Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci - The Gray Man with Mark Greaney

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

This week, Anthony interviews bestselling author Mark Greaney about his latest thriller, 'Midnight Black.' Mark shares insights into his journey from a corporate job to becoming a renowned author, his writing process, and the character development in his Gray Man series. The discussion delves into the real-world inspirations behind his stories, particularly the geopolitical landscape, and the moral complexities of his protagonist, Court Gentry. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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from authors and historians to figures and entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe, wherever you get your podcast, and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know. Anyways, let's get to it. Today, I am sitting down with one of the masters of the high-stakes thrillers, Mark Greeny.

To talk about his latest book, Midnight Black, you know him from the Greyman series, which was adapted into the movie with Ryan Gosling. But this time, he's taking us into a dark, adrenaline-fueled world of crime, corruption, and redemption. So let's get into it. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining me today on Open Book is Mark Greeney.

The title of the book is Midnight Black. What a great title, by the way. It's a Grey Man novel, so we're going to get into the Grey Man series as well with this number one New York Times bestselling author. First of all, Mark, welcome to the show. Congratulations on the release. Many listeners know your work, but give us a little bit of your background before becoming this great thriller writer. What were you doing? Well, thanks for having me first off.

You know, honestly, I don't have the same background. Some thriller writers do. I was just a guy working in an office. I was interested in international affairs and political science. My dad was, ran the NBC affiliate here in Memphis, Tennessee, where I grew up and where I still live. So I just kind of grew up around the news and I had a great interest in it. Studied political science, international relations, and college. Got out and did nothing with it for basically 20 years until I became a published author. I was in international business and so I spent a lot of time traveling and doing things of that nature. But I was a big reader and I was a big, I was obsessed with Tom Clancy and Nelson DeMille and these Cold War era authors and guys that, you know, continued on. And I got

an idea to write a book when I was actually still in college and I spent 15 years just picking away at it and finished it, did nothing with it and then wrote my second book in seven months. And the gray man, was my first published novel was my fourth completed novel. So it took me, it took me 20 years to get published, but say 85% of that time was me not working very hard at it. But there's a, yeah, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, because you're very, very good at this. There's a calling to this, right? So you were doing something else, but you're like, you know, I always wanted to write a great thriller novel. I got to get myself busy, right? The fingers started itching for the keyboard, right? Yeah. So, I mean, I was just such, I was obsessed with reading. I was

have six books going at the same time pretty much all through my 20s and my 30s. And I just had this idea that I could write something. And so it was a calling to, you know, people go like, wow, you were great for never giving up. And it's like, I didn't give up because I actually enjoyed what I was doing. If it had felt like work, if I was digging a ditch for 20 years, I'd have been pretty miserable, but I was doing something that I really liked. So it paid off, finally. Yeah, the people that survive are the ones that don't even realize they're working. But, but what's on your nightstand right now if you don't mind me asking? Because as you know, I'm a big reader.

What are you reading right now? Because I'm sure you've got three or four books going at the same time. So what are they? I do. I'm reading a lot of nonfiction, which is research for my next gray man book. And a lot of it has to do with Northern Ireland and the troubles, the Irish Republican Army, things of that nature. I'm a big fan of kind of a new thriller author named David McCloskey. I don't know if you know who he is.

So I've got his new one, the seventh floor. on deck. And, you know, I like all the guys in my genre. I like to, you know, I say I'm not a jealous person. I'm never jealous of anyone's success, but I get really jealous of people's ideas. I'll read somebody's book and I'm like, God, I should have thought of that. And I'm furious that I didn't. So I love to pick through stuff like that. But right now it's a lot of history about Northern Ireland and the Troubles. So on this podcast, I've had Brad Thor. I have had Daniel Silva. the legendary Ken Follett who writes thriller novels but then also writes these historical novels. There's something you're doing that's unique, though, because I am a thriller reader.

I'm not a thriller writer, but I'm a thriller reader. And I feel like your plot lines are so compelling in the character development as such, but then you slam people at the end of these paragraphs. I mean, it's impossible not to go to the next chapter. Okay, you're almost like you invented book streaming. Okay, what I mean by that is if I'm streaming something, a good stream, you know, if you're watching Yellowstone, you probably have to watch the next episode. You hit play, stay up an extra two hours.

How do you do that? What is you, what's in your brain as you're coming to the end of a chapter? You know, a lot of it happens in the editing, to be perfectly honest. Like, nobody wants to see how the sausage is made. But the truth is, is I will be reading back something I read and go like, this just isn't propulsive enough or you know this the ending of this chapter isn't leading me into the next thing you you really want to finish every chapter with the reader going and then what you know instead of feeling like anything's wrapped up uh you want to keep people moving so i'm just a fan of that style

of writing the faster the better i mean i do like moments of lightness and dark and moments of speed and and maybe some reflection and uh you know vulnerability in your characters, these things, I don't ever want anything to be really one-dimensional. It's not just, it's not, you know, even a John Wick movie has moments where, you know, where they take a breath. But I like to keep things just about as propulsive as I can. All right. So I don't want to ruin the plot for Midnight Black, but you've got a great scene going on in here. We have a lover entrapped in a Russian gulag. There's got to be really bad prisons around the world, Mark Greeny, but I don't know if there's many that are worse than a Russian gulag.

And so tell us, set the scene for us. You throw us into this icy Russian story. Tell us what happened. You get to set it a little bit of a scene for us without giving away too much. Sure. The protagonist of the entire Greyman series is a guy named court gentry, who's a former CIA paramilitary officer. And he's had different relationships with the CIA throughout the the 14 books of the series. But in this one, he is on his own because the woman that he loves, who is a former Russian foreign intelligence officer, her name Zoya Zakarava. And she has been thrown, as you said, in a gulag, a prison in the center of Russia in its winter. And he doesn't think she has long to live. And the Russians are actually hiding her presence there. So there's a lot

of cloak and dagger work for him to figure out where she is. And then he realizes that he doesn't have a lot of support, but he's got to go in there and try and get her out. So, you know, I said earlier, I'm just a huge fan of Cold War novels. I grew up on that. So in this story, it kind of harkens back to that because he actually does develop an affiliation with some Cold War era resistance, you know, members in Latvia, and then some younger present-day Russian resistance fighters in Moscow. And, you know, he creates these alliances of convenience and he scratches their back and they scratch his. And it's his job to try and get into this gulag and get her out. But at the same time, there's a very cunning FSB Russian Foreign Intelligence Colonel who is laying a trap for the gray man to walk right into.

So there's, you know, the other side gets a vote in this story too. It's not just all about him going in there and kick him butt. Okay, but let's talk about the reality of this because it's, you know, of course, all your books have to say that this is not based on anybody. It's all fictional, but there's a lot of real worldness in your book. There are all, are Russian gulags, there are CIA operatives that are entwined with Russian operatives. Some of them are double agents. Some are triple agents. You've got a whole morass of different things that are going on on the membrane between the free world and the world of totalitarianism. And so when you do your research for these books, what shocks you? I guess let me start out by saying this.

When I read the first presidential daily brief, when I was read into what? was going on, at least at that level, I was in a state of shock. And I actually, George W. Bush said to me, well, when you read the brief, did it change you as a person? And I said, yes, yes, it did. It made me see the world totally differently than I saw the world just through the prism of the news or the New York Times. You seem to have that perspective on the world. So tell us a little bit about the world that people don't know that you're trying to share with them in your books. Yeah, I think it's a storyteller when you do research and you come across something, you're just like really passionate about telling people about it. I will come across to research. My books come out in February. Here we are in January. And I will come up with something. I'll read something tomorrow and some research material that won't be in a book for a year. And I'm just so passionate about getting that out because I'm interested in it. Everything that all the research I've done in Russia, this book is very accurate in a whole lot of ways, but I kind of realized late in writing this book that out of all the books I've written

and I've written Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan novels and in my own stuff and parts of other series, I always try and predict geopolitically where we're going to be when the book comes out. But this is the one book that's kind of difference because I told myself it was okay for me to be more hopeful than I really expected to find the world in 2025 when the book was released. So there's a more robust Russian resistance in my book than actually exists or that I actually know about. But I did do all the research on what's happening with the Russian resistance. I did a lot of research on Ukraine and the technology they have and Russian missile defenses, things like that.

I tried to get the information. I tried to understand the information before I kind of departed from it and made things a little bit more hopeful, I guess you could say. But I will say that I am actually surprised that now when the book comes out, I make a lot of a big deal in the book that Ukraine is able to strike a thousand kilometers into Russia and try to explain how that was feasible. And now it's happening almost every other day that is actually happening. So I was a little worried about people not buying that part of the story, but I don't think that's going to be a problem now.

So love and morality. and danger and courage are all mixed into this book. Okay. And so our great protagonist court, court gentry, has got all these things inside his personality. He had a pretty decent moral compass, doesn't he? He has a very strong moral compass, whether or not it's the right thing or not. You know, it's skewed. He sort of grew up as an assassin, but at the same time, he does what he believes is right. So I think that's an important part of his character and his vulnerability. Yeah, you fall in love with this guy. You want this guy to succeed, but you also see there's a chink in his armor. So tell me that chink in the armor. Yeah, his vulnerability is in this book,

to a large degree, it's Zoya. He's not had a lot of relationships in his life. And he's has a difficult relationship with Zoya, but he is in love with her. She was kidnapped in a previous book. All my novels are standalone. You don't have to read any of the other books. I set it up very early in this book, who's who, and what their relationships are. But in a previous book, you know, you see how their relationship is developed. And he's willing to sacrifice anything. And he, you know, the book opens with him saying, you know, he's making a bunch of poor decisions in his attempt to, uh, to rescue this woman, or at least to verify that she's alive. And, you know, and I think his chink in his armor is always, he's kind of a slave to doing what he thinks is right.

And sometimes that has him walking straight into fire. Well, I just want to point out the viewers and listeners, this is your 14 book. But they are standalone books. I have to confess you, I did not read a gray man book prior to this. Right. And so I jumped right in and I just want people to know, you can start right here and go forward. I'm going to go back now that I read the book. But the process, the research, the interviews, the field research.

Have you traveled to Russia recently? Yes, I've traveled to Russia, but previous to the war. The State Department, it's basically they call it it. It's a do not travel advisory. I've been to many countries where there's a lot of risks or code orange or something like that. but Russia would be a terrible place to go now. But I did get to go before the initial invasion. I was actually writing a Tom Clancy novel,

the last book with Tom before he passed away, called Command Authority. So I spent a couple weeks in Moscow and some time up in St. Petersburg. And I still have thousands of photos and videos and notes and all my recollection. So that went straight into this book. Well, you could feel it. So be my CIA briefing agent for a second. You know a lot about the world.

You know a lot about America's adversaries, Western liberal democracies, the adversaries of freedom. Brief me, tell me where we are in the world right now. What should we be worried about? Well, I mean, specifically to Russia, you know, I think Mitt Romney was right back in 2012 when he said that that was our major geopolitical foe. And I think Obama kind of during the debate made fun of that. But look where we are a dozen years later. I think what's important is that Russia is waging hybrid warfare against the West, and the West will sort of begrudgingly call it destabilizing actions or malicious actions and not warfare, but everything from Havana syndrome to the destroying the pipelines and telecommunication cables under sea to the attempted assassination of some political figures and some industry figures in Europe. Gosh, they almost killed the head of Ryan Mattal, a German defense company because they were going to put a Panzer factory in Ukraine and a plot was uncovered.

There's so much of this. And I spend a lot of time looking at sabotage operations. I do discuss it in the book. Over 400 Russian spies have been expelled from the West just in the last two years since the invasion, almost three years now. And now the Russians are doing something. It's kind of jokingly you referred to as like gig economy spying or gig economy sabotage where they're hiring people in the West via telegram and paying them money to set fires and things like that. They're hiring influencers to disrupt our markets. Yeah.

And hugely, hugely influential people are getting paid lots of money to kind of disseminate their propaganda. Is our leadership, and when I say our leadership, I say collectively Western leadership, American, European leadership. Are we up for the task of handling? I mean, it's monumental to me. The Russians only have the GDP comparable to Italy or the state of Texas. Texas is a large state economically prosperous. But if you think of the landmass of Russia, it's a poor country punching over its weight.

Yeah. Do we, are we up for the fight? Yeah, Putin has always bet heavy with a bad hand. I've heard it explained. And I think he's been very successful with that. And whether or not we're up against the fight, you kind of have to ask me on the day. Just, you know, Europe spent a couple of years kind of realizing how wrong it was for them to be so dependent on Russian energy. And they've done so much to, you know, dial back from that. But just this week, Germany is talking about, you know, reopening trade with, with Russia, you know, and importing natural gas again and things like that, as if

they hadn't learned a thing from where they found themselves a couple years ago. I think greed sort of takes over. And so you see things like that and you go, are we just going to keep making the same mistakes until the end of the world? I don't know. I mean, I think, you know, we haven't done enough to support Ukraine. That's my personal opinion. Ukraine is the sixth largest army in the world. And I think Russia is the fourth largest army in the world.

If Russia takes over Ukraine and gets themselves control over the sixth largest army in world. I think it's going to end up costing a heck of a lot more than the 5% of our defense spending that we've given to Russia in the past few years. But a lot of people just, in my opinion, are short-sighted and they don't see that. So I'm cautiously hopeful, but not particularly optimistic about where things are going to be a year from now. But then, you know, let me just throw this at you and get you to react to it. Mark, the Russians have been very successful. They've infiltrated the Republican Party. The Russian talking points have showed. up in Republican campaign and political platforms. And so, I don't know, are they useful idiots? Are

they paid conspirators? What are they exactly? Well, you know, they caught a lot of paid conspirators in the governments in several European nations. And you see the election influence that, I mean, you only see it if you pay attention, but there's a lot of election influence in Georgia and Romania and these other big elections that have happened in Europe that Russia directly was involved in. I remember most Moldova too, right? Yeah, in Moldova as well. The attempt was there.

I looked back when in 2014, when Russia took over Crimea, they immediately held a referendum in the country. Once they had their little green men on the streets and their guns at the election facilities, they held a referendum. And they, the Crimean said, yeah, we'd like to be Russian. And I remember at the time thinking, well, no one's going to buy this because obviously this is under duress a year before they had voted, you know, 58% said they did not want to be Russia. But now I look how naive I was to think that the average person was going to know that.

And I've heard so many people in the media say, well, the Crimeans actually voted to become Russia. And I just think that's the most ridiculous thing in the world, but I don't think people pay attention to it quite well enough and they just take that line. Exactly. They see the superficial propaganda. You know, it would be like if if the Russians invaded the state of North Carolina and they put their operatives there and then they had a vote. What do you think would happen? Of course, they would vote 100% to be part of Russia. I mean, it's just the way it works. I mean, I have, you know, unfortunately, I get too much knowledge about all this stuff, which fussed me a lot. And I was blown away by your book because I see that you have that

knowledge. Thank you. Okay. So there's five words that we came up with from your book, my producer, Holly, and I dig through the book. I'm going to I'm going to say the word and then I want you to react to it. You can give me a sentence or two. Okay, you ready? Yeah. So if I say the word thriller, what comes to mind for you? I thought you were going to ask me Russian words.

I'm very glad. You know, a thriller is the genre and a thriller is any type of a story that, as you said, at the beginning, keeps you turning the pages. And it's not necessarily crime my books. I mean, there's more geopolitical. But at the end of the day, my books are human condition stories. So the thrills are you getting behind these characters and really sort of chasing their plights across the length of the book. If I say the word Zoya, you say what?

Well, Zoya is the love of court's life. I've turned her into a character. She's probably been in four or five books. And gosh, she might have her own book someday. She's a big part of this story. She's a very flawed character just like court, but she's also a very, very strong woman who has a lot of agency in this story. She's the one that he's going into rescue, but she handles a lot of stuff on her own. He's ready to give up his life for her.

Absolutely. And you create that emotional tension between the two characters quite brilliantly. Thank you. I say the word midnight black, or the two words, midnight black. You say what? You know, that became the title because there's just a simple line in the story when court slips into the water. in the Baltic Sea or the Gulf of Finland outside of St. Petersburg. And it's at that moment where he enters Russia, which is halfway through the book.

It takes him a while to figure out what's going on and get there and get the resources. But there's this moment where he sinks into the midnight black water in the middle of the night to make his way into Russia. And to me, that was this sort of stark delineation in the story to where it's like, okay, he's in bandit country now and will be for the rest of the story. So it was kind of a powerful moment in the book to me and turned into a title. I mean, I love the title. I say the three words, the gray man.

The gray man is a term that I didn't coin. I've heard it a long time ago. I was, when I was trying to become a published author, I was going to a lot of firearm schools, and there were a lot of military guys there, a lot of law enforcement, SWAT guys, and that you'd hear them talk about the gray man as, you know, not showing off that that's what you are, you know,

moving without tactical gear clothes on, just sort of making your way through the ether as a normal person, even though you're not, you're one of the, you know, you're one of the sheep dogs and not one of the sheep. Last word, and I'm going to give you the last word, of course, is court gentry. Yeah, so court is, court's my guy. People say, are you like court? And I'm like in his decision, not his ability to jump over a fence and not, you know, break an ankle. That would not be me. But in the sense of, you know, I think we sort of have the same moral code. And he is a, he's a flawed person who has a lot of abilities, but he also has a lot of vulnerabilities.

And, you know, he's doing his best. And, you know, he's a fun character to write. And I hope I get to keep doing these books. What's up next? Another book coming? Yeah. Yeah, the 15th book in the Grey Man series. I'm working on that now.

I'm going to head over to Europe and do some research and back up to D.C. and do some research there. And so, yeah, the books keep coming. Thank goodness. All right. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on. I hope you'll come back for your next book. title of this book is Midnight Black. It's a phenomenal read. And I'll just tell you something.

I'm on the road a lot and I do a lot of reading. And I was itching to get out of meetings, Mark Greenie, reopen this book and find out what the hell is going to happen. So I applaud your writing style and your subject material. Thank you so much for coming on Open Book. Thanks a lot, Anthony. Enjoyed it. So I'm obviously a huge fan of Mark Greenies. I've read most of his books, I find him to be a genius on several different categories. Human nature, suspense. Nobody can make you turn a page faster than Mark Greeney. Also, when I listen to him on Audible, I've got to speed things up because I'm so excited to get to the ending. But there are a lot of real life influences here in his books, and I implore you to read them because you'll get insight into human nature and you'll get

insight into the way the world really works, not the way we want the world to work, but how the world really works. And so lots of plaudits here from Mark Greeney and Midnight Black. I am Anthony Scaramucci, and that was Open Book. Thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, tell your friends and make sure you hit follow or subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast. While you're there, please leave us a rating or review. If you want to connect with me or chat more about the discussions, It's Ad Scaramucci on Twitter or Instagram. I'd love to hear from you. I'll see you back here next week.

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