Author John Amos joins me to chat about his new detective adventure, The Cleopatra Caper.
Bio:
John W. Amos holds a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and a JD from the Monterey College of Law. He is both a professor and an attorney. His academic publications include Arab-Israeli Military-Political Relations, and The Palestinian Resistance, as well as numerous articles in major academic journals. He has also edited Gulf Security into the ’80s. He has written three fictional works, The Student, The Cleopatra Caper, The Stolen Goddess, and The Bones of the Apostle (forthcoming).
Welcome, John. Please tell us about your current release.Cleopatra is an allegory about coming of age. A couple of very entitled kids, Flinders, and Pettigrew, figure they can be much better detectives than those old fogies Holmes and Watson. They discover, very quickly, that they are wrong, and that the world can be both magical and dangerous.
What inspired you to write this book?
As a kid I was frightened to death by the Adventure of the Speckled Band, so I read every Sherlock Holmes story I could find. Then, much later, I saw the movie Cleopatra, so I decided to put the two together. Since it is fiction, I mixed real and fictional characters, and that was the fun part. I suppose you could call it ‘magical realism,’ but then sci fi fiction does it all the time.
So, if you are going to do detective fiction, why not have Agatha Christie in the same book as Hercule Poirot?
And, if you are going to portray as complex a character as Cleopatra, why not try to describe the world she lived in. Movie makers tend to treat her as just a very sexy woman. They forget or ignore the fact that she was playing for all the marbles: Her son, Caesarion, had he lived, would have been ruler of the world. That’s big time, in anybody’s’ league.
What exciting project are you working on next?
The Stolen Goddess comes out at the end of April. Flinders and Pettigrew take on some truly marvelous villains in the late Ottoman Empire. I added T E Lawrence and Gertrude Bell and a plethora of fictional detectives. But the story is about aging, the detectives are now approaching middle age and have become seasoned investigators.
My editor says that I write for eleven-year-olds. I like to think that I write for anybody with enough imagination to be scared out of their wits when the ‘band’ slithered down the bell cord. But that’s what good fiction is about: to take you out of ordinary grunge and put you in the realm of imagination; to lead you to experiences that you would not ordinarily have.
Good fiction makes you stay up all night because you can’t stop reading. And in the morning, youwake up a different person.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I don’t think of myself as a writer just yet; I am slowly learning to be one. But when I read what other writers have done, I say to myself, “there’s no way I could possibly match that.” I once knew a judge who told me that he felt like an imposter, sitting on the bench, and wearing a black robe. I know the feeling, sometimes when I sit down to write, I feel like an imposter pretending to be a writer.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
By day I am an attorney, but by night I am in a different world. I write from 3 to 5 in the morning, and then come back after dinner for a couple of hours. My wife says that I disappear into another dimension. And that’s true. When I write, I am in the book with the characters; I experience what they experience. Sometimes, during the day, when I am in the ‘real’ world, I talk like my characters. It’s wonderful.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I like dialogue, there is so much you can do with it. For me, dialogue just jumps onto the paper. My editors complain that I write too much dialogue. Maybe so. Now, if I could only figure out how to do those confounded dialogue tags.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I don’t think I ever knew what I wanted to be, and I still don’t know.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
Yes.
Writing is the most challenging thing that I have ever done. I used to take ballroom dancing lessons from a crusty old pro. During one of the lessons, he got a phone call. The caller wanted to know how long it would take to learn to dance. The pro growled, “forever” and hung up. He was right. To learn a new skill whether it’s writing or dancing is to begin a journey that has no end. There is always something new to be learned.
Thanks for being here today, John.