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Tavis: Please welcome best-selling author Vince Flynn back to this program. The creator of the popular Mitch Rapp series is back with a new political thriller called 'Consent to Kill.' As usual, Mitch Rapp finds himself in a number of dangerous places and on the 'New York Times' bestseller list. This is Vince Flynn's seventh consecutive bestseller. Vince, nice to have you back.

Vince Flynn: Hey, thanks for having me on the show, Tavis.

Tavis: Glad to have you again. I should say, we didn't get a chance to get to this last time, but I really wanted to say to you how much I admire your tenacity and perseverance. You're like a walking poster child for perseverance. Your first novel got turned down by 60 - that's, like, six-zero.

Flynn: Well, 60 plus.

Tavis: 60 plus publishers.

Flynn: I stopped counting at 60.

Tavis: Yeah.

Flynn: That's publishers, editors, agents. And I grew up in a big, Irish Catholic family where we were told as kids, "If you're not bleeding, don't cry.' All that fun stuff. So I used to take those rejection letters and pin them up on my bulletin board. And I said to myself, I'd look at them, and I'd say, "Someday, I'm gonna prove you wrong.'

Tavis: Yeah. I guess that was the motivation to get you through, 'cause I'm about to ask, what's the lesson of being turned down by 60 plus publishers, and then having seven consecutive bestsellers?

Flynn: Well, part of it is - along the way, I had some people give me good feedback. You know, an FBI agent read it and said, "This is the best book I've read since the 'Hunt for Red October.'' So that keeps you going, but you know, at the end of the day, I think it's just like Lombardi said. It's where, "Luck is where hard work and opportunity meet.' So if you stick with it, it's typically not the first book that will hit. It's the second. That's what happened with Grisham. Nobody bought his first one, 'A Time to Kill.' It was 'The Firm' that broke through. They all rejected Clancy. The list goes on and on and on. So you just gotta say, you don't take it personally.

Tavis: To Grisham - Grisham is a lawyer. So what he writes isn't that much of a stretch. I mean, you've got a great guy. Not trying to dis, you know, John Grisham. I love your work, John. But Grisham is a lawyer, so he's at least writing about stuff he knows. You've never been a CIA agent.

Flynn: Not that I can...

Tavis: Yeah, yeah. Not that you can disclose.

Flynn: No. No. I, haven't...

Tavis: (laughs) He's like, "I cannot disclose whether I've been a CIA agent.' Okay. I don't know that you've been a CIA agent, but yet Mitch Rapp, this guy is, like, in the thick of things.

Flynn: Well, you know, I took a page out of Clancy's book. I looked at him. He'd never served in the military. He never worked for the CIA, the FBI, any of those agencies. And so I thought, and I was 27 at the time. I thought, I was just naive enough to think, "If he can do it, why can't I?' And so then I just started to research and network.

And with each book now that's published, the bureaucrats in Washington, the men and women in the military, the FBI, Secret Service, they know that I'm a fan of theirs. I think they're the unsung heroes. The villains in my book are the - are the politicians, Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives alike, who put their party's advancement before national security. Those are the villains in my books, along with, terrorists.

Tavis: Okay. Before I get to what Mitch is doing in this book, I like you enough to at least warn you up front. This is an unfair and impolitic question, but I'm gonna ask it anyway.

Flynn: Go right ahead.

Tavis: At least I warned you, 'cause I like you. How can you be a fan of the agency called the Central Intelligence Agency these days?

Flynn: Fair question. I think that one of the things that's happened with the CIA is, go back to the Church hearings in the seventies. Politicians got involved, and they neutered the CIA, and they decided, "We're going to get you guys out of the business of real spying, putting people on the ground.' And that led to a series of problems where we were short on Intel. And here's the other, this is gonna be kind of a chicken answer for you, but the CIA is a public relations nightmare.

Every success they have, they have to bury for 50 years. Every time they screw up, it's on the front page of the newspaper. So they do a lot of really good things. They're doing some great stuff over in Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, stuff like that right now, but they can't talk about it. They cannot talk about their successes.

Tavis: You speak of politicians having screwed up the CIA.

Flynn: Yep.

Tavis: Last I checked, Mr. Flynn, it was President Bush who picked a politician named Porter Goss to go run the CIA.

Flynn: Yeah, and a good friend of mine just resigned, and I don't think Porter Goss is the answer at the CIA right now. You know, and there's another thing. There are a lot of people, we live in a civilized society, so we don't like to talk about things, like target assassination and torture under extreme circumstances.

Tavis: Unless you're Pat Robertson, but that's not another issue. Anyway, go ahead.

Flynn: Well, there's a good point. Hugo Chavez, duly elected Democratic leader of a sovereign nation, off limits. You can't touch him. Osama bin Laden, back in the '90s, we should've done it, and there were people at the CIA saying that. There were people at the Pentagon saying, "Let's take him out.' They weren't listened to, because the politicians in Washington on both sides of the aisles, they said, "You know what? We can't do it.' We did not have the political will to get nasty in a sometimes nasty world, and we paid for it.

Tavis: Slightly different issue, but nonetheless connected, so you've been following the story now. John McCain and President Bush are at a stand-off here, because McCain is pushing for legislation that makes it very clear that we cannot maltreat persons in our custody, persons who are prisoners. And the President is, like, I'm not gonna sign that legislation 'cause it's gonna tie our hands.

Flynn: Yeah. He doesn't want to go down that road.

Tavis: Where does - where does Mitch stand on this issue?

Flynn: Mitch stands on this issue very simply. I'll give you a rhetorical question. Week before 9/11, Zacarias Moussaoui is arrested in Minneapolis. FBI did not question him. They did not open up his laptop. They didn't turn it on. They didn't look at any of that stuff. If you could turn back the clock right now, would you let a guy like Mitch Rapp go into that room with Zacarias Moussaoui and uncover the 9/11 plot?

Do whatever it took to get the information out of him. And I think that sometimes people do not want to hear this. Sometimes, our government has to do nasty things to fight. When you're fighting an enemy that won't put on a uniform, that hasn't signed the Geneva Convention, doesn't fight for a sovereign nation, cuts off the heads of the people they capture. You know, it's a dirty world out there, and sometimes, if you're gonna defeat people like this, you've gotta get nasty.

Tavis: I love this back and forth thing. This is like a thriller myself in this conversation. So, let me give you devil's advocate on that. So, maybe the problem is that around the globe, this government through its CIA has done a bunch of unsavory, unethical, immoral things to destabilize certain regions. And the reason why these folks who you call cowards don't want to put on a uniform...

Flynn: I didn't call them cowards.

Tavis: Okay - you didn't call them cowards, people that - others called them cowards for not putting on a uniform and making themselves known, etcetera, etcetera. Maybe there's a reason why they feel about us the way they do. I'm not justifying it, not condoning what they did. Maybe there's a reason for that and we've been at the heart of that instability, so what are they supposed to do?

Flynn: I disagree with the premise for starters. I'm not one of these people that thinks that it's American policy that's caused this. If that's the case...

Tavis: But historically, though, come on, you gotta admit, historically we've done some janky (sic) stuff.

Flynn: We have done some bad stuff. There's no doubt about it, but if all it is about what we've done as a "supposed" imperial nation, where are all the Mexican terrorists? Why aren't they streaming across the border blowing up buildings left and right? They're not because this is actually about a small group of people who have hijacked Islam. And there's leaders like King Abdul over in Jordan and others who are finally standing up and they're speaking and they're saying, you know what? We've gotta take our faith back.

We cannot allow these Wahhabis, these extreme Sunnis to take over the religion and walk into a Mosque, a Shiite mosque, which would be like a Catholic walking into a Lutheran church. A guy blows himself up in Baghdad three weeks ago. Did anybody protest? No, nobody protested. A report's leaked by 'Time' magazine from the Pentagon that maybe a guard down at Guantanamo picked up a copy of the Koran without a glove on?

They riot in Pakistan and Afghanistan and people die. There's a total, you know, I think that this issue is more about the fight within Islam to save that faith, than it is about what America has or has not done through its "imperial" or not imperial powers.

Tavis: I suspect at some point your publisher would appreciate me talking about the new book.

Flynn: No, I love this. Are you - I'm sick of talking about the new book.

Tavis: Yeah, but don't tell your publisher that. Do not tell the publisher that. We want this to stay on the 'New York Times' bestseller list for a while. So in 'Consent to Kill,' Mitch Rapp is doing what?

Flynn: He - this is the seventh book, it's the sixth Mitch Rapp, and this is the one where he becomes the hunted. Which is, I think if you write a series where you've got a guy like Mitch Rapp, who's out there doing the killing and attacking people, eventually he's gotta become the hunted.

Tavis: For those who don't know and haven't read your stuff, and I'm sure they will after this conversation, Mitch is a CIA assassin, basically.

Flynn: Yeah, that's the - he calls himself an assassin. Other people, more civilized people call him a covert operative for the CIA, a counter-terrorism operative. Rapp is put in a situation on this deal where he becomes the target because there's a wealthy Saudi billionaire who thinks that Rapp killed his son.

And so I bring in a bunch of European old East German Stasi Secret Police, French foreign legionnaires. And I kind of show people this clandestine world of a gun-for-hire, and these people that show up on Rapp's doorstep and kind of turn his whole life upside down, and what he has to do try to get back at these people.

Tavis: Where do you come up with this stuff and how long does it take you to like - how long between books do you take to actually put the next one together?

Flynn: You know what I'm doing? When I'm on tour, I'm thinking about it. When I'm editing the first book or the last book and when I'm on tour, I think about it. When I sit down to finally write, it takes me five to six months, and it's literally, it's a question of turning off the phone, turning off the TV. I listen to music while I write, I've got, you know, iPod, I go nuts with all that stuff. And then I just shut myself out and I write. It's like - I use the analogy of people who are running for a marathon.

If you want to write a book, you've gotta start today. If you want to run a marathon, you can't a month before the marathon say, "You know what? I think I'm gonna get ready to run a marathon.' Because you've gotta put in five pages every day or five miles every day and get ready for it. And people who say, you know, "Do you ever get writer's block?' I have a - the real answer is no, I don't have time. Writer's block is like people who go to the gym, they walk in the door, the treadmills are all full, and they say, "I think I'm gonna go home.' You gotta fight your way through it.

Tavis: I did that yesterday.

Flynn: And the other answer to writer's block is to get married, have a bunch of kids, and have a big mortgage and a deadline.

Tavis: Just kind of goes away, doesn't it?

Flynn: Yeah. You gotta produce.

Tavis: (laughs) So let me ask whether or not when you sit down for that five or six-month span, do you know where you're going with this or do you just let the journey take you?

Flynn: I used to try to outline the whole book, and what I'd find is I'd get halfway through and I'd throw the outline away, and I'd waste a bunch of time. Now I'll outline the first third, I know exactly where it's going up to a point, and then I stop and sit down and I start writing. And I've got index cards with major scene summaries. Like I have a good idea that, you know, maybe Rapp kills somebody in a certain city and I think that'll look good.

I have a timeline, character summary, all that stuff, and then I just - after seven books, you finally kind of hit your stride. I used to, after the first book, I had this horrible nightmare that I was gonna be found out to be, you know, Menudo or the Bay City Rollers, a one-hit wonder, you know. And they were gonna come take the check away and say, "You're a failure. You can't do this twice.' But after seven, you finally start to have some faith that your fans like what you're doing and you go to work and you do the same thing.

Tavis: See, I'm too arrogant for that. I would have thought that after the first one. If I hit the 'New York Times' bestseller list after the first book, I'd be like, "That's right, I'm all that, and I got another one coming.' It takes this white guy seven books to figure this out. I don't have that problem, but I love you anyway. Vince Flynn's new book is called 'Consent to Kill.' It's the seventh book, sixth one featuring Mitch Rapp, nice to have you here, Vince.

Flynn: Hey, thanks for me having on the show.

Tavis: All the best to you. That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from L.A. Thanks for watching, and keep the faith.