Pirate Alley Stephen Coonts Interview
St. Martins Press 2013
LIVE-IN-THE-FLESH INTERVIEW WITH ACTION THRILLER 14-TIMES-ON-THE- NY-TIMES-BEST-SELLER-LIST-AUTHOR STEPHEN COONTS, creator of the unstoppable warriors Jake Grafton and Tommy Carmellini, talking with The Mill Girl about his latest, PIRATE ALLEY !
Steve Coonts, the 14-time New York Times best-selling author of Pirate Alley, his newest Jake Grafton, Tommy Carmellini action adventure, has had an interesting life. Coonts grew up in Buckhannon, West Virginia, population 6,000, a coal-mining town where his father kept a law practice and his mother was a school teacher. Mr. Coonts graduated from West Virginia University during the Vietnam War era - from Buckhannon he joined the Navy and after learning to fly the A-6 Intruder was based on the carrier the USS Enterprise. Speaking with a slight accent and a voice reminiscent of another West Virginia flyer, Chuck Yeager, The Right Stuff hero and first human to break the sound-barrier, Coonts says about his first novel, Flight of the Intruder, later a film starring Danny Glover, Willem Defoe and Tom Sizemore, “I lived it.”
The Mill Girl spoke with the very gracious and happily rich Coonts just two weeks after the release of Pirate Alley, the latest Grafton/Carmellini exploit set off the coast of Somalia, a “third-world hell-hole” where the entire passenger and crew list of the British cruise ship Sultan of the Seas finds itself captured and ransomed despite failed attempts to thwart yet another act of international piracy.
Imagine sunning yourself on the pool deck after a round of mojitos and a endless buffet piled with lobster sandwiches, slabs of roast beef, towers of crème fraiche and dark chocolate confections interspersed with fresh fruit, sorbets, seven-layer gateaux and Greek coffees. Dozens of crew members await your pleasure. And the entertainment – nightly choices of live Broadway shows, first-run action movies, card games on the foredeck – it’s enough to make a passenger dissolve into 175 pounds of sated, nearly sedated observer.
But off on the not-too-distant horizon you catch movement, hear the buzz of small boats. You can just make out the dark outlines of armed boatmen – they lean casually on their weapons, long guns of some sort, and they seem to be preparing to board another passenger liner up ahead. “What is this?” you ask the steward, “I thought you promised the trip of a lifetime!” “Well, that’s what you’ve got,” says your half-drunk neighbor, ripening alongside your lounge chair, deep red in the sun, “the trip of a lifetime!” complete with RPG’s, M-16’s, explosives, US Navy ships, and Coonts’ favorite archetype character, The Warrior.
Pirate Alley is the kind of action tale so close to 24/7 news bulletins that we just can’t stop reading. We’re never sure scene-to-scene how long the hostage taking will go on and how many innocents will be sacrificed before The Warriors appear. But as any Coonts aficionado knows, every scene counts, and each warrior exploit is going to be facilitated by some incredible, eardrum-bursting, Made-in-the-US-of-A firepower. Hell, yeah, it’s bloody, but revenge, when it finally appears in the form of Grafton and Carmellini, is righteous and severe.
The Mill Girl:
I was blown over by your use of choppers and RPGs and rifles and explosives. How do you and Tommy Carmellini keep up with it all?
Mr. Coonts:
How do I keep up on weaponry? Well, obviously I’ve been out of the Navy for quite awhile, but I get on the internet, I read professional journals and the other thing is to ask the experts, it’s important to ask experts the right questions – would this work? How would it work? All I am really after is plausibility – I’m not writing a how-to on how to fly a drone, nor are my readers looking for that - if it sounds plausible, that’s what we want. Some of it is fairly simple, not all that esoteric, but the technology we have to get right in the story. My readers let me know if I’ve made a mistake! I’ve done some sci-fi - Saucer and Saucer: The Conquest, and I had a character talking about how a flying saucer works, but we had a reader write back, “no, you got it wrong, a flying saucer doesn’t work like that…” when the truth is, there are no flying saucers!
The Mill Girl:
Benghazi - Glen Doherty was from Boston. I remember when his mother told us - his family were campers at Sandy Island YMCA camp we go to every year on Lake Winnipesaukee – she was so proud when she said that her son was giving up being a ski bum and going to become a Navy seal. I like to think that he did a lot of damage before he died. Can you imagine Jake Grafton and Carmellini saving the Ambassador?
Mr. Coonts:
Jake Grafton in my first novel was going to disobey orders and get caught at it - Jake became a man who would do what he thought was right. That character developed legs that I never anticipated - so many people in our age evade responsibility, but he has become the character for our age. He will always try to do the right thing, and that’s what he does in Pirate Alley - he takes responsibility to do it his way. If they don’t like it, so be it. At one point in the story the President’s Chief of Staff asks, “How do you know these pirates won’t kill you?” And Grafton responds, “Well, if they do, I want you to wear a good suit to my funeral, and send flowers - my wife Callie likes flowers.”
We want somebody that understands - somebody that is a warrior - you may get killed. Jake understands. He’s a warrior to his fingertips. You know there are so many people we admire in the military, like at Benghazi they probably knew they wouldn’t make it, Four to five hours up on that roof is a long time, and so many of us wish we had that kind of courage. That’s why there are so many of these books - we wish we could do that if the chips fall that way. There are real people out there with that kind of courage. That’s what draws so many readers to Pirate Alley, it’s because people like Grafton, they find something in him they admire.
The Seals have a saying, “There are no easy days.” They have to be in tremendous condition and have the mental wherewithal to take whatever comes and keep fighting, keep moving.
The Mill Girl:
You've come a long way since Flight of the Intruder. Writing is hard work, exhausting at times, with great discipline required. When you aren't writing, or thinking through a new plot, or editing a manuscript, what do you do?
Well, like I said, I grew up in West Virginia, my parents were World War II era – my father was in the Navy, and my mother was a school teacher. Dad went to law school after the war and became a small town attorney. I was a pretty generic kid, had a wonderful childhood. Bohannon was a great place to grow up, but a tough place to make a living, so I bailed after college. But I went back to West Virginia when Dad had stroke and my Mom needed help caring for him. I practiced law there 1 ½ years, and I hated it. I had been gone a long time, I wanted more flash and dash, so I got myself a job in Colorado. My personal life fell apart and there was a divorce. I’m settled now, and after Flight of the Intruder, I never looked back, Flight did so well. I’ve been writing since 1986
I’m still ahead of the curve, eating three times a day. Writing is a tough gig, being a professional novelist and staying in the game is also very difficult. I’ve been lucky so far, people like my books.
At what point did I know could write Flight of the Intruder? Well, my personal life was falling apart, the company I worked for was going down the slop chute,
the price of oil dropped to $11 per barrel, so I decided would write the novel. I had lived it and I knew it would make a great novel if somebody would write it, so I started out. I tried to learn how to write books - nights and weekends – and I got turned down by every publisher until one day I saw Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October in a bookstore window. It was from the US Naval Institute Press. I knew they only did serious naval fiction, so I sent it off and they agreed to publish it, - they gave me five thousand dollars and six free books. I would have done it for no money and two free books! To my absolute amazement it was published in September in 1986, and I was the most amazed man in America, it was on the NY Times Best Seller list for 28 weeks. It was luck or serendipity because you certainly can’t anticipate a reaction like from that from the reading public. Meanwhile, the oil company had dire troubles and I was laid off – they fired all 2200 employees, so I decided I would try to keep writing books for a living and I’m still at it, doing ok.
The Mill Girl:
How long did it take you to write Flight of the Intruder?
Mr. Coonts:
I had been fiddling with it for 10 years – I had no plot and I didn’t know how to write a novel. I made every beginner’s mistake, but in ‘84 I had figured out a plot big enough, started writing and I had a manuscript in 6 months. I had friend read it and he suggested changes, worked on it another 2 months. I got 32 rejections before the Naval Institute looked it over and said “it needs some work,” but I was lucky there too. So many writers have to be ready for the line editor before a publisher would consider a book, but the Naval Institute was probably the only publisher in the world willing to get busy and edit the heck out of it, to show me how to rewrite. I learned a lot and acquired the craft by talking to good editors.
What’s my daily schedule? Usually work on one story at a time. The stories are presold to a publisher - we agree what it’s about and then I start working on it. Hopefully in six to eight months I have a manuscript. My editor reads it as I go along, a couple hundred pages at a time, then finally I get the book done.
The Mill Girl:
Do you have an agent?
Mr. Coonts:
My first two books were unagented, but then I finally realized I needed an agent. My agent is Deborah Grosvenor of Bethesda, Maryland. She understands fiction - I first met her when she worked for the Naval Institute Press.
The Mill Girl:
Robert Parker had a goal of five pages a day.
Mr. Coonts:
My goal is one scene a day, however long that takes that’s what I try to get done. Then tomorrow I do another scene, I look back, edit, polish it and I keep motoring along. Sometimes it’s very hard – if it’s too easy it’s probably junk. It’s hard intellectual labor, but on the other hand I enjoy the creative process, I enjoy getting one in my hands - that’s the kick, when I get the published book in my hands, that’s the kick. Lawyers never get that, but I have a carpenter/woodworker friend who says he gets that same feeling, he likes that too.
The Mill Girl:
So do you have your next book in mind?
Mr. Coonts:
Actually, the next one is already done, the next Saucer novel in the sci-fi series will be out this coming winter. I’ve got to go to NY to talk with my editor about what my next thriller is going to be. I’m still playing with that - not sure - haven’t sold Charlie (the Editor) on it. But I’m fascinated by the mess in Europe, the collapse of civilization in places like Greece. There’s tremendous stress and I know there is a novel in there. We’ll just have to see if can convince my editors. Books have to be sold, they have to appeal to a wide range of readers - this is not Advise and Consent. I write action and adventure, so the question is what can we do as action and adventure – how to write without preaching to people about what to do with piracy. Sometimes we dance between the raindrops because you want to keep all your readers. It’s a balancing act.
The Mill Girl:
What do you do when you are not writing or thinking about writing?
Mr. Coonts:
Oh, I have some hobbies. I collect knives, guns, I go hunting with my friends. I’m just interested in everything and I try to do everything – it’s fortunate that the book business managed to make it all fiscally possible.
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