with Howard Kaplan
We are delighted to welcome author Howard Kaplan to Omnimystery News today.
First published in 1977, Howard's suspense thriller The Damascus Cover has recently been re-released as a trade paperback and an ebook. It is also being adapted into a film, which is currently in production and will be released by Relativity Media in 2015.
We asked Howard to tell us a little more about the path his book took from publication to screenplay.
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Photo provided courtesy of
Howard Kaplan
In 1977, The Damascus Cover rose on the Los Angeles Times best seller list for 3 months in hardcover. All then ten paperback reprint houses bid on the rights for the paperback version which went to Fawcett, the highest bidder at auction. The book was published separately in Great Britain by John le Carré's esteemed British publisher, Hodder and Stoughton. A Yugoslavian publisher bought the rights for translation into Serbo-Croation. Then came a sad note from my agent about their representative in Belgrade. When the galleys arrived there, the managing director read it himself as my New York agent presented the book as an important title and potential best seller. He enjoyed the book so much that he decided to market it himself. The first market proved successful, and he secured an offer from a publisher in Belgrade. Unfortunately, when the book was turned over to the central committee for authorization to translate it, the permission was denied, and all the remaining copies of the galleys still on submission elsewhere were confiscated by the government. The Damascus Cover was put on the official Eastern Europe blacklist. He wrote, "So we won't have a Yugoslav edition after all, and shall not be able to market the book in the other East European countries." I had mixed feelings, both disappointment and excitement that the novel was garnering so much attention.
Now, 37 years later, a film is currently shooting on location in Casablanca, starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers (Match Point and The Tudors), Abigail Spencer, (This is Where I Leave You and Rectify), Jurgen Prochnow (Das Boot and The Da Vinci Code) and Navid Negahban, who played Abu Nazir in Homeland. Some changes have been made due to the long passage of time but the director/screenwriter told me several times he found himself always returning to the spine of the novel as it worked so well. The film will be released in 2015.
With the film coming out, I decided to reissue The Damascus Cover as an ebook and paperback. It's been out of print all this time.
This fast-paced spy novel is full of plot twists, intrigue, a central love story, all set in Damascus. With both Syria and Israel so prominent the film producers see the novel and book as very timely. The story itself about can one use one of their own people without their knowledge, to reach the desired goal is timeless so it needed no update at all.
When I was a student on my junior year abroad in Jerusalem, I flew to Cyprus and got a new passport at the American Embassy in Nicosia. From there I flew to Beirut, where a Canadian Sergeant Major sitting beside me on the plane offered to procure me the best gold and the cleanest girls. I decided to pass on both. From there I took a shared taxi to Damascus. The idea for this novel, about an Israeli agent who works his way high up in the Syrian echelons was born when I visited Marjeh Square, where the actual Israeli spy, Eli Cohen was hanged after being uncovered in 1965. He had risen to be the highest advisor to the Syrian Minister of Defense.
The Los Angeles Times said about it: "In the best tradition of the new espionage novel. Kaplan's grasp of history and scene creates a genuine reality. He seems to know every back alley of Damascus and Cyprus." The American Library Association, in a starred review, said: "A mission inside Syria, a last love affair, and the unfolding of the plot within a plot are handled by the author with skill and a sure sense of the dramatic."
Overall, it feels like a miracle to have the book become alive again as a film and in print again after nearly four decades. I'll be on set the first week of February. So expect to see a bald, 64-year-old, gray bearded author sitting at a bar somewhere in the film.
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Howard Kaplan, a native of Los Angeles, has lived in Israel and traveled extensively through Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. At the age of 21, he had his own spy experience while attending school in Jerusalem, when he was sent on two missions into the Soviet Union to smuggle out a dissident’s manuscript on microfilm. His first trip was a success. On his second trip, however, he was arrested in Khartiv and interrogated for two days in the Ukraine and two days in Moscow, before being released. He holds a BA in Middle East History from UC Berkeley, an MA in the Philosophy of Education from UCLA, and is the author of four novels.
For more information about the author, please find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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The Damascus Cover
Howard Kaplan
The Jerusalem Spy Series
