Novel ideas

A conversation with Jon Land

by Bill Rodriguez

Twenty years and 20 published novels later, Jon Land hasn't lost a bit of the enthusiasm that got him into the business of writing thrillers. And a busy business it is for him, with some six million copies in print, both hardback and paper, half with the prestigious Random House imprint.

The Barrington-raised Providence writer with wiry hair and wired personality is an eager promoter of his work at book-seller conventions and promotional interviews around the country. A 1979 Brown University lit grad, with honors, Land has been unabashedly going for the commercial rather than the literary, after the Ian Fleming rather than the John Le Carré fans. As a result, his super-heroic characters -- Land's Blaine McCracken makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Woody Allen -- have had their exploits published in more than 20 countries and translated into six languages.

Land's latest thriller, The Pillars of Solomon, was released this month. The second in a new series involving two Palestinian and Israeli detectives, a man and a woman. It is an ambitious departure for a writer who has so far stressed action over relationships in his novels.

At his East Side condo, Land spoke recently about his success.

Q: So after you were graduated you hit the ground running as a writer. How unexpected was that?

A: It was totally unexpected. I had never taken a writing course in my life. I went to Brown to become a lawyer. Law school was as natural to me after college as college was after high school, no doubt about it. But it Brown, I found that I really enjoyed writing. Even writing papers, reading books, I found I really enjoyed this.

I started writing magazine articles. I found I was pretty good at finding ideas. I wrote for People, Saturday Evening Post, the National Enquirer. I'm still at Brown at this point. And the freedom of the Brown curriculum allowed me to actually get course credit for publishing articles. And then course credit for doing a senior thesis, which was my first novel, where I really got to know my mentor, Elmore Blistein, who passed away a couple of years ago. He always used to call himself Dr. Frankenstein, because I was the monster he created.

Q: He must have taught you well.

A: Professor Blistein was a Shakespeare scholar, he wasn't a writing teacher. He believed that you couldn't teach writing. He said, in analyzing my first novel, that I had all the abilities Brown could never teach me and none of the abilities Brown should have taught me. And that had great impact on me, because Elmore Blistein had read every thriller ever written.

Q: So you got your first novel written here. Did it get published?

A: Very few people publish their first novel. A first novel is a learning experience, and I was no exception. But I learned I could do it. I learned I could finish it. And that was enough to give me the confidence, and for my family to realize that I was doing something that made sense, to give it a few years, three or four years, to try to become a writer.

It was called Iconoclast. I retitled it, after I rewrote it to the following year, The Abadon Factor, to try to get it published -- but it was terrible! Oh, it was a horrible book! But it was the learning experience. James Michener says that to publish your first book you have to write 10 and read a thousand. I think that's more write one and read a hundred.

Q: Do you find yourself giving a lot of advice to young writers?

A: A lot of people call me who want to write, want to publish. I read their stuff -- I hate to do it, but you do it. And you ask them what they read. "Well, I don't read that much." Well, what are you writing? "Science fiction." What are you reading. "I'm reading mysteries." You can write what you wouldn't read if someone else had written it. That's why I'm a thriller writer.

Q: Wasn't it awfully ambitious for a guy living in Providence to set a thriller series in both Israel and the West Bank? Before you sat down to write, were you comfortable taking on the point of view of the both investigators?

A: It was such a great idea, and probably the only original one I ever had. A Palestinian detective and an Israeli detective. No one had ever done it before. When you have an idea that you love, nothing gets in your way. It's a steamroller. Once I got the idea, and once I built these characters, both of whom were such loners because of the paths their lives had taken, and brought them together, the relationship became a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

At times it could seem overwhelming. What you do when something gets overwhelming, whether it be technology, religion, street names, you find people who can help you. I'm very good at locating people who can give the information that I need, whether it be reading parts of the entire manuscript to fix it. I [had] lunch a week with Rabbi Jim Rosenberg, who is a Jewish scholar and a good friend. He has read the manuscript [of the next novel] because there's a lot about Orthodox Russian Jewry in there.

That kind of discussion, five or six years ago would have exclusively been going to somebody to find out how to blow something up!

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Foreign intrigue

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