BOOKS MENTIONED:
- The Jericho Quinn Series - Power And Empire - Field Of Fire - The 48 Laws Of Power - The Force - The Cartel - A River Runs Through It Visit Marc online at MarcCameronBooks.com
FULL TRANSCRIPT
C. G. Cooper: Welcome to Books in 30 with me, C.G. Cooper. Here at Books in 30 we discuss great books with some of today's top authors. Don't forget that you can snag the full list of books we discuss in this episode at cg-cooper.com/podcast along with the full transcript. Welcome to our listeners, and a big Books in 30 welcome to today's guest, Marc Cameron. Marc is the author of the New York Times best selling Jericho Quinn thriller series. Cameron's short stories have appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and Boys Life magazine. In late 2016, he was chosen to continue Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan campus thriller series and Tom Clancy's Power and Empire was published this past month. Cameron is a retired chief deputy US Marshall who spent nearly 30 years in law enforcement. His assignments have taken him from Alaska to Manhattan, Canada to Mexico, and dozens of points in between. He holds a second degree black belt in jujitsu and is a certified scuba diver and man tracking instructor. Originally from Texas, Cameron is an avid sailor and adventure motorcyclist. His books often feature boats and bikes, including OSI agent Jericho Quinn's beloved BMW GS Adventure. Cameron lives in Alaska with his wife and BMW GS motorcycle. Welcome Marc, how are you today? Marc Cameron: Hey great. Thanks for taking the time and letting me be on. C. G. Cooper: Absolutely. We are super excited. I know my readers have been excited to hear from you. They're all military and action thriller fans. If you wouldn't mind, could you tell the listeners a little bit more about why you became a writer? Marc Cameron: Well, you know, I wanted to be a writer since I was a small boy. My aunt was a librarian, both my parents are teachers, I ended up marrying a teacher, and I've been surrounded by books my whole life. In fact, my aunt used to give us boxes of discarded books, just the kind with a crayon mark in them or a ripped page or whatever. Every year we'd visit her, and she'd give us a big fruit box full of dozens and dozens and dozens of books. One year, she actually gave me a signed copy of Wilson Rawls’ Where The Red Fern Grows. I think I was about eight and struggled my way through it because I was still learning to read. I took it into my third grade teacher and she read it to us and cried. I had kind of a crush on her and I thought, man if a book can move this beautiful lady like this, I might like to write. So I wanted to write, my first memories of it have been since the third grade. C. G. Cooper: That's awesome. I love that you had a little crush on the teacher and that somehow, the romance actually fed into your writing career. That's fantastic. Well, obviously people are gonna know you big time now because of what you're doing within the Tom Clancy universe. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came about and where you see it going in the future? Marc Cameron: Sure, I was fortunate enough to meet a guy named Mark Greaney at Long Beach, at a writers’ conference in Long Beach, and we became friends. Mark's just a good guy, a good mentor, and I've watched him help other starting writers and sort of “new to this” writers and I had just broken into the list but had a successful series of my own, but not near as successful as Mark. At that point, he had done I think six of the Clancy's, and we talked over the years and became good friends. Last year, about maybe 18 months ago, he offered to do a cover blurb, or a blurb, for my newest Jericho that I was finishing up at the time called Field of Fire. I sent him a PDF of the proofs and he read it and, unbeknownst to me at the time, he was deciding (at that time, he’d written seven) to step away from writing Clancy. At that time, he had done seven, and he was deciding to step away from the franchise and work some more on his own projects. So he recommended me for the gig and forwarded those manuscript pages to Putnam and they read it and liked what they saw and offered me the job. C. G. Cooper: That is amazing. Well, congratulations. I know that must have been exciting in it's own little whirlwind and you said that you'd just gotten back from doing interviews. What was the most challenging part of that process of getting that book produced or getting it out there in the world or just taking over the reins? Marc Cameron: That's a really good question. I'm often asked if it was surprising to me or if it was scary or what, and the answer is yes and yes. In fact, I think I was talking to Tom Colgan, the editor that I work with at Putnam for these books, and I kind of came to the conclusion, because when I did hear from my agent, it came out of the blue. I'd spoken with Mark about writing and my books and his books and Clancy. We talked about his experiences writing the Clancy franchise because I've been a Clancy fan for years and years. In fact, I picked up The Hunt for Red October early on, before there was a movie and people got excited about it. I go back all the way to the beginning as a Clancy fan. I'd read Without Remorse on the way to a protective detail after the first bombing of the World Trade Center when I was with the US Marshalls. So I remember right where I was when I read Sum of All Fears, and the airplane trips I was on when I read Rainbow Six. So I've been a Tom Clancy / Jack Ryan / John Clark fan as long as there's been a Jack Ryan and a John Clark. It just was stunning to get this opportunity and I was telling Tom Colgan that I think if it would not have been I probably wouldn't be the guy to do it. Because nobody's gonna imitate Tom Clancy, but what I try to do is make sure that I have those characters as Clancy envisioned them. In this book, for instance, there's a big human trafficking plot and Clark runs up against these human traffickers that are brutal, they're evil men and women, and he reacts as he did in Without Remorse and some people who haven't read all the Clancy titles may not like that and they might think, "Oh my gosh, Clark's mean." Well yeah, he is mean and he just hasn't been confronted with that sort of theme in the past few books, so I'm not really taken a turn on the character. I think I'm writing the character the way I believe he was envisioned. I think really striving hard to make sure Clark is Clark and Jack Ryan is the Jack Ryan that Clancy envisioned, that's been the ... I don't know if hard is the right word but I certainly have worked hard at it to try and get those right. C. G. Cooper: Again, I can't even imagine. Without Remorse is still probably within my top five books. I remember when I first read that and the John Clark character, he's always been my favorite, him and then Jack comes right behind him because I just ... I don't know, something about that pain that he went through in that book just resonates. It's like, what if that happened to you? What power do you have to seek vengeance? I'm really excited that you're bringing that back out again because I've always wanted it, reading through all the Clancy stuff, I want evil John Clark to come back so that's very cool. Marc Cameron: Obviously I do too, we'll see how people respond. C. G. Cooper: Well good. Let's get to the meat of the show, our listeners love hearing about books. They would love to know about a book you're reading or one that you've recently finished that you think that they would love. Marc Cameron: You know as an adventure writer, thriller writer, I read a lot of thrillers in the genre, but I also read a lot of nonfiction. I read a lot of history and I'm rereading now a book by Robert Greene I think. That's the thing about Robert Greene, called The 48 Laws of Power. It's actually just this series of philosophical ideas, but what I like about it is all the little snippets from history and vignettes about people's lives and Benjamin Disraeli and what he did when he was prime minister and little things like that. I read that and marked it up (I read everything I read with a pencil or a highlighter in my hand) which really gets me in trouble in the library, but I really go through these books and it's been a long time since I read that one and I just finished rereading it. As far as fiction, I read pretty much anything Don Winslow puts out, so I just finished The Force a little bit ago and The Cartel and all those others. C. G. Cooper: Very cool. Marc Cameron: That's the kind of stuff I read. C. G. Cooper: Yeah, I actually started reading some of Robert Greene's. He's got a ... I guess you would kind of call him a protégé, Ryan Holiday, who recently wrote another nonfiction book called The Perennial Seller. He talks about The 48 Laws of Power quite a bit because that was kind of how he came up in the world was reading that book and following Robert Greene. The 48 Laws, I'm definitely gonna have to check that out because it's on my list and hopefully the listeners will pick that up as well. Let's get to the loaded question, the one that's always fun to ask other authors. What's your favorite book of all time? Marc Cameron: You know this may come as a surprise to some people because my books are fairly - my mother-in-law calls it lurid - but my books have a lot of real world violence in them and they're drawn from my experiences in law enforcement and some of the bad guys that I've investigated, tracked, and arrested and transported. But my favorite book of all time and the one that I use to sort of wash my brain every few months and at least twice a year is A River Runs Through It. I love the lyric prose, I just love the way Norman MacLean puts words together. I just think he's a ... I could read that book over and over and over again and frankly I do. C. G. Cooper: I finally read that book last year. I'd seen the movie; I know it's crazy to say. I've seen the movie a ton of times and I finally went and finally went back and I read The Green Mile because Bob Dugoni told me to read it. Yeah, same thing and it's not that long. How long is The River Runs Through It? Marc Cameron: No, not long. C. G. Cooper: It's probably what 150 pages maybe? Marc Cameron: Yeah, if that. My book is actually, the one that I keep on my writing desk is maybe 100 and ... I've got it right here, 104 pages, but my book is a collection of his three works which are all worth a read, and I read them all as if they're A River Runs Through It because his voice is the same. But A River Runs Through It, The Ranger, The Cook, and a Hole in the Sky, and then another one called Logging and Pimping and ‘Your Pal, Jim’. They're just vignettes from his life, but so well written and you just feel like you're sitting in a coffee shop with a poetic older dude in a John Deere hat and hearing his stories with a dry fly stuck in the top of it. Anyway, so that's what I read. C. G. Cooper: I like how you say that that's like a reset button. That's like how you kind of clear your mind. So at least two times a year, you're reading that book, pulling it out? Marc Cameron: Oh yeah, it's right here on my desk and in fact, through the whole time writing Power and Empire, my office is set up so I have credenza behind me with a small bookcase, so I'm careful with the books I keep there. I have my Clancy books, my kind of battle-worn paperback Clancy books that I've carried around with me. During Power and Empire, Without Remorse was on my desk. In fact, there's like hot chocolate stains and I don't know what else on it. I think a dead mosquito on the front of it from reading it outside but a copy of A River Runs Through It and I mean there's a lot of crummy fiction out there too and whenever I read something that's crummy, I turn right back to it because it's kind of a brain washer, goes over my brain and cleans it up and like you said: resets it. C. G. Cooper: That's awesome, that is awesome. Well, like I mentioned earlier, you provided some notes. You've been doing the tour for the new book and I was really intrigued about the part when you talk about where you get the most work done. You're up in Alaska, explain to the listeners how you get away, how do you get stuff done, how do you put pen to paper? Marc Cameron: I try to unplug. I know myself and I love to research and I can start .... You're a writer, I'm sure you understand that once you go down the rabbit hole of research, you can be like Scrooge McDuck throwing your words and research around in the air and really never getting anything done except research. I can spend four hours looking at something that's very interesting and even positive and even something I might need to know and not get any writing done. I try to go someplace that allows me to ... that has either like really expensive internet or no cell phone service or something like that with my notepad, pen and pencil, and do a lot of writing. My wife and I go away for a couple of months every year during the darkest, coldest time in Alaska. Which we love living in Alaska, but we have some friends in the South Pacific in the Cook Islands that let us stay at a little bungalow there on the island of Rarotonga. It's kind of south of Samoa and Tahiti and Tonga and all of that. If you were to fly from LA to New Zealand, get on another plane and turn back around and fly back three hours, you'd be in the Cook Islands. C. G. Cooper: Holy cow. Marc Cameron: We spend a lot of time there, so you can look on my Facebook page and my website and see some of the pictures that're just incredible. It's like Hawaii must have been 75 years ago. There're no franchises, there are people but you go into the towns and it's crowded like any tourist place but not really bad. It's not uncommon for us to have the whole beach to ourselves on a Saturday, I'm talking no one. It's a great place to write and the internet's a bit expensive, so we have to drive up the road and park in front of a dressmaker’s shop to spend our $50 for three gigabytes. So I do all my research and then drive back home and write, write, write and so on. C. G. Cooper: That's awesome. I better not let my wife listen to this one. Although she's probably gonna be going through the transcripts because ... yeah two months in the Cook Islands, I think I could deal with that, I think I could. All right, let's move on to- Marc Cameron: Well you know it sounds good, but there's a lot of opportunity to write. C. G. Cooper: Oh yeah. Marc Cameron: The typical day, even though it's paradise, a typical day will see me writing 10, 11 hours a day. I just get to write in a beautiful spot. So it's work, it's just fun work. C. G. Cooper: Yeah, exactly, in a beautiful location. All right, noted, that's going on my bucket list too, thank you very much, I appreciate that. All right, how about your work? Did you happen to bring a snippet to read for the listeners? Marc Cameron: Yeah, I did. I really hate ... I mean I'm gonna read you one, a little bit of from Power and Empire. It's one of the little short little military scenes without giving too much away. In the beginning of the book, as a set up, there's a container ship that explodes, so one of the premises of this book is that things are not always as they seem. I remember when I was interviewing for Chief Deputy spot, one of the questions they asked me is if you've ever received bad information from the field. Of course I have, it's like playing that telephone game, so oftentimes as responders we don't know exactly what we have until we get there. I got a chance to work with / interview and sit down and have a tour of the Air Station Port Angeles, with Air Station Port Angeles Coast Guard has a station where they fly the dolphin helicopters out of and do the rescues up and down the Straits of Juan De Fuca and around Seattle. It was just incredible to hang with those guys for a day, a couple of days, and get to know them a little bit. That's one of my favorite parts of the books. The ship is 15 miles away and on fire and people are jumping in, but they don't know that, they just think there's a man overboard. [Reading from the book, Power and Empire] In the rearmost seat of Rescue 6521, mounted almost flush to the deck, Rescue Swimmer Lance Kitchen checked his gear for a second time since boarding the aircraft. He was five-feet-ten, 172 pounds. At 24, and a recent graduate of a monumentally stressful thirteen-week Coast Guard Rescue Swimmer School in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. He was in the best shape of his life. The darkness was nothing to him now. Dangling on a spinning cable above an angry sea was second nature. Black water and big waves called his name. What he feared was failure. More specifically, any failure brought about by something he'd missed. Unlike the other members of the SAR crew, Petty Officer 2nd Class Kitchen's gear reflected the fact that he planned to get in the water. The scuba mask and a snorkel were affixed to the top of the windsurfing helmet, along with a strobe that would allow the pilots to keep him in sight in heavy seas. His black Triton swimmer vest harness contained, among other things, a regulator, a small pony bottle of air, a Benchmade automatic knife, a 405 personal locator beacon, and a waterproof Icom radio with an earpiece. An EMT paramedic, he'd leave the bulk of his trauma gear on the chopper to utilize it once her got the guy in the basket and hoisted back up. Heavy rubber jet fins hung from a clip on his high-vis orange DUI dry suit. He'd slip them on once he got on the scene, just before he attached to the hoist. With the gear and mind-set checks complete, Kitchen set back in his seat and looked to the Seiko dive watch on his wrist. Eleven minutes out. One man in the water. Simple. He could do this. C. G. Cooper: That's great, thank you so much. I'll tell you what I'm glad you read that. I've always been fascinated by those Coast Guard swimmers and obviously the crews of the helicopters too. You've been through some rigorous training, I've been through some rigorous training in the Marine Corps, but man, I'll tell you what I don't know ... How many Coast Guard rescues swimmers actually make it to that station up there? There aren't that many, are there? Marc Cameron: No. I don't know the exact number but there's one on call. You know they have their immediate response, their B zero response time crew and that's just a rescue swimmer, a mechanic, and two pilots and they rotate through on shifts. There can't be more than three or four or five at the Air Station Port Angeles. We have this view from the movies and you know from the Marine Corps we have this cultural view of kind of knuckle dragger cops, knuckle dragger military, but I'm always so gratified and so fascinated. Because I have a son in the military, son in law enforcement, it's so nice to see how incredibly intelligent and well spoken and not just fit the Coast Guard pilots, the mechanics, the rescue swimmers, they're all incredibly fit, particularly the rescue swimmer. Also just well read, articulate. That's the kind of stuff that I want people to know when I write these characters, the realities, and I think that's one of the things that Tom Clancy really got across. I mean if you read back in The Hunt for Red October ... I'm having a mind black the Sonar Operator. C. G. Cooper: Oh yeah. Marc Cameron: “Way to go, Dallas.” I can't remember his name. But in later books, he's an enlisted sonar operator in the Navy. In later books, he's got graduate degrees and he's moving up. You see these are smart people, these are extremely intelligent people, and I like reflecting that, not making stuff up. I'm just reflecting, hopefully, not near as good as Tom Clancy did it, but reflecting the realities. C. G. Cooper: Yeah, I was always impressed with the Chavez, the Dean character. He was the same way. Marc Cameron: Yeah. C. G. Cooper: How many languages did he speak? That was a smart, smart dude. Marc Cameron: Exactly. C. G. Cooper: I think someone would brush it off as he's an enlisted guy, yeah he's a sniper, but he's just an enlisted guy. Man, they're way smarter than me, I'll tell you that. Marc Cameron: Me too, me too. C. G. Cooper: Well, that's cool. Are you ready to move onto the speed round? Marc Cameron: I'm ready when you are sir. C. G. Cooper: All right, well, let's see. Let's start with a good one: what's your favorite thing about being an author, Marc? Marc Cameron: Research, research and travel. I just love seeing people. You know law enforcement is a people business, writing is a people business, it's all about observation and getting to know people. When I can go to a spot and discover something new. Like in this particular book I've been to Japan several times, half a dozen times, and I had never been to the little area around Kabukichō called the Golden Gai, G-A-I, which is just a little labyrinth of streets, alleys really, they're from World War II times. It is like a little maze and certainly a fire hazard but it's historical so they let it stay there, but what a great place for a foot pursuit and it ended up in the book. I didn't know it existed, and I'd been there many times. Just finding those little serendipitous discoveries, I love that. C. G. Cooper: So cool, I feel exactly the same way about travel. It's funny what it brings to mind. All right, next question, what is the best advice you ever received? Marc Cameron: I had a college professor once tell me (he knew my personality, I guess) but he told me, "Marc, you will never amount to your full potential unless you use those 15 minute spots in life that other people waste. The spots where other people are waiting for a train or waiting for an airplane, whatever, use those." I really took that to heart. I remember I had a friend in the Marshall service, we were going on some trip, and I was writing at the time, already I'd been published and got some westerns out. We were sitting, waiting for a plane to go fly somewhere, pick up a prisoner or something, and he said, "Man, it must be nice," he was kind of joking but kind of sour grapes, "It must be nice to get that little extra paycheck," and I said, "You know what? The reason I get that extra paycheck is because I'm writing right now and you're playing Angry Birds." You got to really use that time. I've tried to take that to heart. C. G. Cooper: Love it, love it. All right, next question, what is one piece of technology you could not live without? Marc Cameron: I'm kind of a Luddite and so I do a ton of my writing on yellow pads and with a fountain pen and I think of all the writing instruments that I can't live without. It'd be a small notebook and I have like 30 moleskin notebooks but I really ... because I do so much writing remotely, I mean, I write on a laptop. I like having an email and all that, but really a lot of incredibly good writing was done with paper and pencil and paper and pen. So I'm pretty good without technology. C. G. Cooper: Well you know what? At one point those things were high speed technology so it's all good. I'm the same way, I type, but there's nothing better for me than a great journal with a pen or a whiteboard and pen, that's where all my ideas come out. It's good to hear that you do the same thing. Marc Cameron: I'm glad to hear somebody else. C. G. Cooper: Oh heck yeah. Next question: What is one thing you wish you could change about publishing? Marc Cameron: I think I mentioned to you when we were chatting before the program that I don't read my own reviews. I wish people had to work a little harder to leave a review. I think it's so easy to be ... you know good or bad, it's so easy to just fire off some snarky anything, but I think somebody outta have to put a stamp on an envelope or even open up an email or something like that. I just think we authors work very hard, and so I frankly stay away from reviews. I guess if I was gonna change anything it would be that, but frankly I think a lot more about writing than I do about publishing. I try to just focus on the craft and the characters and all that and let the other people worry about publishing side of things. C. G. Cooper: I like it, I like it. All right, if you could teach a college course, what subject or class would you teach? Marc Cameron: I would like to teach a class on tracking and human behavior. Actually people think tracking is just looking at footprints on the ground, but tracking is really about human behavior and guessing and sort of sussing out through the evidence, where someone might go with the evidence that you find on the ground, and that's what I would do. I love to study. Again, that's the people business, which is all a part of writing, so I enjoy studying human behavior. C. G. Cooper: I love that, I love that. I know as a kid I was always fascinated by Indian trackers. Way back in the day and I've always been fascinated by whether it's scouts or interrogators, just anything that it's not just using the environment but actually looking into somebody’s mind if you can, always fascinates me. Cool, I love hearing that. Marc Cameron: Yeah, one other thing to add. I used this in the book already, so it's not like somebody could steal, but it's one of my better stories. If you see where somebody, say goes to the bathroom in the woods. Because women are generally more frightened the way that they leave their, shall we say, leavings behind is a little more sort of half moon spread out shape because they're constantly looking over their shoulder and afraid of being found. But men do not, it's more like a pile. Little things like that that you learn about human nature and so when I take somebody on a rescue out and we see where somebody went to the bathroom in the woods and I go, "I think this is the guy we're looking for," or "These are the girls that are lost," they say, "How do you know from looking at that it's a female?" Well human nature, so that kind of thing. It's interesting to me. C. G. Cooper: That is really interesting, gosh. All right, now I really need to pick up the new book. Well Marc, thank you so much for joining us! Can you give the listeners a few last words, tell them where they can find you and your work? Marc Cameron: Yeah I'm online at MarcCameronBooks.com and Facebook @MarcCameronAuthor and the books are Jericho Books and that new Tom Clancy’s Power and Empire, everywhere books are sold. C. G. Cooper: All right, well thanks again and this has been Books in 30 with C.G. Cooper, thank you for listening, and don't forget to email at cgc (at) cg-cooper.com to say hi or let me know of an author you'd like to see as my guest. Thanks for tuning in, C.G. Cooper out.
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