Interview with Will Thomas

There are several influences for SOME DANGER INVOLVED. The Barker/Llewelyn relationship owes as much to Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe series as it does to Doyle's Holmes and Watson. I also used the employer/employee dynamic from James Herriot's ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL. Barker was based on several Europeans who traveled in the East, while much of Llewelyn's history came from the life of writer George Gissing. Having said that, the works are somewhat autobiographical, as most works are.

2. In some ways, Doyle had it pretty easy writing about the Victorian era as he did. Say something about the research that went into SOME DANGER INVOLVED.

The advantage I feel I have over Doyle is that I am looking back on the age, while he was living it. I know how it ends and I've read hundreds of books about the era. Obviously, I've done a great deal of study about the period, but it is a subject that interests me. People comment that I must have done a great deal of research for SOME DANGER INVOLVED, but aside from the Judaica, I already knew most of the material I used for the novel.

The most interesting part for me has been the study of Victorian era martial arts. I've studied fencing and boxing, as well as Bartitsu, an early form of jiu-jitsu that came to England around 1900. I researched French and Irish stick fighting for TO KINGDOM COME, and Hung gar for the third book in the series. I like to balance the physical aspects of research with the more cerebral ones.

3. You have a day job. That means you have to make time to write -- Can you say something about the process of putting together a novel? Outline? Notes? Late nights? Early mornings?

During the day I work as a librarian, which I consider an ideal occupation for a writer. I write at night and on weekends. Granted, I'm tired sometimes, but after a few minutes of staring at the paper (yes, I write in longhand), Llewelyn starts chattering in my ear and I'm off. Have you ever read Jack Finney's TIME AND AGAIN? It's like that. It's the closest thing to time travel, which makes it so much fun.

As to the eternal question, outline versus inspiration, I outline what will happen in each chapter at the earliest stage of writing the novel, but it frequently changes as inspiration occurs.

4. What made you decide on the crime that Barker solves in SDI? Was it based on some fact? Did you want to say something about Victorian England or today's America? Or both?

SOME DANGER INVOLVED was inspired by a book on Anglo-Jewish history by Chaim Bermant called LONDON'S EAST END, POINT OF ARRIVAL. I found during the course of my studies that hardly anything had been written about English Jews at that time, despite the fact that they were enduring terrible conditions.

I'm interested in subjects that began then, but are continuing now, so that the conditions in my novels mirror what is happening today. SOME DANGER INVOLVED was about anti-Semitism. TO KINGDOM COME is about terrorism. My family was in the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City the week before it was bombed, so the subject of terrorism has resonance in my life. I don't want my readers to feel that what I write about only had implications about the past.

There are so many books out there about how to write and how to break into the business, but there's next to nothing written about what to do once your book is published. Things happen very slowly in the publishing business. I try to stay focused on my writing and not the minute details over which I have no control. It helps to rely on the professionalism of the agents and editors, but at the same time I actively seek to promote my books locally, speaking to various groups and organizations. The hardest thing is to retain confidence in the quality of one's work in the face of reviews, the success of other authors, and the volatile market of publishing, but like Llewelyn, I have confidence in Cyrus Barker's eventual triumph.