Novelist Robert Dugoni
Novelist Robert Dugoni – ahead of Central Pennsylvania appearance
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Scott LaMar
Novelist Robert Dugoni
Airdate: April, 5th 2023
Best-selling novelist Robert Dugoni is one of the world’s most prolific writer of legal and spy thrillers. His police investigator Tracy Crosswhite and spy Charles Jenkins series are must reads for Dugoni fans and read like an on-going TV series – in other words, readers want to read the series of novels one-by-one to learn about the next adventure.
His latest novel is a first or stand alone for now – called Her Deadly Game about lawyer Keera Duggan. Duggan is an attorney representing a man accused of murder, facing off against a prosecutor who she had a romantic relationship with and the daughter of a legendary defense attorney who has been diminished by alcoholism. As in all of Dugoni’s books, there are twists and surprises throughout the story.
Dugoni appeared on The Spark Wednesday and talked about how his own life inspired part of Keera Duggan’s story,”My mother was the product of an alcoholic household. She was the third daughter in a family of six, and her father was a very prominent dentist in San Francisco, and he was also a binge drinker. She used to she didn’t talk about it much, just like veterans. The Vietnam veterans don’t talk much about the Vietnam War. They don’t want to relive it. But when my mother would talk about it, she would talk about, you know, things like having to go down to his office and go into the waiting room and tell all his patients that he was sick and then bring him back home. Her and her sister would have to get in a car and he would drive them home and finally got to the point where they actually put his office in the same apartment building that they lived in so that he wouldn’t have to drive. As I got older, my brother and I were often tasked with driving over to Marin County to make sure he was still alive, to pull the spark plugs out of his car so he couldn’t drive it to just check in on him to make sure that he was okay. So I saw I saw the impact that that illness had on my mother and her brothers and sisters. And so I wanted a situation that was real for so many people. I wanted Keera to be in a household that’s dysfunctional, which is the reason why she didn’t initially want to work for her father’s legal defense firm, criminal defense firm, because it is so dysfunctional and all the children are impacted by it. Not just her. Her two older sisters are impacted. Her two brothers are impacted. And that’s how it is in an alcoholic household. So part of it comes from a lot of experience.”
Dugoni described how a teacher in the Catholic school he attended set him on the path to being a writer,”Sister Mary Williams was my sixth grade teacher and she loved boys, which was unusual back then. Most of the teachers, favorite girls and the boys were the troublemakers. But Sister Mary Williams had a soft spot for boys, and I never really understood why. But there was an incident that happened one time where the principal who was an alcoholic, came into the classroom and just berated me, and Sister Mary Williams took me outside and she said I was a good boy. I was a good boy. And then she got a hold of my mom and she said I think he’s just bored. He needs more to read. And so my mother, who had been an English teacher before she started having ten kids, began to hand me all these books or take me to the library, and I’d check them out of the library, which is why libraries are so, so appealing to me. I would read The Count of Monte Cristo, The Old Man and the Sea, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird. And so, I fell in love with stories, and that really is what put me on the path.”
Dugoni has said he now writes with his heart rather than his head,”When I was writing by my head, I was really absorbed by the plot. I was absorbed by, you know, this happens and then this happens. Then this happens. When I finally started to write from my heart, it came from a quote from Stephen King in the book on writing when they asked him, how does how does an author touch the heart and soul of a person he’s never met? Living in a small town, he’s never visited and never will. And Stephen King said telepathy, which I didn’t know what to make of that. But then later, I was on a panel with Diana Gabaldon, who wrote the Outlander series, and she used the very similar word. She said it was magic. Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol much the same way organically. It just the characters came in and started talking to him. And so I decided at that time that I was going to give it a shot. I was going to I was going to see how that went. Now, I had studied story structure for 20 years, but I understood how a story was to be told. But I wanted it to become the character’s story, not mine. And if that meant that the characters were going to surprise me, all the better.”
Robert Dugoni appears at the Library System of Lancaster County’s spring author event Thursday, April 13 at 11 a.m.
