person recover from either tragedy, much less both? And how would Ryker, who spent his entire career protecting his nation and its leaders, live with himself when he couldn’t protect the two people closest to him in the world?

I didn’t have answers for those questions, but they intrigued me. They seemed like questions that could keep me challenged for a long time.

How would Ryker be persuaded to reenter the game? Why would he say yes? Where would he find the inner strength? Would being a widower make him more vulnerable in the field or more dangerous? More cautious or more reckless? Would he ever want to get married again? What kind of woman would want to marry a man whose life was so dangerous? What kind of woman could Ryker picture marrying, if he could even see himself settling down at all? Is settle down even a term in his vocabulary?

In short, I wanted a very smart, very capable, and very dangerous new lead character. I also wanted one shaped by deep wounds that might never truly heal. Those were the foundational building blocks as I began to envision Marcus Ryker and started writing the first novel in this series, The Kremlin Conspiracy.