The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Assassins Anonymous by Rob Hart

Episode Date: August 18, 2024

Assassins Anonymous by Rob Hart https://amzn.to/3X4YQqJ In this clever, surprising, page-turner, the world’s most lethal assassin gives up the violent life only to find himself under siege by mysterious assailants. It’s a kill-or-be-killed situation, but the first option is off the table. What’s a reformed hit man to do? Mark was the most dangerous killer-for-hire in the world. But after learning the hard way that his life’s work made him more monster than man, he left all of that behind, and joined a twelve-step group for reformed killers. When Mark is viciously attacked by an unknown assailant, he is forced on the run. From New York to Singapore to London, he chases after clues while dodging attacks and trying to solve the puzzle of who’s after him. All without killing anyone. Or getting killed himself. For an assassin, Mark learns, nonviolence is a real hassle. About the author Rob Hart is the author of THE WAREHOUSE, which sold in more than 20 languages and was optioned for film by Ron Howard. He also wrote the short story collection TAKE-OUT, the Ash McKenna crime series, and he co-authored SCOTT FREE with James Patterson. His next book, coming from Ballantine, is PARADOX HOTEL. He lives in New York City.

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The Aunt Lady sings That Makes It Official. Welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. As always, for 16 years, over 2,000 episodes, we bring you the Chris Voss Show. Refer us to your family, friends, and relatives. Tell them to join or else. No, don't do that. Don't be that way.

Tell them to subscribe to the show so they can be smarter, brighter, happier, more fulfilled, and all those serious things that I'm not sure we can legally say that we'll provide. But, you know, we have so many great authors on the show that provide so much data. You can learn stuff from everything from fiction to nonfiction to educating yourself, psychologists on the show, or, you know, worst case scenario, you just might laugh a lot. Anyway, go to goodreads.com, for instance, chrisfosslinkedin.com, for instance, chrisfoss, chrisfoss, one of the TikTok, all those crazy places on the internet. We have a multi-book author on the show with us, very prolific author as it is. Rob Hart joins us on the show.

His book came out June 11, 2024. It's called Assassins Anonymous. That should have been the title of our other podcast. Sounds like a good title for a podcast. There you go. Anyway, his new book has come out, and we're going to be talking about what's inside of it. Rob Hart is the author of Assassins Anonymous, The Paradox Hotel, The Warehouse, and the Ash McKenna Crime Series. He's also the co-author of Scott Free with James

Patterson. He works as a book publisher, a reporter, a political communications director, and a commissioner for the city of New York. He lives in Staten Island. Welcome to the show, Rob. How are you? I'm doing all right, Chris. Thanks so much for having me. There you go. That's quite the bandwidth you got there on the bio. I keep myself busy.

There you go. So give us a, let's see, we need a website link for people to find you on the interwebs. Yeah, sure. I'm at robwhart.com and and you can find all of my stuff there oh that's so great it's such an easy url too gotta love it so give us a 30 000 overview what's inside your new book sure assassins anonymous is basically if john wick got into a 12-step recovery program for killers i'm sorry that is hilarious man hilarious. I blew the curve on that one. I blew the curve on that one because that's the best elevator pitch I've ever had on any of my books.

And I'm never going to get to that height again. John Wick goes into a 12-step recovery program for killers. Yep. So there you go. And so that explains the coffee cup that's on the cover with the knife through it, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. It's the 12-step program coffee cup that's on the cover with the knife through it, I guess. Yeah. It's the 12-step program coffee cup from the meetings and stuff.

This has got to be an interesting sort of thing because, you know, I mean, does he go to a group? Is there a group of anonymous or can you tell us that? Is there a group? Yeah, absolutely. So it's like a covert organization. It's all killers who want to get out of the game but kind of like need that support because here's here's something that i found that was really interesting is there are actually similarities in brain structure between people who are addicts and people who are killers really and and part of that has to do with things like impulse control and stuff like that and and we know that it doesn't have to be a substance to be addictive

because you could be addicted to gambling you could be addicted to sex so sometimes it's just about that pleasure reward system and so he's in this group and and he's with all these different killers you know one is a former mercenary one is a former hitter for the yakuza one is a serial killer and they all argue over whether he should be in the group he's we're not with the other assassins damn it we're better than we're better we kill people we're better you know whatever i guess there's divisions and everything when it comes down to it so there you go how did you come across this idea who hurt you when you were a child i mean yeah no every single book of mine it's it's it's better than going to therapy because i'm getting paid instead of me paying the therapist what you're what you're up to. Yeah. You know, it's, I always wanted to write a book about assassins because I love the assassin

character. It's like that sort of, you know, classic, it fits within the mold of gunslinger and the private eye and the samurai. And it's just, it's, it's an interesting character to write. And I always thought it would be cool to do like a group therapy type setting with a bunch of different assassins. And then it just kind of hit me one day. It's oh, 12 step. Because the thing about 12 step is that once you get to the eighth and the ninth step

you're making a list of all the people you've hurt that you have to then go make amends to and i'm like what does that look like for a professional killer yeah you go you go to the grave and put flowers on it is that what i mean for a lot of it it's it's going to like family members and friends and trying to explain what happens and it's it's of it, it's going to like family members and friends and trying to explain what happened. And it's, yeah, it's tough. Yeah. And clearly these people aren't in jail yet. So that might be bad for their freedom.

Very bad. You know, but, you know, from a larger sense, it was me getting to a point in my life where I realized, you know, I'm 41 years old. I've made mistakes in my life. You know, I've done dumb things as, as all of us have done. And, and I kind of got to a point where I'm like, you know, I want to be a better person. Is that possible? Can, is change possible? So I was like, let's, let's take it to the greatest extreme that I possibly can and write about people who kill people for a living. There you go. I would never get want to get an argument at that meeting with anybody i'd always be really uh passive because i would never want to piss anybody they do have rules and they

do they do their best to stick to it but but the the the plot of the book is basically you've got this guy who is like the world's best assassin and he's cleaning up a meeting and then someone attacks him and stabs him and takes his notebook with his list of all the people he needs to take amends to and leaves. And he finds himself having to figure out who's trying to kill him, but he no longer has the tools he used to have access to. Because it used to be real easy. You know, he could just shoot someone in the head and then the conversation was over. And now, oh, he has to figure out how to navigate this world without killing anybody. Without killing anybody. What do I do now?

Like John Wick with no guns. Exactly. Am I just going to have to talk nice to somebody? There you go. So give us a little bit about your upbringing. How did you grow up? What influenced you to be a writer? How early on did you start to notice that you were interested in writing and had a knack

for it? Yeah, I grew up on Staten Island in New york still live here born and raised and you know i was the first member of my family to go to college you know my dad's a new york city firefighter my mom works in a bowling alley they were always incredibly supportive of me in wanting to be like because i was an artistic kid i actually i thought i was going to be like a graphic designer or a comic book artist or something and i got got into an art conservatory for, for, for fine art and then hated it. It just wasn't for me. And so it was so around when I was like 18, I was like, you know, I've always loved books. I like writing. Maybe I should give this a shot. You know, when I was,

yeah, when I was about 18 years old, I was like, all right, you know, I'm going to do this, but you know, I'm going to get a degree in journalism instead of creative writing because journalism, that's where the money is. And you know, that worked out the way it worked out. I did that for a couple of years and, you know, then just kind of bounced around until finally, you know, I wrote a book that made me enough money that I can become a full-time writer, which was the dream. And what was the proponent for crossing the threshold there and getting the book written? Was it, was there, was there something that moved you in life or do you just finally say hey i'm gonna just finally get this book thing done i think i kind of started out with a mission statement which is i so my very first book was called new york and it's like a a punk rock private eye novel about

a sort of brash you know hot-headed kid who will eventually one day become a private investigator. But I wanted to sort of like draw out like an origin story of what brings someone to that line of work. And I and that took me like five years to write because I had no idea what I was doing. You know, I could write a book in five months now. But you know, I've written enough now that I kind of have a process. But yeah, I wanted to, it was a story that i felt like i had never seen i was like you know you always meet these private eye characters when they're deep into their career and they're older and they're jaded and i'm like what it would look what would it look like to follow someone who was eventually going to get there well what's that origin story look like ah hero's journey maybe

yeah unless they're assassin i don't think you're quite here at that point but technically in some sort of story format i mean mean, you're the hero of the story. So there you go. And then you wrote the series. Let's see if I have it here. It was called the Ash McKenna Crime Series. Yep. So that was five books.

And then they were great and they were fun. They came out from a small press. Then I wrote a book called The Warehouse. And The Warehouse is basically like it's an entire novel length indictment of amazon and their entire business model oh wow but yeah that turned into a thing that was a book that i was like there's no way anyone's going to publish this because amazon is 75 of u.s book sales like no one's going to poke the bear even amazon will put on their site they'll be like no we're not yeah and and then it turns out you know a lot of people wanted it you know the book the book sold in a really nice deal and then we sold it in 20 languages and then it turns out, you know, a lot of people wanted it. You know, the book sold in a really nice deal. And then we sold it in 20 languages.

And then it got optioned for a movie. And, you know, my whole life changed that year. There you go. You know, we had Dana Aoli on recently. And she wrote the book, The Everything War, Amazon's Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power. And she outs, like, all the dirty secrets of Amazon. And so we were joking about how, you know, Amazon still lets it be put on their website. You know, it's like all the dirty secrets of Amazon. And so we were joking about how Amazon still lets it be put on their website. It's funny. I would love to think that someone somewhere along the way told

Jeff Bezos about my book. I'm sure he hasn't read it, but I would love to know that he at least knows it exists. One of the best compliments I got was, so I'm researching this book for years and I'm writing about Amazon. It's a very secretive company. And when I was writing it, there was really only one good book about Amazon at the time called the everything store by Brad Stone. And so that's pretty much what I was basing it on that and like some new stuff, but also a lot of research into Walmart, because Amazon's kind of copying Walmart's playbook in a lot of ways. But so I write this book. And I have a friend who works on like a high level in Amazon and she pulls me aside after she read it

and she's, who did you talk to? I'm like, oh, I made everything up, but I'll take that. I will put that feather in my cap. Does it have pee buckets in it? You know, there was a thing where they put- Well, it definitely has, it has breaks. Like your bathroom break is time.

The bathroom break is... You get like 10 minutes, but it's like from whenever it tells you, you can go to the bathroom. Oh, when it tells you. On the other side of the warehouse, like you're kind of screwed. Well, my bladder would not survive that in my old age. The, yeah, it's, that's, that's amazing. And so it hit really well. It got a ton of ratings and reviews. Got over 13,098 ratings on Goodreads and 3,015 ratings on Amazon.

It still keeps kicking. I believe that's the Kindle version. I think the numbers stay the same. Yeah, they do. Ah, awesome, man. It was a fun one. Yeah. It's funny how, what is it, fiction is, real life is stranger than fiction, I suppose, in some ways. Yeah. Yeah. There was actually something. There were things that I was thinking of that I was going to put in the book.

And then I'm like, nah, this is too ridiculous. This is crazy. No one's ever going to believe it. And then within a year or two, Amazon was introducing these things. And I'm like, man, I wish I put that stuff in the book because people would have thought I was so smart. That's hilarious. And then you did the Paradox Hotel and that did really well with ratings. Yeah.

Yeah. That was another fun one. That was a time travel murder mystery. And, you know, time travel, I eventually found that writing time travel is kind of like going to White Castle. You think it's a great idea until you do it. And then you're like, oh God, what have I done to myself? It's brutal, but it's a ton of fun. There you go. It's billed as

Noir Inflected. I'm a big fan of Phil Noir. What does Noir Inflected mean? I kind of had this idea of I wanted to set a book in a hotel for time travelers. And so, okay, if we invented time travel, what would happen? I figure it would probably look like space travel where at first it's, you know,

someone develops it and it becomes sort of like a venture for the government, but then slowly private industry starts to get involved. And then, you know, it turns into a tourism thing. And then you've got this hotel where the tourists stay before they travel in time.

And I thought, you know, it would be cool as if the in time. And I thought, you know, it would be cool as if the book was about the house detective, you know, and this is something Ritzier hotels had back in the day, they would have a house detective, someone who would live in the hotel. And basically they were,

they were like usually like a retired cop or something. And they would keep things quiet, you know, to, to, so as not to tarnish the reputation of the hotel of something bad went down. We do that around my house. Yep. There you go. it, you know, to, to, so as not to tarnish the reputation of the hotel of something bad went down. We do that around my house.

Yep. There you go. And so it just seemed like a fun entry point for telling the story. And you had a blast with that one. It was a fun book. Yeah. And readers loved it. So finalists for the Lambda Literary Award and one of the best books of the year, according to NPR and Kirkus Reviews.

There you go. It was the Boston Globe who used the nor inflected. This is why I do the show, so I can learn new terms all the time. So there you go. So now you've launched in this book and it's out for sale. People can check it out. John Wick goes on a 12-step

program. You can find out how it turns out. Anything more you want to tease out about Assassin's Anonymous before we go? Yeah, I mean, I would say the thing that I'm really excited about right now is that so the book actually got options by Amblin and Steven Spielberg for a potential film series. And there are some things moving right now. And it's Hollywood, so things move slow. But my man, I would love to see that happen. I got to tell you, when I was having a conversation with the executive who bought it at Amlin,

and she was like, oh, and I had a conversation with Steven last night about this, and he loves it. And I'm like, the thought that Spielberg knows my dumb little book is probably one of the best moments of my life. That's awesome, man. Yeah. That's awesome. You know, I think it'd be great. I think it'd be great. I don't know. I'm thinking of Fight Club. club remember fight club they would always go into those anonymous groups yeah

one guy the one guy had a thing where he'd always go it's i think those are interesting to watch so there you go what does your future look like anything on the horizon that you're maybe working on toying with next book for the contract etc etc yes i wrote a sequel to assassins that's called the medusa protocol and that's coming out probably next summer um i also have a book that i co-wrote with alex segura called dark space which is essentially if john leclerc was writing star trek it's like space espionage and that's coming out in october and then i'm co-writing a book with someone that i can't talk about yet because we haven't announced it, but we should be announcing it hopefully within the next few

weeks. But that's been a fun one too. So basically I just, I haven't been sleeping a lot lately. You got a lot going on. There you go. I mean, you know what? It's good to be busy. I'd rather be busy than the alternative. That's true. There's a lot of authors out there that would love to, you know, be selling a lot of books and being successful. So, yeah, keep on rocking it. We'd love to have you back for the future ones. Please come back, Rob.

I would love that. Thank you so much. There you go. Thank you for coming to the show. Give us your dot coms. Tell people where they can find you on the interwebs. Sure. It's robwhart.com.

I'm also most active on Instagram, which is robwhart1. There you go. Folks, order up wherever fine books are sold. Stay away from those alleyway bookstores because you might need a tetanus shop. It's called Assassins Anonymous by Rob Hart. It's out this June 2024 on June 11th. Thanks for

tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.