Sweet success for Steve Berry

From The Star Online: Sweet success for Steve Berry
Success came slowly but surely for bestselling American author, Steve Berry.

ALTHOUGH every new book of his appears on bestseller lists everywhere from Malaysia to New York, thriller writer Steve Berry likes to say that he does not know much about writing.

“But I’m an expert on rejection,” the 56-year-old adds in his good-humoured drawl, on the phone from his home in St Augustine, Florida.

He explains that he wrote eight manuscripts and had his work dismissed 85 times in total before one story was picked up and published by Ballantine Books in 2002.

That novel was The Amber Room, a tale of art heists and war history. It was followed by nine others, all blending historical fact and heaps of imagination.

Seven of the books star Berry’s popular character, Cotton Malone, a Copenhagen-based rare-book dealer. Berry describes him as an alter ego who gets to do things his creator has not had the chance to try, including firing guns and jumping out of planes. Both collect old books – Berry has more than 1,000 – have a son in his teens, and are “lousy with women”, he jokes.

The latest in the Malone series, The Jefferson Key, is now available in major bookstores in Malaysia. A tale of modern-day piracy and old-school action, the book has had regular spots on The New York Times’ bestseller list since it was published in May.

At first glance, it seems that Berry and his creation have a lot in common with thriller king Dan Brown and his fictional creation Robert Langdon, who is regularly embroiled in historical mystery. Asked about this, Berry responds humbly and happily.

“I’m fine with the comparison. I was a fan long before The Da Vinci Code,” he says, of Brown’s 2003 mega hit. “If it wasn’t for Dan Brown and what he did by publishing The Da Vinci Code, I wouldn’t be here. That book brought the thriller genre back to life.”

In fact, he adds, if he sees a Brown book in a store window, he always pauses to pay his respects. “I stop and I bow. You must pay homage to the Da Vinci!” Like his hero Brown, Berry began writing in the 1990s, but it took him much longer to get published.

After graduating with a law degree from Mercer University in Georgia in the United States, he practised divorce law and, later, criminal law, married and raised a family. But in his 30s, he says, “a little voice in my head started telling me to write books”.

So, every day he would write stories from dawn to breakfast, before either his first wife or three children got up.

“I was 35 years old when I wrote my first book. It was horrible. I wrote a second book – it was horrible. Then I wrote my third book,” he pauses suggestively, “and it was also horrible!”

Finally, he joined a writers’ group in nearby Jacksonville, an hour’s drive away from his then home in Atlanta, Georgia, and the feedback he received over the next six years helped him polish his manuscripts enough for publication.

“I quit three times, but that little voice in your head keeps driving you and nags you and annoys you,” he says.

Now he teaches writing to aspiring authors and the lesson always includes these words: never give up.

Berry spends up to 18 months on every novel and a third of the time is usually research. He reads extensively, consulting perhaps 300 sources for every book and also likes to travel to the locations his characters find themselves in.

He flew to Russia for The Amber Room and France for The Templar Legacy (2006), the first Cotton Malone book. While he failed to find time to head to China for last year’s The Emperor’s Tomb, he had “eyes and ears on the ground” and got regular reports from a friend who visited the country for three weeks.

The next Malone novel is slated for 2013, while Berry is now working on a standalone, which will star a disgraced newspaper reporter.

“Cotton called me on the phone and asked if he could have a year off,” he says in explanation, though clearly it is he who needs the break!

He has no plans to do a John Grisham and write legal thrillers for a change of pace, saying: “I do not adhere to the philosophy that you should write what you know. Write what you love.”

And what he loves is history. His fees from teaching and lecture tours are channelled into History Matters, a non-profit society he founded with his second wife, Elizabeth. They raise funds to preserve historical artefacts, whether art, writing or memorabilia. Most recently, they helped the Bridgeport History Centre raise funds to preserve 19th-century posters.

“History matters,” says Berry. “Without knowing where we’re coming from, we have no clue where we’re going. History is critical in that regard.” – The Straits Times, Singapore/Asia News Network.