It was a man’s world at the Vero Beach Book Center last week where two New York Times best-selling authors, both men, appeared on consecutive nights to promote their latest books.
Who goes to a book signing for Brad Thor’s latest CIA thriller, “Act of War”? A surprising number of women, and a whole lot of men, including a former CIA operative living in Vero – who wouldn’t give his name. Secrecy is the premise of Thor’s book: a terrorist attack is coming, the White House knows it, and the operation to stop it amounts to an act of war – if it’s uncovered.
As for Chris Bohjalian’s audience the next night, it was nearly all women. Not that anyone would call his books chick lit. “Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands” begins with an explosion at a nuclear plant, leaving its protagonist an orphaned, homeless, drug-abusing, prostituting outcast who survives by living outside the law.
From the outset of each signing, it was clear the books were worlds apart, despite their dark themes. Thor’s “right-leaning thrillers that fret about militant Islam,” as a New York Times blurb put it back in 2008, find a lot of fans at Fox News, where Thor, an unabashed conservative, frequently appears. His novels’ hero is a former Navy Seal, and Thor has gone to extremes to research his plots, including being embedded on a “highly classified mission” in Afghanistan for his 2009 thriller, “The Apostle.”
Bohjalian is known for his female characters; his own 20-year-old daughter recently told him, “Dad, your sweet spot as a writer is seriously messed-up young women.” His far more literary style relies on devices like writing narration in the second person “you,” or in the case of “Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands,” pulling back from the plot line to let his adolescent protagonist reflect on a random detail, much like a Facebook post.
His 17 books, nine of which became New York Times best-sellers, range from historical fiction to Gothic horror. Three have been made into movies (two for TV); major publications, including the Washington Post and Publishers Weekly, have named them to their “Best Books of the Year” lists.
Thor has just inked his first movie deal, with Warner Bros. His best-selling “The Athena Project,” about an all-women counter-terrorism Delta Force unit, is set to star mixed-martial arts champion Ronda Rousey in the lead role. At the same time, he told his Vero audience he has formed his own production company for future book-to-film ventures.
The two writers have other things in common. Along with their Swedish roots (Bohjalian’s mother; Thor’s father), both have highly educated women in their lives. Thor is married to a sports medicine physician. They have two young children.
Bohjalian, who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst, married a Smith grad, a former bond trader turned photographer. Their daughter just graduated from NYU in theater.
The Bohjalians met while they were living in Brooklyn. Later, they were “cab-napped,” taken for a wild ride for 45 minutes late one night and left on a nearly deserted street, just as police were about to bust a crack house. They were told to lie down on the sidewalk to get out of the line of fire. That’s when his wife remarked that it might be time to move to New England.
They did, and though it may have made them safer, it didn’t slow Bohjalian’s imagination. While he writes a newspaper column about his daily life in a small town, his novels’ plots have ranged from a man telling his girlfriend he wants a sex change operation – and still wants the relationship, to a homeopath sued for a patient death falling in love with her lawyer. His fifth novel, “Midwives,” about a woman who delivers a baby by C-section believing the mother is dead, skyrocketed to 1.4 million in sales when it was named to the Oprah Book Club.
Thor has had his adventures too. His first book, “Lions of Lucerne,” was about to go to press when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center. Re-working the book to include the tragedy, he claims his thriller is the first to mention 9/11.
When in 2008 he published “The Last Patriot” he reportedly got so many death threats that he and his family had to move. The book was banned in Saudi Arabia for fictionalizing a lost Islamic text; he wore a bullet-proof vest to book signings on the advice of law enforcement.
Even today, after he barely made it to the Vero appearance, flying in from Corpus Christi, TX, with only 20 minutes to spare, he strode into the Book Center flanked by a security detail. Two burly guys stood at the perimeter of the store’s used book section, keeping the rather docile audience of mostly retirees under surveillance.
From his first words, Thor referred to himself frequently as a small businessman, probably more often than he did a writer. Raised in Chicago, he was a very small businessman when he earned his first paycheck as a child model, appearing on a box of diapers.
Thor was raised by entrepreneurs – his dad was a real estate consultant and his mom a headhunter. He started out majoring in economics from the University of Southern California but – without letting his dad know – changed his major at the last minute to creative writing.
In France for his junior year, he got the idea of doing a TV travel show and went on to produce and host “Traveling Lite,” a two-man production shot with a Betacam that ran for two seasons on public television stations.
He managed to launch it despite the Republican Party’s “Contract with America,” which targeted federal funding for public television and as the Chicago Tribune wrote in a 1998 profile of Thor, “put a massive crimp in Thor’s efforts to find private financing for the show.”
Vero was Thor’s only scheduled stop in Florida promoting “Act of War” – a remark by book center marketing director Cynthia Callander that drew a proud round of applause from the audience.
It was nearly interrupted by a CNN interview that Thor declined, seeking comment for his nine-minute rant on Glenn Beck’s internet talk show the day before about Attorney General Eric Holder’s remarks on racism and Obama.
“My Twitter’s been blowing up,” he said, rolling his eyes after a man in the audience remarked on his “good quote on Fox News.”
“CNN wanted to send a satellite truck here. He wanted me to come on tonight to discuss what I’d said. I told him I’m not going to say to the people I work for (his readers), ‘Say, can you all sit tight for 15 minutes while I go outside and do this interview?’“
Judging from the star-struck audience members, it probably would have made their night.
Brad Thor’s “Act of War: A Thriller,” 355 pages, Simon and Schuster, $27.99.
Chris Bohjalian’s “Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands, 288 pages, Doubleday, $25.95.