The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Picture in the Sand by Peter Blauner

Episode Date: March 27, 2024

Picture in the Sand by Peter Blauner https://amzn.to/3JeZeLP "On rare occasions I read a book that reminds me of why I fell in love with storytelling in the first place. This is such a book." ―Stephen King Peter Blauner's epic Picture in the Sand is a sweeping intergenerational saga told through a grandfather's passionate letters to his grandson, passing on the story of his political rebellion in 1950s Egypt in order to save his grandson's life in a post-9/11 world. When Alex Hassan gets accepted to an Ivy League university, his middle-class Egyptian-American family is filled with pride and excitement. But that joy turns to shock when they discover that he’s run off to the Middle East to join a holy war instead. When he refuses to communicate with everyone else, his loving grandfather Ali emails him one last plea. If Alex will stay in touch, his grandfather will share with Alex – and only Alex – a manuscript containing the secret story of his own life that he’s kept hidden from his family, until now. It's the tale of his romantic and heartbreaking past rooted in Hollywood and the post-revolutionary Egypt of the 1950s, when young Ali was a movie fanatic who attained a dream job working for the legendary director Cecil B. DeMille on the set of his epic film, The Ten Commandments. But Ali’s vision of a golden future as an American movie mogul gets upended when he is unwittingly caught up in a web of politics, espionage, and real-life events that change the course of history. It's a narrative he’s told no one for more than a half-century. But now he’s forced to unearth the past to save a young man who’s about to make the same tragic mistakes he made so long ago.About the author Peter Blauner is the author of eight novels, including SLOW MOTION RIOT, winner of an Edgar Allan Poe award for best first novel from Mystery Writers of America, and THE INTRUDER, a New York Times bestseller. He began his career as a journalist for New York magazine in the 1980s - covering crime, politics, and other kinds of bad behavior - and segued into writing fiction in the 1990s. His short fiction has been anthologized in BEST AMERICAN MYSTERY STORIES and on NPR's SELECTED SHORTS FROM SYMPHONY SPACE. In recent years, he has also written for several television shows, including Law & Order: SVU and the CBS series, Blue Bloods. His newest novel is SUNRISE HIGHWAY, published in September 2018, by Minotaur/St. Martin’s Press. He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. with his wife, author Peg Tyre.

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We have an amazing gentleman on the show. He's a multi-book author. And we're going to be talking about two of his novels today. The first one we'll be talking about is Picture in the Sand. Came out March 19th, 2024. It's got a ton of reviews and ratings and love on the Amazon and the Goodreads there. Peter Blauner joins us on the show today. We'll be also talking about his reissue of his new book

with a new hardcover called The Intruder. It's out March 26th, tomorrow, 2024. We'll be talking to him about both books. He is the author of eight novels, including Slow Motion Riot, winner of an Edgar Allan Poe Award for the best first novel from Mystery W writers of America and the intruder a New York Times bestseller he began his career as a journalist for the New York Magazine in the 80s covering crime politics and other kinds of bad behavior and segued into writing

fiction in the 1990s his short fiction has been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories and on NPR selected shorts from Symphony Space. In recent years, he's also written for several TV shows, including Law & Order, SVU, do we have to do the sound? Is it required? Ching-ching. Can you say that? Ching-ching. And the CBS series, Blue Bloods. His newest novel is Sunrise Highway.

It looks like this is a little outdated from September 18th. You need to upgrade your Amazon thing. And we'll be talking about pictures in the sand. So welcome to the show, Peter. How are you? I'm good, Chris. And thanks for having me on. Really appreciate it. Thanks for coming. We appreciate having you as well. Stephen King gives a great plug to your books as well. We should mention that. So give us any dot coms where you want people to find you on the interwebs peter blowner one word p-e-t-e-r-b-l-a-u-n-e-r dot com and i love hearing from readers that's what makes the job worthwhile to me oh yeah doesn't it people can read your book and you're like that's awesome people they like it awesome yeah people read are awesome no matter what i like people who can. Because I don't like hearing banjos on the river. I don't know what that means.

Deliverance. So give us a 30,000 overview of the book Picture in the Sand. This is a journey that took me 20 years. I started writing this book on March 27, 2002. And it was published January 3, 2023. Because it's a story that I believed in with all my heart and soul. It was rejected by every major publisher around, and I kept going. I went to Egypt six times researching this book.

I went to Hollywood twice as many times researching it. I interviewed 200 people because I just thought there was something on the other side of that brick wall that I had to get to. Wow. That's an extraordinary thing. What caused you to want to write this book? What was the motivating factor? On March 27th, 2002, it was the first Easter Passover weekend after 9-11. And Cecil B. DeMille's film, The Ten Commandments, was on, as it's always on television at that time of year. And everybody in New York where I live was still thinking about, why the hell did this terrible thing happen? We were angry, we were confused, we were sad. And because everybody had a hard time sitting down for the holiday meal, I saw the movie for the

first time from the beginning because I was killing time before the meal. And usually I only see the parting of the Red Sea at the end with Charlton Heston. Everybody's seen that. This time I saw the credits from the beginning. It said Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, and as the Pharaoh's army, the Egyptian cavalry corps. And I was like, wow, they actually shot this movie in Egypt. And I know just enough history to know it must have been 1954. So it was right after the war with Israel. It's right before the Suez crisis. I also knew that the Muslim Brotherhood was really starting to form its anti-Western ideology, which eventually gave birth to Al-Qaeda back then in 1954.

I knew that was big time. I knew the military was fighting against the religious fundamentalists in Egypt then. And into the middle of this comes the most extravagant production in Hollywood history. And I thought, if I can't get a good book out of this, I'm in the wrong business. There you go so what give us some more depth inside the book and and some of the things you can tease out I know with novels we can't talk about the middle of the end but tease out a little bit more part of the challenge was who's going to tell this story because this is a story about faith hope terror and, and movies. And it took me a long time to figure out who the main character could be.

This is not going to be Charlton Heston because he wrote his own book. And I'm a novelist. I like to make things up anyway and weave in real history. Because I think readers want to know something about the world we live in. But they also want to be swept away in an emotional story. I want this to bring you back to the old kind of books that Leon Uris and people like James Michener used to write, but I'm not going to bore everybody with the notebook. So I eventually figured out this should be the story of a young Egyptian guy who gets a job working as Sesebiy Demil's assistant. And he thinks he's going to change his name from Ali Hassan to Al Harrison.

He's going to move to Pasadena. He's going to get a Plymouth. He's going to get the American dream. And it doesn't work out that way at all. Instead, he gets pulled into this terrorist plot that actually happened in 1954 by the Muslim Brotherhood when they decided to attack anybody who was in favor of the west and he ends up going to prison and he finds an unlikely tale of redemption there and i don't want to give the right story away yeah yeah part part of the issue is who is

he telling the story to and it took me a while to figure out that he should be telling the story as an old man. And he's telling the story to his grandson. He's never heard the truth about his life. And the grandson really needs to hear the story because he's about to run overseas instead of going to college and join ISIS. And he's about to make some of the same mistakes that his grandfather almost made. And so the novel is shared almost as an old-fashioned epistolary novel, except instead of letters, it's email these days. So there's commentary as the old man is telling the story of the secret life he had in 1954 as a Hollywood wannabe became radical. He's telling it to the grandson who interrupts every few chapters and says, hey, who is this Charlton Heston you're talking about? Who is this Yul Brynner you're talking about?

So it's a conversation not only between grandfather and grandson, but also between past and present. There you go. Is there a point in there where it goes, ding, you have mail? Yeah, the audio version. The audio version, yeah. Yeah, like that's just the start of every chapter or something. Yeah. But that sounds wild.

And it took you basically 20 years to write this and then get someone to buy it. And in the meantime, you were writing other novels. Yeah, I was writing other novels. I got jobs writing for these television shows that you mentioned so I could keep room and board and put food on the family's table and do all the things that you want to do to be a happy person. In the meantime, and eventually I did find a real publisher. Most of the novels that I've written have been crime novels, contemporary crime novels. So this was different than anything I've ever tried to do before. This was really swinging for the fences.

And that's part of the reason why I wouldn't give it up, no matter what anybody said to me in the intervening years. So I'm glad as hell it worked out. There you go. Now, tell us a little bit about how you grew up. People like to know the author. What influenced you as you were growing up? What made you want to become a writer? When did you kind of know you developed into a writer?

I grew up in New York City in the 60s and the 70s. And it's hard for people to imagine it now because they have an image of New York being a very glossy place in a lot of ways. I think people are aware that there's great poverty as well in some of the underserved neighborhoods. That was much more mixed together when I was growing up. But every day was really an adventure because of that. And I can remember the moment that I decided I wanted to be a writer. That was when I was 13 years old.

I'd saved up some money from a little job I had working in a shoe store. And I went to buy my mother a tiny, tiny bottle of perfume for Mother's Day at a store called Gimble's. And as I was standing at the counter, I looked behind me and there was a little girl in the store. And she was with her nanny. And the little girl, maybe about four years old started to pull down her underwear in the middle of the store and the nanny looked at her and said stop that you're as bad as your mother and i thought i i see the whole story that's behind that yeah like you yeah i got the character i got the. I got to tell somebody about this.

That's the moment that I decided I had to be a writer. We need to meet this mom. I do that in stores too. Okay, great. I'll get another book out of it. Great, I'll come with you sometime. Judge says I can't do it anymore. Next week I get one of the ankle bracelets off.

I'm down to four. They don't understand. They just don't. Yeah. Sometimes you got to be free, I get one of the ankle bracelets off. I'm down to four. They don't understand. They just don't. Yeah. Sometimes you got to be free, man. It's all about air conditioning. Yeah. There's another book for you.

There you go. Yeah, that's a character. But I also, you were asking about influences. There were two great newspaper columnists when I was growing up in New York City. One was named Jimmy Breslin, and the other was named Pete Hamill. And I ended up being Pete Hamill's assistant. That was my first job. He was a fantastic writer and he was an even better guy. And

he taught me everything that has carried me through my 45 years since as a writer within the first time we had lunch. But before the sandwich came, he told me the three most important things that I needed to know. And what were they? If you have an experience and you think there's any chance you'll ever write about it, you should write down every single aspect of that experience within 24 hours, or you will forget the detail that you'll need in five years when you're writing this story it's a brilliant brilliant observation yeah you may not think the picture frame matters but you'll later find out oh that was the grandmother's picture frame that she had right before she got

taken away to the prison camp or whatever it is and and it really turns out that way. The second thing was always read writers who are better than you. Because if you're reading people who are worse than you, they'll make you think that you can get away with crap and you can't. And the third thing was write three pages every single day. And if you stop after three pages, you got a great place to pick it up. You got this from Hemingway. But if it's going badly, and this is just as important, you can recover from three pages the next day. I mean, you know, you're not going to stink up the house that badly just with three pages. Yeah. I like that last one.

That's how I wrote my book was doing an hour a day with an accountability group. Yeah. And that made all the difference. And then, you know, at first it seemed like it was a struggle to get to that hour. And then, you know, I caught fire with all my stupid stories. But, you know, the other thing,

writing everything down, like you say, the number one point, I wish I'd done that with all my companies. I probably had enough employee crazy stories that employees pulled with us over the years of our corporations. I could have write four books. And the thing that you think I will,

the thing that you think I will never forget this, I will never forget this crazy experience. You will forget it because the longer you live, the more experiences you have and the more they kind of blend together. Whereas the really exciting thing, the really revealing thing, if you write it down right away, you'll look at it later and go, okay, now I remember everything that happened, and I'll remember how I felt when that thing happened.

Yeah. In fact, I should probably turn them into novels, because then you can have a lot more fun with the stories like you do, rather than just business books where you're just like, yeah, here's a stupid thing Bob did at the cop here, and don't do that, which is, you know, all of Tom Peters. So let's get into the other book that's released March 26th, The Intruder or re-release. Tell us about when this was originally put out and then why you're putting it out now again. Again, that began with one of those real life experiences that I had to write down right away. It was February 1993 and I was obviously a lot younger than I am now.

We all were. Yeah. And I had a one-year-old son, and my wife, Peg Tyre, who's a very, very good writer and a better person than me, said, take this screaming infant out of the house. I need to get some sleep. And it was seven o'clock in the morning. And I put the kid in the stroller and I was pushing them up Broadway. It was February. It was cold. It was a different and more volatile time in the city. And there were a group of homeless guys hanging out in a doorway. And one of them came up to me as I was pushing the stroller, and he cocked back his fist, and he got this close, and he said, call the police on me now,

like he was about to punch me in the face, and my hands are down on the stroller handles, and the kid's defenseless in the stroller. And I felt an anger that I had never experienced before in my life. I mean, I was really ready to go at this guy. Was it the father defends? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

That was a brand new thing. You know, like anybody else, I'd had conflicts with people before. But when you're really protecting somebody else who's small and defenseless like that, that's all papa bear thing happens. And the guy dropped his fist and he laughed, you know, like it was a goof to him or whatever. But I thought that anger, I mean, it was like lava. It was so hot.

I thought that emotion is strong enough to start a book. But then by the time I got to the street corner, I was like, that's enough to start, but that's not enough for a whole book. So you went back and fought the guy? I went back. I don't know. That's something to it. There's something to that. I went back because I'd been a journalist, and I started to think,

what if I was that guy? Because all books, all good stories, I think, bring together two opposing ideas. Stephen King says a book needs two opposing ideas to come together. And if the book is partly from

the point of view of a guy who's a family man and thinks he's got a home to protect and married and all that, and he's facing off against a guy who's got nothing to lose at all. And if you can see the point of view of the guy who's got nothing to lose, then you've got some real friction going in the story. And then it developed into a story about a family, middle class, that's getting stalked by a mentally disturbed guy who thinks he's stolen. They have stolen the life that he was meant to have. Oh, wow.

But sort of, again, the thing that's different about this book is that his point of view is as important as theirs. That there is something valid about the way he's a real human being. And ultimately, I hope, someone you feel something for and that you understand his journey and why he ended up where he ended up and and the question gets raised in the book who is really the intruder is it is it the family man is it the homeless guy or is it a third character who i'm not talking about at all a spoiler alert in the book and again i i went through this whole journey of i I can't just make up a story and just present it on the page as if it's like a television show that you can knock off in a week. I'm expecting people to really live in a world that I'm creating, and I got to make that world real to them. I got to make it really something that you can get immersed in.

So I left my job at the time, and I took a job as a volunteer at a homeless shelter. I got to know a bunch of homeless people, some of whom are still friends of mine. I visited the train tunnels underneath Riverside Park in Manhattan, where there was a group of people called themselves the mold people lived down there they lived in the train tunnels they had their whole alternative society going on down there with little huts that they constructed next to the train tracks and their their paintings that they put on the walls there and i visited there at night and it was the darkest place i've ever been in my life it was like being in a coffin that was like three miles long. And just occasionally, you would see a little flicker of light in the distance, and you knew it was somebody lighting

up a crack pipe in the distance. And then when I went back there the next day, just to see it in daylight, a cast iron skillet flew past my head, because one of those people who lived down there was like, you're in my home. Get the hell out of here, buddy. And so that became an adventure. So I wrote that story. The book came out, you know, for reasons known only to the marketers and God, it did pretty well. And as you mentioned in the introduction, and that was great. And that kept me going in my career for quite a few years. More recently, a friend of mine, Jeremy Wagner, has started a publishing company called Dead Sky Publishing. Jeremy's a musician.

He's an author himself. And he said, what do you think about putting out The Intruder again? And a couple of years ago, I would have said, listen, it's a period piece. It's a time in our cities that's gone by but looking around now it felt like a story that could happen again yeah like on friday or something like that yeah i didn't have as many cell phones as there are now and and we're not and the characters aren't as locked into their computer screens but i think that's a good thing because then they actually have to do this thing called talking to each other in person and you know of relating to each other or fighting and so the story began to feel alive

again there you go and so with the reissue has it been updated in any way there's a there's a new introduction with book and sometimes there is a temptation especially these days with you know different groups and their sensitivities but i kind of feel like i called it the way i saw it at the time and a lot of the writing again coming out of this thing of just like get it down as it's happening capture the moment i'm just telling it like it is, man. So yeah, it is the book that people were reading back in the mid-90s again. And the feedback that people give me this week

is that, okay, this feels like it could have happened right at the moment. There you go. And people love your books. What's the future for you right now? Is there anything you're working on that you can tease out? Yeah, I am writing another historical novel,

but obviously has this suspense elements as well, and some emotional elements as well. One that delves more closely into my own family history. But I don't always just write about myself. I like to write about people who are different from me and as different from me as possible, because honestly, I learn more about myself by doing that. Because if it's just me, I know what I already think. I take my assumptions for granted. And in some cases, you might even be defensive about what you're becoming a homeless person, if you're becoming a potential terrorist, if you're becoming even a lawyer or a police officer. The first book I wrote was about a probation officer. I spent six months as a volunteer probation officer.

If something's forcing you outside your comfort zone, forcing you to have a new set of human experiences, You can't help but expand your own mind by doing that and challenge yourself and ask yourself, what would I do if circumstances were different? And that's the life of kings for me. That's the great part of the job. You know, you talked about the number one thing out of the three of seeing things and noticing things. Yeah. You know, your time as a journalist for New York Magazine in the 80s covering crime, politics, and other bad behavior,

obviously you use a lot of that material for your books and your writing and stuff. One thing that struck me is I've always been, and I'm not sure if most writers, I'm running a theory by you is what I'm getting around to, but I think a lot of writers are people that are aware of things and they see things. Like I used to be one of my, I used to hang out with my business partner and friend and we would drive down the road.

I'm like, hey, did you see that? Hey, did you see that? Did you see that girl? Did you see that? Did you see that thing there? And he'd be like, well, I didn't see anything. I remember I joke about how one of my girlfriends used to be fly for Delta and she would go around the world all day long, come home. And I'd be like, Hey, what happened today? And I'd have like five stories from whatever happened to my companies to bring to the dinner table. And I'd be like, so what

happened to you? And she'd be like, nothing. And I'd be like, you interacted with hundreds of people, you flew to three airports in three major cities, and you flew home and nothing happened? And I think my theory is that writers and journalists and people like ourselves, we see the world. And we notice those instances, like the thing about the underwear and the bomb. Yeah. And we notice those, and I think we're curious about them. I don't know. Yeah, and it's part of how we connect with other human beings in a way, because otherwise we're just trapped inside our own heads.

We're thinking about bad things that happened in high school and what we're going to have for dinner. There's a whole horizon that's out there that's as vast and interesting as the natural landscape and it's called other people and that's a place that i like to go to you know that's a privilege yeah that connects with what i always say they were the storytellers yeah you know i talk a lot about the show the owners stories are the owner's manuals to life and that's what really what the Chris Voss show is we feature people there to tell stories on the show and whether it's fiction or nonfiction we learn things

about the stories they're they're entertainment yeah but they're also the owners manual how we learn from each other and how we realize sometimes we're not alone with the problems we have and and sometimes they something sometimes they are you know entertainment or getting us out of whatever we're in, but we learn things from them. Yeah, sure. We learn behavior, reflections and mirrors upon ourselves. So, yeah, stories.

Yeah, I love to hear people's stories. I always try and ask people questions, and I don't do it as often as I should, but even when I'm just in an Uber or something like that, somebody's sharing with me the story of their life. And it's a gift. I was in a car in Ohio the other day and I asked the driver, hi, how long have you been driving? He said, only a month. I said, what were you doing before? He said, before I had a business selling cell phones at a gas station, but it got kind of bad because I saw somebody get shot in front of me. I said, wow, that sounds terrible. What happened?

He said, this guy was acting up and he was like, it sounds like a theme in my writing. He was showing his stuff to people in the gas station, including a little girl, a 14 year old girl was there. And then somebody got angry at him and shot him i said wow that's terrible that sounds heavy he goes yeah you know the crazy thing is he came back and he did it again a month later i was like what what are you talking about i said he i said first of all he got shot and he survived he said yeah he got shot four times i said and then he came back this to the same place a month later. He said, yeah. And he did the same

thing again a month later. He said, yeah, the exact same thing. Except the guy who shot him wasn't there. It was four other guys. And they beat him up. And they beat him up. And here's the kicker of the story. He says, and then they stole his car. I was like, wait a second. A guy who

showed up at the same place twice dropping trout owns a car yeah and drove to the same place like human beings are endlessly interesting and unpredictable i think that's my story on fridays that was you sorry sorry sorry chris i didn't mean to offend you know you can always back. If it's not five shots to the torso, four is not enough. Yeah. It's the lessons in life. But, yeah, I think I'm coming to the conclusion that writers are great story collectors and storytellers, of course. But, yeah, we see the stories in the world.

And journalists, I think, do, too. They see the stories in the world, and they're the teller of the stories so there you go peter anything further plug out feel free to tell us whatever to do to order up the book and find you on the interwebs okay i guess you're gonna show the book here or sure so i'm picturing sand out in paperback not only would i encourage you to read it obviously i would encourage you to let me know what you think of the book, if it reached you, if it meant anything to you. Same thing with The Intruder. You know, the money comes and goes. Sales come and go.

Success comes and goes. But the great thing about writing, and it's different from television, which write for and different from movies but with writing I get to communicate from the low box that's up here to the little box in your head and and I'll keep doing it as long as they let me keep doing it there you go thank you very much Peter for coming on this has been a fun romp thank you Chris really appreciate it you know please come back for your next book as well absolutely there you go folks ordered up where refined books are sold. Picture in the Sand came out March 19th, 2024, and also the reissue of The Intruder

that's coming out on the March 26th, 2024. Thanks so much for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, FortressChristophouse, LinkedIn.com, FortressChristophouse, Christophouse1, TikTokity, and CrispFossFacebook.com. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out.