The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – City of the Dead (4) (City Spies) by James Ponti

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

City of the Dead (4) (City Spies) by James Ponti In this fourth installment in the New York Times bestselling series from Edgar Award winner James Ponti, the young group of spies go codebreaking in Cairo in another international adventure perfect for fans of Spy School and Mrs. Smith’s Spy School for Girls. Codename Kathmandu, better known as Kat, loves logic and order, has a favorite eight-digit number, and can spot a pattern from a mile away. So when a series of cyberattacks hits key locations in London while the spies are testing security for the British Museum, it’s clear that Kat’s skill for finding reason in what seems like randomness makes her the perfect candidate to lead the job. And while the team follows the deciphered messages to Egypt and the ancient City of the Dead to discover who is behind the attacks and why, Kat soon realizes that there’s another layer to the mystery. With more players, more clues, and involving higher levels of British Intelligence than ever before, this mission is one of the most complex that the group has faced to date. And it’s also going to bring about a change to the City Spies…

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, welcome to the big show, folks. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here.

As always, we certainly appreciate you doing everything you can to support the show. Refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Remember, the Chris Foss Show is the family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as far as she's your mother-in-law. Anyway, guys, go to Goodreads.com for it says Chris Foss. Go to YouTube.com for it says Chris Foss. Go to all our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, all those crazy places the kids are playing nowadays.

Today we have an amazing multi-book author on the show. He's here to talk about his newest book coming out February 7th, 2023. James Ponte is on the show with us today and his book we'll be talking about today is City of the Dead, number four of City

Spies. And we'll be talking about all that release and what will be going into it and why I should order it up today. He is an amazing gentleman who's done several things with his books and everything else. He is a New York Times best selling author of three middle grade book series, City Spies, about an unlikely squad of five kids from around the world who form an elite MI6 spy team, the Edgar Award-winning Framed series about a pair of tweens who solve mysteries in Washington, D.C., and the Dead City trilogy about a secret society that polices the undead living beneath Manhattan. I think that's true, actually. I don't know.

That's the only nonfiction title in there. Oh, there you go. There you go. Dead City. I don't have any jokes for that. I'm just going to leave that. His books have appeared in more than 15 different state award lists, and he's the founder of a writer's group known as the Renegades of Middle Grade.

He's also an Emmy-nominated television writer and producer. He's worked for many networks, including Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, PBS, History, and Spike TV, as well as NBC Sports. He lives with his family in Orlando, Florida, and he joins us here today. Welcome to the show, James. How are you? I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me on. Thank you for coming. We really appreciate it. Give us your dot-coms or wherever you want people to look you up on this interweb, just in the sky.

Sure. You visit the website at James Ponte dot com. And you can follow me on Twitter at James Ponte or Instagram at James Ponte books. There you go. James, how many books do you have out? This book coming out in on the 7 february is the 10th book it's weird i i wrote books when i was in the tv world as writing for nickelodeon and disney channel i would sometimes write like companion books and there were books that came out but i didn't think of them really as books because I was using characters from other shows or adapting. So 10 of what I consider the sweet spot of books. Yeah. There you go. So what motivated you want to

write this? So this is fourth in the series of your books, right? Yes. It's, um, you know, I, I really, I was, I was a poor reader growing up. And so I've always tried to write books that I think would have interested the young version of me, which it, you know, the thing that really connected with me was stuff like Indiana Jones. And so I have tended to write storylines with mysteries because I love mysteries and with action adventure and comedy and, you know, and like an indie little, little family in there as well. And it's just been, it is a genre I really particularly like.

And it's funny because the adventure genre exists in middle grade and young adult. In adult, they just call it thriller. You know, and this sense of adventure really kind of, I think, fits me. It's why I write for kids and not adults. There you go. So what's the target age group for your books? I think the target is probably nine to 13, eight to 15.

But you know, I say half the emails I get is, I know I'm not who you're writing for. I'm a 74 year old grandmother who read this. And I love that. I love that email. And I wish they knew, you know, you're not alone.

Don't be ashamed. The, the I wish they knew, you know, you're not alone. Don't be ashamed. The books have, you know, the spy mysteries that I write and then the mysteries that I wrote the last one. They are pretty intricate plots, you know. So too young, the plots may be too complicated. But, yeah, they like to move. Well, it's good to know that people in that age group of, you know, 9 to 13 are reading books and stuff. You know, I thought they'd given up on books, but that's awesome. It's so funny you say that because that's what everyone thinks.

And, you know, when I worked in television, certainly that's what everyone there thought. I get, you know, it's a real honor. I get to go around and I'm about to go to a 10 city book tour and I meet these kids. And not only do they read them, they reread them. I mean, they know more, you know, they ask about stuff that I don't know because I read it the sixth time I read it. I'm like the sixth time. Why? Why are you reading it that much?

And what I really love about writing this age group is as an adult, I really enjoy books. And some of them, like Michael Conley is my favorite author. And when his book comes, I try to read it that week. These kids love books, whether it's yours or someone else's.

And they mean so much to them that it just really feels like a special place to be that I get to be part of that, you know, and, and I love it. It's an honor. That is awesome. I mean, it's, it's, you know, it's, it's storytelling and stories and learning for stuff is, is how we master life. It's, you know, stories are kind of the instruction book for the world. So, uh, let's talk about what happens to the city of, uh, the city spies this time, I guess, in book four. So the basic idea of the series is that there is a British secret agent for MI6 whose wife was a secret agent.

And she turned, went rogue. We don't know exactly what, but she left and took their children with her and just kind of vanished into the ether. So he has been searching for his kids to reunite his family. Along the way, he finds other kids who have been fallen through the cracks and he can't turn his back on them.

And he winds up adopting them. So he has these five kids. So he's looking to build his fam, rebuild his family along the way, builds an entirely new found family. And because these kids have been on the street or fostering or whatever, they're really resilient. They've got a lot of skills. They're actually natural spies in the sense that there are certain places where adults can't go that they can go.

And so I get that the plot seems far-fetched, but that's what I embraced. And the kids that read it like it. So in this one, what happens is it starts, and as you would expect in each book, kind of the missions that go on are a little more escalated as they prove what they can do and as they develop skills. And it starts with them actually breaking into the British Museum. So the fun part of that is I get to think, how do you break into the British Museum? There's a lot of crime planning

involved in writing these books. I'm lucky I have a SWAT team member. Are you hiding this behind your books? Are you planning something we should do? There's a SWAT team member who lives on my block, and all this stuff, I'm scared to Google. I just go and I knock on his door, and I'm like,

yo, Mike, you know how to build a bomb? And he goes, goes yeah of course you know how to break into you know and so he always so and and what ends up happening is it's tied in the british we have there there's a cyber assault so it's a very modern crime because there's the cyber assault on all these institutions in london with its kind of ransomware and it's like we're not going to give you back your information unless you pay us whatever amount of money. But it's somehow connected to ancient Egypt. And so what's fun for me as a writer, and I hope for the kids that read it and those adults that read it,

is that it's very modern at one point because it's about hacking and cyber and things that they need to be aware of. But the mysteries revolve, take them down first to Cairo and Giza and then down to the Valley of the Kings. And to solve it all, they have to go there. And we find out it's part of a high-tech search for, I don't want to spoil anything, for, you know, there's still tombs that have not been found down in the Valley of the Kings. And that's how it all kind of connects. So it is a journey into the past and the future where we, and this is the first time I've pitched it.

Obviously, I'm not good at pitching it. I haven't gone on tour with it yet. But they go into Egypt, and so we get to have that Indiana Jones moment of they're in tombs, they're doing this. But we also get to have kind of the mission impossible stuff of how's the cyber attack going. So we get a little bit of best of both worlds.

You know, the Indiana Jones series, I mean, it really tapped in. i remember watching when i was young uh i think a teenager i have to go back and uh think but i think i was in my teens uh when i saw it and you know i mean you at that age you have this great imagination of the world and and what you imagine is in it or what you think maybe is in it or the adventure of it you know i i grew up in the world and what you imagine is in it or what you think maybe is in it or the adventure of it. You know, I grew up in the world where, you know, we built forts and we played in the woods and, you know, we were always adventure. You know, we had those mothers who were like, go do anything but be in my house until dinner.

Yeah, exactly. And so our whole world was, you know, building bows and arrows for, you know, whatever ventures we were going on. Exploring and adventuring, yeah. Exploring, yeah. And so it really taps into kind of the imagination that's so vital and beautiful of young people at that age. You know, we get old, we get a little bit more jaded. One thing you have is you have a great multicultural cast of characters. Tell us about some of the, I think there's five people that you have is you have a great multicultural cast of characters tell us about

uh some of the i think there's five people that uh you have as the main character so i knew i wanted these kids to be from all over the world because i thought that would be more fun and more exotic and you know and also it would give us different perspectives it lets you naturally address perspective and then i worried about um there's this, I went to see the Dead Poets Society with my, my mom was with me. And this seems like it doesn't connect, but it does connect back. And so we're at the Dead Poets Society. And in this movie, every kid is the same age with the same haircut. They're all white.

They all wear the same school uniform. And halfway through the movie, my mom turned to me and she said, I can't tell them apart. I don't know which one's which. I thought, okay, that's a problem from a writing standpoint. Later on, when I'm actually a writer, I'm like, I want to make sure my reader or my viewer when I was doing TV doesn't get confused.

One of the things I came up with for this, God, I know I wanted five kids. That number just felt right to me. How do we keep track of them so that when you're reading, you're not going back, wait, is that the one who likes this? Is that the one? And so the idea I came up with is, you know, when they join the group, they have to kind of basically leave their past behind. And the only thing they bring along is the code name they call each other is everyone's hometown. And that way the reader knows, oh, Paris, he's the one from France.

Oh, Rio, he's the one from Brazil. And so that was the start of kind of the trick of the series. So I actually made a list of 150 cities around the world that didn't sound like ridiculous names. Like you can't say, hey, Fort Lauderdale, come over here. Oh, sure thing, sir. And then I want to basically one from each. But you can get away with Provo or Logan. Yeah, Logan you can get away with.

And so in the cast that i have now it's it is um paris who is a boy who actually is a was a uh rwandan refugee in paris you're the name of the town when you join right and um he's kind of this really self-taught genius um then there is brooklyn and brooklyn is a girl from um obviously brooklyn from new york who is really good with computers sydney is a girl from australia who's quite the athlete and and she is my voice of overly righteousness in it um rio is a boy from brazil who was a street musician magician and so I really liked that because when I was doing the research at the start, I found out that at the start of the CIA,

they hired Harry Houdini's best friend to come teach all the agents magic. This may have been OSS days still. They even have a handbook. I have it over here. Do you really? It is.

Because they got, yeah, the official CIA manual of trickery and deception. Oh, wow. And it's because magic and sleight of hand comes in really handy for, and then so Rio is my street magician. And then the last one is Kat. Kat is from Katmandu. And she is my kind of neurodiverse, looks at numbers first. So she's excellent at code breaking.

It was really having these five characters and trying to make, I figured the plots, you know, they take a leap of faith. If you're going to believe these kids are spies and they're going on these missions. So that the kids had to be real. You know, they had to have real issues and have strengths and minuses they had to mess up and they had to get emotional and they had to fight and and that becomes part of the fun as writing as well that's amazing man i mean it's it's great to have a broadcast of characters so that you can take and you know see them all understand them all and people can identify with them it's it's what we do too in the books is each book is basically one of the kids moves into the lead so now you know they each get their moments but the funny thing that

surprised me actually is i thought like you go around and you meet kids and say you got a couple hundred kids in the room you're looking for some general questions you can ask. It's like, OK, who's your favorite character? And I thought like at least half of them would pick the American character because she's American, because it's the first book. She's the main character. And it's like equal. They all have favorites. And so that's why it makes it sometimes a little hard.

It's like I have to make sure that every character has their moments, their chapters that are really about their development and where they get to shine so that the kid who loves that character the most doesn't feel like I read this whole book and there's nothing about the one who connects with me. There you go. Well, it gives a nice complex blend to everything. They've got a different range of ethnicities, personal backgrounds, and

unique skill sets. So they're kind of like a Marvel team or something like that. You could say that without the really super skills. Well, super skills. So anything more we want to tease out of the book?

Any things that you can tease about? There's big surprises in the book? Any things that you sick out we can tease about? There's big surprises in the book, but one in which if anyone has read them, I don't want to spoil that, but this is the book where suddenly now that we're four in, stuff that we've been laying the groundwork with for the first three books, like epical changes within the characters and the plots begin to happen. So that's been really fun to write. There are these three sisters who live two blocks down the street from me,

and they got the first copies. They came over. Two weeks before the book came out, I gave them a copy. And yesterday I'm sitting here, and one of the 10-year-olds comes literally stomping up to my house with this, like, face. And I'm like, what's the matter? She goes, how could you leave me with so many questions? And it was like, you know, it's like there were bigger changes than she expected. I thought, oh, okay, well, if that's how people are going to respond to this one, that's a good sign.

There you go. What's really fun in these books, though, is I do a ton of research. And I'm amazed at some of the, you know, they've gotten to the point where they're popular enough that if I call someone or write to them, they'll usually call right back and say, yeah, sure, I'm all on board. So for this one, it was during COVID. I couldn't, not that I have the money to go to Egypt and just saunter around, but I couldn't go to Egypt during COVID. So I tracked down, I watched National Geographic, and I said, who's the big archaeologist? And I wrote her, and within an hour, she's on the phone saying, yeah, let's get together and talk. And I was able to ask her, like, you know, what's it really smell like inside the pyramid? One of the things I always love to ask when I get to talk to an expert is what do you hate in movies that show your job like what is it that or movies or books that get

wrong about your job um i i once got this seems ridiculous but i got an email from a librarian who was um a fan of the books which is great and her kids students like them and she said oh by the way my husband was deputy director of the cia for about 10 years if you wanted me help with cia stuff and so he got on the phone with me and and i basically said okay here's the mission how would you really do it it's okay there's four things you got to do and he plotted like it's like this guy was the spy man twice he was acting director of the CIA, and here he is helping me plot the thing. I'm going to go on this book tour. I'm going to D.C., and I think we're going to have dinner,

and I'll get to ask him more questions, you know. So in all of them, we're looking for things. You know, I hope they're entertaining as all get out, but I also know that kids especially, they always have a screen nearby, and if you talk about a place, they'll look up and if they find out oh that's real or oh you can do that thing they get more engaged and hopefully it expands their interest beyond just what's in the book there you go there you go uh so i mean it's something that's appealing to all ages it sounds like you. People can identify with different characters.

What was interesting is the first book in this series, City Spies, came out on Tuesday, and COVID shut down the world that Friday. So I was on a tour that then got canceled and got to come home. But during COVID, my writer friends and I're part of a zoom group and a chat, but we thought, well, who knows what's going to happen now? Sales actually all went up because so many people were stuck at home.

They were reading. We were finding so many people were reading as families because they were all home. And, and, and for, for once mom and dad aren't both at work and they're talking and that's what you hope when you write it the same way as, know if you go watch a pixar movie if you're the adult taking your kids

a lot of times you feel like oh that's that's in there for me that joke is over their head and so try to put some of that in because yeah hopefully it appeals to not just 9 to 13 there you go do you ever see this making it a tv i I'm used to writing for TV. I never believe any of those things are going to work out until they actually happen, but we've dealt with that. My agent has been dealing with that with the studio

and we'll see if anything happens. That would be cool. It would be great, but I'm more than happy if I get to just keep doing the books. That is, for me, great. Anything else is gravy. There you go. So the next book you're working on, is it going to be a step five in the series?

I am finishing. I actually am turning in book five on Monday. So I am three days away from that, and I realize it's a timeless interview. So in three days, I'm turning that book in and um then actually I have a new series it's a mystery series set in South Florida that I am going to write and then I'm going to alternate back and forth between the two series that's great oh we have a lot of authors that come on the show and you know they have these different book threads that they're doing multi--book threads, and it makes it so they can hop around. The hope is that you can then

people to jump from one to the other reading-wise. Like that. This will probably be a little bit younger. This one is more of a straight mysteries show, and it's a book show. It is to a

brother and sister, and their grandfather lives with them and he's a retired investigative reporter for the miami herald and it's basically them looking his cold cases from the 70s so it's like there's a car named after roberta flack which i don't know that most 12 year olds are going to get into but that that's, you know, it's fun for me to write something completely different. And that basically is more like my childhood, at least in setting. And yeah, generational. Awesome sauce. Awesome sauce. Well, anything more we want to tease out of the book, James, before we go?

I think that is, that's a good sign of what it is. I really appreciate you being, you know, you having me on. I know you talk to big, important writers and you talk to powerful people. So a little kid's writer feels, you know, like I'm swimming in the deep end. Well, you've written 10 books. You've written a lot of books. No, but it is, it's just an honor to get to do this after years. And I love TV and I love sports television.

I did stuff like I did three years producing roller derby. I mean, I really had a wild kind of ride to get here. And it just feels like a wonderful place for me to be. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. Thank you. Give us your dot coms one more time or wherever you want people to contact you on the internet.

JamesPonte.com is for my site. Also, I'm part of a group of writers known as the Renegades of Middle Grade. That's RenegadesOfMiddleGrade.com. And you can find me on social media on Twitter at James Ponte or Instagram at JamesPonteBooks. There you go. So check it out, folks, order up wherever fine books are sold.

Stay away from those alleyway bookstores. You might get tetanus, a needed tetanus shot. Uh, order up the book city of the dead. Number four of the city spies series comes out February 7th, 2023 by James Ponte. Uh,

thanks for tuning in as always for the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Get them in on the big family that loves you, but doesn't judge you. At least not as harshly as you know, for tuning in. As always, refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Get them in on the big family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as, you know, your mom does. Now go clean your room. She wrote that into the show. Thanks for tuning in.

Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. Probably the go-to.