Brad Taylor’s new novel Hunter Killer is out this week in the UK from Head of Zeus, who have also released his back catalogue of adventures featuring Pike Logan and the team he leads, The Taskforce. Paul Simpson caught up with him to discuss the challenges of writing a globetrotting thriller in the current pandemic and much more…

 

You’re with a new publisher in the States, and have a new market here in the UK. Obviously it’s not a new strand of books so, for the benefit of those who haven’t encountered either you or the books before, what’s both the fictional and the non-fictional genesis of the Pike series?

Well I actually just always had it at the back of my head as a bucket list thing, I was going to write a book one day. I served 22 years in the military, most of that time in special operations.

I left Fort Bragg – I was in a special mission unit at Fort Bragg – and became Assistant Professor of Military Science at a military college here in South Carolina. It was like leaving a bullet train and crawling. I taught classes but I just had a lot of time on my hands and so I told my wife one day, ‘Hey, I’m going to write a book’. And I thought it would just sit on the bedside table, my Mum would say it’s a good book and that would be the end of it.

But the book actually sold and so I had to make a choice. I came out on the promotion list to Colonel; My next assignment was unaccompanied to Pakistan; my daughter was entering high school – there were a lot of competing interests there so I decided to give writing a try. If I’d have known how hard it was to be published and how hard this whole thing is, I never would have done it! But at the time I was like, “OK let’s give this a try”. I put in my retirement paperwork and turned down the promotion and started writing books.

To begin with, you were writing more than one a year… The words “a glutton for punishment” come to mind here.

I didn’t, not initially. I wrote the first two books and what was happening was, you don’t make a lot of money off books initially and I still had to feed my family, so I was doing a lot of security contracting. I have a unique skill set and it was in high demand so I was doing security contracting all over the place. The book would be due in January and I’d look at my calendar and say, ‘Well, I’m going to be gone from July until January’ so I had to get it in in July. Then once I turned the book in, I would get mad at my publisher, like ‘What are you waiting for? Put it out there.’ Because the problem with writing about current events is that they’re current, and anything could destroy the plot. For instance One Rough Man, if we’d have gone to war with Iran – we were rattling sabres big time then – the whole book wouldn’t have mattered.

So I kept telling my publisher to put it out, put it out, put it out and then of course they told me, ‘You’re not our only author, I hate to tell you. There’s a schedule here and you’re on the schedule.’ And so they finally got sick of me doing that and said, ‘OK smart Alec, if you want to do one every six months, we’ll do it every six months.’

So that’s how I got roped into that and it just about broke me. For four years I did two books a year, but you’re actually doing more than [just writing] two books a year. I was promoting one book, editing a second book, creating a third book, doing book research trips all over the world… and by the time Ring of Fire came out I told my wife, ‘I’m not going to finish Ring of Fire, there’s no way.’

We’d just come back from Spain and Morocco and everywhere else doing research and I said, ‘I’m at my wit’s end’, then my publisher called up and said, ‘Hey, we think we want to go back to one book a year. You’re cannibalising yourself.’ The next book would come out and the first book was still selling and I was like, ‘OK, let’s go back to that!’

I think that’s always the mark as well, when you’ve got an editor in tune with you, someone who’s going to pick that up from your communications…

Exactly.

I had to learn how to write. I’m a reader first so I wrote what I thought I’d like to read and then fine tune that. People say, ‘How long did it take you to write your first book?’ Well, you’ve got your entire life to write your first book; it doesn’t really matter. But I had to learn how to write and I tell people I learned what my editor wanted to see, not so much the market or anything. He said, ‘This is the way you need to go’ and I’d say, ‘OK, let’s go that way.’ And he taught me to write.

I always describe my job as an editor as being to help the writer write what they thought they wrote in the first place.

Yes, exactly.

And that’s the thing, a good editor will be in tune with you. They’re the only person probably – apart from maybe your wife or a close buddy – that you’ve actually discussed the characters with, their progression and all of it. So it should be like looking in a mirror but slightly distorted mirror that puts you in a slightly different direction.

Exactly. I’ve never heard it described that way but that’s exactly right. Especially my early formative years in 2011 or so, he was coaching me. I’m a pretty quick learner, so the first book I had a five page editorial letter, Here’s everything terrible about your book. The second book I got a two page letter and now I get comments in the margin: ‘Hey, how about this?’ I don’t even get a letter. So it was “OK, he said do this, therefore I will never make that mistake again”, and I tuck it away and start writing.

What’s the backstory for Pike and the team? How do they come together? Without huge spoilers, where do they come from?

It’s basically they work in an organisation called the Taskforce which is an extra-legal counter terrorism unit.

People ask me all the time ‘Do we have the Taskforce in the United States?’ and we don’t. It’s against our Constitution, it’s illegal, but we used to fantasize about it. If you watch Hollywood you’d think it’s super simple, but to get a mission done, you’re competing with the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, Department of State. There’s all these competing interests. I like to tell people, ‘If I really wrote what happened, it’d be 400 pages of PowerPoint briefings and the first guy gets on an airplane a year later.’

So we used to fantasize about the Taskforce, this extra-legal counter terrorism force and Pike’s a member of that. So I created a whole cloth. I knew it would have oversight – you wouldn’t just let that guy go loose, there would be some way they’d operate. I have a pretty healthy appreciation for how the State Department and intelligence community and all those guys work; we call it Title 50 vs Title 10 which is United States code: military vs intelligence work.

So they’re a member of the Taskforce and they go around the world.

When you first write anything, the world is wide open. The minute I say someone has blue eyes, he’s got blue eyes forever and the minute I created the Taskforce, I created the Oversight Council. I wrote down what they can and can’t do.

Every book I write, I put 100% into that book and then the next book I’m like, ‘Why did you write that?’ because now you can’t do ‘X’, you’ve got to figure out how to do ‘X’ because you’ve specifically said you can’t do ‘X’ in the book before.

But then, that’s one of the great challenges isn’t it? And that’s going to keep you interested in characters that you’ve written lord knows how many hundreds of thousands words about, at this stage.

Yes and the hardest part about writing a series is the growth of the characters because human beings change. You have a daughter that just entered college or university, that’s a life altering experience; having a kid is a life altering experience. Humans always grow so I’ve got to make the arc of the story with recurring characters where they’re growing, they’re doing something. They can’t just be in stasis from One Rough Man in 2011 till Hunter Killer now. Pike can’t be the same guy; he’s got to have grown and that’s difficult to get through.

That’s something that I liked about the book – there was a very obvious change between Pike and Jennifer’s status from the beginning of the book to the end. Also, there’s the whole discussion of the moral imperative between them: when is it right to kill? Is that a theme through the series or is that something that’s very particular to Hunter Killer, because you’ve got almost the devil and the angel on Pike’s shoulder with Jennifer and Shoshana in this one?

It’s more prominent in Hunter Killer but it’s been a theme throughout. I have served in combat and I just get so sick of the black and white world that you see in Hollywood and other books. It’s like “If I could take a drill bit and put it through this guy’s knee and everybody get off my back, I’d save the world”. It doesn’t work that way. The world is not black and white, it’s a mess of grey, and when you go to combat, make no mistake, you’re making life and death decisions over and over again.

It’s not like a movie. Every decision is not a good decision and you live with that decision. If you make a bad decision, you’re going to live with it. It’s just something that happens and I try to show that on the page.

There’s a moral conundrum, the moment you step into combat: you’ve been told, especially in the Christian tradition, that thou shall not kill, thou shall not kill, thou shall not kill. Then you’re given a weapon and told, ‘Go kill that guy’. There’s a moral conundrum right there; there starts to be a breakdown in your moral cohesion the minute you enter combat and I try to show that in the books.

It’s been described to me before that part of bootcamp is not erasing what you are before but setting something else in so that you’re in a certain mindframe once you’re in combat. Is that a fair description?

Yes, I’d say that the army’s learned a lot of lessons. There’s been a lot of studies done. In the Civil War only one out of eight guys actually shot their musket. The rest of them just kept loading it; they’d find these guys dead with eight rounds loaded in their musket because they refused to fire. So the army made a concentrated effort to dehumanise the enemy, so you would not feel bad about killing the enemy. But you still know they’re human, when you step in there.

My combat was always against a completely different culture, completely different system – Islam, the Middle East – but you still have to grapple with that.

In writing Hunter Killer what was the biggest challenge?

Keeping up with technology; it is just overwhelming. In the James Bond movies you have Q, and the CIA has their Director of Science and Technology and in the old days, that’s where all the cool stuff was. Well now it’s just commercial; off the shelf is overwhelming anything the CIA can come up with.

All the old spy technology is classified and so I couldn’t use it in a book, I don’t have to worry about that anymore because it’s all open. You just buy stuff off the shelf.

In Ring of Fire I had to have a way of finding where this guy was. I did some research and found out that in New York City criminals were using drones to steal information. When you go out, you have your phone set to Wi-Fi and most people leave it hooked up, so when you re-enter a network you’ve been in, your phone automatically hooks up to it. Very few people turn that feature off, so if you go to Starbucks and sign into their Wi-Fi, it automatically hooks up. Well, these criminals were a block away from the Wi-Fi and were hovering a drone with a spoof of a server so that when anybody leaving that Starbucks got under the drone, their phone would automatically hook up to the drone and they’d drain it of all the personal data and use it.

I read that story – that’s not classified from the CIA, that’s a real thing that happened – and I thought I could use that.

Every morning I’m reading feeds from hacker news and everything else trying to keep up with technology and it’s almost impossible.

Obviously your books have been built around going to the places, researching the places, so unless Pike’s doing a mission at the top of your stairs next…

(Laughs) It’s killing me.

I just finished book 15 and I had been to Taiwan and Australia doing the research for it before the pandemic hit. I was trying to figure out how I was going to work this in and I decided not to. I wrote the book during the Taiwanese elections in 2019 so that’s the setting. The next one I’m starting now and first of all I can’t even go anywhere. I can get to Croatia, but it’s the only place that will let me in.

But it does offer some opportunities because when you’re writing a story, you want it to be realistic. Especially in London, you know this, the surveillance cameras are everywhere. So if you’re going to do a hit somewhere in London you’ve really got to work through how you’re going to do that where these guys can’t see it.

Well nowadays everybody’s wearing masks: you put on a mask, a hat and sunglasses, you get away with that. You could do a hit and not be seen, so there are some benefits to it but the whole globetrotting thing… How are you going to fly around the world solving these problems when nobody’s going to let you in?

You’ve got another issue of course because you’ve got a different White House set up, with President Hannister. There’s no sense in this book as to which party he’s from but obviously the American response to COVID and everything has been dictated by President Trump whereas your president may have reacted differently…

Yes I completely stay away from politics. I don’t do politics. In fact this is the 14th book. I’ve had two presidential administrations throughout the books and I’ve never said what party they’re from. I don’t deal with politics that way.

Some people try to read politics into my books and I’m like, “There are no politics in my books. It’s national security, there’s a problem set that Pike’s trying to solve which is clearly discernible.” If you read the books, there’s no politics to it. I just stay away from that.

I remember during the 2016 campaign I was on a book tour and I kept getting asked about who I was going to vote for, what do you believe… and I refused to answer. In the military you’re apolitical. I spent 22 years in the military not saying anything about a politician and I do that now, and especially in the books because I’m a reader before I’m a writer. I read voraciously and I can’t stand it when I read something and someone is trying to put some kind of political agenda in the book, clearly trying to tell me something. Whether it’s right or left, I don’t care either way. It aggravates me so I don’t do that. I have my opinion, I don’t need to hear your opinion. I enjoy reading, so that’s what I try to write.

Do you still read in this genre?

I don’t. Honestly, because I lived the life I never read the genre because invariably you’re going to read something . I do it, make no mistake. There are people who will read my books from my old special mission unit who’ll go ‘That would never happen!’ Of course it wouldn’t, I’m writing a book!

When I read their books I think, “This would never happen, I’m not going to finish this book.” I’m sure doctors don’t read medical thrillers and cops don’t read police procedurals for that very reason. And now I don’t read the genre just because I don’t want to be turned off from writing something because this guy just happened to write something very close.

Do you presumably also steer clear of things like the Jack Ryan TV series and stuff like that?

I watch them. I’ve watched Jack Ryan. Extraction just came out on Netflix, I watched that. A buddy of mine that was in the unit with me was a military advisor on the movie so I watched it.

Can you switch off that part of your brain and go ‘This is popcorn entertainment’?

Yes; my wife doesn’t like sitting with me when I’m watching movies like that because there will always be something. For instance 12 Strong, the movie that came out about the first Special Forces team in Afghanistan with Thor, Chris Hemsworth, in it. There’s one scene where they’re getting shot up and he’s got to get this grid to get the planes to drop the bombs. So he jumps on his horse, right in the middle of battle, right down to where he wants the grid, gets the grid and rides back. I’m like, “Before we had GPS’s we used to call in fire all the time; why’d you have to ride your horse down there? Just tell them where to drop the bomb.”

Hunter Killer is your first book for a new publisher on both sides of the Atlantic. Did you write it differently knowing that was going to be the case?

No, actually there was a lot of trepidation, I’ll tell you that. Because you just never know. I’ve worked with the same editor forever, and now I have a new editor but I just write it like I write it. I just wrote it straight through.

I don’t ever do an outline. I do what I call a framework where I know the threat vector, I know the characters and up until No Fortunate Son I would have said I know the ending. After No Fortunate Son I would say 80% of the time, I know the ending and the plot changes.

I sent Hunter Killer in wondering how this was going to work. Was I going to get, for the first time in years, a five page editorial letter saying “Fix all this”? And I didn’t. It was about the same thing, so it worked out well.

There’s enough backstory provided for someone like me, coming in cold to the series, to have an understanding of the characters without having all the details. It’s fed nicely in so that I feel now that I have a handle on the characters although I wouldn’t say I know the characters the way that somebody who’s read all the previous books does.

Right and that’s the hardest thing. I’m writing the next book right now and you have to describe the Taskforce, you have to describe the Oversight Council, you have to describe Grolier Recovery Services – the cover platform that Pike and Jennifer use – but you don’t want to do it the same way every time. The easiest thing would be to cut and paste the first five pages and throw it in there! So I say, “I’m a reader: does a reader really need to know this in the first five pages?” You get the information, you know what’s going on but it’s not this drumbeat of “Pause the book, let me give you a presentation on everything you’ve missed in the past fourteen books, here we go!”

Back to the PowerPoints again!

Right, exactly. “Here’s a PowerPoint presentation, view this before reading my book.” So I intersperse it all throughout the series and through character interaction too. That’s the best way to do it, rather than just some explanatory paragraph. There’s interaction, there’s dialogue, and the reader gets the information through the dialogue, most of the time seamlessly, not even realising they’re assimilating this information – that’s the best way to do it.

Do you see your future as just writing Pike books or would you like to do something different?

Right now, it’s just Pike. I get a lot of drumbeat about doing an Aaron and Shoshana spinoff or maybe a Knuckles spinoff but I do write novellas and usually those end up in a novella.

The Target is Aaron and Shoshana’s origin story; it’s set in 1998 in Argentina, so it’s way before the Taskforce or anything else. Knuckles has a kind of origin story, the first one I wrote, The Callsign. I think that I could do an Aaron and Shoshana standalone but I’m scared to. I don’t know enough about the Mossad in Israel, I know a little bit but not enough to really get the intricacies right on that.

I’m comfortable in my own world, if I had been a cop, Pike would have been a policeman. If I had been a priest Jennifer would have been a nun but I happen to be a counter terrorist guy so that’s what Pike is. I know that world really well so it’s easier for me to write that stuff.

Hunter Killer is out now from Head of Zeus. Click to order from Amazon.co.uk

Thanks to Sophie Ransom at Midas PR for her help in arranging this interview