![]() (Hmmm, sound familiar?) Whatever our father’s rationale for exposing us to humanity’s dark underbelly at such an early age, my brother and I developed a deep appreciation for the conspiracy novel, one that has shaped our sense of story in a way similar to its influence on our father’s writing more than three decades ago. The tumultuous 1970s was a fertile time for conspiracy tales, thanks in large part to Watergate and a growing distrust of government, coupled with diminished US credibility abroad. Long before the term “binge” entered the vernacular, my father would gorge on conspiracy stories, a trope that served as the foundation for many of his novels. Perhaps his quest to find common ground inspired him to expose us to stories that were arguably a wee bit too mature for our young minds to process. While the width of our generation gap wasn’t the chasm my grandparents had to cross to reach their kids in the 1960s, we still cared about things (see: Atari, Rubik’s cube, Dungeons and Dragons, The A-Team) that didn’t exactly resonate with my father. His side gig during my youth was as a novelist, and it was his job to inflict terrible harm against the characters he made his readers love or despise.Įven though my dad had a unique job, he also had the very non-unique challenge of trying to connect with his two sons-me and my older brother Matthew, a career diplomat and author of four political thrillers. My father was a doctor-an ER physician at Falmouth Hospital, to be specific-but that’s not why our dinner conversations often revolved around ways to save people, or how to kill them.
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