Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, let's do something completely different.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
One of my favorite and one of the very best
thriller writers out there, is Kyle Mills. He writes his
own stuff. He wrote nine Mitch Rap novels in that
Vince Flynn series, and his latest is called Fade In.
I have read the whole book before we talk about this, Kyle.
Normally I wouldn't ask where you are and where you live,
(00:23):
but you do put it in public in the book
that you spend at least some of your time in Granada, Spain,
and as listeners may know that.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
As often as I.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Can, I do my interviews by zoom, so I can
see the guests. You can't see them, you only get
the audio, but I can see them. And Kyle, it
looks to me like you're drinking a margarita. You are
drinking something that is margarita colored with salt around the rim.
So what's going on here?
Speaker 3 (00:52):
I am indeed drinking margarita because it's eight o'clock, almost
eight o'clock my time.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
And are you in Spain?
Speaker 4 (01:00):
I am, yes, yes, I am in Granada, Spain.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
So I've not been to Granada. I have been to Spain.
I have not been to Granada, is it? I have
a vague recollection that it's an old walled city.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Is that right?
Speaker 3 (01:13):
I think what you're remembering is there's a huge Arab
fortress here that all kind of hangs over the city,
called the Alambra, which is one of the biggest sort
of attractions in all of Spain.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
All right, I've been to Toledo, which is an old,
beautiful walled city, and I was wondering, if it's a
little like that.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
It's a lovely town.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
What Why did you pick Granada?
Speaker 3 (01:35):
You know?
Speaker 5 (01:35):
I mean, we drove we wanted to move.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
To Spain, and we drove all around and looked at
all the cities, and this is the one that really
spoke to us. It's a really beautiful World Heritage site.
And it's also very easy to get out of so
I'm a big cyclist, so you can get out into
the mountains.
Speaker 5 (01:53):
There's a ski resort close.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
In fact, you can get to the ski resort in
forty minutes in the beach in.
Speaker 5 (01:59):
About an hour and ten minutes. It's the best of
all the worlds.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
How's your Spanish?
Speaker 5 (02:05):
It's coming along. It's not too bad. We just renovated.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
We gutted an apartment here and renovated it and it
was sink or swim.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
All right, last question for you on this.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
I think this is more of a Barcelona specific thing.
But there's been some pushback in Spain against the number
of tourists, and I doubt you have that level of
problem in Granada, although you know there is some tourist
interest in that town for the Alhambra, as you said,
But how do you feel there as an American right now?
Speaker 3 (02:36):
I feel good. You know there are protests. I think
there are may be a little bit overblown.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
The Spanish.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
They have a valid beef on some of this stuff. Yeah,
Barcelona's overrun, Granada is not. But the thing with the
Spanish is they're all very very nice people, so one
on one you don't really get that.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
It's just when they all get together in March.
Speaker 5 (02:58):
You just got to avoid the marches.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
I was in Spain on my honeymoon, and I think
the thing I remember most is we got to a
restaurant and I don't remember, might have been Barcelona. I
actually preferred Madrid, but wherever. We got to a restaurant
around eight thirty at night and they said, we're not
(03:21):
open yet.
Speaker 5 (03:23):
We're not open.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
We're not open yet, and so they said come back
at ten.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
So we came back at ten.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
We were like the first people in the restaurant, and
it was our honeymoon, so we were eating slowly and
drinking and having fun, and so we sat there for
a long time and the restaurant wasn't full until eleven.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Thirty or twelve. It's just such a different thing.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Well, you know, you have to embrace it because one
thing you definitely realize is it's hot for real here
in the middle of the day. H and so the
I thought that the CS I found really annoying when
we first moved here, but I've completely embraced it.
Speaker 5 (03:57):
You get up early when it's nice.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
And cool, you go to sleep while it's nice, and
then at ten ten thirty go out to dinner.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
You sit outside till midnight one am.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
And then what's sice and pleasant again, very civilized way
to live, it really is.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
All right, let's talk about Kyle's book, and listeners know
that I'm one of the few radio hosts who reads
every book with rare exception. Every once in a while
there's a book I've only read half of, but I
pretty much read all the book of an author I'm
going to have on the show, and I read Kyle's
new book.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
It's called Fade In.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
And if you've been following Kyle Mills for some time,
you may have a recollection. It might be vague if
you haven't thought about it for a while, But another
Kyle Mills book that has the word fade in the title,
in fact fade being the title, and tell us a
little bit, Kyle just kind of tie that together. I'll
let you elaborate on what I just set up for
you there.
Speaker 5 (04:51):
Yeah. So I first wrote a book about this character.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
He's a former Navy seal named Sala Mel fay Ed,
but his friends and teammates called him Fade. I wrote
that book twenty years ago, and I kind.
Speaker 5 (05:05):
Of thought Baide was dead at the end.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
But I could never get him out of my mind,
and my readers constantly sent me emails. They still were
sending me emails a few years ago about him, and
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
I was waiting.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
I figured out a way he could have survived, and
I was kind of waiting for a story for him.
And the world has gotten so weird and has changed
so quickly in the last few years, it really felt
like it was time to resurrect him because I thought
he was a perfect guy's guy to kind of tell
the story through, to tell the story of what is
happening in the world now through his eyes.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
He's a very interesting character, right, And so even just
just beginning, and I don't think I read the first
Fade book. I don't have a great memory, but I'm
thinking I should go back and read it. But just
a super interesting character to think of, Well, a Middle
Eastern Muslim movie comes in Navy seal and then and
(06:01):
then he gets injured and he is disaffected, to put
it mildly, just a very complex character for a for
a thriller hero. You know, there's only a couple people
who write the kind of stuff you write that I
think have that kind of character development, which I really appreciated.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Yeah, he is not your typical thriller hero. He's a
bit of an anti hero. Yeah, he was kind of
screwed over by the US government after he got injured
on an operation for the CIA, and doesn't his relationship
with America is complicated.
Speaker 6 (06:40):
But he's a bit of a pop philosopher and has
a way getting sucked into things that are maybe over
his head. And this is what I liked about him
because I considered actually writing this storyline.
Speaker 4 (06:53):
This is the storyline very much about the elite, the rise.
Speaker 5 (06:57):
Of this incredibly powerful group of.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Elite, who can who know everything about us, who control
everything we see in here. And I thought about using
this idea with the Mittrap series, but in the end,
because Mitch Wrap's always.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
Sort of the master of his universe, it didn't really work.
I wanted somebody that could get dragged into it and
wake up and think, oh my god, what have I
gotten myself into?
Speaker 5 (07:23):
Very much like all of us do every day, I think.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
And who struggles with the moral compass surrounding it all.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
We're talking with Kyle Mills. His new thriller novel is
called Fade In. It's a great read, and you do
not need to read the first fade book from twenty
years ago to.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Love to love this book.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
I'll also say, Kyle, I think I read maybe not all,
but many of your Mitch Rap books, and the writing
style is quite different.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
And I'm at least I think so. I'm not a writer.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
You can tell me if I'm wrong, but I wonder if,
when you're, you know, continuing the Vince Flynn's stuff, if
you felt a need to write in a style that
somewhat comported to Vince's style, and whether this is more
either what you might call your style or the style
(08:19):
that you thought was most appropriate for this kind of character.
Speaker 4 (08:23):
Yeah, well, thank you for noticing I worked. When I
took over Vince's series.
Speaker 5 (08:29):
You know, it was kind of it. If it ain't broke,
don't fix it. You know, there's a I love that series.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
I'd been a huge fan of Vince's and so I
really set out to write books that I thought Vince
would have written, and that in a way that fans
would have not would have never known that he.
Speaker 4 (08:48):
Died, that they would have said, oh, yeah, that.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
Wasn't a Vince Flynn book.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
And so a lot of people over ten years came
to think that was my writing style, which is not
the case really. So in fact, it was kind of
strange when I got hired for that job, because I thought, man,
I don't write anything like Vince flym and so I
made it really my always at the forefront of my
mind to make sure I was writing something Vince would
(09:14):
have written, not necessarily something I would have written. So
this is much more my style there. You know, I
explore the gray between the black and white. I have
complex characters with complex relationships that are not necessarily always
the masters of their universe, and so that's the thing
I tend to find interesting about the world. Like Like,
(09:36):
a lot of people said that one of the main characters,
John Lowe, is this billionaire who kind of wants to
try to use his power to calm the world down,
and people would say, you.
Speaker 5 (09:44):
Know, I wasn't sure if he was the good guy
or the bad guy.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
And I love that comment, because John Lowe isn't sure.
Speaker 5 (09:51):
If he's the good guy or the bad guy.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
So you know, it's exactly what I was going for.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Yeah, no doubt.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
And the other thing that I that I like about
this is, you know Fade. The character of Fade, as
we talked about already, he's kind of he's physically and
psychologically damaged, and he's also really funny, and the book
has a lot of funny moments. And you know, I've
got a few friends, probably not as many as you do,
(10:18):
but I've got a few friends who come out of
the Navy, Seals and other special operations, you know, community,
and a lot of those dudes are you know, badass,
you know, you know what, and really funny. Maybe you
have to be to be in that world.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
That's always the people that I knew from Stechops is
the people who had that really dark sense of humor.
Speaker 5 (10:42):
Yeah, yeah, because I mean, and I'm sure that it gets.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
You through, you know, and the bombs start following, the
bullets are flying and everything, humor is what gets you
through and say, and I had particularly a specific friend
who was a ricon marine in Vietnam back in the day,
who is absolutely larious, you know, like a practical jokes joker,
prankster and all these things. And he was a little
(11:06):
bit of a model for Fade that in that in
that the guy was just incessantly hilarious. And so I
wanted to capture that. And I wanted because Fade's life
is so hard at the beginning. I I mean, you
wouldn't want to make the book depressing, right, So it's
(11:26):
fades observations and kind of sarcasm that that make the
book fun.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
All right, So let's talk about the plot of the
book just a little bit. I don't want to give
away much. But essentially there's there's somebody who wants to
recreate like COVID, but worse kind of in a maybe
more targeted sort of way. Again, I don't want to
give away much. You gotta you gotta read the book.
I I marked a page in here. You know, every
(11:56):
once in a while, when you're reading a book, you
can tell, Okay, this is the author telling me with
the thinks rather than really what the character thinks.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
So I want to read this as was.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
The current custom, though everyone seemed to be ignoring the
actual issue. There was a guy on the loose who
seemed both willing and capable of creating a WMD from
the building blocks of life. Beyond a growing backlash against
anyone who looked Asian and a few independent minded politicians
in safe seats, no one seemed to see this as
anything more than a ratings grabber or a subject line
(12:27):
for a campaign donation mailing, And.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
That seemed to sum up the problem with the modern era.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Everything had become theater, so on the rare occasion that
the real world reared its ugly head, no one had
any idea what to do.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
All right, that sounds to me like Kyle Mills every
bit as it is.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Fade you want to say anything about that, that.
Speaker 5 (12:46):
Is Kyle Mills for sure.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
I mean, you look at the reactions we have to
our politicians have to problems, disasters, et cetera, and you realize,
oh my god, some of these people never even graduated
from high school. And they all, I imagine, immediately go,
how can we how can we use this to you know,
win the next election?
Speaker 4 (13:08):
And that's what it's become about winning the next election.
And they're all safe, nothing's going to happen.
Speaker 5 (13:14):
To the Senate or the President or anything like that.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
They can go barricade themselves in a bunker somewhere. So
it's in a situation like this, it's interesting to think about.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
This is a person has a who's a brilliant.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
Biochemist, Chinese biochemist, who wants to create a bioweapon, and
what would happen?
Speaker 5 (13:35):
Like what what?
Speaker 4 (13:36):
Who would handle that right now? And I don't know.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
To be honest with you, idea, there aren't a lot
of people in government, whether it's in ours or any other,
that I would think i'd want in a life and
death situation, you know, on my side, frankly.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
And even that guy, even the Chinese biochemist in the
book who wants to create a WMD of sorts. And
I'm leaving out some details intentionally. When you hear Kyle
or me described in that way, you're probably thinking, you know,
pure evil, But it's much more subtle than that, actually,
and he doesn't think of himself as evil, and he actually.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Has a purpose in mind.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
I guess I would say that goes beyond just I
want to kill a bunch of people, And it's sort
of more of the moral ambiguity that you are that
you work so well into Fade in.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Yeah, And that's again kind of a hallmark of myself
if you read my books before the Vince Flynn stuff,
is that I love villains even more than heroes. Is
really fun to write villains, and I always want people
to say at one point to think, well, you know,
the guy's got a point.
Speaker 5 (14:51):
And so that's kind of where I went with this
is now, of course.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
You're going to be against the guy who wants to
kill billion people or whatever. Of course you're against it,
but you think, you know, I can kind of understand
where he's coming from on it. And even Fade thinks
that sometimes so that is to me, every villain is
the hero of their own novel, right, so I want
to create rich characters that everyone can identify with, as
(15:16):
opposed to sort of a I mean with the genre
that was popular, certainly with the Vince Flynn stuff. You're
really talking about Islamic terrorism, and then it's much more
black and white than the Islamic terrorists.
Speaker 5 (15:29):
Aren't that complex? You know, they have an agenda. It
doesn't really make it.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
Necessarily a lot of sense, and off they go.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Kyle mills new thriller novel is called Fade In, sure
to be a number one New.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
York Times bestselling book.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Well, Kyle has been number one New York Times bestselling
author multiple times. I'm sure this will be on the
bestseller list as well. It's a wonderful summer read your
summer is not over. To go buy fade In today,
Read it, enjoy it. Maybe go back and get the
twenty year old first book called fade But you don't
have to read it first, and you will. You'll thank
Kyle and you will enjoy yourself. Kyle, it is great
(16:05):
to have you on the show. Great to see you
enjoy the rest of your Margarita there in your Spanish
evening
Speaker 5 (16:11):
I will do Thanks for having me on all right,
glad to do it.
All right, let's do something completely different.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
One of my favorite and one of the very best
thriller writers out there, is Kyle Mills. He writes his
own stuff. He wrote nine Mitch Rap novels in that
Vince Flynn series, and his latest is called Fade In.
I have read the whole book before we talk about this, Kyle.
Normally I wouldn't ask where you are and where you live,
(00:23):
but you do put it in public in the book
that you spend at least some of your time in Granada, Spain,
and as listeners may know that.
Speaker 1 (00:34):
As often as I.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Can, I do my interviews by zoom, so I can
see the guests. You can't see them, you only get
the audio, but I can see them. And Kyle, it
looks to me like you're drinking a margarita. You are
drinking something that is margarita colored with salt around the rim.
So what's going on here?
Speaker 3 (00:52):
I am indeed drinking margarita because it's eight o'clock, almost
eight o'clock my time.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
And are you in Spain?
Speaker 4 (01:00):
I am, yes, yes, I am in Granada, Spain.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
So I've not been to Granada. I have been to Spain.
I have not been to Granada, is it? I have
a vague recollection that it's an old walled city.
Speaker 1 (01:12):
Is that right?
Speaker 3 (01:13):
I think what you're remembering is there's a huge Arab
fortress here that all kind of hangs over the city,
called the Alambra, which is one of the biggest sort
of attractions in all of Spain.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
All right, I've been to Toledo, which is an old,
beautiful walled city, and I was wondering, if it's a
little like that.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
It's a lovely town.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
What Why did you pick Granada?
Speaker 3 (01:35):
You know?
Speaker 5 (01:35):
I mean, we drove we wanted to move.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
To Spain, and we drove all around and looked at
all the cities, and this is the one that really
spoke to us. It's a really beautiful World Heritage site.
And it's also very easy to get out of so
I'm a big cyclist, so you can get out into
the mountains.
Speaker 5 (01:53):
There's a ski resort close.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
In fact, you can get to the ski resort in
forty minutes in the beach in.
Speaker 5 (01:59):
About an hour and ten minutes. It's the best of
all the worlds.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
How's your Spanish?
Speaker 5 (02:05):
It's coming along. It's not too bad. We just renovated.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
We gutted an apartment here and renovated it and it
was sink or swim.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
All right, last question for you on this.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
I think this is more of a Barcelona specific thing.
But there's been some pushback in Spain against the number
of tourists, and I doubt you have that level of
problem in Granada, although you know there is some tourist
interest in that town for the Alhambra, as you said,
But how do you feel there as an American right now?
Speaker 3 (02:36):
I feel good. You know there are protests. I think
there are may be a little bit overblown.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
The Spanish.
Speaker 3 (02:44):
They have a valid beef on some of this stuff. Yeah,
Barcelona's overrun, Granada is not. But the thing with the
Spanish is they're all very very nice people, so one
on one you don't really get that.
Speaker 4 (02:56):
It's just when they all get together in March.
Speaker 5 (02:58):
You just got to avoid the marches.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
I was in Spain on my honeymoon, and I think
the thing I remember most is we got to a
restaurant and I don't remember, might have been Barcelona. I
actually preferred Madrid, but wherever. We got to a restaurant
around eight thirty at night and they said, we're not
(03:21):
open yet.
Speaker 5 (03:23):
We're not open.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
We're not open yet, and so they said come back
at ten.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
So we came back at ten.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
We were like the first people in the restaurant, and
it was our honeymoon, so we were eating slowly and
drinking and having fun, and so we sat there for
a long time and the restaurant wasn't full until eleven.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Thirty or twelve. It's just such a different thing.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
Well, you know, you have to embrace it because one
thing you definitely realize is it's hot for real here
in the middle of the day. H and so the
I thought that the CS I found really annoying when
we first moved here, but I've completely embraced it.
Speaker 5 (03:57):
You get up early when it's nice.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
And cool, you go to sleep while it's nice, and
then at ten ten thirty go out to dinner.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
You sit outside till midnight one am.
Speaker 3 (04:07):
And then what's sice and pleasant again, very civilized way
to live, it really is.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
All right, let's talk about Kyle's book, and listeners know
that I'm one of the few radio hosts who reads
every book with rare exception. Every once in a while
there's a book I've only read half of, but I
pretty much read all the book of an author I'm
going to have on the show, and I read Kyle's
new book.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
It's called Fade In.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
And if you've been following Kyle Mills for some time,
you may have a recollection. It might be vague if
you haven't thought about it for a while, But another
Kyle Mills book that has the word fade in the title,
in fact fade being the title, and tell us a
little bit, Kyle just kind of tie that together. I'll
let you elaborate on what I just set up for
you there.
Speaker 5 (04:51):
Yeah. So I first wrote a book about this character.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
He's a former Navy seal named Sala Mel fay Ed,
but his friends and teammates called him Fade. I wrote
that book twenty years ago, and I kind.
Speaker 5 (05:05):
Of thought Baide was dead at the end.
Speaker 3 (05:07):
But I could never get him out of my mind,
and my readers constantly sent me emails. They still were
sending me emails a few years ago about him, and
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
I was waiting.
Speaker 3 (05:18):
I figured out a way he could have survived, and
I was kind of waiting for a story for him.
And the world has gotten so weird and has changed
so quickly in the last few years, it really felt
like it was time to resurrect him because I thought
he was a perfect guy's guy to kind of tell
the story through, to tell the story of what is
happening in the world now through his eyes.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
He's a very interesting character, right, And so even just
just beginning, and I don't think I read the first
Fade book. I don't have a great memory, but I'm
thinking I should go back and read it. But just
a super interesting character to think of, Well, a Middle
Eastern Muslim movie comes in Navy seal and then and
(06:01):
then he gets injured and he is disaffected, to put
it mildly, just a very complex character for a for
a thriller hero. You know, there's only a couple people
who write the kind of stuff you write that I
think have that kind of character development, which I really appreciated.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
Yeah, he is not your typical thriller hero. He's a
bit of an anti hero. Yeah, he was kind of
screwed over by the US government after he got injured
on an operation for the CIA, and doesn't his relationship
with America is complicated.
Speaker 6 (06:40):
But he's a bit of a pop philosopher and has
a way getting sucked into things that are maybe over
his head. And this is what I liked about him
because I considered actually writing this storyline.
Speaker 4 (06:53):
This is the storyline very much about the elite, the rise.
Speaker 5 (06:57):
Of this incredibly powerful group of.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Elite, who can who know everything about us, who control
everything we see in here. And I thought about using
this idea with the Mittrap series, but in the end,
because Mitch Wrap's always.
Speaker 4 (07:12):
Sort of the master of his universe, it didn't really work.
I wanted somebody that could get dragged into it and
wake up and think, oh my god, what have I
gotten myself into?
Speaker 5 (07:23):
Very much like all of us do every day, I think.
Speaker 3 (07:27):
And who struggles with the moral compass surrounding it all.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
We're talking with Kyle Mills. His new thriller novel is
called Fade In. It's a great read, and you do
not need to read the first fade book from twenty
years ago to.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Love to love this book.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
I'll also say, Kyle, I think I read maybe not all,
but many of your Mitch Rap books, and the writing
style is quite different.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
And I'm at least I think so. I'm not a writer.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
You can tell me if I'm wrong, but I wonder if,
when you're, you know, continuing the Vince Flynn's stuff, if
you felt a need to write in a style that
somewhat comported to Vince's style, and whether this is more
either what you might call your style or the style
(08:19):
that you thought was most appropriate for this kind of character.
Speaker 4 (08:23):
Yeah, well, thank you for noticing I worked. When I
took over Vince's series.
Speaker 5 (08:29):
You know, it was kind of it. If it ain't broke,
don't fix it. You know, there's a I love that series.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
I'd been a huge fan of Vince's and so I
really set out to write books that I thought Vince
would have written, and that in a way that fans
would have not would have never known that he.
Speaker 4 (08:48):
Died, that they would have said, oh, yeah, that.
Speaker 5 (08:50):
Wasn't a Vince Flynn book.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
And so a lot of people over ten years came
to think that was my writing style, which is not
the case really. So in fact, it was kind of
strange when I got hired for that job, because I thought, man,
I don't write anything like Vince flym and so I
made it really my always at the forefront of my
mind to make sure I was writing something Vince would
(09:14):
have written, not necessarily something I would have written. So
this is much more my style there. You know, I
explore the gray between the black and white. I have
complex characters with complex relationships that are not necessarily always
the masters of their universe, and so that's the thing
I tend to find interesting about the world. Like Like,
(09:36):
a lot of people said that one of the main characters,
John Lowe, is this billionaire who kind of wants to
try to use his power to calm the world down,
and people would say, you.
Speaker 5 (09:44):
Know, I wasn't sure if he was the good guy
or the bad guy.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
And I love that comment, because John Lowe isn't sure.
Speaker 5 (09:51):
If he's the good guy or the bad guy.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
So you know, it's exactly what I was going for.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Yeah, no doubt.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
And the other thing that I that I like about
this is, you know Fade. The character of Fade, as
we talked about already, he's kind of he's physically and
psychologically damaged, and he's also really funny, and the book
has a lot of funny moments. And you know, I've
got a few friends, probably not as many as you do,
(10:18):
but I've got a few friends who come out of
the Navy, Seals and other special operations, you know, community,
and a lot of those dudes are you know, badass,
you know, you know what, and really funny. Maybe you
have to be to be in that world.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
That's always the people that I knew from Stechops is
the people who had that really dark sense of humor.
Speaker 5 (10:42):
Yeah, yeah, because I mean, and I'm sure that it gets.
Speaker 3 (10:44):
You through, you know, and the bombs start following, the
bullets are flying and everything, humor is what gets you
through and say, and I had particularly a specific friend
who was a ricon marine in Vietnam back in the day,
who is absolutely larious, you know, like a practical jokes joker,
prankster and all these things. And he was a little
(11:06):
bit of a model for Fade that in that in
that the guy was just incessantly hilarious. And so I
wanted to capture that. And I wanted because Fade's life
is so hard at the beginning. I I mean, you
wouldn't want to make the book depressing, right, So it's
(11:26):
fades observations and kind of sarcasm that that make the
book fun.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
All right, So let's talk about the plot of the
book just a little bit. I don't want to give
away much. But essentially there's there's somebody who wants to
recreate like COVID, but worse kind of in a maybe
more targeted sort of way. Again, I don't want to
give away much. You gotta you gotta read the book.
I I marked a page in here. You know, every
(11:56):
once in a while, when you're reading a book, you
can tell, Okay, this is the author telling me with
the thinks rather than really what the character thinks.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
So I want to read this as was.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
The current custom, though everyone seemed to be ignoring the
actual issue. There was a guy on the loose who
seemed both willing and capable of creating a WMD from
the building blocks of life. Beyond a growing backlash against
anyone who looked Asian and a few independent minded politicians
in safe seats, no one seemed to see this as
anything more than a ratings grabber or a subject line
(12:27):
for a campaign donation mailing, And.
Speaker 1 (12:29):
That seemed to sum up the problem with the modern era.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
Everything had become theater, so on the rare occasion that
the real world reared its ugly head, no one had
any idea what to do.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
All right, that sounds to me like Kyle Mills every
bit as it is.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
Fade you want to say anything about that, that.
Speaker 5 (12:46):
Is Kyle Mills for sure.
Speaker 3 (12:48):
I mean, you look at the reactions we have to
our politicians have to problems, disasters, et cetera, and you realize,
oh my god, some of these people never even graduated
from high school. And they all, I imagine, immediately go,
how can we how can we use this to you know,
win the next election?
Speaker 4 (13:08):
And that's what it's become about winning the next election.
And they're all safe, nothing's going to happen.
Speaker 5 (13:14):
To the Senate or the President or anything like that.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
They can go barricade themselves in a bunker somewhere. So
it's in a situation like this, it's interesting to think about.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
This is a person has a who's a brilliant.
Speaker 3 (13:29):
Biochemist, Chinese biochemist, who wants to create a bioweapon, and
what would happen?
Speaker 5 (13:35):
Like what what?
Speaker 4 (13:36):
Who would handle that right now? And I don't know.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
To be honest with you, idea, there aren't a lot
of people in government, whether it's in ours or any other,
that I would think i'd want in a life and
death situation, you know, on my side, frankly.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
And even that guy, even the Chinese biochemist in the
book who wants to create a WMD of sorts. And
I'm leaving out some details intentionally. When you hear Kyle
or me described in that way, you're probably thinking, you know,
pure evil, But it's much more subtle than that, actually,
and he doesn't think of himself as evil, and he actually.
Speaker 1 (14:14):
Has a purpose in mind.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
I guess I would say that goes beyond just I
want to kill a bunch of people, And it's sort
of more of the moral ambiguity that you are that
you work so well into Fade in.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Yeah, And that's again kind of a hallmark of myself
if you read my books before the Vince Flynn stuff,
is that I love villains even more than heroes. Is
really fun to write villains, and I always want people
to say at one point to think, well, you know,
the guy's got a point.
Speaker 5 (14:51):
And so that's kind of where I went with this
is now, of course.
Speaker 3 (14:55):
You're going to be against the guy who wants to
kill billion people or whatever. Of course you're against it,
but you think, you know, I can kind of understand
where he's coming from on it. And even Fade thinks
that sometimes so that is to me, every villain is
the hero of their own novel, right, so I want
to create rich characters that everyone can identify with, as
(15:16):
opposed to sort of a I mean with the genre
that was popular, certainly with the Vince Flynn stuff. You're
really talking about Islamic terrorism, and then it's much more
black and white than the Islamic terrorists.
Speaker 5 (15:29):
Aren't that complex? You know, they have an agenda. It
doesn't really make it.
Speaker 4 (15:34):
Necessarily a lot of sense, and off they go.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Kyle mills new thriller novel is called Fade In, sure
to be a number one New.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
York Times bestselling book.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Well, Kyle has been number one New York Times bestselling
author multiple times. I'm sure this will be on the
bestseller list as well. It's a wonderful summer read your
summer is not over. To go buy fade In today,
Read it, enjoy it. Maybe go back and get the
twenty year old first book called fade But you don't
have to read it first, and you will. You'll thank
Kyle and you will enjoy yourself. Kyle, it is great
(16:05):
to have you on the show. Great to see you
enjoy the rest of your Margarita there in your Spanish
evening
Speaker 5 (16:11):
I will do Thanks for having me on all right,
glad to do it.
The Ross Kaminsky Show News
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