[energetic music] - He's a New York Times bestselling author who continued Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels, and he created his own bestselling Gray Man series.

He's also a Memphian, with deep local roots.

I'm George Larrimore.

Join me for a conversation with Mark Greaney.

[energetic music] Hello, everybody, I'm George Larrimore.

Glad you could join us on A Conversation With... here on WKNO.

This time, we're talking with author and Memphian, Mark Greaney.

Mark has written 19 novels, including 11 featuring the character Court Gentry, perhaps better known as the Gray Man.

The Gray Man, as you may know, is about to be seen on Netflix.

We'll talk about that in a minute.

Mark's books are thrillers, probing the world of intelligence and terrorism, geopolitics.

Mark's most recent Gray Man novel is "Sierra Six", and his new standalone novel is called "Armored".

They're hard books to put down.

Mark, thanks for being with us today.

- Thanks for having me, George, I appreciate it.

- I just wanna rattle off some...

I've been trying to, in my mind, summarize the character of the Gray Man, and these are some of the things that occur to me.

He is a covert operator, obviously.

He's fierce, he's loyal, he's cranky, lacking in people skills, has a sarcastic sense of humor, knows an incredible number of languages, not good with romance, and when he's on the road, he likes to sleep in a closet.

What else is there?

- You've nailed it.

That's pretty much the character map that I have.

Yeah, he is a loner.

You learn throughout the series, as you said, book 11 came out, I'm working on book 12 now, it develops where you learn more and more about his personality and his story arc, but he's a guy that was recruited into the CIA very, very young, and was basically owned by them for quite some time, and just worked as a kind of a solo operative, and then part of a ground branch, which is a paramilitary unit.

So he has this big background, and then, now, he's in the private sector with forces arrayed against him, and so each book is where he's trying to achieve some sort of mission and duck all the people who are after him for the things that he's done in the past.

- And someone suggested to you, I heard you say this the other day, that he should save someone as the books go along.

- Yeah, well actually, what happened was, the first Gray Man book, I was talking to an agent in New York and told him I was working on something, and he said, "Send me the first 50 pages."

And he sent it, and there's an incident at the opening of the Gray Man book that the hero sees something bad happen, and all he can do is get a little retribution for it, 'cause it's too far away, and there's too many people, or whatever.

And my agent, who's my agent now, but he wasn't even my agent then, he said, "You know, it's really good, I love this opening, but he needs to at least save somebody."

And I was like, "Well, how's he gonna do that?

"Because it's like, he's a mile away, "he's got a sniper rifle, and there's like 30 bad guys."

- And he said, "You're the writer."

- Yeah, he said, "You're the writer, you have to come up with that."

So then it really did re-inform the whole series for me, and I decided, okay, it's gonna push the envelope of credibility here and there, but it's my job to sell it every place I can.

So that makes the stories a little more detailed.

- Now, there are people who say that the other characteristics about Court Gentry that they like are that he has a sense of vulnerability and that you also...

There's a lot of action, a tremendous amount of action in the books, you turn the page constantly as you're reading it, but you also try to show the damage that's done by people in war, in intelligence, in combat, in battling terrorism.

You try to show more than just action.

- Yeah, and I'm always fascinated by the psychology of everybody, no matter what they do, what walks of life, so I spend a lot of time, when I write these books, thinking about the effects that this would have, you know, what did this guy just see, what did he just do, what did he experience, what is he up against, and how does that affect him psychologically?

And other secondary characters come into the series and leave the series, and it's just as important to me that the rationale for what they do makes sense to the reader.

Even the villains, I don't want the readers rooting for the villains, but when you're in the villain's point of view, I want his logic to make sense, even if it's evil.

So I do spend a lot of time... Like, pretty much all aspects of human nature need to go in these books.

Even though they're spy novels, or thrillers, or whatever, the full scope of human interaction is involved, so you have to put it all in.

- Yeah, I mean, you need to know what drives them.

- Yeah, exactly, and I've met people in the intelligence community that have vulnerabilities, and they have incredible skills, and they're not that different from you and me, and I think it's kind of interesting to portray that.

- Now, did I hear it right, that this character came to you in a bar in El Salvador?

- Yeah, it did.

I was looking for something to write.

I had written a couple of full manuscripts and never even gotten them...

I got one in front of an agent, and he told me I was a great writer and to try something a little simpler, it was a little too complex.

He said it was a little too like James Michener, and I should probably go into something a little more, like, action-oriented.

So I was in El Salvador.

I was studying Spanish in Guatemala, working for Medtronic here in Memphis, and I just went down to improve my Spanish.

And I went down to El Salvador for the weekend just to relax, and I was just sitting in a bar where the beers were probably about 60 cents, and there was an American in there who looked very different from the other Americans that were down in Central America that I saw, language students, or surfers, or hippies, or whatever.

And I never talked to the guy, but I just kinda looked at him while I was drinking a beer and just came up with a backstory that he's former CIA, but there's a burn notice out on him, so now he has to live off-grid in the developing world, and he's hopping from place to place, and of course, he has to keep being an assassin to make money.

And I just sort of built the character that night, and by the next day, I had the idea.

- Were you writing notes on napkins?

- Not that I remember.

I think I was just keeping it in my head, and I can get kind of obsessive about things, mentally, and I just remember thinking about it all that night, and the next day, I wrote an entire book with this character, the Gray Man, and gave that to the agent who I'd spoken with before, and he said, "I love this lead character, "but I'm not as in love with the story.

"There's one little subplot in this story "that if you wrote the whole book around that, it would be a fantastic book."

And the subplot was, there were these kill teams trying to kill or capture the hero.

And so I wrote a whole 'nother book with the hero, and that was the Gray Man.

So it didn't happen overnight.

- You've been associated with Tom Clancy for the early part of your career.

You had written several books of your own, and then you wrote with him, I think, and then in his name.

How do you describe that relationship, when you're writing for the estate?

- I mean, you're writing for the estate.

It's a Tom Clancy novel, a Tom Clancy Jack Ryan novel written by Mark Greaney, so I did three books with Tom before he passed away as a co-author, and then when he passed away, his family asked me to continue the series, so I did four more, I did seven in six years.

- Now, one of the things...

I remember reading "Patriot Games", which I understand is one of your favorites, or a book that really got you going, and there's so much detail in there, I remember, at the time, reading something that, if I have this right, that he kind of got in a bit of a jam with people in the intelligence community 'cause he knew stuff that he wasn't supposed to know, but your books are full of that kind of, what seems like that kind of information to a reader like myself.

How does he know this?

Where does he come from?

Is this story that you are telling me, is this accurate?

And it seems like you try to really make things accurate.

- I try to make you think it's accurate [laughs].

I mean, there is a lot of detail in there, and I do a lot of research for all the books, and I go to the places when I can, and I train with the weapons when I can, and talk to people in the intelligence field when I can.

And then at some point, there's a departure from all that, and I'm making stuff up, and I will... As I've gotten further along in my career, I've realized it's less important to be completely accurate, and more important to be good and entertaining.

So I caught myself, in some of my earlier books, basically writing things into the story so that no one would email me and say, "Well, why would that bullet do that, if that?"

And so I would explain it all in the story.

And then I realized, that's just not good writing, so you have to take that out [chuckles] and then just get it as accurate as you can without wasting too much space.

- Again, I think I remember this correctly, that you had written, in "Relentless", that the United Arab Emirates were using former American military people to commit assassinations, And I believe you said that you didn't know that that was really occurring, but you found out later that it was.

- Yeah, I was in the middle of the book, and I'd already had this team of Americans working for the UAE, and somehow, it was before the book came out, I'd started reading about how they were doing just this in Yemen, this exact same thing, working for the UAE and doing targeted killings, and I just went back into the story and incorporated Yemen into it a little bit more than it was, but it was something that was just kind of a happy accident, where I was already working on it, and I can't remember the research I was doing, where I just stumbled upon something, and I'm like, wow, this is kind of like what I'm writing about.

So I piggybacked off of the reality there.

- Let's talk about the Gray Man on Netflix.

Ryan Gosling's gonna play the Gray Man, and Chris Evans is gonna play, what's the character's name, Lloyd?

- Lloyd, yeah.

- Okay.

And what do you think when you watch the trailer, when you're watching Netflix, and there your trailer pops up?

- I mean, it's...

I'm so tired of saying it's surreal, 'cause I would want a better answer from a writer about it, [both chuckle] and nothing else really comes to mind.

I initially wrote the book in 2007 here in Memphis, Tennessee, at a Starbucks, before work every morning, and it came out in '09, and right before it came out is when it was first optioned to Hollywood, so it's been in Hollywood the entire time it's been out, and with different studios, different directors, different actors attached, and I've learned really quickly...

I never really got excited that it was going to be made.

I always just thought, like, well, let's see how far this goes before it all falls apart, and at least I get to say my book is in Hollywood, or whatever.

And it got really close a couple of times and then fell through, and I kind of gave up on it, but it was reconstituted.

Joe and Anthony Russo, the directors, were big fans of the book, and had me come out to California, when they were working on the screenplay, they wrote the screenplay for it, and they sent it to me a year later or so, and it was fantastic.

And then they left the project for a while because they were making all the Marvel movies, and they came back a couple of years ago, revamped the script, got Chris Evans, Ryan Gosling, Ana de Armas, Billy Bob Thornton, a lot of really good actors.

And they sent me the script last year, right when they started filming, and it was fantastic to read it.

- So how much involvement do you have in it, or do you have any involvement at all, at this point?

- Yeah, officially, I have no involvement whatsoever.

I wasn't consulting as they were filming it, or whatever.

I mean, I definitely talked to them about the screenplay and ideas, and about where the story was planning on going and all that, but that was in the early stages.

And I'm here in Memphis, writing two books a year, when they were filming that last year.

So that's kind of my place.

- Talk about "Armored" for a second.

What can you tell us?

I don't know anything about "Armored".

This is your new standalone book, so tell me a little bit about that, because I know that it's being talked about as another feature film of some sort.

- Yeah, "Armored" started out...

It's my newest book.

It's not a Gray Man story, it's completely different, as you said.

It's about a character named Josh Duffy who is a private military contractor, basically a high-threat bodyguard, who is down on his luck.

He's been injured, he has a lot of bills and family issues he's trying to deal with, and he's resorted to working as a mall cop in Virginia, and he bumps into a guy that he used to do contracting work overseas and he gets hired on to a high-paying job down in Mexico, but it's a high-paying job by what's known as the world's worst private military company as far as the danger they put their men in.

So Josh Duffy has to go down there.

He leads a team through the Sierra Madres of Mexico, and there's threats outside the motorcade and within the motorcade as well.

So it's a big action thing, and as you said, Sony picked it up, they optioned it with Michael Bay and Erwin Stoff to produce, so I'm hopeful something comes out of that.

- Tell me how you work.

What's your day like?

- Yeah, it really varies.

I used to get up every morning at 5:00 and write as long as I could.

Now, I have three stepkids, and four dogs, and a lot more media to do, and a lot more things that are asked of me, so I write when I can.

This morning, I sat down in my office at 8:00 and didn't look up from my computer till about noon, and that's four hours.

That's probably all the actual writing I'll get done today because I have to write a newsletter and I have some other media stuff to do.

It gets tougher and tougher.

And I realize that I signed on to do just as many books as I did 10 years ago, when I wasn't married, I didn't have a family, nobody was asking me to come talk to them [laughs].

and at some point, I realized, I'm gonna have to dial back on the output of two books a year.

- But you're juggling two books all the time.

Are you writing on each book in the same day?

- No, I never do the same day.

I will stick with one book, pretty much writing it while I'm thinking about the next book to write, and while I'm editing the previous book which hasn't come out yet.

So there's a lot of bouncing around.

I will get my edits, I'll get something from my editor, and they need me to go through the manuscript in the next two weeks of the book that I've already turned in, so I'm right in the middle of one book, and then I have to take a couple of weeks off and go back into the other book and do editing.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to think of the next thing or things down the road.

So there's usually... You're juggling a lot of ideas, but as far as writing, I pretty much just write on one book at a time.

- If we could talk about something that's in the headlines right now, you wrote in a Tom Clancy novel about Russia invading Ukraine.

Am I correct in that?

- Yeah, yeah.

- And were you surprised, or what was your reaction when this actually happened?

- I mean, I think, like a lot of people, I was surprised.

I thought this was brinkmanship.

I thought he was setting everything up to get some sort of concessions from the West.

I didn't think he'd actually go in.

And then when he went in, the way that they've bungled it has been a surprise to a lot of us.

I wrote a standalone military thriller with a Marine Lieutenant Colonel, and it was about Russia invading Poland and other places, but we used the latest and greatest Russian technology like the Su-35s and the T-14 Armata tanks.

We're not seeing those at all in Ukraine.

They're using T-72s, which is 50-year-old technology at this point.

So I've been surprised by a lot of things that have happened.

Initially, Tom Clancy and I wrote "Command Authority" back before Russia invaded Ukraine the first time, or started their invasion, in 2014, and they invaded a couple of months later, and they took Sevastopol and the Crimea, as we said that they would in the book, so it seemed like we were really prognosticating, but really, what it was was, they were threatening Ukraine at the time, and they'd done this in Georgia, and they'd done this in Dagestan, and they'd done it in other places, so we just basically took Putin's playbook and put it on Ukraine, and that, unfortunately, is what's going on.

- I went to a book signing that you did out at Novel, at the bookstore, Novel, not long ago, and the room was filled with people, and people lining around the walls, waiting to get books signed and to speak with you, and you gave them all the time in the world.

What do you get back from that, from people in your hometown coming out to see you?

- Yeah, there's a few people that have been with me, showing up to these things, since 2009, but obviously, I've been there since 2009, and to see...

I think, my first book, I probably had about thirty people come, which was pretty good, but my second book, it was like 15 people [chuckles], and then I started building my way back up, and now there's 150, 170 people come, and it's fantastic to see Memphis support me and get behind me.

I get a lot out of it.

Releasing two books a year, most years, you kind of have that date pegged in your mind when you're gonna do the signing with Novel, here in Memphis, as kind of a big deal, and so you get kind of excited about it, even though you get overwhelmed with all the other interviews you have to do.

There's some days where I'll do like 26 phone interviews in a single day, and you're just, your mind is mush, but when you go actually out and get to see people and talk to them, it's actually a lot of fun.

- Tell me who encouraged you when you were a kid.

Did you have a teacher, a particular teacher that encouraged you?

- I mean, it was honestly my father.

My dad, Ed Greaney, was the Assistant General Manager at Channel 5, here in Memphis, and he was a massive reader, he was a really, really good writer, a fantastic copy editor, because he did that at work all the time, I guess, and he worked at Channel 5 for 50-something years before he passed away in '05, and I loved to talk about books with him, and I would give him a Tom Clancy book every Christmas, or he'd give me one, and then we'd pass it back, and that happened for years and years and years.

And he was very, very supportive.

I'd only written...

I wrote three novellas, short little novels, that I never got published, or even submitted, and he read those before he passed away, but I hadn't even finished my first unpublished novel before he passed away, so he would be fascinated to see [chuckles] how my life has changed in the last 15 years.

- People, I think probably most of us, we dream of something when we're young, we think of something, "Well, this is what I'd like to do," or "That's what I'd like to do," and the vast majority of us will maybe reach a point where you might make the turn and go for it, or you might say, "Well, I should have something safe, "I should have a job, I should have a career, and maybe that dream is not for me."

But you didn't do that.

You decided to go for it, and I wanna know how you made that choice.

- Well, I will say that it's really, really easy, and it's so funny, because people reach out to me all the time because I'm established, and they'll be like, "I wanna be a writer.

What can you say inspirational for me", or whatever, And I want to say, "If you need to come to me for inspiration to write, you're not gonna be a writer, unfortunately."

I did it because I love doing it.

And I was very stressed.

I was in my late 30s, I hadn't been published, I was working, I won't say a dead-end job, but I was making it a dead-end job, because I wasn't interested in going anywhere else, I just wanted to be a writer.

And I kind of had this epiphany, at one point, that I was actually doing what I loved to do, even though I hadn't been published, and there was no success, and nobody else was reading it, I liked to think about stories and put them together, and edit them, and figure out all the nooks and crannies of what's wrong, and of course, I liked to read that genre.

So I was just doing what I loved, and I don't think I ever really believed I was going to get published.

And when I got my first book deal, nine publishers turned it down, and the 10th and last publisher is the one who took it.

So I just kind of got in by the skin of my teeth.

And then after that, I've just thrown everything into it to keep this going.

- Now, I'm sure there are people who ask you, "And you're still living in Memphis?"

But you live in Memphis?"

- Yeah, I get asked that all the time, and I always go back to them and say, "Where should I go?"

[laughs] "I don't know where else to go."

No, my wife is from here as well, and I have three stepkids here.

And for a while, I was thinking about leaving town, but at the time, I had an elderly aunt who was the last of her generation, and she lived in Memphis, and I said there's never gonna be a point where I'll walk up to Dorothy and say, "Hey Dorothy I'm moving away.

Bye" So [chuckles] there was that, and then I met Allison, and I'm real happy here, we moved, and I like living here.

I love traveling, I love going to other places, and I like coming back home.

And Memphis is...

When you live in other places, you realize a lot of charms that are here that you wouldn't necessarily know if you haven't left [chuckles].

- Now, I've read that you've been to 38, 39 countries, researching.

- Yeah.

- Is that correct?

- That's probably about the right number, yeah, yeah.

- Well, you get nice tax write-offs, don't you?

- Oh, yeah.

I did a honeymoon/research trip to St. Lucia this year, which is actually featuring in the book, it's on the cover of the book, so I feel like it's a legitimate tax write-off, but I was also having a really nice time scuba diving, and I was down there with my wife.

Yeah, I've gotten to go to Russia, and China, and Algeria, and Central and South America, and pretty much anywhere in Europe that you can imagine, so it's been a fun part of the job.

I do as much as I can in the time that I have.

And obviously, COVID threw a wrench into the works for a couple of years.

But yeah, it's a fun part of the job.

- Now, where do you see Court Gentry going?

Or do you have any thoughts that you can share with us about where this character might go?

'Cause this is book 12?

- Yeah, I'm writing book 12 now, and he can't be the same at the end of every book as when he starts out, so there is... Each book stands alone.

You can pick up book 11 as your first Gray Man book, if you want, and then go back and read them, but there is a longer story arc if you read them from beginning to end, and I don't know exactly when it's going to end or exactly how it's going to end, I have some ideas, but I wanna just keep developing him, his psychology.

"Sierra Six", my most recent one, goes back in time and shows him as a younger man, and I tried to dial his personality back to a 25-year-old guy from where he is now, in his late 30s, and that's all very fascinating to me, and so I wanna just keep developing him as a character.

Things that happen to him have an effect on him, and people that he comes in contact with are either his friends or foes, but he changes as a result of his interactions.

- And we talked about some of the characteristics in the character that seem evident to you when you're reading it, and you read along, you read a different book, and you pick up a little bit more.

How much of that is you?

How much of him is you?

- Yeah, I get asked that a lot, and I usually say I'm thinking up the things that he does, but he's the one that physically has to do it.

He's the one that has to climb that wall [chuckles].

I just have to think it up.

When I travel, and I'm doing research on a Gray Man story, I like to travel alone most of the time, and it's just me and a backpack.

And the first Gray Man book, that's exactly what I did.

I just went to Europe and went to some of the same locations they ended up filming in last year.

And I was there, outside of Paris, and there's helicopters flying and machine guns going, and I'm sitting there watching that, going, like, wow, I wrote that at 6:30 in the morning in a Starbucks in Memphis, Tennessee, with a muffin in my lap and a cup of coffee, and it's very surreal.

But I'd say the only part of him that's me is the sarcasm, kind of the worldview.

Physically, he would wipe the floor with me pretty quickly, but I just have to be able to talk about it.

- Now, what do you see?

Do you see any other kind of book in your future?

Is there some other kind of story that you'd like to try to tell, something that is perhaps not intelligence, or not... - Yeah, sort of.

I don't think I'll ever go very wide of the genre because I have other ideas that'll probably last me for a while, but I have an idea about a romantic suspense novel which involves the intelligence world but it's more romantic and suspense, and less of just a regular spy novel and it's something that I think will...

I really have high hopes for it.

I just have to get like six other projects done before I can devote my time to it, but I expect that'll happen, and that'll probably be the furthest I go away from the genre, and it's really not that far away at all, but it's a little bit different spin.

- That could be the product of you being a newly-wed. - Well, I'd like to think that, yeah, yeah.

- Mark Greaney, thank you so much for being here.

- Thank you so much, George.

I appreciate it.

- Really appreciate y'all watching today, and we look forward to seeing you again.

Thank you very much.

I'm George Larrimore.

[acoustic guitar chords]