FAQs

Why did you start writing?
In 2012, I hosted a hunting trip at a fly-in remote cabin in the Alaska wilderness. There were six men there, for the 25th edition of the trip. The group of friends aged 30 through 70 all knew about fall weather in Alaska when storms raged, often for days, trapping us inside. Each of us had shown up with a couple of books to get us through hours of rain and wind pounding the roof and walls. What was different about this trip, was that a trend to fewer authors being represented had finally yielded 12 books from only three authors: Clancy, Cussler, and Lee Child. Over the previous three decades the cabin library had accumulated books from hundreds of different authors. Something was wrong.

Like most Americans with a little grey hair, I balanced a thrilling life of my own with reading, favoring books that took me places that I might never see. I loved the adventure stories of James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville. As I grew older, thrillers like those of John le Carré, Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Creighton had my attention. Traditional adventure from Hemingway, Joseph Heller and James Michener were always in my briefcase as I traveled the world. Social drama as presented by Harper Lee, George Orwell and Alex Haley fed my fascination for history and politics.

Up until the 1970’s both men and women were avid consumers of literature. Then something happened. The publishing industry changed, and with it the readers. A quick survey of my guests yielded one response, “There aren’t a lot of choices, and many of those have replaced complex ‘thinking’ plots with touchy-feely stories that challenge much of what we love about America.” 

I’m a political scientist and businessman who has worked around the world. I was involved in trying to establish capitalism and democracy in Russia before Putin tore it all down. For years I did political consulting and writing, including ghost writing for politicians. When I got home from the hunting trip my wife just smiled at my literary observations and offered, “Well, you’ve been writing fiction about politicians for years, why don’t you write your own?”

Boom, career change. For the last ten years, writing has been a fulltime job. I like to find snippets in history, pieces of stories that don’t add up; usually because something went completely to hell and the powerful don’t want the story known.  I then research across the globe and create a fictional story that just might offer a more accurate picture of what really happened. I write thrillers, often historical fiction that takes readers to all those places I finally got to visit. I want my readers to be entertained, thrilled, and to think. Welcome to the storytelling of Rodger Carlyle. Enjoy.