Joseph Finder writes:
When I was 24 and a grad student at Harvard, I published my first book, a controversial nonfiction book about powerful American businessmen and the leaders of the Soviet Union that not many people read called Red Carpet. There was more to the story that I wanted to tell, and legally couldn’t tell – and I decided to tell it in the form of a novel. Truth is, I’d always wanted to write thrillers, like Ludlum or Forsyth. I talked about writing a novel so much that finally my girlfriend (now my wife) said, “Well, are you going to write it or not?” She challenged me to either write the damned thing or stop talking about it already.
I took the challenge. But I was determined not to live my life as a poor starving writer, so I gave myself my own challenge: write a novel and get it published within three years, or move on and get another job. So I spent months reading and rereading all the great thrillers, from Eric Ambler to John le Carré to Frederick Forsyth, taking notes on what worked and why.
The basic kernel of the story concerned a very powerful and wealthy American businessman who had, decades earlier, lived in Russia, secretly fathered a child, and even more secretly was forced into working for Soviet intelligence – i.e., the real story behind Dr. Armand Hammer, which no one knew and which I’d found out in Moscow. Then I came up with an overlay plot, a contemporary story involving a coup attempt in the Kremlin, which I got from friends from graduate school.
It was a good story, but I didn’t know the first thing about how to write a novel. So while I supported myself by teaching writing at Harvard (!) I wrote and rewrote, and with each new draft I tried a few literary agents, all of whom turned it down. Finally I had a draft that I thought was pretty good. It was turned down quickly by one big-name agent who told me he’d stopped reading on page 55. I sent it immediately to the next agent – Robert Ludlum’s agent, as it turned out – who read it and called me up and said, “If you’re willing to cut out the first 60 pages or so, you’ll have a great story here, and I’d be happy to represent you.” I did so and signed on.
A year or so later I got a call saying that the British publisher Pan had bought the rights to my first novel, The Moscow Club, for more money than I’d ever made in one year. Immediately thereafter, we had an American publisher, Viking. Within days, I had a dozen foreign publishers.
I went in to see the head of my department at Harvard and told him that, at the end of the semester, I’d be resigning to write full time.
Three years, almost to the day, from when I started.
Joseph Finder, a frequent commentator on espionage and international affairs, wrote his first book, a work of non-fiction, when he was only 24. He later turned to writing fiction and has since published 6 novels, the latest of which is the superb thriller Company Man.
