The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Last One: A Novel by Will Dean

Episode Date: August 4, 2023

The Last One: A Novel by Will Dean https://amzn.to/45b71Dd An unputdownable locked-room thriller about family, trust, and survival from the acclaimed author of the “utterly thrilling” (Lisa Jewell, #1 New York Times bestselling author) First Born. When Caz steps onboard the exclusive cruise liner RMS Atlantica, it’s the start of a vacation of a lifetime with her new love, Pete. On their first night they explore the ship, eat, dance, make friends, but when Caz wakes the next morning, Pete is missing. And when she walks out into the corridor, all the cabin doors are open. To her horror, she soon realizes that the ship is completely empty. No passengers, no crew, nobody but her. The Atlantica is steaming into the mid-Atlantic and Caz is the only person on board. But that’s just the beginning of the terrifying journey she finds herself trapped on in this white-knuckled mystery.

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 rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys being here.

Who would we be without you? Nothing, actually. Nothing. Today, we finally hit the mark. We are on our way to 1,500 episodes. And we'll probably hit that in, what, September, October, depending on how it goes. So, 14 years, 1,500 episodes. What more do you people want from me damn it

two to three new episodes a weekday 10 to 15 a week please keep up and share share please share because the sharing is caring i'm begging you please go to itunes give us five star reviews over there go to goodreads.com for just christmas youtube.com for just christmas linkedin.com for just christmas today we had an amazing guest on the show and not only does he write really popular amazing novels and books people are just uh enthralled with him he's got a great youtube channel if you want to learn to be a writer and get some good advice there too uh but he lives in a boggy swamp and if that doesn't tell you that we're going to talk about some interesting stuff you need to watch the show and uh this is his third returning time to the show so we're excited to have him he was here for his uh first books uh the last thing to burn and uh first born and now for his current book the last one a novel that comes out August 8, 2023.

Will Dean joins us on the show today. This book isn't even out until August 8th and already has 501 ratings. So that tells you where it's going. And it just kicks ass and he's a great writer. People love him. What can you say? Unlike me and my mom. She doesn't love me either.

Will Dean grew up in the East Midlands, living in nine different villages before the age of 18. After studying law at the LSE and worked many variety of jobs in London, he settled in rural Sweden with his wife. He built a wooden house in a boggy forest clearing, and it's from this space that he compulsively reads and writes. Welcome to the show, Will. How are you? Thank you, Chris. It's good to be with you again. It's a pleasure. I'm really well. I'm good. It's good to have you as well, and I think I may have misquoted. I may have said that you live in a swamp, not a boggy forest. Swamp is a good description. Where i'm talking to you from right now i can walk i can trek in any direction for a full day i'm still in the same forest oh we live in this

but yeah by accident we bought the swampiest part of it so it's a proper boggy clearing right in the middle so does it make for great writing that's not for me to say it makes no it's it's a good place to read yeah it's a good place to read and it's a good place to write there you go and it's a good place to write books that are about isolation and that are that are thrillers or suspense novels that kind of touch on a little bit of horror uh don't tell my wife that she'd probably want to move house but yeah it's uh i like it it's very atmospheric living here now i know your your uh one book the last thing to burn was kind of based on a bit of isolation is this new book gonna have some of those themes in a way yeah i mean i'll tell you what the book is about just in a couple of words

if i can because this is probably the first book I've ever written where I can describe it in a sentence or two. The last one is about a woman from the UK who's 50 years old. She runs a little coffee house. She's never been really on vacation, and she's got a new partner, Pete. They go on a cruise, on an ocean voyage, on the RMS Atlantica, this big ocean liner, very luxurious. The first night, they're there. They have a great time. They go out for dinner. They dance, they go on the deck, they go back to their cabin. The next morning,

she wakes up and he's not there by her side. She checks the balcony. He's not there. He's not in the bathroom. She walks out into the corridor. All the doors of the other cabins are wedged open and they're all unoccupied she runs around the whole ship and she realizes she's steaming into the mid-atlantic and she's the only person left on board holy crap yeah and uh there's no captain of the ship i guess uh obviously and anyone running no that's a terrifying thing like we're so used to being able to use our phone to get an answer or to go to someone in uniform and get some help, but there's nobody there in uniform. The ship is kind of

sailing by itself, and she has nobody to give her any answers. Wow. That sounds like most of my life, a ship without a crew. So this is interesting. Give us your.com, too. Let's squeeze that in so people can find you on the interwebs and stuff. You can find me everywhere.

You can find me on Twitter, at Willardine. I'm on Instagram, at Willardine. I'm on Facebook. And I'm on, like you said, I'm on YouTube, Willardine Forrest Author. But that is not so much about my books. That's giving tips on how to find an agent, how to get a book turned into a film, that kind of thing. So that's more me trying to give back and help a little bit because I know how daunting it is when you're starting out, especially if you've got no contacts.

So she finds herself trapped in a white-knuckled mystery on a terrifying journey. Is the boat running itself? Like basically it's just moving forward on its own and without a crew this is the kind of thing i can't really talk much about uh without giving spoilers but it all is revealed pretty quickly and then i don't know early readers have said it's very very twisty it's kind of the eight it's kind of and i didn't realize this when i was writing it but i

realize it now it's kind of inspired by Alien. Oh. The idea that you're on a ship all alone, and something is targeting you, and you cannot leave. You cannot get away from this thing. Wow. You're stuck on the ship, you know, running around. You know, this is weird, man. I'm getting goosebumps. I've wandered around the Titanic.

Or not the Titanic. Jesus Christ. What looks like the Titanic, the, the Queen Mary lots. And I've spent hours in the Queen Mary photographing it, wandering around. And, you know, there's, there's a weird feeling in on that ship of, of ghosts and beings or people that just kind of maybe walk those halls. You think about the sort of souls that walk through those halls and and uh maybe cruise on the ship i have a friend who actually came over on the queen mary with his parents when he was young um and uh so yeah it's you know ships definitely can create that whole you know that whole vibe of whoo and

it's they're so big and expansive and uh you know you can kind of yeah you get that you're like you say ghostly you get that kind of mary celeste kind of vibe yeah what the hell has happened to everybody yeah yeah how did you come across the idea for the premise of this so with all my book it is i have it luckily i have an image that pops into my head roughly once a year when I need to deliver a book. Yeah. And this one, it was, it was 2020, early 2020. So COVID was just hitting.

And I had this vision as I was falling asleep one night of a, of a vast ocean liner, kind of like the queen Mary the second. And from a drone point of view, flying, following the ship and then flying through the ship and the big internal spaces, the ballrooms in the big internal spaces, the ballrooms, the big lobbies.

I saw there was nobody there. And that was so disconcerting to see. They're so crammed full of people normally. It's weird to see them empty. And then in the distance, I saw a woman and she was running away. And I was like, what is she running away from? And how did this happen? Yeah.

Who hurt you, man? Like, why are you like this? No, I'm just kidding. I'm just teasing. No, but this is a brilliant premise. I mean, I don't think anybody's ever done anything like this. It's pretty awesome. And so she's got to go through the ventures, solve the mysteries,

figure it all out. Is she in danger during the time? Can you tell us that or not? I know some things we can't. She's definitely in danger during the time? Can you tell us that or not? I know some things we can't. She's definitely in danger. Oh. Yeah, she's in danger. But also, there's this, I think, at least writing it, I felt this tension that, you know, she cannot get answers.

And you have that travel anxiety that we all have. You know, when you leave your family behind, you kind of worry that they're okay and they're going to manage. And she has that with her mom has has alzheimer's and she has a little business and she's worried about her sister running the business when she's away and then suddenly she's locked on the ship and she doesn't know if she'll ever get off the ship and a lot of things happen that i can't talk about but it's actually the themes of the book it's a lot about like modern society and privacy and technology and how yeah how like 20 years ago we would or 30 years ago we would never have dreamt that we walk around with a phone with microphones

all over it and cameras on both sides and we give permissions to all of these apps constantly and we we accept terms and conditions that we never read like we i would never have done that 30 years ago to read everything and now i'm like yep accept and it's so weird and all of this is moving so fast so that's kind of what the book is about there you go yeah we never read any of the fine details and then we wonder we're like why are we stuck here uh so did i suppose a lot of your isolated nature of of your where your domicile is is uh you know that what we talked about earlier, being kind of alone and isolated. I imagine that contributed to the themes of the book,

given you're the only one on a, well, technically the only one on a ship, as far as we know. It does. I mean, the difference between me and Kaz Ripley, her name is Ripley, as a kind of a hat tip to Alien. The difference between me and her is that she doesn't want to be alone, and I do.

So I love it here. Like, I have to travel a lot to go to book festivals and events all around the world. I fly out of here, like, every month or two, but I would rather not. Like, I would love to have a year. A year here would be great, just in the woods. And so she wants answers she wants answers like i think there's a difference between doing something when you're in control of it and then the situation she's in where she's not only out of control but without giving too much away she's being controlled

and that's terrifying yeah yeah because you're anytime you're out of control you you're a loss of power uh you know you you're at some the whim or will of someone else's thing i remember your book um uh the uh what was the prior one i just said it earlier let me see if i can get my first born first born there's first born and that was your first one right the last thing to burn was the first oh the last thing to burn was the first yeah i remember the last one the last one to burn um the last thing to burn was the first. Yeah. I remember the last one, the last one to burn, um, the last thing to burn. Uh, wow. I mean, that was just shocking.

This stuff. Yeah. They kept you on pins and needles and the premise of it was just, oh, hey, they, uh, it w it was quite the premise. And, and from the very first, uh, on both your books from the very first reading their first paragraph and first page, you page, you're gripped by them. You're just sucked right in, and you're just like, I've got to turn to the next page and find out what the hell's going on here. And so I imagine the last one is like that.

I hope so. I mean, that's what I love to read. I love to read something where I'm completely immersed in a new world. And I'm, like you said, if there's a kind of energy about the writing, that's what I love to read. Something where I'm pulled through the narrative. I want to get to the end. I want to find out what's happened. There's something quite satisfying about suspense novels if they're well done, I think, because you're kind of solving a puzzle as you go along.

And as humans, we're pretty basic. We like to solve a puzzle. Yeah. And that gets into it, man. So what about the – can you tell us about the character maybe a little bit? What type of person is she? Why'd you choose her? Was there any influences outside that made you choose her character and build it the way you did?

So I don't really, I tend not to kind of write a CV for a character like a lot of writers do. I saw her on the ship and I knew she was around 50 years old. And then I just kind of spent six months visualizing the key scenes of the book and trying to see her and seeing what kind of person she is. But as with all my main characters, I don't really know what they look like because I see the world through their eyes. So I knew she had this complicated family. I knew that her mom was kind of barely recognized her anymore. And that's something a lot of us live with. And it's kind of tough to go through.

And her sister is a recovering addict. So that's also tough because she's not really sure if she's going to be okay there with all this stress and strain once she realizes that Kaz is on this ship alone. And then also they have this layer of shame around the family because her dad, her late father, was a gambling addict. And he stole some money. And he stole it from a veteran's charity. And the shame of that just hangs over the family. And shame is a difficult thing to deal with, I think. Uh-huh.

Yeah. Well, this should be interesting interesting how the subject goes into it uh anything else you can you want to tease out about the book i mean i can i can tell you that when i when i had the idea in the middle of the night i wrote a note on my phone i tried not to wake up my wife i wrote a note on my phone and it basically said the shining at sea ah there you go that is effectively what it is. If you imagine the Overlook Hotel, but it's floating and there's nothing around it. You know, at least you can try and escape the Overlook Hotel.

I think they tried to in the snowstorm. But yeah, what a terrifying movie. I just saw some stuff on Stanley Kubrick and how they built those scenes and set the tone. But it sounds like it'd make a great movie too. Yeah. It's funny you should say that the last 10 days and probably the next week i'm in constant calls and in meeting first people in person meetings with with movie people and tv people about adapting this one which is really exciting and and weird to be talking to so many different people it's nice there you go well

hopefully so i think it would make an awesome movie i i don't know if i go see it because i shiny scared the hell out of me so uh but uh you know there you go i mean it would be it would be fun to watch too bad you can't get jack nielsen to play any characters in it um he's kind of got oh you know weirdly it's weird you should say. You're the first person who's mentioned that he would be amazing in one of the roles. Oh, wouldn't he? Yeah. He would be the best, actually. Yeah.

He does crazy like few people do. Crazy, mad, whatever you want to put it. But yeah, sadly, he's gotten old. I had to give up acting in movies too because it was just getting too old for the camera um uh so how's everything going on the uh boggy land there you got moose how close are you to any sort of uh life uh you know

7-elevens mcdonald's that sort of thing? It's not that far. Sweden is really big compared to the UK, but it's not big compared to the US and Canada and Alaska. It's like 40 minutes to the local store. It's a small store. That's it. There's nothing around. We eat out restaurant-wise once a year.

Oh, wow. That's all. It's terrible. It's really expensive it's like it's better for us to fly to spain really to eat out and it's probably cheaper than in sweden sweet i love sweden the bits and i'm a swedish citizen now but the restaurants are really expensive there's no eating out culture here really especially in the rural areas yeah the most you do is grab a hot dog at the gas station and even that's expensive so yeah yeah that'll kill you those those things that thing's been sitting in there for like uh here in america we leave them in there for like a day or two before they take

them out so uh but sometimes they're better that way you know it depends on how hung over you are maybe but we we we tend to cook a lot over campfires i've got a nine-year-old so do you really he's spending most of the summer sleeping in a tent on his own in the forest, just around the corner. He's already turning into a teenager and is rejecting you basically at nine? He is turning into a teenager, but no, it's more that I don't know. He likes sleeping under the stars. There you go. It's quite cool. It's beautiful to sleep under the stars. I remember being a Boy Scout and going out and we'd go up to the Uintas and

there's no, there's no lights of cities. So you can actually see the stars, you know, and all their glory in the galaxy way and the big dipper. And, uh, yeah,

I miss that sort of feeling, but that, that, I guess that really contributes to your writing and stuff. You couldn't write probably in the middle of New York with all the horns horns beeping and the sirens i think i could i said weirdly i think i could because i write in a small room with the blind pulled i have my desk facing a wall and i wear earplugs so i think i could write anywhere now but i think i would i like to live here but i think i could write a book anywhere yeah there you go. So maybe you should set up a commune out there in the woods.

Yeah, except I'm a hermit and I want to get away from people. So absolutely not. I've had a lot of writer friends saying, can we come over and just like stay in one of your huts? And I'm like, no, I want to be on my own. Like, no, sorry, sorry. The nice thing about going over to other people's place is you can choose when you want to be on my own. Like, no, sorry, sorry. The nice thing about going over to other people's place is you can choose when you want to leave.

If they come over to your place, then you're like, you have to start getting hints. Like, hey, do you have someplace you got to go, man? Like, you've been here for an hour. That's true. The good thing about this place is nobody can find it. It's not on any of the maps. It's not on GPS.

Really? Yeah. So the Google car is a good idea. Wow. not on any of the maps. It's not on GPS. Really? Yeah. Wow. Well, that'll be good. Hopefully, while you're in Sweden, didn't Sweden just join NATO? Yes, we're kind of doing it now.

Yeah. Well, hopefully if the Russians come through there, they won't find you or something. I think they would probably pass us by and we probably wouldn't even find out about it. That's good. Just, yeah, just to rock them as they go by.

So we'll, it's been fun to have you anything else we want to tease out or talk about before we go. No, man, that's it. That's I'm just very excited for people to read the last one starting next week.

Like you said, a lot of early readers enjoyed it, which is amazing. I'm shocked. I guess the, I guess the arc readers readers they've already posted the advanced copy the arc advanced reader copy yeah they've already put a 501 rating you're like hitting the ground going man you know what else it is it's these amazing people like book

talkers on tiktok and that oh really they they've got behind it and i'm very grateful to them yeah it's nice we're trying to figure out figure out TikTok and put stuff over there. We put a few of our things on. I guess we'll go look at what those book talkers are doing because whatever we're not doing right, you know, and we're kind of an intelligent, smart format, and there's kind of a dual screen. I don't know.

It doesn't play well, I suppose. I don't know. I'm old, man. I'm an old bearded dude who looks like Ernest Hemingway. Uh, you know, if people on Tik TOK, look at me and they're like boomer,

whatever. Uh, so anyway, it's been wonderful to see you again. Well, uh, I mean, Oh,

let's tease this out. Anything you're working on dude. That's a, going to be coming out soon. I'm working on, uh, something I can't talk about actually at all. Sure.

I can't mention the title. I can't mention what it's about, but it's scaring the hell out of me. I'm writing it. I wrote the first draft in June, in five weeks, June, July, and the last 10 days of writing the first draft, I could not sleep. And I'm a good sleeper. And I was so uncomfortable about this book and tense that I stopped being able to sleep. Wow.

You scare yourself awake. There you go. Yeah. There you go. Will, give me your dot coms wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs, please. You can find me on Twitter at Willardine,

Instagram at Willardine. And like we talked about, the YouTube channel, if you're interested in writing, if you're interested in forest life, if you're interested in getting an agent or making a living out of writing, then maybe it'll be useful.

There you go. And it's good for writing and stuff and some of the different aspects that are on there and very popular as well. Thanks for coming on the show, Will. We really appreciate it. Good to see you again, friend. Good to see you again. Thank you. There you go. I might come try and visit you someday if you let me.

I don't know. But I promise I'll only stay for like 15 minutes. Just perfect. I just want to see your blog. All right. There you go. So, folks, order up the book wherever fine books are sold. You can go to Amazon or wherever.

The Last One, a novel, is out August 8th, 2023 by Will Dean. It's probably going to be a bestseller the way it's looking with these ratings, man. So pre-order the book now while you can or find it wherever fine books are sold. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. Now, that should have us out, Will.