At the end of my review of thriller writer G.W. Eccles’s first Alex Leksin political thriller, The Oligarch I wrote that it was a shame that publishers and agents had passed up the opportunity to publish it.
Fans of Alex Leksin will be pleased to know that he’s back in Corruption of Power and this time, George you are published by Peach Publishing. How did that come about?
I approached Sonia Land at agents Sheil Land, and she suggested doing my book as an ebook and paperback through Peach Publishing. I did my research: Peach is a small publisher, compared with the normal mainstream houses who publish thrillers, but it has had a number of successful thriller writers in the Amazon top ten lists. It also is actively on the lookout for authors at an early stage of their writing careers.
My experience with The Oligarch had filled me with dread about the process of trying to sell Corruption of Power to agents and publishers. Publishing, as you know, is an amazingly slow business, and there seems to be nothing slower that an agent or publisher who is considering your manuscript. It had taken a year of hanging around for responses, then trying again, before I’d finally decided to self-publish The Oligarch, so the prospect of starting all over again with the sequel was daunting.
Peach Publishing’s offer to publish Corruption of Power provided a solution that promised to avoid all this. I have to say that once we got going the process was very smooth and consultative.
You spent ten years living and working in Russia and Central Asia. And it’s Central Asia where the action shifts this time. Given the recent dramatic political events involving Russia (their annexation of Ukraine, as one example) how many last minute revisions have you had to make?
Alison, you’ve hit the nail on the head with this question. Corruption of Power had always been premised on Russia’s quest to regain its former colonies. When I started writing it, the Russian occupation of Crimea hadn’t actually taken place. The Russian move into Crimea suddenly validated my whole premise, but of course the story then needed adaptation to reflect a major shift in the region’s dynamic.
But it didn’t end there. Think what happened in the period 2013 to 2015: the Russian-encouraged civil war in the Ukraine; the imposition of Western sanctions; the shooting down of the Dutch airline over Eastern Ukraine; Russia’s threat to strangle Europe’s gas supply; the energy pipeline deal between Russia and China; the collapse in the Rouble, the rapid decline in oil prices, increased volatility in the Middle East culminating in the rise of ISIS; and most recently Russia’s active support of the Assad regime in Syria. All of these required changes to the book – literally right up to the last moment. The last one went in at the proof stage!
How did you go about creating that utterly convincing sense of place in such a remote and other worldly region as the Garabil Plateau in Turkmenistan?
The Garabil Plateau itself is real, much of it out of bounds in view of its proximity to the Afghan border. The places mentioned are real too – I traced Leksin’s route across the Plateau on an old map I bought in a market in Ashgabat.
I lived for nearly five years in Central Asia where I was Chief Operating Officer of a US-backed enterprise fund, and we had offices in all the ‘Stans’. The fund was heavily involved in investing in start-ups throughout the region, including both Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan where much of the book is set, which meant that I was in the privileged position of having access to places few Westerners have seen.
In understanding the topography of the region, it is important to realise that, in essence, it is a land without natural boundaries. The Soviet Union chopped the region into administrative purposes, and these formed the de facto borders when the republics broke away and became independent. This demarcation was totally arbitrary, splitting up communities and causing unrest that persists to this day. In many places it is difficult to distinguish the scenery of one country to another, and my description in the book of the Garabil Plateau is a distillation of my reminisces of the mountain foothills around Bishkek and my detailed research into the Plateau itself.
Bestselling author Peter James’s advice for writing the perfect thriller is, in this order: character, research and then plot. I’d add in structure/pace as the fourth essential component. With reference to your own writing process, would you agree or disagree, and if so, why?
I think my own starting point is slightly different. I start with a good outline of the plot. Thrillers tend to have a number of strands running simultaneously which need to be interwoven throughout the book, then brought together towards the conclusion. There have to be twists and turns and surprises. I like to have these firmly in my head before I move on to the next phase.
It’s only then that I work on my characters. Of course, in the Leksin thriller series, there are a number of repeat characters: Leksin himself, Nikolai Koriakov, his best friend and deputy minister in the Russian government, President Karpev and Nadia, the terrorist. They are already firmly established in my mind, so then I have to build up a similar identikit of the new main characters (how they look, mannerisms, backstory, ambitions, etc). Once I’ve done this, I then work on the plot outline again with a view to producing a much more detailed chapter-by-chapter plan.
As I’m going though this process, I keep a running tally of things I need to research. Rather than doing the research as a separate phase, I tick these off one by one at various different moments, so that by the time I start writing it’s all completed.
Structure and pace, of course, are key, as you say. I try to take account of this in the planning process, but to be honest these issues are normally addressed most after I have a first draft of the manuscript. This is when the red pen comes into action, moving chunks of story around, cutting scenes that don’t work, building tension into scenes where it’s missing.
What lesson did you learn from writing your first thriller that you were able to apply to this one?
As a result of writing The Oligarch, I was more prepared for how long the process would take. With The Oligarch I’d been under the mistaken impression that you wrote a first draft of the manuscript, then spent a few weeks tinkering around with it before asking a few random friends to read it and comment. How wrong can you get?
With Corruption of Power, writing the second draft took me nearly as long as writing the first. Then, with the help of my wife, I edited and rewrote large passages of it yet again. It was only after all this that I sent out the manuscript to a carefully selected group of readers who had different experiences (some literary, some business, some Russia) and would therefore approach the manuscript from different perspectives. Several of them came back with excellent comments which required further substantial changes.
This is the second outing for Leksin. Is there a third planned and if so can you tell readers a little about it?
Yes, I’m half-way through the third Leksin thriller. It’s difficult to describe the story without giving away too much, but let me try.
FACT (Daily Telegraph, December 2014): British businessman with Russian connections found impaled on the railings in front of his house. One of a conclave of businessmen invested in an abortive, Moscow-related project, each had subsequently died in unusual circumstances.
FICTION: Leksin is brought in to find out what happened and recover the money.
You can buy Corruption of Power in paperback or for Kindle:
Amazon US Link: http://amzn.com/B018XXLKAE
Amazon UK Link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B018XXLKAE
Website: http://www.gweccles.com