Murder On The Evening News: Bill O'Reilly Talks About His First Novel

The cut throat network TV news environment makes an excellent setting for a murder mystery -- at least it did for a well-known TV news commentator.

In this 1998 interview Bill O’Reilly talks about his debut novel Those Who Trespass.
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You may also enjoy my interviews with Sam Donaldson and Chris Matthews

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Photo by Justin Hoch

#TV news # fiction # mystery #whodunit

television knows I speak my mindon the Fox News Channel, on
Inside Edition. I I just laid it out there for
you. You make up your own mind.
I'm a maverick. I've always been that.
TV news commentator and novelistBill O'Reilly today.
And now I've heard everything. I'm Bill Thompson.

(00:25):
Well, we all know that network television news can be a
cutthroat business. Big egos, big money, big power
collide on a daily basis, and infiction, sometimes that
combination can turn deadly. For his first book, a mystery
novel called Those Who Trespass,TV news Anchorman and

(00:47):
commentator Bill O'Reilly assembled a cast of characters
equipped with big egos and big money and a craving for big
power. And as in any good mystery
novel, some of them wind up dead, and the story then turns
into not just a whodunit, but a why done it.

(01:09):
This, of course, was Bill O'reilly's first book, and he's
had a string of best selling novels since then.
Now he and I met one day in the spring of 1998 to talk about
Those Who Trespass. Just a moment, our conversation.
No, Sherman, this isn't the Wayback Machine, but it is a
look back at an interview from the 30 year archive of national

(01:29):
radio personality Bill Thompson.Enjoy.
So here now from 1998, Bill O'Reilly.
Those Who Trespass is a murder mystery thriller about the
television industry. Somebody is assassinating

(01:50):
television executives and on airtalent, national broadcaster.
Somebody's killing them in very grisly ways.
A New York City detective, homicide detective named Tommy
O'Malley, is assigned to the case. 2 suspects emerge, a
charismatic Anchorman named Shannon Michaels and a veteran
network news correspondent namedDavid Wain.
O'malley's got to figure out whothe killer is and then catch the

(02:12):
killer because the killer is brilliant.
Also on the case is a very lovely and smart reporter named
Ashley Van Buren, works for New York City tabloid newspaper.
She's trying to find out the same stuff.
You almost have to have, with a story like this, you almost have
to have more than one suspect, of course, but also more than
one crime solver, don't you? So there's a little bit of

(02:34):
tension going on there. Yeah, the tension in the book is
basically between O'Malley and the arrogant people who inhabit
the world of network news. Not only does he have to
investigate and try to find out who the killer is, but he has to
interview these people. And he he finds out because the
detective had no idea what television was really like.
He just watched it. He finds out that these are a

(02:55):
lot of these people are bad, arrogant people.
And then when he investigates them, the ones who were killed
and finds out what they did in their past lives when they were
alive, he says, whoa, what a business.
So basically, Those Who Trespassis a thriller, and you can read
it for that, but it also gives you the underside of what really
happens in network television news.

(03:17):
Boy, thank goodness there's no bad or arrogant people in
television news in real life. Right.
It's total fiction. And everybody that I know in New
York, Washington and LA are calling me going, it's this one,
right? That one, right.
I had a guy in Dallas walk up tome and said, you just killed Sam
Donaldson in chapter 1, didn't you?
You know it's. It's funny you should mention

(03:37):
that because that's exactly the first person I thought of.
I mean, if if you think in in quote real life, if you're
thinking of the Killing Network correspondence, the first one
came to mind with Sam. Donaldson.
It isn't Sam Donaldson, but it'sclose.
I can't tell you who it is because I'll get sued.
I have a don't ask, don't tell policy, but all the characters
and those who trespass are basedon real people.
Some are composite characters, but they're all people that I've

(04:01):
met throughout my 20 year television career.
So are their skeletons in their closets similar to the real
skeletons in real closets? Everything in those who trespass
is true except for the murders, if you can believe it.
I people don't believe me. They say, oh, come on, you're
exaggerating. O'Reilly, I said no way this
happened. I kept journals of everything

(04:22):
that I did in my 20 years in this business and all the stuff
that you read and those who trespass, you can take it to the
bank. You're not worried, are you,
that you're going to wind up as some of the victims of the book?
I mean, there's some people out there.
So if there's some grim, arrogant, not very nice people
out there, you might need a bodyguard.

(04:45):
More the thing that people ask me is, aren't you afraid that
after the book comes out, the people in the television
industry will blackball you or be angry at you or this or that?
No, I'm not worried because they're already angry at me.
They were angry at me far beforethis book came out.
I've always been a maverick. Anybody who's watching me on
television knows I speak my mindon the Fox News Channel, on

(05:09):
Inside Edition. I I just laid it out there for
you. You make up your own mind.
I'm a maverick. I've always been that.
That's why those who trespasses a book that I don't know if the
networks, I don't know how they think, but nobody says it is
true. Nobody says the stuff that I
describe. And those who trespass, it did
not happen or could not happen it.

(05:31):
Reads like a made for TV movie. I mean, well, you hadn't mind.
We are negotiating now with we don't want a TV movie.
We want a feature film because, you know, it's a pretty, there's
a little violence in the book, alittle sex in the book.
I don't know if television is ready for that.
I I want Alec Baldwin to play Shannon Michaels, the
charismatic Anchorman. I want Liam Neeson to play Tommy

(05:52):
O'Malley, the detective, and I want Renee Zollenweger from
Jerry Maguire to play Ashley VanBuren.
Now, I wrote the book Those Who Trespassed with a movie in mind.
And we have, you know, a big time Hollywood agent calls me
babe. That's how I know he's big time.
He's trying to negotiate it and this and that.
So the more people who buy the book, obviously the quicker the

(06:13):
movie will get made, but I do believe it will be a movie.
That's pretty good that you're on a first name basis.
You call him Bob, he calls you Babe, you know.
Yeah, I just say I call, I don'tcall him anything.
I just say, is anything going on?
Oh, don't worry, babe. We'll get it done.
Babe, Babe, Babe, Babe. At first I thought he was
calling me a pig. You know, Babe, the movie.
I, this guy calling me a pig, he's calling me Babe or not, you

(06:35):
know, you know, the Hollywood thing.
It's that's another book. Yeah.
Over the years, though, I've interviewed any number of
journalists who, in making the transition from journalism,
where all the facts have to be straight and you're working
within a very strict framework of fact, and you should have to
double check and triple check. They move into fiction and they
find that fact doesn't translateas easily to fiction as they

(06:57):
thought it would. You can't just chunk something
out of here and just plug it in over here.
You have to. Fiction is not the same as real
life. It's interesting.
I left Inside Edition in March of 95 and I had six months
before I went to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
And in that six months I wrote Those Who Trespass and I had all
these journals that I had accumulated.
So I said it's going to be easy.Oh, it was so hard to take what

(07:21):
I knew to be true and to fashionit into a thriller.
So I read Grisham and Crichton and all the thriller writers,
and I like those books. And I said, I'm going to make a
thriller out of it. But boy, was it hard because you
have to get the people involved with the characters and then you
have to make a story that isn't full of cliches that the mystery
writers are going to say, Gee, Ididn't know that, and give them
something different. It was a hard discipline to do

(07:43):
it. Think I've accomplished it.
But you know, the readers of those who trespass will decide
that for themselves. How well do you have to know
your characters before you startto write?
I mean, if even if they're basedon real people, do you have to
know? I talked to writers who who have
complete biographies of every character.
They know where they went to school.
They know what they eat for breakfast.
Or can you learn about them as you go along, much as we, the

(08:03):
reader, learn about them as we go?
Along well, Tommy O'Malley, the homicide detective, I based on a
real detective in New York who Ihung around with for weeks.
He let me ride with him. He let me go on the murder
scene. So that's that's just really
authentic. Plus my grandfather was was a
cop in Brooklyn. I know that world Shadow
Michaels, the Anchorman. He's not me, but obviously I've
been an Anchorman for now a decade.

(08:25):
So I know that world and I know how narcissistic a lot of
Anchorman are. That wasn't a hard character.
The real hard character was the woman, Ashley Van Buren.
Because I, you know, I'm kind ofa macho type of dopey jock kind
of guy, you know, and sit and watching the game.
I don't have the sensitivity to write a woman character the well

(08:45):
as well as some women could, forexample.
So I really had to concentrate and I picked out a couple of
professional women journalists and I just asked, I drove them
crazy, as was I did. I just asked them every intimate
question in the world. How would you react to this?
How would you react to that? And I think I nailed the
character down, but I'm not sure.
But the woman and character in Those Who Trespass drives the

(09:06):
story. Well, there has to be some male,
female tension to make it a goodstory, isn't there?
There's plenty of male, female tension in this book, but all
the women who have read the booksaid, oh, I like the love scene.
And that's good because I wrote the love scene from a female
point of view. And I, I, you know, guys are,
they're gorillas, they're animals, most guys.
But the So I wanted to get away from the usual thriller sex pot

(09:31):
boiler thing and I wanted to write it from a woman's point of
view, and I think I did. Well, how do you decide whose
point of view to tell a story from A First person, third
person, third person, omniscientthird person?
All the little variations? How what?
How does it come to you as to how to tell a story?
The trend these days is to tell a detective story in the first
person. I, I'm the detective Spencer for
hire, all of the detectives likethat.

(09:52):
This book's totally in the thirdperson because the narrator, me,
the writer basically has the bigpicture about television news.
So I had to tell it in the thirdperson.
But I just popped back and forthinside the detective's mind,
inside the anchorman's mind, inside the woman's mind.
And then the evil, evil television executives and air
talent, I had to pop into their minds too.

(10:15):
And now people say to me, Hey, O'Reilly, I used you that evil
that you can. I said, no, I've just observed
this. This is just observation.
It's not me. After this short break, Bill
O'Reilly takes us deeper inside his homicidal mind.
You know, AI is not just for 22 year old coders.

(10:37):
A lot of us older adults are drawing on our life experience
to find unique and creative waysto use AI at home or at work.
It's not an AI success story you'd like to share.
Tap the link below to visit our YouTube channel, AI After 40 and
Let's keep Learning together. Now back.

(11:00):
To my 1998 conversation with Bill O'Reilly.
How do you decide who dies? It was easy.
I was, it was. I could have killed off 50
people. I'm telling you the truth here.
In my 20 years in television, I have come across so many evil
people. And it, it's, I'm not whining
about it. It's a fact of life.

(11:21):
Power drives people in television news and I would say
50% of executives are what I call morally challenged
individuals. They're there for power.
They want to be able to tell people you do this, you do that,
you are fired. You're and I've seen so much
cruelty, that unnecessary cruelty that I just decided I

(11:42):
picked out a few of them and just killed them in very grisly
ways in this book. And it was, it was like a
catharsis. I was.
Going to say you seem to be enjoying this.
Great. Too much, right?
You know, as readers, we enjoy seeing the bad guy get what's
coming to him. And that's why you're going to
love those who trespass, becausethe bad guys get what is coming

(12:03):
to them, and in very unusual ways.
It's not. There's aren't shootings.
These killings are very personal.
The killer wants to get up closeand personal, as Barbara Walters
would say. Well, this.
Is one thing that has. Long fascinated me at a time
you're sitting in a city that for a Long for many years in the
80s was the murder capital of the world.
You know where where people dying on the streets by the

(12:24):
dozens, by the scores. How do you get people interested
in a couple of two or three or five, however many deaths,
People they don't even have never even heard of, They don't
even exist. Well you have to set up a story
and the story is what gets people interested not the
murders. The murders are just the
sideline and and drive the drivethe mystery.

(12:45):
Most murders as a as a news man,I know this are emotional or are
financially motivated. These murders are not.
This is war. The killer in Those Who Trespass
declares war on the evil people who have hurt him in his life
and he goes after them much likea soldier would go after.

(13:05):
In fact, they have a portion in the book which explains the
mentality of soldiers when they're caught up in battle.
That's what this killer in ThoseWho Trespass does.
Everything in this book is true.As I said, it's been researched,
it's thorough. It could happen tomorrow.
Hey, the post office. This is the only place where
people can flip out. Don't be surprised if you see

(13:26):
this happen sometime in television news.
People don't often realize just how much not, not aside from the
arrogant people, the rude people, the nasty people.
They don't realize how much justraw pressure there is in this on
this side of the camera, the microphone.
That's a great point. The stress in television news
can drive anybody over the edge.And the killer in those who
trespass is obviously somebody who has a who has a mental

(13:50):
problem. He's been driven over the edge,
but he still has enough clarity to say, OK, I'm going to come
back and I'm going to take my hedoesn't call it revenge.
It's retribution on these peoplewho have trespassed against me
as we forgive those who trespassagainst us.
And that's really the, the the thriller part of the book.

(14:13):
Now, whether he gets away with it, that's what drives the
mystery to the end of those who trespass.
So are we necessarily then rooting for Tommy and Ashley?
Everyone I've talked to who reads the book roots for another
person. I you know, it's you root for
who you want to root for in thisbook.
I think the detective is the heroic character and Ashley is

(14:35):
also very heroic. But there are people who say,
you know, that killer was justified and and you know, at
the end, you don't know what's going to happen till the very
last page. Because this killer and those
who trespass is brilliant. He's brilliant.
He doesn't make mistakes, he doesn't act out of emotion and
he's playing the most dangerous game there is to play.

(14:56):
And that drives the book all theway through to the end.
So I have to confess, I'm alwaysa little troubled when I'm in a
movie and the character in a movie who's obviously a bad guy
does something that maybe we don't feel he was entirely
unjustified doing. People are cheering.
I think you're cheering for the villain.
You're cheering for the bad guy.Right, right.
But a lot of things in life aren't black or white.

(15:16):
There's a lot of Gray, and I explore the Gray in those who
trespass. But at the end you'll see.
I think everything comes out in the way that will satisfy the
reader in the sense of, you know, what really goes on in the
world, what's right and what's wrong.
But to get there, you have you listen.
This is not a book that's gone by the numbers.

(15:38):
A lot of interesting things happen in Those Who Trespass
that you don't see in other books.
Not for the squeamish. Not for the squeamish.
Will we be looking at televisionnews in a different light after
finishing this book? I believe so.
If you read Those Who Trespass, you will know exactly what
happens to anchor people to reporters, what they go through,

(16:00):
why many of them are crazy, why many of them crack up, why they
disappear. How many people have said, Gee,
I like that Anchorman, I like that radio announcer, What
happened to him? You'll know what happened.
You'll learn about the undersideof television news.
But at the same time, I think it's a good beach book, a big
good airplane book that it, the thriller will drive you.
You don't have to like television news to read those

(16:23):
Who trespass. It stands on its own as a murder
mystery thriller. The next book is called Deliver
Us from Evil, and it's about thetalk show world.
Jerry Springer, Oprah Winfrey and Tommy O'Malley, The
Detective and Those Who Trespasscomes back.
So I'm writing a sequel now because of my six years at
Inside Edition, I know that world in and out.
And if you think that the the world of network television news

(16:46):
is wild, wait till you read about the talk show World.
Unbelievable. You know, Geraldo just yesterday
taped his last daytime show, brought back the chair that
broke his nose in 88. Happens on Springer every day
now. Yeah, it's like that's just
professional wrestling under thecloak of a talk show.

(17:06):
We know what that is. Bill O'Reilly is 76 now.
He has the No Spin News podcast and you can see him on Newsmax
and News Nation now. You can get your copy of Those
Who Trespass by Bill O'Reilly bytapping the link in our show
notes by clicking the link in the description below.
If you're watching this on YouTube or by going to our

(17:26):
website heardeverything.com, we may earn an Amazon Commission if
you make a purchase. Heard everything.com is where
you can also find my 1987 conversation with Let's See Sam
Donaldson. You come to think of the
television correspondent who's bringing you the bad news in
someone's administration who youlove as being an enemy, and then

(17:47):
it brings you the good news if you hate that person as being a
cheerleader for the team. And my 1988 conversation with
Chris Matthews. Getting ahead in any
organization is simply a matter of finding out who's in charge,
who has the votes, who has the clout and getting to know them.
It's not what you know, it's notwho you know, it's who you get
to know that matters in politics.

(18:08):
And of course, we post new episodes of Now I've Heard
Everything every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
And you can find us wherever youfind podcasts.
And thank you so much for listening.
Next time on Now I've Heard Everything.
You know her as a stand up comic, an Emmy nominated and
Oscar winning actress, sitcom star, TV talk show host.
She does everything. My 2003 conversation with

(18:30):
Monique. I'm a fat girl and I'm OK with
fat. Fat means fabulous and thick.
That's who I am. But now I when I look in the
mirror, I don't see. Oh, she's, she's big.
I see beauty. That's next time.
Now I've heard everything. I'm Bill Thompson.