"I always wanted to be a writer," Brad Meltzer says as we sit in
the lobby of his hotel, cramming one more interview into his packed schedule,
"but I wasn't from the kind of family that would pay for me to do that. I had to
support myself, so I went to law school to become a lawyer and pay my bills. I
thought I'd probably be working at a law firm and working on my novels at
night." Instead, he wrote The Tenth Justice and launched a highly
successful career as a thriller writer. "I don't read in the genre, though," he
confesses. "I think it's a trap in a lot of ways, and when I did, I was always
second-guessing my own voice, thinking maybe I should write like this guy or
that guy does. Instead I read graphic novels, stuff by Neil Gaiman and Alan
Moore and Warren Ellis." In fact, you can find comic book references
peppered throughout his novels, including his latest, The Millionaires,
and shortly after we met, DC Comics announced that Meltzer would become the
new writer on their Green Arrow series.
RH: How did you end up taking on international finance after thrillers
set in the Supreme Court and the White House?
BM: I always delve into worlds where I think the readers really want to go and,
most importantly, where I've never been. I just love the idea of these banks where the
ultra-rich keep their money. Private banks where it's a two million dollar minimum just to
open your account. If you have $5 million, they tell you that's a pretty good start. $75
million, they'll gas up the private jet and come see you right away. Those are the numbers I
put in the novel, but that's because a real banker at a private bank gave them to me.
These private banks are amazing. Rich people don't want you to know where they keep
their money, so these places have back doors instead of front doors, so nobody can see
you go in. They're in the buildings you pass every day. They don't even take their clients
out to lunch, because then you'd be able to see who their bankers were--they have private
chefs who will cook your favorite meal.
RH: And how did you get from there to Disney World?
BM: Disney World keeps its secrets better than the White House and the Supreme
Court combined. I'd heard for years about the tunnels underneath Disney World, the
elaborate labyrinth, and I wanted to find out if the stories were true. They're true. What we
know as Disney World is actually the second level. If you think about the topography in
Orlando, you can't dig underground; you'll hit water. So Walt Disney built the first level,
covered it up with the dirt from digging the 20,000 Leagues lagoon, and built Disney
World on top of that. Disney granted me access to the tunnels, so when you read chapter
seventy-one, that's a real entrance to the labyrinth. It's the easiest one to get into, the one
without a guard or a video camera... although probably not for much longer.
RH: This novel seems to draw a lot more on your own personal
experience than your previous work. For one things, it's set in Brooklyn
and Florida...
BM: Where I was born and raised, and where I moved to, right. So clearly I'm
reaching into the furthest stretches of my imagination to come up with the details for the
setting. (smiles) This has definitely turned out to be the most personal of the books
that I've written. Charlie and Oliver's issues with wealth and people who spend that kind
of money freely...those are my same issues, as are their issues of trust.
RH: So even with your success, you're not ready to stick your money
into a private bank just yet.
BM: When my last royalty check came in, I said to my wife, "You know, I could
make this money really disappear." I spent two years calling the government's top financial
investigaotrs, getting them to teach me how to hide money from the government. It's not a
call they're comfortable taking every day, I'll tell you. But I spoke to investigators at the
Secret Service, the Federal Reserve, and FINCEN, the Financial Crimes Enforcement
network. I couldn't research this novel if I was starting now; they've got far more
important things to do these days than help some fiction writer learn some tricks for his
new thriller.
To me, the fun is in the details, and it's easy to find them out if you ask the right questions.
I went down to some of the private banks, and eventually somebody said, "Sure, I'll help
you. Let me show you around." For the beginning of The Millionaires, when
Oliver and Charlie steal the money, I asked the head of security at a bank in Maryland if he
could help me figure out how to steal money without anybody knowing it. He said he'd
give me a foolproof plan, the one way that you could do it without gettting caught for
years. I could put it in the book, but I had to promise not to put him in the
acknowledgments. Well, that's exactly the kind of information I want.
I hired a real private investigator when I started the book and told her to investigate me.
Within a minute, she had my Social Security number. A minute after that, she had my
address. That's the easy stuff. Then she tells me she's going to profile me by going
through my garbage. Here's a typical male's garbage: let's say the first thing she pulls out
is a wrapper for a quarter-pound of turkey, the premium honey-roasted kind. So now we
know the guy's spending a little little more money for food; either he's got disposable
income or good taste. Dig a little further, you find pre-made salad, which supports the
disposable income theory. Pizza boxes, Chinese food containers...this is someone who can
afford to order out. Let's say you find a tampon...it's got to be the girlfriend's. There's
only one, so she doesn't stay over all the time....
You can shred your bank statments and bills all you want, but an investigator can still
profile you. And when you go to a restaurant, and the waiter swipes your credit card
through the little black box, who do you think owns that box? I always thought it was the
credit card companies, but no, it's a third party that now has access to your credit card
information and knows where you've been shopping, and when you were there. It's like
having somebody follow you around taking notes on you, and I find that creepy. But it's I
needed to know how investigators would try to track you down if you were trying to hide.
Can you even hide today, because of all the trails you leave every day?
Hollywood creates so much B.S. in their thrillers; they just make up whatever they want
for a story. I remember in my first novel, The Tenth Justice, I wrote a lie detector
test. Now we've seen lie detector tests in tons of movies: guys sweating through fifty
questions while the needle shakes. That's not how it happens. In a real test, you get a few
baseline questions to set the scale, and then you get three questions. That's it. That's how I
wrote it, and I can't tell you how many letters I got from people saying that little two-page
scene was one of their favorite parts of the book. So that's why I always take the time to
get those kinds of details right. I write fiction, but I write it the way it would really happen.
RH: This might not be as much of an issue for you, since your thrillers
have always been rooted in intimate, personal conflicts, but I think thriller
writers in general are trying to figure out how to approach their genre after
the events of September 11th.
BM: It's a different world now, sure. Thriller writers, and especially filmmakers,
always seemed to have to top themselves as far as the violence went. They couldn't just
just blow up a plane, it had to be two planes, or five car crashes instead of just one. I've
never found that a way to scare people; I'll always go with the personal motive first. If you
have characters that people care about, readers will follow them for a thousand pages and
be terrified by every single event, but if they don't care about the characters, no amount of
violence will impress them.
Before, when somebody had a bomb, it was a chessy plot device, something you'd seen a
million times before. So you're down to the red wire or the blue wire and the hero'll figure
it out in the last ten seconds. It's not like that anymore. It's a whole new ball game now.
Does it change how I write the thrillers? Absolutely not. The only thing I changed in
The Millionaires is that I had some scenes that referred to the Secret Service
headquarters in the World Trade Center.
I'm always going to try to scare somebody on the personal level, set in an organization
where the stakes really are high. You can write a car chase, or a knife in somebody's head,
or a long, bloody fight scene, but as far as I'm concerned, those are the cheap, easy thrills.
What I think scares people far more is the tiny creak coming from your closet when you
walk into the bedroom. What scares you more is what can really happen.
RH: How did you manage to write your first novel for course credit in
law school?
BM: The Tenth Justice was my first published work, but it wasn't my
first novel. That was a coming-of-age story that was rejected by twenty-four different
publishers. It still sits on my shelf and it's going to keep sitting there. After I got rejections
twenty-three and twenty-four, I decided to write another one, but I was in my second year
of law school, and I wasn't going to be able to write the book if I had to do a full course
load. So I found a professor who agreed to give me credit for working on the book. If you
want to be an international lawyer, they'll give you credit for taking Spanish. You want to
be an entertainment lawyer, you can take film classes. But they usually don't give you
credit for writing legal thrillers. Eventually, Kellis Parker, who taught a class called "Jazz
and the Law," agreed to give me a couple credits every semester to work on the novel. I
just got lucky.
RH: Any idea what's next?
BM: I'm taking some time off. I've done two books back-to-back, and I
need to rest. Writing to me is like squeezing a sponge; eventually you can
squeeze it dry and you need to let it soak up some more.
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