Kindle Author Interview

David Wisehart recently interviewed Darrell Delamaide, author of The Grand Mirage, in his series of Kindle Author Interviews. You can read the full interview at Wisehart's blog. Here are some excerpts:

DAVID WISEHART: What can you tell us about The Grand Mirage?

DARRELL DELAMAIDE: The first time I encountered the Baghdad Railway, oddly enough, was in a history of Deutsche Bank, the big German bank I covered as a financial journalist. The bank was instrumental in getting it built because the Kaiser wanted a direct land link between Berlin and the Persian Gulf. Britain opposed it because they feared war was on the way and didn’t want India to be vulnerable. What a story, I thought, full of adventure and intrigue. It’s the story I set out to tell in The Grand Mirage. I also thought it would be a great way to conjure up an exotic Middle East that has vanished in history and yet forms part of our Western imagination, from Scherezade to Lawrence of Arabia....

DAVID WISEHART: Who do you imagine is your ideal reader?

DARRELL DELAMAIDE: My ideal reader is anyone who will enjoy this book. It may be older readers who thrilled to the first Indiana Jones movie – which incredibly came out 30 years ago. But it may be younger readers who read Outside magazine and who would love the adventure of taking a caravan from Constantinople to Baghdad in 1910. One woman reader told me she liked the heroine, an Armenian poet, so much, she would like to see a sequel devoted to her. I like to think of my book as the thinking man’s or woman’s thriller – literary, intelligent, and vastly entertaining....

DAVID WISEHART: What authors most inspire you?

DARRELL DELAMAIDE: I gravitated more or less naturally to the thriller genre, so in general I find a lot of inspiration there. John Le Carré is the master, though I find his characters bleak. British writers seem to have a better feel for the deep Anglo-Saxon roots of the English language. Rennie Airth (River of Darkness) and Robert Goddard (Into the Blue), who are popular in Britain but not too well known here, are particularly good in that regard. Alan Furst (Kingdom of Shadows), though an American, has lived abroad and had his early success in Britain as well. Again, I find his characters a little hard to warm up to, but he is a wizard at creating atmosphere. Among American writers, Joseph Kanon (The Good German) has also written some very fine historical thrillers....