Sparking the readers’ interest with crime thrillers
“Technology moves very fast, but learning to deal with it and make it work for us (and not against us) can be much slower.”
Author John M Green has always harboured a deep curiosity, drawing his inspiration from the craziest places.
Perhaps it has something to do with having grown up in Sydney’s Kings Cross. The child of Holocaust survivors who moved to Australia after the war, Green explained that he spent his childhood years in what is often characterised as the seedy underbelly of Sydney. Green spent his days “roaming the back alleys and rubbing shoulders with prostitutes, drag queens, drug dealers and witches”, he said, explaining these experiences helped his later careers in law and investment banking.
Since leaving his job as a banker, though, he has straddled the worlds of arts, business and philanthropy, publishing five crime thrillers and co-founding his own publishing house, Pantera Press.
He will return in August 2022 with his latest book Framed, which draws inspiration from his lifelong love of art.
Last year, he published Double Deal.
“The inspiration for Double Deal came from my fascination with technology, and the rise of artificial intelligence, drones and deepfake videos,” he told The AJN.
Explaining that there aren’t enough female heroes in crime fiction, he created the character of Dr Tori Swyft. “I wanted to create a female who was effectively a James Bond but with her own brain,” he said. “[Swyft] is a PhD, and a champion surfer. She’s a strong, brilliant and complex character who gets into the darkest scrapes but has the capacity, will and panache to extract herself from them.”
With Double Deal, Green wants to provide a gripping page-turner, but also wants readers to question the way technology can influence our lives.
“Think about the possible downsides of a lot of our exciting new technologies,” he said. “Technology moves very fast, but learning to deal with it and make it work for us (and not against us) can be much slower.”
Double Deal is published by Pantera Press. $29.99 rrp.
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