Swimming to Catalina (38 page)
CEW: How much of Stuart Woods is there in Stone Barrington?
SW: Stone and I share a few tastes, but we are very different people.
CEW: How did you first become involved with sailing?
SW: I moved from London, where I was working in advertising, to Ireland, in 1973, to begin to write my first novel. I worked for two days a week at an ad agency in Dublin to support myself, and spent the rest of the time in a little flat in the stable yard of a castle in County Galway. While there, I took up dinghy sailing against small children, losing regularly. You can’t win dinghy races when you weigh more than the boat.
CEW: What was it like sailing alone for six weeks during the OSTAR?
SW: The company was good.
CEW: What was the most difficult challenge you have faced in your sailing career?
SW: That came when the forestay broke, about four hundred and fifty miles north of Bermuda…I was holding onto it at the time, and it could have killed me, but I was lucky. I managed to repair it and finished the race.
CEW: Your love for the water and yachting is reflected in your work. Do you still spend much time on the water?
SW: I sail on other people’s boats, when asked, and my small motorboat is for sale, in Florida.
CEW: After
Blue Water, Green Skipper
, you finished your first novel,
Chiefs
. What was the most difficult aspect of writing this novel?
SW: The most difficult aspect of writing
Chiefs
was to finish it. It took me eight years. After that, I gained confidence, and now I write two books a year.
CEW: Please tell us about your writing habits: do you write everyday, do you use the computer, do you always write in the same location or do you take a laptop everywhere you go etc.?
SW: I usually write a chapter—five to ten pages—at a sitting, which usually comes at mid-afternoon and takes under two hours. First, I re-read the previous day’s wo?k and make small corrections, and that gets me into the new chapter. Near the end of a book, I tend to write two chapters a day, one in the morning, and one in the afternoon. I write wherever I am, and I take a laptop when I travel while writing a book.
CEW: You are known for being a master of creating suspense in a novel. What techniques do you use when plotting to achieve that timing of the suspense and action which keeps the reader eager to turn the page to see what happens next?
SW: The process of writing is still a kind of magic to me, and I never try to analyze it too deeply, for fear that it might stop working. I do try to make each chapter a
small story in itself, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and I try to end each one in such a way as to lead naturally into the next one. It seems to work.
CEW: What did you enjoy most about having
Chiefs
turned into a mini-series?
SW: I enjoyed the whole process. The producers were kind enough to let me read each generation of the screenplay, as it was being written, and to ask for my suggestions, some of which they actually took. I also enjoyed visiting the set in South Carolina and playing a small part (an FBI agent) in part three. They “dressed” the town three times, for the different periods of the story, altering something like twenty-three store-fronts and planting a large oak tree in the center of town. I was amazed at the thoroughness of the job. I made some friends, too; I still see Martin Manulis, the executive producer, when I am in L.A., and also Charlton Heston, and Steven Collins, and I hear from the producer, Bill Deneen, once in a great while. The director, Jerry London, pops up now and then; he and his wife usually stop and stay the night when they’re traveling from a shoot in Toronto to New York, and we play golf.
CEW: How much do you use the Internet? Do you find it valuable for research?
SW: I use the Internet mostly to answer email from readers, but I also keep track of my investments, buy cars, rent vacation houses and read about things that interest me, but I haven’t used it much for research, because I don’t do a lot of research these days.
CEW: Rumor has it that you are writing a memoir—is this true?
SW: I have written some chapters of another memoir, but I have no idea when it will be finished or when it will be published. I guess it’s not a priority right now.
This interview was originally published July 1998 in
The Internet Writing Journal
(R),
http://www.writerswrite.com.
Stone Barrington: The First Five
New York Dead;
Dirt;
Dead in the Water;
Swimming to Catalina;
Worst Fears Realized
New York Dead
Everyone is always telling Stone Barrington that he’s too smart to be a cop, but it’s pure luck that places him on the streets in the dead of night, just in time to witness the horrifying incident that turns his life inside out.
Suddenly he is on the front page of every New York newspaper, and his life is hopelessly entwined in the increasingly shocking life (and perhaps death) of Sasha Nijinsky, the country’s hottest and most beautiful television anchorwoman.
No matter where he turns, the case is waiting for him, haunting his nights and turning his days into a living hell. Stone finds himself caught in a perilous web of unspeakable crimes, dangerous friends, and sexual depravity that has throughout it one common thread: Sasha.
“Hollywood-slick and fast-moving”
—
Los Angeles Daily News
“Suspenseful and surprising”
—
Atlanta Constitution
Dirt
Feared and disliked both for her poison pen and for her ice-queen persona, gossip columnist Amanda Dart finds the tables have turned. When an anonymous gossipmonger begins faxing the scathing details of Amanda’s sexual indiscretions to national opinion makers, she turns to Stone Barrington—ex-cop, fulltime lawyer, and sometime investigator—for help.
“This slickly entertaining suspenser displays Woods at the top of his game with no signs of flagging…. The narrative rockets toward an abrupt but absolutely stunning denouement. Using all his skills here, and subtly reminiscent of the waggish P.G. Wodehouse, Woods delivers a marvelously sophisticated, thoroughly modern, old-fashioned read.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“The devious plot…deftly skewering society types, would be enough to hook most of us, but veteran thriller writer Woods…shrewdly stacks the deck further by bringing back Barrington, the immensely likable star of…
New York Dead
. The result makes for a lost weekend’s worth of dirty fun—the kind you would want your friends to find out about.”
—
People
Dead in the Water
A beautiful young woman sails a large yacht into the harbor of the lovely Caribbean island nation of St. Marks.
Alone.
But she had departed from the other side of the Atlantic in the company of her husband, a well-known writer. His absence places Allison Manning under the intense scrutiny of St. Marks’s considerable Minister of Justice, Sir Winston Sutherland—and, therefore, under the protection of the otherwise vacationing Stone Barrington.
Sir Winston’s motives are unclear but his methods bear little resemblance to the judicial system ex-cop attorney Stone is accustomed to navigating—and Stone finds himself inextricably caught in a swirling storm of island madness and murder, made worse by a hurricane of sensational press coverage.
“One of his best…Woods is a pro and this goes by like a summer breeze, with just enough heat to make you sweat.”
—
Detroit News
“Fast paced…Thoroughly entertaining.”
—
Publishers Weekly
Swimming to Catalina
Stone Barrington had thought he’d heard the last of Arrington Carter after she’d left him to get engaged to Vance Calder, Hollywood’s hottest star. The last thing Stone expected was a desperate call from Calder.
Arrington has vanished, and her new fiancé wants Stone to come to L.A. and find her.
The assignment turns out to be the most dangerous and treacherous of Stone’s career. Powerful people are gunning for him. Where is Arrington? Why did she disappear? And does Vance Calder
really
want her back?
People
magazine’s “Page Turner of the Week”
“A heck of a plot, intrigue, and cover-up between the first page and the last.”
—
San Antonio Express News
Worst Fears Realized
It is the scenario that every ex-policeman dreads—all around him people are dying, and Stone Barrington suspects the killer may be someone he’d put in prison years before. Stone hooks up with his ex-partner from the NYPD, Dino Bacchetti, now the head of detectives in the 19th Precinct, and the two men must pool their resources to protect those close to them.
Stone’s former love, Arrington, now married to movie star Vance Calder, is back, too, and nose-to-nose with the new woman in Stone’s life—who has a Mafia bloodline and who may be as dangerous as she is beautiful.
From a premier table at Elaine’s to dark back alleys where lurk Armani-clad mobsters with the latest lethal accessories, Stone launches a life-and-death hunt that will test him as no case has ever done before.
“Satisfying to the last dirty deed…This seductive novel will have readers twitching with suspense.”
—
Library Journal
“Excellent…A fun read for fans of undercover agents who get plenty of action under the covers.”
—
USA Today
More Stone Barrington and Stuart Woods coming from PerfectBound…
The five Stone Barrington novels described above (there are, to date, nine, also including
L.A. Dead
;
Cold Paradise
;
The Short Forever
) are available from HarperCollins e-books as of April 2003. Please visit www.perfectbound.com for details of and to purchase these five titles and other Stuart Woods e-books titles. And get all the latest news on Stuart Woods at www.stuartwoods.com.
And new in hardcover from Stuart Woods…
Dirty Work
Back in New York City after the London adventures of
The Short Forever
, cop-turned-lawyer Stone Barrington is approached by a colleague at the firm of Woodman & Weld seeking help with a celebrity divorce case.
Heiress Elena Marks needs proof of her lay about husband’s infidelity before she can begin divorce proceedings. When the undercover work Stone sets up turns dirty—and catastrophic—leaving the errant husband dead and the mystery woman gone without a trace, Stone must clear his own good name and find a killer hiding among the glitterati of New York’s high society.
Carpenter—the beautiful British intelligence agent first encountered in
The Short Forever
—arrives in New York to begin an investigation of her own; Stone suspects that her case is strangely connected to the dead husband. And he and Dino, his former NYPD partner, are set to face the most bizarre and challenging assignment of their very colorful careers.
Stuart Woods
was born in Manchester, Georgia; graduated from the University of Georgia; and served in the Air National Guard. A professional sailor, Mr. Woods participated in the Observer Single-handed Transatlantic Race (OSTAR) in 1976 and the catastrophic Fastnet Race in 1979, in which fifteen competitors died.
W.W. Norton published Woods’s first novel,
Chiefs
, in 1981. It won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America that year and was made into a six-hour television drama starring Charlton Heston.
Mr. Woods, who has written twenty-six novels—including nine featuring Stone Barrington—currently resides in Florida, New York City, and Maine.
Please visit www.stuartwoods.com.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
SWIMMINNG TO CATALINA
“This enjoyable, star-dusted plunge into Hollywood’s dark side agreeably melds ’90s glitz with classic noir.”
—
People
magazine
“A fast-paced thriller….
Swimming to Catalina
is Woods’s 17th novel, and his experience is evident in a tight storyline that never loses focus while barreling to an exciting finale…. Woods…keeps readers interested.”
—
Rocky Mountain News
“Outstanding…. After nearly two dozen books, Woods can still surprise readers, not only with clever plots and characters, but also with his knowledge of everything from aeronautics to yachtsmanship.”
—
Booklist
“His best book since
Santa Fe Rules.”
—
Boston Globe
“Woods is in the entertainment business…and he’s good at it.”
—
Winston-Salem Journal
DEAD IN THE WATER
“A man lost at sea, a small airplane crash, some impassioned sexual antics, and a tropical island…. One of [his] best…. Woods is a pro and this goes by like a summer breeze, with just enough heat to make you sweat.”
—
Detroit News
“Fast-paced, filled with enough humor, sex and clever surprises all the way to the last page to make it thoroughly entertaining amusement.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Trying to make this neat tale last more than one sitting would be like staying up all night nursing a Godiva truffle.”