spy fiction | spy fiction
Jun.10.2013
The Kindness of Strangers
As a hard-charging author of masculine fiction it pains me to admit that I share the fate of that frail flower of Southern womanhood, Blanche DuBois. Yes, “I have always relied on the kindness of strangers.” That can be a thin reed to lean on, as Blanche would tell...
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May.01.2013
Here are my five fave passages from “The Proxy Assassin,” Book Three of the American Spy Trilogy. Former OSS spy Hal Schroeder has been recruited by CIA covert ops chief Frank Wisner to parachute into Transylvania and liaise with anti-Communist insurgents…
It’s November 1948 and I have somehow...
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Apr.26.2013
The first time I visited Hollywood was 1965. I was sixteen and my parents were keen to show me and my three younger sibs ‘The Beckoning El Dorado.’ I had been weaned on my mother’s stories of her maiden voyage down the palm-lined streets in the early 40s – lunch at the Brown Derby, a...
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Apr.17.2013
My five fave passages from “A Despicable Profession,” Book Two of the American Spy Trilogy. It’s 1946 and former OSS agent Hal Schroeder has been lured to Berlin by his former boss, General Wild Bill Donovan, to work for something called Global Commerce LTD…
I had never flown on a commercial...
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Mar.17.2013
I believe that my American Spy Trilogy is unique in genre fiction in one respect. It’s about character more than plot. It’s the coming-of-age story of one Hal Schroeder, disaffected and cynical former OSS agent who was a behind-German-lines spy during WWII.
The following are three...
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Feb.07.2013
‘You Tawkin’ to Me?’
or
Critiquing the Critics
The best quip about critics I ever read was from a long-dead author whose name escapes me. “They expect that you won’t hit them!”
My sentiments exactly.
My beef isn’t with literary critics at major publications – even if they don’t give your...
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Jan.18.2013
My partner Mark McIntyre and I ran a small company in West LA that produced radio commercials. In the 80s and well into the 90s our going rate for voiceovers was a measly thirty bucks. We paid more when we had a national project but most of our clients were independent retailers who thought $...
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Jan.14.2013
Everyone knows that serious purveyors of fiction write in the third person. Like battlefield generals, authors prefer to observe the action from a fortified redoubt far above the fray. Nothing wrong with that if you can pull it off.
And I did passably well with the third person approach in my...
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Jan.07.2013
How to Write Good
I stole that title from an early ‘70s article in the National Lampoon by Michael O’Donoghue, the long-dead founding member. The article was a satirical primer on cheap tricks that writers can fall back on when they haven’t done their homework. Need to inject some tension...
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Nov.23.2012
John Knoerle interviews John Knoerle for Literarily Speaking
Q. Why do you write?
A. In that wonderful movie Moonstruck Olympia Dukakis has an ‘aha’ moment. She has been trying to understand why men like her husband commit adultery. She figures it’s about more than just sex....
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