We are delighted to welcome author Bryce Zabel to Omnimystery News today, courtesy of Partners in Crime Tours, which is coordinating his current book tour. We encourage you to visit all of the participating host sites; you can find his schedule here.
Bryce's alternate history thriller is Surrounded by Enemies (Diversion Books; November 2015 trade paperback and ebook formats) and we recently had the opportunity to spend some time with him talking about it.
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Omnimystery News: Tell us a little more about the Breakpoint series as a whole.
Photo provided courtesy of
Bryce Zabel
Bryce Zabel: The first book in the series, Surrounded by Enemies, features two characters as you've never seen them before — President John Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. It's my view that if the bullets had missed on November 22, 1963 that November 23rd would have seen the Kennedy brothers moving at full speed to solve the crime of the near assassination. After all, the President of the United States had just been targeted for murder in broad daylight on a public street.
As characters, however, the post-Dallas Kennedy brothers have something else going for them. They, more than anyone, knew that JFK was living one headline away from disaster, and that he had many enemies, particularly in his own government. Jack and Bobby would have become the first conspiracy theorists.
Each book in the Breakpoint series, however, will feature a different what if story with different characters. The Kennedy survival scenario became my first book but the second one that I'm writing now should shake a few paradigms, too. It's called Once There Was a Way, and it's about what would have happened had The Beatles stayed together.
OMN: You have a broad amount of experience in different genres, writing everything from books to movies. How do you feel about being a mystery author?
BZ: I feel great about it. Toward the beginning of my career, I was so honored to receive an Edgar nomination from the Mystery Writers of America for an L.A. Law episode I co-wrote with David Kelley. It's the one where the parents blame each other for killing their baby in the courtroom and end up getting a hung jury and you realize in the last scene when they hold hands on an elevator that they'd planned the whole thing. I saw Jimmy Smits in the Fox commissary once and he told me it was his favorite episode that featured his character.
I like suspense and surprise in my writing and sometimes you bring those qualities and crime stories into other genres like science fiction or superheroes. Certainly my UFO series for NBC, Dark Skies, was not a crime or mystery series per se, but it sure had a lot of those qualities embedded in its structure. The same is true about my series, The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, that's based on the feature film.
I did not set out to write Surrounded by Enemies as a true crime mystery, although there are certainly mysterious ideas in it, a whopper of a crime, and a surprise or two about who thought it might be a good idea to let JFK get ambushed in Dallas.
OMN: How would you tweet a summary of Surrounded by Enemies?
BZ: I love a good challenge. Boiling Surrounded by Enemies down to a Tweet:
What if John Kennedy survived Dallas? #JFK and his brother Bobby become the first #conspiracy theorists, out to solve the crime. #althistory
That sounds so good I have to Tweet it. (pause) Okay, done. Onward.
OMN: Describe your writing process for us.
BZ: My background is TV news, working first as a CNN correspondent, then later as a Hollywood screenwriter. Both of those careers put a premium on being fast, but they also reward a writer who knows his story going in and has a structural plan for delivering it.
Surrounded by Enemies took a long time to think about but was a fairly quick write. Oddly, when I was first struck by the concept, I grabbed a number of Kennedy photos and assembled a visual "look-book" of the story's chronology. It was a very unorthodox approach, to be sure, and I've never done it before, it just happened. Then I wrote a treatment that laid the story out with a lot of specificity. When I actually got down to writing the book, however, it flowed out of me fast and furious. I've done a lot of re-writing, of course, but the essence came with speed.
I've been on a dozen TV writing staffs and created five drama series that have gotten on the air. The process there is usually very straightforward. Pitch an idea. Get notes. Write an outline. Get notes. Write a screenplay. Get notes. Revise for a production draft. Shoot. While I don't have to embrace that detail in a book, it gives me something to draw from. One thing I liked about the book writing process, however, is that you don't get notes until the manuscript gets to your editor. Mine was Randall Klein at Diversion and he loved this story as much as I did. When they sent me the first copy, he put a Post-It on it: "It's rare to have so much fun with something this intelligent. Congratulations on an amazing book." That Post-It is sitting here right above my desk. It's my Moment of Zen.
Also, having so much that I've written actually produced has given me a good ear for dialogue and pacing, and I do think that Surrounded by Enemies has benefited. I got so deeply into hearing JFK's voice in my head that I added a 12-page interview with JFK at the end, conducted in 1976, shortly before his death (in the book's timeline).
OMN: How did the original idea come about?
BZ: My Hollywood mentor, Bill Asher, was a contemporary of JFK, and directed not only the pre-inaugural show in 1961, but also the famous "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" as crooned by Marilyn Monroe. Bill attended more than a few Rat Pack wild parties and JFK was at a lot of them. The things he told me made me believe that President Kennedy was living a dangerous life.
Over the years, I came to the conclusion that if the things we know now that have drip-dripped out over decades had instead come out quickly while he was President, it would have been a very dramatic time. Don't get me wrong. I loved President Kennedy and I wept at his death as a child. Yet as a journalist and a dramatist, this what if just burrowed in my head and would not leave until I wrote it.
Now others have speculated and written in this area over the years, but I think I have a very original take for several reasons. First, it's not a time-travel piece with the protagonist going back in time to save JFK (like Stephen King's 11/22/63). Second, it's not a rose-colored glasses piece either where everything turns out just great (like Jeff Greenfield's If Kennedy Lived). And, finally, unlike those other projects, I happen to agree with the 62% of the American public who believe to this day that JFK was murdered as the result of a conspiracy, something that King and Greenfield have, in my view, ignored the facts about.
OMN: Where do you most often find yourself writing?
BZ: Hah! Well, being a Hollywood screenwriter, the short answer is "Have MacBook Air, Will Travel."
Producing TV series teaches a writer to write at any time and in any place possible. I've written a lot of stuff on airplanes going to the set in Vancouver, B.C., for example. I used to write in Starbucks but now all I see around here is people writing in Starbucks, and the part of me that wants to be different won't let me do that anymore.
My favorite place to write is still my home office. It's big, and it's got a big desktop, my iMac, and this is where I love to crank. I have reliable, fast Internet, all my books, a Keurig, and my wife, Jackie, who I can bounce ideas against. Of course, I also have easy access to my kitchen. That obstacle I haven't figured out yet …
OMN: How did you go about researching the plot points of Surrounded by Enemies?
BZ: This book is the result of one explosive idea married to a ton of research and then twisted to the purposes of alternate history. I've been reading and thinking about John Kennedy and how he lived and how he died all my life. That's involved reading, I'd imagine, over fifty books.
Even though I'm writing as a dramatist these days, my old journalistic habits are hard to shake. I still like to pick up the phone and talk to somebody who's an expert. I love to ask questions and because I'm willing to ask some challenging or odd ones, I've always come away from a conversation with at least a nugget or two that's pure gold.
For a first bounce, though, when my writing is on fire and I need a quick factoid, I will zip over to Wikipedia, find what I need and keep going. Later, in the revision and editing process, I'll fact-check all those quicky visits to get the information right. Please do not send me hate mail for looking at Wiki once in a while. I know it's not factually reliable since someone put a page about me up and it's wrong all over the place but they won't let me correct it because I'd be biased. Go figure.
OMN: OK, we have to ask: Where were you when President Kennedy was killed?
BZ: I was attending Peter Boscow Elementary School in Hillsboro, Oregon. The TVs were on in the cafeteria at lunchtime and everyone was pretty much in shock. My teacher, Mrs. Braden, was a tough old bird who always forced us to eat our vegetables. On this day, she sat at the table silently, as did we, and nobody touched their vegetables. Finally, they sent us home. It was Friday afternoon. I went home and watched TV with my parents for the next four days and everybody cried a lot. Except for when Oswald was killed. At that point, my father, an American History teacher, said, "That's not right. Something's not right." He, of course, was correct.
OMN: If you could travel anywhere, all expenses paid, to research a new book, where would it be?
BZ: Given that my next book, Once There Was a Way, is about The Beatles staying together and all that entails, I'd imagine my favorite place to be (and I'd even pay the expenses for this one!) would be at Paul McCartney's home (his choice of which one) hanging out, and running a few of my theories past him to see how he'd react. And if Yoko or Ringo want to drop by to say hi, well, I wouldn't complain. But if they want to jam together, I'm only good for the tambourine.
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Screenwriter Bryce Zabel has created five primetime network television series, written for a dozen other TV shows, and written and produced feature and television projects for many of Hollywood's networks and studios. His journalism and screenwriting work has been nominated for awards from the Environmental Media Association and Mystery Writers of America, and for Golden Mike, Gemini and Emmy awards. Bryce lives in Los Angeles with his wife and writing/producing partner, Jackie Zabel.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at BryceZabel.com and his author page on Goodreads, or find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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Surrounded by Enemies by Bryce Zabel
A Breakpoint Novel
Publisher: Diversion Books
What if Kennedy survived Dallas?
President John F. Kennedy has lived through the ambush in Dealey Plaza. America holds its collective breath, seeing its president nearly executed in broad daylight. But as the country marches on, the office of the President finds itself under a much more insidious type of fire.
Political scandal, an endless war, and a country coming apart at the seams take the 1960s in a terrifying new direction, and both John and his attorney-general brother, Bobby, struggle to stay ahead of their enemies, political and otherwise, and steer America toward a greater future.
— Surrounded by Enemies by Bryce Zabel
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