Growing up in Baltimore, James Scott was an avid reader—nonfiction mostly, and books about World War II in particular. One of his goals in high school, he reminisces, was to read his library’s entire WWII wing: “I didn’t make it,” he says with a laugh, “but I had them worried.”
World War II fascinated him, he says, “because I wanted to understand the world I was going into.”
Writing, though, was never an avocation until the army gave him the opportunity to get his master’s degree. “I had been reading field manuals and military material for 10 years,” Scott says. “I wanted to read for fun, so I went out and bought five novels and took the time before school to sit in front of my fireplace and read. Only one of those books was any good in my estimation (laughs). I said out loud to myself, ‘I could write better than these guys.’ A little voice inside my head said, Oh, yeah? Where’s your book? And I said, ‘That’s a good question. I’ll write one for you.’ And I did.”
In 2005, at the age of 50, Scott became a published author with The Iran Contradictions, an alternative take on the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal.
Now he is out with this third book, The Blood of Patriots and Tyrants, the second in a series featuring Max Geller, a former CIA operative going though that Michael Corleone/The Godfather Part III thing: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
Taking a break from the agency, Geller is compelled to return to Russia at the behest of his former superior, who puts his lover, Vanessa, in peril to manipulate him into smuggling a defector out of the Soviet Union. Based on his exploits in Book 1 of the series, The President’s Dossier, Geller is none too popular in Russia, nor is he particularly well regarded by some of his own colleagues. “The tension grows palpable,” Kirkus Reviews praises. “The novel’s strength lies in its excellent pacing and intricate construction of geopolitical machinations—a strength that ultimately proves to be rather topical.”
The idea of Vladimir Putin treating the world like a giant game of Risk is at the core of The Blood of Patriots and Tyrants. Yet Scott began this prescient second Geller novel even before Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine. The invasion wasn’t all that hard to anticipate, Scott says. “I was reading Fiona Hill’s biography of Putin. Almost two decades ago, he said the worst thing in the century was the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and he was going to get those countries back. I wondered how he would go about it.”
President Thomas Jefferson’s maxim about how “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with blood of patriots and tyrants” provided further inspiration. The question the book asks is what happens if a Moscow-friendly president refuses to assist Europe in the event of a Russian attack. “That was my premise,” he says, “I went from there.”
In Geller, Scott has created a formidable operative that one underestimates at their peril, as one unfortunate character realizes (name redacted to preclude spoilers):
“[XXXXX] went to the cabinet above the sink, took out a brandy snifter, and poured himself a stiff Cognac. He inhaled the aroma and set it aside. Out came the cigar box. [XXXXX] opened it. I enjoyed watching his self-satisfied expression dissolve into disappointment. He looked up at me. “You took my gun. It seems I made a habit of underestimating you.”
“It’s not a habit. It’s a mistake. I found the other one, too. Enjoy the brandy . . . while you can.”
As with satirists who may find it challenging to top real-world absurdities, so it must be for writers of espionage thrillers to keep one step ahead of the headlines. Scott professes that this does not concern him. “I don’t try to stay ahead of the news,” he says. “Some writers want to write over the horizon. I pick a topic that will have staying power and write about that.”
Scott has had an unconventional career path. He began college as an art major, but into his first year, he jokes, “You realize it’s a license to starve.” He pursued engineering briefly, then switched to history. He had what he calls an “unofficial double major” in the ROTC.
Scott had an uncle in the army, but that didn’t influence his decision to join that branch of the service. He credits the movies with piquing his interest in the military (his favorite war movie is 1961’s The Guns of Navarone starring Gregory Peck and David Niven). But moreover, he says, “I liked the discipline, and I wanted to be of service and not just doing something for the money.”
A Vietnam vet, Scott also had three European tours beginning in 1978. His last three-year tour began in 1985, and he stayed until 2009 with his wife, a teacher. After Europe, he then found himself at Iowa State University, where he received his PhD in education administration.
His stints in Europe, as well as his other travels, gave him firsthand experience with the locales he writes about. His love of history shaped his writing “in a roundabout way,” he observes. “One of my writing heroes is Winston Churchill. The Second World War expanded my world and my vocabulary. I read those six volumes with a book in one hand and a dictionary in the other.”
Scott was working on a follow-up to The Iran Contradictions and had intended to take it to a conference in New York to pitch it to agents. But his wife shared with him an article about former Hustler publisher and free-speech activist Larry Flynt, who was offering $10 million to anyone who could prove the infamous Christopher Steele dossier on Donald Trump was authentic.
“I stopped and said, ‘Boy, that would be a great story. What would somebody do if they wanted to track down that information? I wrote the book in three months.”
Scott’s writing process can be best described as “go with the flow.” “I’m not the kind of guy who gets up at seven in the morning and writes 2,000 words,” he says. “When the words are coming and the ideas flowing, I will stay up night and day. I will resist anything that tears me away from getting the words on paper.”
To aspiring authors of any age, Scott lists seven commandments:
1) Create a better plot and characters than those on your reading table;
2)Persist! Many will tell you No. You need only one to say, Yes;
3) Attend writers’ conferences;
4) Listen to advice but be skeptical. Agents and publishers know a lot; they don’t know every book that will be successful. If they did, why do most books fail to earn back their advance?;
5) Self-publish, if you must;
6) Persist!
7) Don’t give up your day job. Your ship may never come in, but the mortgage comes due once a month.
There are more Max Geller thrillers in the offing. Now retired and living in Virginia with his partner and two Jack Russell terriers, Scott hadn’t intended to write a series, but readers of The President’s Dossier have encouraged him to bring Geller back for more globe-trotting adventures.
“I hope I entertain my readers, which is what I always want the author to do for me when I read. That’s what inspired me to start writing in the first place.”
Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer whose work has been published in theWashington Post, Town & Country Magazine, and on vanityfair.com.
