ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
We're past Valentine's Day now, and I've been thinking a lot about the obstacles that get in the way of spending time with your person. Maybe you and your partner are so busy that your schedules never align. Maybe you're in a long-distance relationship and the thing keeping the two of you apart is an ocean. Or maybe you're an off-the-books assassin, former CIA, and the woman you love is imprisoned in a high-security Russian gulag. That's where we find Court Gentry in the upcoming thriller novel "Midnight Black." It is the latest in the Gray Man series. Author Mark Greaney joins us now. Hey, Mark.
MARK GREANEY: Hey, how you doing?
LIMBONG: Not bad. Not bad. All right, so set us up here a bit. This is the 14th novel - right? - in the Gray Man series, and it follows around this guy named Court Gentry, who is very good at pulling off these, like, off-the-record assassinations, right? He's a former CIA guy who does other people's secret dirty work. Where is Court Gentry's head at in this one?
GREANEY: Well, in this book, as you said, it's the 14th in the series, it is a standalone novel. You don't have to read the first 13 to know what's going on here - thankfully, for everyone. But this one opens up with him in Bulgaria, and it establishes really, really quickly that he is in a very desperate point of his life. His - the woman he loves, as you said, has been taken by the Russians. All of his confidants and people he trusts in the West believe that she's been executed, but he just can't let himself believe that. So he has tried all the "easy," quote-unquote, ways to get into Russia, which is a police state, obviously, and none of that has worked. So at this point, he is trying to make a deal with the Romanian mob to smuggle him across the Black Sea and into Sochi, Russia. And, of course, things go wrong on Page 1 and continue go wrong for him for quite a while.
LIMBONG: Yeah. A lot goes wrong for him in this book. You're famous for getting firsthand experience for the things you put your characters through. There's a Washington Post article that called you the Tom Cruise of thriller writers, right? So if someone's shooting a gun in your books, you try to shoot that specific gun. If there's a car being driven, you try to drive that car. Did you have to do any special research for this book? Did you head into any Russian gulags or anything?
GREANEY: Not into the gulags, thankfully. I actually went to Russia when it was safe to do so, several years ago, when I was writing a book with Tom Clancy called "Command Authority," and that was shortly before the invasion - the initial invasion - of Ukraine by Russia. So that was kind of the last chance to go and do that sort of thing. And, fortunately, I have my thousands of videos and notes and recordings, and so I was able to kind of recount what it looks like at Gorky Park or what the subway station is like just from my time being there back then.
LIMBONG: What about the other stuff? There was a scene where he - where Court Gentry has to, like, scuba dive. And it's like, the way you describe it, I'm like, oh, I feel like you've done this before - like, just in the cold, deep ocean. Was that a real-life experience you had?
GREANEY: Yeah. I am a diver. I learned how to dive specifically for one of the Gray Man books, the third Gray Man book, a long time ago, and was terrified of the ocean and everything beforehand, but told myself I had to. And now there's nothing I love to do more than dive. So just like with all the things that I do to try and get the realism right, I tell myself I just have to do it enough to be able to write about it. I don't have to be particularly adept at it or particularly hardcore at it. But it's a fun aspect of the job.
LIMBONG: The last Gray Man novel was about artificial intelligence. This one touches on the current status of the war in Ukraine and how it's affecting the people in Russia. How do you sort of pick and choose what stuff from the headlines makes it into your novel and what gets left out?
GREANEY: I always like to write about, you know, geopolitical issues. That's what's interested me since I was a kid. When I was young, I didn't read novels. I had a subscription to The Economist and U.S. News when I was 15 years old. And even if I wasn't writing a book about what's happening with Russia and Ukraine and, honestly, Russia's subversion in the West, I would be researching that stuff for an hour a day anyway - I guarantee I would - just because it's so interesting to me. And this book, for me, is kind of an homage to these Cold War novels that I was reading in the 1980s, Tom Clancy and all those guys, because what's happening over there now, sadly, is very similar, and I wanted to kind of tell that type of a story.
LIMBONG: I want to talk about craft for a bit. You do pay a lot of close attention to things - right? - like the brand, the make, the model of certain objects. And even if you don't know anything about cars, you can tell by how you, like, position it that, you know, some car that some mid-level dude rolls up in is saying something about him. In this world of, like, shadow ops and war criminals, what do the things that you use, the clothes you wear, the stuff you have on your body say about you?
GREANEY: The entire term, the gray man, was not something that I invented. It was something that I would hear from military contractors and people in military describing someone who is in their line of work to one degree or another but doesn't telegraph that. You can't be in the airport and look at that guy and go, well, those sunglasses and that watch and those Merrell boots and all those things identify him. A gray man is somebody that does all those things but does not wear the gear or walk with the certain posture of somebody that's, you know, ramrod straight 'cause they've been in the military for 20 years. So the people that are really good at this do not telegraph it with their gear, that's for sure.
LIMBONG: Yeah. You know, you've mentioned a few times that you worked with the late Tom Clancy. Think it's fair to call him a pillar of his genre, right? You co-wrote with him. You took over writing the Jack Ryan books after he died. Is there any bit of either career advice or a writing tip you learned from him that you still think about today?
GREANEY: Well, there's a lot of things. The first time I met him, he said, I'm going to give you a piece of advice. I'm like, oh, great, I can't wait to get advice from Tom Clancy. He said, never fly commercial. Always use a private plane.
LIMBONG: (Laughter).
GREANEY: And I kind of looked at him, and I was like, OK, that's a great idea.
LIMBONG: Easy for you to say, Tom (laughter).
GREANEY: Exactly. I still have never flown on a private plane. But no, he - you know, it just made me feel like I was in this world now and had to go out and get the information. Before Clancy, I wasn't going to the Pentagon and, you know, getting information, or the three-letter agencies. And, you know, I wasn't flying in the back of an F-18, which I got to do a few years ago. He really, you know, pushed me up to the next level - less so with advice and more so with just this - you know, you're working on such a large scale now. I was just a little paperback writer before I worked with Clancy, and then, suddenly, you know, you're - have the No. 1 book in the nation, and that was all thanks to him.
LIMBONG: That was author Mark Greaney. His new book, "Midnight Black," the 14th in the Gray Man series, is out Tuesday. Mark, thanks so much.
GREANEY: Hey, thanks so much, Andrew. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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