with Michael E. Rose
We are delighted to welcome author Michael E. Rose to Omnimystery News today.
Michael is the author of three books featuring investigative journalist Frank Delaney, originally published in Canada generating widespread acclaim, with two being shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award. Momentum is releasing the titles as ebooks this year; you can learn more about the first in the series, The Mazovia Legacy (Momentum; January 2015 ebook formats), below.
We recently had the chance to catch up with Michael to talk more about the series.
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Omnimystery News: How do you categorize the books in this series?
Photo provided courtesy of
Michael E. Rose
Michael E. Rose: I write spy thrillers. That's the genre I was always interested in when I started writing fiction. I'm the former Chief of Communications for Interpol and a former journalist, broadcaster and foreign correspondent, so I can draw on my experience in exotic locations around the world and my time in law enforcement for my stories and characters. I've been to so many rough places and met so many strange and even mysterious people over the years that sort of by default I assembled a wealth of ideas for stories and characters that are basically my raw material. The work at Interpol also helps me a great deal. At Interpol headquarters in France, you have police from more than 60 countries working side by side, and they bring with them an incredible variety of stories about crime and international intrigue, and about Interpol's own investigative work and intelligence sharing. For a journalist and writer to have been able to spend time in a place like that was an outstanding opportunity.
OMN: Introduce us to the series lead characters.
MER: My main guy is Frank Delaney, who is an investigative journalist by trade, but who gets pulled into the world of spies and international affairs at first through contacts of his in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. He is a guy who lives off information: gathering it, sharing some of it, publishing other bits of it as he sees fit. Once he gets pulled into the spy world, though, he starts to see the gathering of information and the uses to which it can be put somewhat differently. I trace this development of Frank's character over, so far, three books, in which we see him changing in the way he does his work, both as a journalist and a sometime-spy. He starts to see that the arms-length relationship he has had as a journalist with his sources and his information can no longer be maintained. He has to make life and death decisions, something he never really had to do as a journalist who watched things unfold from the sidelines.
OMN: How much of your own personal or professional experience have you included in the books?
MER: Being a journalist, or now a former journalist, is really still at the centre of everything I do. I spent a lot of time as a wire service journalist and editor. I was a news agency man. We always prided ourselves on getting the facts right and on writing clear concise copy that got to the heart of any story fast. So in that regard, I try very hard in my books to get historical or geographical or political or technical facts right, and to write in an accessible way. But one of the reasons why I made the jump into fiction was that I grew impatient with "just the facts" and wanted to be able just to imagine scenarios and endings for real life stories. In my first thriller, The Mazovia Legacy, for example, I took a real-life historical situation, the decision to hide the Polish national treasures in Canada during World War Two, and from there I imagined where that story might have gone, imagined a series of characters operating inside that existing historical situation. Then I threw the story and its consequences forward to the present day.
OMN: Tell us something about the series that isn't mentioned in the publisher's synopsis of the books.
MER: Well, I am very interested in psychology, and the way the previous life experiences and concerns of human beings shape their reactions to current troubles or dangers or challenges. I try hard to "know" my characters as well as I can, to know their histories and their worries and weaknesses and personal concerns and to work out how they would react to certain events and situations they encounter. I am also very interested in dreams, in the dreaming state and what it can tell us about people. So I occasionally will use a dream that a certain character has to help readers understand more fully what sort of person this is, what he or she is really all about, even though this may not be clear at that moment in the story to the characters themselves.
OMN: What's next for you?
MER: The first volume in the series was set in Canada, then Paris and Rome. In The Burma Effect, Delaney was in Canada again at the start, then London, Bangkok and the most remote parts of Burma. In The Tsunami File, he was back in Thailand, then in Germany and France. I think it's only natural that in the next instalment Delaney goes off to some other exotic locale. I'm thinking Australia first, as I am living there now, but then I want to take him into Latin America, probably Mexico and Costa Rica, which are places I have spent a lot of time in and which I think have all the elements a thriller writer needs to keep things really moving.
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Canadian-born writer, journalist and broadcaster Michael Rose has worked in senior roles for major media organizations around the world, including the CBC, MacLean's Magazine, UPI, Radio France International, Australia's Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, and the Reuters news agency in London. He has also been Chief of Communications and Publications for Interpol at the police agency's headquarters in Lyon, France. In addition to his fiction writing, Rose works as a communications consultant and media trainer based in Sydney, Australia.
Rose has written extensively in a variety of media genres — news reporting, political commentary and analysis, as well as many feature and travel articles. He's taught journalism at the University of Western Sydney and the University of Sydney in Australia and delivered guest lectures at Concordia University and the University of Hanoi. He has also trained working journalists in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, East Timor, Thailand and Sweden.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at MichaelRoseMedia.com and his author page on Goodreads, or find him onTwitter.
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The Mazovia Legacy
Michael E. Rose
A Frank Delaney Thriller
The snow in a Montreal winter covers a multitude of sins …
In the icy depths of a Quebec winter, a harmless old Polish man dies in mysterious circumstances. His suspicious niece draws in Montreal investigative journalist, Frank Delaney, to help her find the truth behind the death, a story the authorities seem to want covered up.
The search for answers sweeps them into a dangerous web involving Canadian, Polish and Vatican agents who will use any means, even murder, to stop them. The catalyst for this international intrigue is the true story of Polish national art treasures secretly shipped to Canada to be hidden from the Nazis in the opening days of World War Two. This classic thriller combines fascinating history, deft storytelling and psychological depth.
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