Praise
for David Poyer’s Tiller Galloway Series:
“Riveting enough to terrify experienced divers."
– Publishers
Weekly
"Fans of Clive Cussler will love this thriller."
- Library
Journal
"White-knuckle diving scenes, constant action."
- Kirkus
Reviews
"Local atmosphere and a good knowledge of treacherous
currents keep things on course."
- The
London Times
“Plunges the
reader into a briny brew… a scary adventure.”
– New York
Times Book Review
1. What is your newest
book, Yucatan Blue, about? Lyle
“Tiller” Galloway is the black-sheep hero of four previous underwater
thrillers, set in various locales. They include HATTERAS BLUE, BAHAMAS BLUE,
LOUISIANA BLUE, and DOWN TO A SUNLESS SEA. Each book stands on its own, as does
this one.
In
YUCATAN BLUE, Tiller’s suddenly wealthy with the proceeds from his haul of gold
from North Florida and subsequent real estate investments on Hatteras Island.
But now the IRS is asking how a blue-collar oilfield diver and ex-con drug
smuggler ended up so rich, and his lawyer advises him to leave the country, at
least for a while.
Fortunately,
Tiller has a “job offer” in Mexico, helping an old flame hunt for a mysterious site
associated with the collapse of the Mayans circa AD 900. But it’s not on land, but deep beneath a
cenote-fed lake in the thick jungle of remote South Yucatan.
In
the face of a peasant revolt, corrupt federales, murderous looters, and the
mortal terror of deep rebreather diving, Galloway, Max, and July Toll struggle
to penetrate the sunken temple complex.
But they’ve stumbled on more than the solution to an ancient
mystery. Unless they can stop it, the
same evil will be unleashed on the world that destroyed the Mayan Empire a
thousand years ago
2. It is the fifth in a
series of Tiller thrillers. What ties them together? I’d say, two things: First, the
character of Tiller Galloway, a reluctant yet competent commercial diver who’s
trying to go straight after a prison sentence, but keeps getting pulled back
into compromising situations. Second, the lovely yet dangerous world of diving,
whether for sport, cave diving, wreck exploration, salvage, industrial diving,
or underwater archaeology!
3. What served as the
point of creation or inspiration for The Tiller Galloway Underwater Adventure
series? Diving off
Hatteras many years ago on U-85 and other wrecks, and wanting to craft a novel
that drew on the rich oral history and legends of the Outer Banks. That
triggered the first in the series, and Tiller, Shad, Sticky, Bernice, Max,
July, and the crew took it from there!
4. You have had over 50
novels published. Which ones stick out - -and why? My personal favorites, for
different reasons, include THUNDER ON THE MOUNTAIN, a novel of 1936, which is
about as good as I get as a writer. Reviewers compared it to Steinbeck’s work.
TOMAHAWK, for exploration of the ethical side of military service and weapons
development. And STEPFATHER BANK, a
dystopian yet comic look at where our economy is heading. But of course, every reader has his or her
own favorite!
5. How would you
describe your writing style? I
try hard to keep sentences straightforward, but I’m not above using terms of
art or technical explanations when the plot or credible dialogue requires
it. One of my early mentors, Frank
Green, said over and over: “The reader is always in trouble.” I get that! I try
to keep my readers in mind through all five-to-seven drafts that these novels
require. I coach writers from time to time, and that’s a lesson I try to hammer
into their heads too!
6. Did you have any
challenges to overcome in writing the latest installment in this series? I’d had the plot in mind for a long
time. When I finally got the chance to go pyramid crawling and cenote diving in
the Yucatan alongside my archaeologist brother-in-law, I jumped at it. The real challenge came later, in deciding
how to balance possibly supernatural elements with the realistic tone of the
series. But in the final draft I pulled back and left it unclear what exactly
Max and Tiller experience, and whether it is real or induced by drugs or
high-pressure nervous syndrome during deep diving.
7. As a retired captain
of the US Navy, diver, sailor, and marine engineer, how do you exploit your
real-life experiences to create authentic, action-oriented, underwater
adventures? I’ve
never done a memoir, though I’ve taught memoir in creative writing classes.
That’s because I’ve embedded so much of my own experiences in my novels.
Primarily, these are the 22-volume Navy series (The Dan Lenson novels), the
Hemlock County series set in Pennsylvania, where I grew up, and the Galloway
books, which draw on my diving experiences and interviews with other divers. I
wouldn’t call it “exploiting” – it’s more like using the background and some of
my experiences and people I’ve known to add verisimilitude to a story. Or IS
that exploiting?
8. What kind of hero did
you draw in Tiller Galloway, whom some see as a dark character? Well, yeah, he’s got a dark side.
That was clear when I first “met” him. After losing his family, torpedoing his
Coast Guard career, running cocaine, then losing his freedom to a prison
sentence . . . yeah, he’s dark. And he definitely has a substance abuse
problem. But he has a little light left inside. Outside forces keep pulling him
back to dealing and smuggling. He has his own yens to battle as well. But in
the end, I think, he cares for those he loves, and tries to do the right thing
. . . in his own way!
9. Character. Action.
Dialogue. Which is most important and how do they all work together in your
books? Oh,
difficult question. I start with character and present them with a challenge.
The downstream work all follows from that! Dialogue, I work over endlessly for
draft after draft. Narrative perspective is important to me. I don’t think too
many thriller writers working today fully employ it. And of course, the setting
also plays a big part in these books. Setting helps convey tone, I feel. And
there are still some dark places on the earth left. Those are the locales people
like Tiller seem to end up at.
10. How do you build up
suspense? Mainly
through the challenge and the danger. Fortunately, whether it’s industrial
diving on the seafloor of the Gulf, or caves deep in North Florida, or in this
latest book, deep unexplored cenotes in the Yucatan, danger is never far away.
Your equipment fails, you die. Run out of air or mixed gas, you die. Make a
wrong decision, you die. Trust the wrong people, you die. Claro?
11. This newest book
involves archaeological theft on the black market. What do you want readers to
know about that? That
it’s a huge business, not just in the Middle East, but in Mexico and Central
America. Mayan pots and sculptures sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Aside from being looted cultural items, they fund crime, drugs, and weapons
smuggling throughout the region. Very little of that is fictional; it’s all
unfortunately true. Don’t buy looted art!
12. The story in Yucatan
Blue pits ordinary people against forces far larger than themselves. What
do you hope readers experience when they reach the climactic ending? The felt knowledge that it’s never
over until it’s over. That there’s always a way out of the darkest situations
if you can keep your head, control your breathing, and think. And of course,
trust your dive partner . . . as Tiller does July in our final scenes deep
beneath the limestone crust of Yucatan!
13. Mayan history and
mythology are a part of your new book. What is so fascinating about their
culture? We’re
finding out more and more lately about how advanced this supposedly “primitive”
culture was. How carefully they used their environment, and how they managed
sustainable yield for a massive population in what today is a scrape of dirt
and jungle over base limestone. How much they understood about the heavens and
time. How intriguing and different their mythologies were compared to the Greek
and Roman stories we’re familiar with. But more chillingly, how they regarded
human beings as essentially plastic, as formable or pliable, to be remolded
mentally and even physically to fit into what was essentially a changeless,
eternal vision of society. That’s so foreign to us today! But with modern
technology, it might be the way we’re going . . . another book there maybe?
14. Each of your books in
the series have different geographic settings. How did each of these locations
play a role in the stories that you tell? Tiller’s story begins in his home island of Hatteras,
and now and then – as at the opening of YUCATAN BLUE – we find him trying to
return. (Sorta like Odysseus?) I wrote guidebooks and articles about the Outer
Banks, and you’ll find the stories I was told embedded or transformed in my
novels. From there, we took him to the Bahamas, where Don Juan Nunez, his old
boss, forces him to recover a cargo of sunken cocaine . . . only it isn’t
what’s really there. That too is based on what I found in the islands. After
those events, Tiller and Shad have to decamp to avoid Nunez’s revenge. Where
better than deep beneath the Gulf of Mexico, earning big bucks as oilfield
divers? A retired oilfield diver took me to Louisiana and got me an intro to
that hardheaded hard hat community. And after that, an old friend’s widow needs
Tiller’s help in North Florida to sell a cave-diving business.
Now,
in this latest story, the IRS is sniffing around, and Tiller and his son Max
are headed out of the country without knowing if they’ll ever be allowed back.
Fortunately, an old flame needs his help on an archaeological expedition deep
in the Mexican jungle. So, you see how the setting determines the challenge,
but also how personal relationships steer Tiller this way and that as he tries
to fight back from the darkest places in his life.
15. You are an
award-winning, critically-acclaimed, best-selling author. But is success
measured, for you, by these things – or something else? Really, for me, it’s more about
bringing a good story to an appreciative reader! One seldom gets rich doing
that, but it’s personally rewarding. To
my longtime fans, thanks so much for letting me pass my life doing what I love!
And enjoy this new page of Tiller Galloway’s checkered career!
About The Author: USA
Today best-selling
author David Poyer has over 50 published novels, receiving critical acclaim
from The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Booklist,
Kirkus Reviews, and The London Times. His books have sold millions
of copies worldwide. His work has
been translated into Japanese, Dutch, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, and
Italian, and rights have been sold for films and audiobooks. He has also had
plays produced in America and Switzerland. For more information, please see: www.poyer.com.
Marketing Help?
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For
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letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal,
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and The Washington Post. His first published book was The
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was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.
Born
and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids,
and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog.
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can connect with him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum/ or https://www.facebook.com/brian.feinblum
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