Sea Control - Sea Control 535 - The Return of Jack Ryan with Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson

Episode Date: July 11, 2024

Links1. Tom Clancy Act of Defiance, by Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, May 21, 2024. 

Hey folks, it's Sherrod. Today I'm joined by Jeff Wilson. He and his co-author, Brian Andrews, have brought back Tom Clancy's legendary Jack Ryan in their latest novel, Tom Clancy, Act of Defiance. This episode was edited and produced by Andrew Frame. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimber's Men.

You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Hello, Hashimates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Jeffrey Wilson, and we're going to be discussing his new book, co-authored with Brian Andrews, which marks the return of legendary character Jack Ryan. And the book is Tom Clancy, Active Defined. So, Jeffrey, welcome. Could you tell the audience a little bit about your background, please? Yeah, for sure.

Thanks for having me, first of all. Excited to talk to you. My background's a little bit eclectic. I've done a lot of things. I've been a pilot. I've been a surgeon. I spent most of my Navy career working as a combat surgeon with Special Warfare at the JSOC element, as well as Counterterror Task Force. So I've sort of been around the Navy in different areas for most of my life, very little with submarine warfare, which is the expertise of Brian. He was an officer aboard a 688. He was on the Louisville out of Hawaii. So between us, we got a good bit of the Navy covered.

Been writing for the last decade. Brian and I have been co-authoring since my fourth book came out, and we write a bunch of thriller series, most of them focused on special warfare and the Navy and how we keep the nation safe. So it's been a real thrill to be able to honor the Navy that we've loved so much, especially now with the Clancy properties. That's been fun. Thanks.

And as a reminder, all opinions today are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. Jeffrey, what's your personal relationship with Tom Clancy's work? So my personal relationship is probably like you. I was inspired by it as a kid, right? So 40 years ago, the very first Tom Clancy book came out, Hunt for the Red October, which really, in my mind, sort of defined a genre of fiction that really honors the service of America's men and women. You know, he sort of invented that genre. And I can remember reading hunt for the red october later seeing the movie as a very young man about to enter the navy so to say it had uh an impact on me would be an understatement it was just really impactful in so

many ways all of his books and then that franchise continues now so you know 40 years later to be invited by uh clancy's editor tom colgan and the estate to write in the series that sort of not only impacted me as a naval officer but later as a writer was just unbelievable it was mind blowing was hunt for red october your favorite of the book sir i feel like the answer is always yes only because it was the first you know what i mean like you you always remember your first it was so new and it was so different i'd read ludlam growing up i had read lecar and and all of the big thriller writers but then this book hit and it was so different it was almost like the men and women of the navy were a character it's almost like he somehow made the government and the

military service a character in this book that really came to life so it definitely was one of my favorites i don't know if i can say for sure it was the favorite but it probably was one of the things is you read back other people's commentary on clancy's work they would accompany him on his visits to bases and ships and stuff and he was kind of renowned for having this incredible access because of men women in uniforms or love for his books what kind of access did you get as you prepared to write this? I know Brian has his 688 experience that he can fall back on here, but there's a lot of like very close up detail of what the interior of a Virginia class submarine looks like. That makes me believe it was like you two were invited

at some point to tour. Yeah, absolutely. So that was one of the things when they invited us to do it and when we found out it was the 40th anniversary, our first book would fall on that. Obviously we wanted to write a submarine book to honor that. But one of the things that we were really serious about was returning the Clancy series to that vibe that we remember, to that tick on a hound, feeling like you really were in that boat or on that ship or with that team. And as you pointed out correctly, that was Clancy's gift, right? His ability to engage and work with people. And we got to meet some retired folks that worked with Clancy, which was really exciting, even all the way back from Hunt. So I guess it was sort of a journey of

audacity. We were like, well, if him, why not us? We're the first Navy veterans to write in the estate. In fact, I think we might be the first veterans in the Jack Ryan Senior. Don Bentley was an Apache pilot who wrote Don Jr. for a while. So we reached out through the office of the East Coast NAV East, which is the PAO service for the East Coast, and said, hey, we're these two knuckleheads that get to do this thing. What kind of access can we get? Expecting very little, to be honest. But to our surprise, they just totally embraced us. And we were notified a couple of weeks later that the office of the CNO had approved us to have almost unfettered access. So we were able to fly out to the Ford who was underway, the Gerald R. Ford, newest class of

aircraft carrier, which was an incredible experience. Brian got his very first carrier arrested landing in a cod. We spent a couple of days there talking to the skipper and the crew from E1 all the way up through the CAG and DCAG and all those folks. We got to go out to sea on the Indiana Virginia-class submarine, and we got to tour the Blackfish, the USS Washington, got to fly F-18 simulators with VFA-106. So we got to see a lot of cool stuff, and hopefully that's reflected in the book. But what I think the most important point is that wasn't what made it cool. What made it cool was the access to the people.

You know, we both served, we both love the Navy. And I think we went out there with this idea of wonder what it's like now. You know, there's a lot of strange cultural changes that we won't get into, a lot of division in the country. Hey, has that impacted the Navy? And it was amazing to find that we found the Navy very, very much as we remembered it. A lot of very dedicated, very young people, patriotic, love their country, love their job, love their Navy, hardworking. And we were just amazed. So we had the opportunity to sit, for example, in the crew's mass aboard the Washington and talk to the enlisted and officer crew and say, how do you want us to reflect your community in this book? Millions of people are going to read it. They want to know what is it like now, 40 years later, how can we best do that? Not just the technology, but the people and what you do day to day. And they love that. And so I think that's really what made the book come to life. I had said Clancy sort of had the Navy as a character in his books, and we really wanted that too, and to the point where I feel like this book should almost have the United States Navy as a co-author. They really embraced us. They assigned us subject matter experts. Lieutenant Commander Dennis Guy was an incredible asset to us.

He's now the XO on his own boat. At the time, he was working at Subland. He got to actually read stuff and say, no, that's not quite it. Tweak this, tweak that. But it also gave us the opportunity to sort of vet things. You know, OPSEC is hugely important to us. We've written 27 or 28 books in this space before we did Clancy, and that's something that's always been important to us.

You know, we have brothers and sisters out there on the pointy tip. We want to make sure we're not violating anything. So at the same time that they were able to vet OPSEC for us, they were able to say, oh, you would say it this way, or just those little things that give it that authenticity that we were looking for. It was amazing. It was my favorite part of the experience was being able to engage with the sailors. Why did you decide it was time for a revisit of the Jack Ryan senior character?

Or was it the estate's idea? Yeah, so the Jack Ryan senior character never really went to bed. Mark Graney had written a book or two with Tom before he passed. And so there wasn't much of a gap between Tom Clancy's last book and Mark Graney picking up the torch and writing the books for a time. And after half a dozen or so novels, he passed it on to Mark Cameron. It is hard to write someone else's canon of work, so eventually you sort of burn out from it. So the series has continued since 2013, most recently under the hands of Mark Cameron,

who lives in Alaska as a former U.S. Marshal. So when they came to us, and it was them coming to us, when Cameron announced that he was going to be writing his last book, Tom Colgan, the editor for Clancy, who we know and had been friends with, we worked on another project for him under the W.E.B. Griffin brand. Yeah. He tells us he had in his mind that we were going to be the next ones. We didn't get that. We must've missed that memo, but he asked us to meet with him in New York when we were up there and have a drink. And we sort of thought maybe that might be what we were talking about. I'll be honest with you at the time I told Brian, I was like, you know, if this is what's happening,

I don't know that we can do it. Like we write the tier one series. We write the shepherd series. We write the sons of valor series. We have a lot of film and television in development right now. The timing just felt really bad. Like there was so much work that we had on our plate. And when we sat down with him, that was when he told us, hey, just so you know, if you do this, your first book will be on the 40th anniversary. Our first book would fall on that. I sort of watched his eyes glaze over and I sort of, yeah, it's over.

We're going to wind up saying yes to this. And I will say this, our main publisher is Blackstone and the CEO there, Josh Stanton, amazing human being. We went to him and said, hey, we have this opportunity. And he said, you let us know how we can support it. He's a Clancy fan, too. He's like, Brown will support the schedule. And so they always intended to continue it on.

We're just very blessed that they thought of us and let us take it over. Was there any work in particular that you revisited as you started working out the plot? We did revisit Hunt for the Red October. This book, as you know, is definitely an homage to that book. So we spent a lot of time revisiting those characters. people that read that book or saw the movie and are fans of that story will find some little easter eggs in our book little throwbacks to the original where we pay homage to it and we did try to tie the plot to what happened with the red october and you see that actually in the very

opening pages of the book so we spent a lot of time with that but also you know a lot's happened since then so we did have to refresh our memories as to what's been going on for 40 years in the franchise. Our book is the 24th book. So we wanted to refresh on memory about John Clark and how that works and what he does. As you may know, Jack Ryan's now the president, right? So in this series over the decades, he eventually became the president of the United States and you can't put that genie back in the bottle. So we weren't going to be able to have Jack Ryan fast roping onto a helicopter or going into a hot LZ like you see John Krasinski doing the TV show. So that was a bit of a challenge. How are we going to address that? How are we going to get that vibe that we

loved? My favorite thing about Hunt was that Jack Ryan character, the young Jack Ryan. He was a fish out of water, right? That's what made it so engaging. I think people could say, well, that could almost be me, right? Because I also wouldn't know what the hell I was doing if I was on a United States submarine. And he didn't. He just was a dog with a bone, super smart, and he had some ideas. And there was no real opportunity that we could see to make Jack Ryan recapture that. He's the president now. And so I think we found a cool way to do it. His family has been in all of his books. Jack Ryan Jr. now has his own series on the Clancy estate. So he's sort of tied up. We know what he does. He's a covert operator. His oldest daughter, Jack Ryan's oldest daughter

is a surgeon. But these two other kids, Katie and Kyle, aren't written about much. Last time we met Katie, she was like six and going to be kidnapped by terrorists. So we got permission from Tom in the estate to age her up, say, what would she be doing now? One of the complaints some of the Navy guys had when we talked to them, especially in Naval operations, they're like, yeah, the only thing that bothers us is Jack was CIA. Why wasn't he Naval intelligence? And so we made Katie Ryan, his daughter, his youngest daughter is now an Academy graduate who has become a Naval intelligence officer. She's done her fleet tour and now she's at ONI. And she becomes that sort of analog for Jack Ryan, that fish out of water, dog with a bone, the one who uncovers the mystery

and has to go out there and prove her case. So that was cool. And had we not revisited Hunt, I think that we might not have come up with that idea. And then I would imagine that the two of you sat down and did some sort of character sketch of who Jack Ryan is prior to embarking on your portion of this project. What did you come up with? It's interesting that you say that because Jack Ryan is a bit of a challenge for a writer, isn't he? Because people in our culture, we're not just reading the books, we're exposed to all of the Jack Ryans that have been out there. You know, Jack Ryan is one of our heroes in the history of the world, probably. And he's got so many iterations. He's got, you know, Chris Pine

has played him and Harrison Ford has played him. And, you know, now we have John Krasinski in this rebooted, reimagined Jack Ryan series. So everybody in the world has their own sort of vision of who Jack Ryan is. But for us, we really wanted to return to that original Tom Clancy version of Jack Ryan. And so when we remembered what we had learned as fans, and then augmented that with rereading some of the work, we came up with this guy who is the original Jack Ryan. He is that, he's a Boy Scout. He does the right thing for the right reason, no matter the consequences. He's got a very significant moral compass. And that was good because that's sort of the characters that we write. We try to write that hero arc that way. We want people to read a book

and say, yeah, that's who I strive to be. So we don't really do the anti-hero type thing. So that's who we found Jack Ryan still is in the books. As president, he's going to do the right thing for the country. He's not going to compromise his own integrity. And Katie has unconsciously sort of walked in her father's footsteps and become that same kind of character. So that was really fun to sketch that out. Do you have a personal favorite of the on-screen Jack Rhines that's sort of in the back of your mind as you go through? Harrison Ford sort of captured that Boy Scout version, right? Didn't he? I think Harrison Ford did a really good job. For Hunt for the Red October, obviously that was a different take,

but I really liked how Harrison Ford really grabbed onto that. He does the right thing, no matter what. So he's probably my favorite on-screen version of him. I think that tracks with our relative ages. We were probably at the correct age where Harrison Ford is going to be the natural choice for us. There's a lot of fan service in the book. You packed, like you said, a lot of Easter eggs in from previous iterations of the character, previous things that were in the book. How did you pack all that in and keep the book to a manageable size? Because I can remember when a new Tom Clancy book would come, it would be like this thick. My fingers are a good three inches apart. It is a very thick novel. Were you making

trade-offs about what you kept in there to keep the book to a certain size? I think that for us, it wasn't as much balancing the volume of the book. Clancy books are a bit big. This book definitely is a little bit longer than an average Andrews and Wilson book. And I think that's mostly just the way a Clancy story unfolds and introducing the technology and letting you really see the characters and the technology at the same time. So for us, the balancing act was less about the volume of work and more about the creative art side of it. We wanted to pay homage to this. It is a love letter to that first book. There's no question. And when you read it, you'll see that. But we can't just do a retread of that story. So for us, the balancing act was

balancing enough of those little Easter eggs, giving the reader that nostalgia without retelling an old story that they already know how it turns out. And so for us, that was what we tried to balance. We need a new exciting story. We need new characters. And a lot, as you pointed out earlier. So much has changed. I mean, down to the little details. I remember when we were aboard, I think we were on the Washington and they were showing us in control how everything works and there's no periscope. And he's like, how can you even be a submarine officer without dangling your arms, right? And now everything is on a photonics mask and it's all on a screen TV and it's touchscreen and they literally use an Xbox controller to control everything. So, so much

has changed that we wanted people to be able to see some of that as well. So, that was more the balancing act, I think, being able to show the new fresh story and new fresh technology with just enough smattering of nostalgia to make it an exciting ride for everyone. And then a final question is, how did you use your own experiences in the Navy in the book? I know not a lot of this is special ops related, which is where you spent most of your time. Yeah, so there's always that opportunity. In the Ryan world, there's that blend of big Navy and covert operations, especially as involved. That John Clark character gave me the opportunity to sort of bring my background in. So John Clark is now running a covert team. I spent some time in the spooky task force world,

we'll call it. So I sort of get that vibe and how those things are going. So there was definitely enough opportunity to do the subs and the spies and subs and the operators, sort of our dream when we came together as a co-author team. That was how Brian pitched it. We got to do subs and we're going to do SEALs and SPIs. And this was the book that we finally really brought it all together. And I think that was almost fate. We've always said, well, we haven't done the sub thing. We haven't tied everything together yet. And how did we know that 10 years later, we're going to write the Clancy book and that would be the best opportunity. So definitely, my background is weaved through the book as well. So that was fun. And I learned a lot about subs. As a non-sub guy,

I was on a sub once when I was on active duty and I hated it. Like we were going to do something unpleasant to get off the boat that I had never done before. I was a little nervous about that. And I will say that by the time I got off, you could have shot me out of the torpedo tube. I just wanted to get off the boat. So I didn't have a very objective view of submarine service before that, but I learned

so much and am so impressed with the men of the submarine warfare community now. The men and the women, you know, it's an integrated force. There's a character in the book that's based on a real character, a female WEPS aboard the Washington that is based on a real person who was one of the most impressive, intelligent, hardworking naval officers I've ever met in my life. So what an experience for me to learn all that. And now we get to share it with the world. Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Jeffrey Wilson. Jeffrey, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Is there going to be a continuation of the Jack Ryan series here? we're committed to at least three the next clancy novel comes out in december that's called defense protocol but our other books are still coming out book after book after book four minutes just came out our next tier one novel comes out in july that's book eight in the tier one series called ember but you can find everything about us at andrews-wilson.com if you go there all of our

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