12 Damien Hunter
SATURDAY SPOTLIGHT NO.12 – DAMIEN HUNTER
Complementing the author spotlights I ran from 2011 to 2016, today’s Saturday Spotlight, the twelfth, is of crime novelist Damien Hunter. If you would like to take part in a spotlight, take a look at Saturday spotlights.
For Hunter, that world of fiction had real-life reflections of intrigue, mystery, and tragedy in the assassinations of multiple political figures – closely followed by the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. These formative events shaped Hunter’s view of the world and America’s role in it, leaving a sense that authority is deeply flawed, and good guys often lose without superior guile, abundant planning, superior firepower, and uncompromising unscrupulousness – a powerful combination that underdogs can rarely muster simultaneously –along with a belief that the end justifies the means, and if you’re squeamish about breaking eggs, then you have no business thinking about omelettes.
Growing up African-American in the United States, Hunter developed a keen sense of unfairness not just toward Blacks, but people of color in general. A searing experience that he witnessed at age four was his mother being wrongfully accused of shoplifting. He felt empathy toward the few Native-American schoolmates he had whose ancestors had their culture and way of life virtually destroyed by the U.S. government.
His education at home and at school was liberal in nature. His father, a formal naval officer, exposed the family to food from different parts of the world, and from a very young age, Hunter developed an appreciation for multiple cultures, and a profound distaste for all forms of racism.
His mother, a social worker, adorned the family home with art, sculptures, paintings, books, a set of encyclopedias, and a thick two-volume set of Webster’s Dictionary. As a child, when he asked how to spell a word, Hunter was often told to go look it up himself. Eventually, Hunter took to reading the dictionary, something that later led to his having a somewhat larger vocabulary than his schoolmates. His mother also instilled in him a love of books and reading, with weekly trips to the public library.
While a student at the University of California at Berkeley, Hunter spent a summer interning at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. During this time, at a luncheon with CIA officials interested in prospective recruits from top universities, Hunter asked questions about a then-recent agency operation in Beirut intended to eliminate a terrorist, but that had instead killed several bystanders, and about how the CIA maintained control over its contract operators, people with certain skill sets who were not actually agency employees. He got no answers, but was later the subject of what he called a “softball recruitment effort” by one of the officials present at the luncheon.
His Berkeley radical days long behind him, Hunter is today a career civil servant who never lost his fascination with the world of spies.
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And now from the author himself:
My writing initially set out to be pure adventure, escapist fare featuring a James Bond-like character who happened to be Black, and along the way it became decidedly political…I discovered that in my writing, I could not get away from who I am at the very core. I want my stories to touch on the fact that agents of the U.S. government are sometimes asked to do unsavory things no leader would brag about back home, and how those agents respond to such orders, how they feel, even if they execute them to the letter. I try to delve into the human factor of espionage, more deeply than is usually the case.
Is he a sell-out, or has he devised a way of working from within the dark world of the military-intelligence-industrial complex to make the world, to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., “bend toward justice”? Can that even be done, or does he slowly drive himself to the edge of insanity in the attempt? These are the themes I wound up grappling with.
I try to craft interesting plots, adding varying degrees of action, political intrigue, tradecraft, and sex.
I try to keep the gadgets to a minimum, because they can distract from the characters and the story itself. To the degree I can, I try to create a world and have the reader step into it as they read – I feel if you can’t do that, it’s not entirely believable – and at times even get inside a character’s head.
I do lots of research to help set the tone for particular locales. I’m told that my writing is very visual, almost cinematic. A big reason for that is that I have been a huge fan of movies since I was a child. I’ve studied directorial styles, the way certain directors use lighting and camera angles to tell a story, the way they guide or consciously decline to guide the actors. Those things have all strongly influenced my writing.
One of the biggest influences on my writing is music. I often use it to create or maintain a creative frame of mind, to get to that state that I call “the Muse talking to me”. When the Muse is talking to me, I can write for hours on end. When I have bouts of writers block, it’s because the muse is absolutely silent.
I’ve also been motivated by films and even graphic novels, most notably Frank Miller’s Sin City. Potentially anything can motivate you: a radio broadcast, a film, a piece of music, even a newspaper article. You just have to be open to it.
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You can find more about Damien and his writing via…
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If you would like to take part in an author spotlight, take a look at Saturday Spotlights or email me for details.