 I'm Roger Janonek, your host on the book worlds, and my guest today is Jonathan Moore. He's the author of five books that we'll be talking about, and I wanted to introduce him first by getting a little of his background. Jonathan, you have the classic book jacket copy on all your novels, which as you've done a lot of interesting odd jobs before you became an attorney. Can you tell us about them? Well, I guess the easiest way to explain that is it took me a while to find myself after I graduated from college, which itself took a while. I went to five undergraduate colleges before I... Five? Yeah, my parents were very patient. After college, I had a job teaching English in Taiwan. I did that for three and a half years. I also owned a bar and restaurant in Taiwan. It was a Mexican restaurant. And then during college I had a few interesting jobs. I was a whitewater raft guide and I was a counselor at a camp for juvenile sex offenders in Texas. So it was basically like a wilderness reform camp. And then during law school I worked as an investigator for the Washington DC Public Defender Service. So that was an interesting little stint in criminal law. And then after three years of teaching kindergarten and restaurant work, I decided to go to law school. And then I ended up in a hole. But you only went to one law school? Well, technically no. I went to two. But I did one semester at the University of Arizona in Tucson. And that was entirely due to Hurricane Katrina. But you were there during Katrina? Yeah, I went to Tulane for law school in New Orleans. And I had to evacuate the city for Hurricane Katrina. And it shut down the city for months. And so Tulane didn't reopen during that semester. And all the students ended up scattered all over the country. Fascinating. But you did work there for a while in New Orleans after you graduated? No. I worked there during one of my summers in between semesters at law school. And then I worked there during the semester as basically an intern in a law firm. Were you writing all along all through this time? No, actually. So I had wanted to write basically since I was about six years old. And so when I was a kid I wrote a lot of short stories. And when I got into college I started writing novels. So I wrote my first novel when I was 20. And then I wrote another one at 21 and 22. And then I graduated from college and moved to Taiwan and got hit with writer's block that lasted for about 10 years. And it was very frustrating for me because I had loved writing fiction but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. And I was so jealous of people who could that for 10 years I didn't even read fiction because I would just get angry every time I saw a novel. So I read nonfiction. And then after I got settled in Honolulu I started reading fiction again. And then one day I sat down with an idea and wrote my first book that would become published. Now of the five books that have been published, do they include the two that you wrote when you were in college? No, those books will never see the light of day. So in Honolulu here you're a lawyer at a very prominent law firm. Kobayashi Sugita and Gouda, how long have you been there? I've been there since 2008. That's a pretty high-powered firm, downtown firm. Yeah, we see a lot of the large cases and it's a great job for me as a writer actually because I get to see all manner of different people and businesses and just learn the ins and outs of so many different industries. Big law firms are notorious for working very hard. When do you sleep? Usually from 10 a.m. to 6 a.m. It's better now when I was a Green associate. Those were hard times, but now I can push off all that work on our junior guy. Well you've written this trilogy about San Francisco. Tell us what you had in mind with these three books. So the books began with my novel, The Poison Artist. That came out in January of 2016. So all three of these books are murder mysteries and they're quite dark. Stephen King said The Poison Artist was the most terrifying thing he had read since Red Dragon or something to that effect. So they're very dark books. Let me just tell us a story of how you got Stephen King to say anything about it. I had been a fan of Stephen King since I was in the fourth grade and my father gave me a copy of It, which was timely since that just came out as a movie. So I'd read every book that he's published and when I had The Poison Artist coming out my editor asked me to write fan letters to authors that I particularly liked. So I wrote a fan letter to Stephen King and gave it to my editor and I had months went past and I didn't hear anything and I figured I never would. And then on my birthday in 2015 I was coming home from a fishing trip. I was out on the water all day and came back and checked my phone as soon as I got back to the dock and there was an email from my editor for an email from Stephen King. It's lucky that I did not get that email while I was out on the water. I probably would have fallen off the boat. I was blown away. Stephen King said I hadn't read anything so terrifying since Red Dragon. That's the book by Thomas Harris that introduced Hannibal Lecter. That's quite a compliment. It's amazing to have got him to read it and he obviously had read it. Yeah, he obviously did and I eventually emailed him to thank him. It took me a couple of months to get up the nerve to email him back but I did email him back and he had a few comments about the book so I know he really did read it. But at first I kind of wondered if he had read the same book that I had written because I've always thought of The Poison Artist as kind of a dark love story but not necessarily terrifying. Oh, I find it pretty terrifying. Tell us a bit more about it, about the premise. The main character in The Poison Artist, Caleb Maddox, is a San Francisco toxicologist who is studying the chemical effects of pain on the human body. He has just suffered a rather harsh breakup with his live-in girlfriend at the time the novel starts. He is nursing his wounds which are both psychological and physical by drinking in a bar called The House of Shields which is downtown right across from the palace. He then asked me if I could write a third book that would sort of serve as a bridge between The Poison Artist and The Night Market. I happened to already be writing a book that had some connections to both so I just continued doing that and they changed the publication schedule around so that The Night Market would come out in 2018 and The Dark Room came out in 2017. What's fascinating to me is that you have a trilogy set in the same city mostly at night with very much the same feel but they're actually three different genres. The Night Market that's coming up as you say is set in the near future with some pretty scary high tech in it. The Dark Room that was published last year is actually a much more conventional police procedural, very precise but much more in the classic mode of crime fiction. The Poison Artist which is I think the scariest, the three I agree with Stephen King who is really scary, has a quite different kind of fantasy, psychology, terror in it with terrifying implications of how people lose their minds essentially. So that's extraordinary. The versatility involved in writing three quite different kinds of books with some of the same characters. The Dark Room, James Patterson called it Suspense that never stops. If you like Michael Connelly's novels you will gobble up Jonathan Moore's The Dark Room. You want to tell us some more about that? The Michael Connelly comparison that made me feel very warm and fuzzy inside. I love Michael Connelly's books. I've read them all. In fact, when I first discovered him I kind of, you know, some people binge watch Netflix. I binge read Michael Connelly and read maybe 15 or 20 Harry Bosch novels in a week which was a lot of fun. We're going to take a break for that but we'll come back. Guys, don't forget to check me out right here at the Prince of Investing. I'm your host, Prince Dykes, each and every Tuesdays at 11am Hawaii time. I'm going to be right here. Stop by here from some of the best investment minds across the globe. And real estate, finances, stocks, hedge funds, managers, all that great stuff. Thank you. If you see something suspicious, say something to local authorities. Thanks Jonathan. You were saying about The Dark Room. Oh well, so I had gotten that blurb from James Patterson, mainly through the efforts of my editor. And I think the Connelly comparison I'd like to think is apt. It is a police procedural. I spent a lot of time researching the procedural aspects. During the process of researching the poison artist, I had made friends with some cops in Sausalito and I contacted them frequently while writing The Dark Room. I have a private investigator friend here in Honolulu who also helped me with a few things. I thought that was a remarkable aspect of all three books. Obviously the amount of research we did for the books was phenomenal. And I'd love to know the background of some of it. For instance, the geography of San Francisco, I was quite tempted to follow you with Google Earth or Google Maps. Because you were so precise, almost obsessive. Tell us about that obsession. Well, I guess I have kind of a funny relationship with San Francisco. I went to undergraduate college there when I finally graduated from college. I was in San Francisco. So I spent three and a half or four years there. And while I was there, I was so depressed the whole time that it warped the way I saw things. I just absolutely hated San Francisco. I thought it was the worst place on planet Earth. Really why? It was cold. It was always raining. I was always getting dumped. I couldn't afford to do anything there. I was too depressed to do the things that you can do in San Francisco for free. And so I failed to see the beauty of it and saw only the ugliness. And there is a lot of ugliness in San Francisco. It's got an incredibly bad and homeless problem. It's got huge drug problems. There's a lot of poverty. But I didn't see any of the good parts. And then when I moved here and started working at the law firm, I had to go to San Francisco quite a lot. So then I wasn't depressed anymore and I wasn't a poor student anymore. And so I could appreciate all the other aspects of San Francisco that I had missed the first time. But I still remember seeing it in that kind of dark lens. And so I think all three of the books San Francisco comes across as kind of this glittery dark place where it's a beautiful city but it's got a lot of shadows. A lot of shadows, yes. Wonderful. One of the shadowy parts is the morgue. You spend a lot of time in the morgue in your books. Tell us about that. Well, when I was writing The Poison Artist, I actually started that book when I was in college and I couldn't finish it because I just didn't know anything about human relationships or police procedure or autopsies. And I didn't know how to start doing that research. And when I moved to Honolulu and started writing again I decided to take another crack at this story. And so I started doing the research and I realized right away that I would need to know a lot about autopsies. So I contacted the Honolulu Medical Examiner's office and I asked them if they would let me come in and watch some autopsies and tour the facility. They were very cautious with me at first because I was emailing them from my work account so they knew I was an attorney. And I don't know, maybe they thought I was trying to set them up or something. But once they realized that I was wearing my Mystery Novelist hat, they let me in with open arms and they asked if I could maybe put them on a show. So my initial tour there, I had spent weeks setting it up and when I finally got in it was on the day my grandmother died. And so I spent all this time setting it up so I went anyway and went in and found myself standing in a walk-in freezer full of dead bodies. And I had a very somber feeling at the time because I knew that my grandmother in Arkansas was in a similar setting. And so it really set a tone right away for me. And I think the medical examiner scenes in all three of these books, there's a lot of autopsies in all three of these books. And I think that they're fairly accurate as compared to what you would see. Were you upset by what you saw? It was sad and it was dirty and there's roaches on the floor and there's concrete floors that are wet and there's drains on the floor. It's cold. And it's cold and it's nothing at all, it smells bad. And it's nothing at all like what you see on a cop show where everybody's well dressed and everything's sparkly and clean. For example, the first thing they do in an autopsy is this Y incision that opens up your whole chest cavity. And they don't use specialized high-tech medical equipment for it. They use pruning shears that they buy at Home Depot. Wow. But then you got into the actual technical aspects of it in considerable detail. It's not something you see on the Y-50 for instance. No. So yeah, I spent a lot of time researching that. I have several friends who are doctors so they helped me out a lot there. And then, you know, I'm not too shy about just cold calling people and asking questions when I have questions. What I found particularly wonderful was the very exact logic, the scientific logic that you have researched and present. So it's sort of classically in the line Sherlock Holmes. I guess I guess he was the founder of it. But it's beautifully done and it's a huge amount of information. I found there was a surprising, a new surprising piece of information almost on every page. You spent a lot of time in bars in the books. You know a lot about drinking or the drinks or bartending. Tell us some more about that. How did that come about? I did own a bar once. So I learned some there but part of that is that San Francisco has a great selection of old bars and speakeasies and really gorgeous and dark and strange places to drink. And I think that alcohol and massive consumption of alcohol and the criminal underworld kind of go hand in hand. So I think those two things tend to come together. But in terms of how I know about the drinks that are served in The Poison Artists. Well, there's one particular drink. You want to describe that? It's a major element in the book. There's a lot of absinthe in The Poison Artists. And so I did have to go and research that. That wasn't something I had any personal experience with before I started writing that book. But I knew it was the drink for a particular character and so I had to go seek it out. And it's a good drink. You want to describe it? I don't think many people will be familiar with it. Yeah. Are you still illegal? No, it was legalized in the U.S. in 2007. So you can buy it in any good liquor store and you can order it online. Why was it illegal? There was a push to illegalize it in France in I think the 1920s maybe or 1890s. Mainly because there was this perception that the wormwood in it was poisonous and was causing people to go insane. In fact, to be poisoned by the wormwood in absinthe you would have to drink so much that the alcohol would kill you long before the wormwood would have any effect. And so the problems that people were seeing back then were just due to hardcore alcoholics making fools of themselves. And I think maybe the push to illegalize absinthe was driven by wine producers in France who were worried that absinthe was going to cut into their business. But there's quite a ritual involved in drinking. It's a highly ritualized drink. Most good drinks have their rituals and absinthe has an elaborate one that has a lot of equipment. You describe it? Well you take a glass and you set a slotted spoon over the top of the glass and you put a sugar cube on top of the slotted spoon and then you get this crystal reservoir of water that has a little faucet on it. And you set the faucet on a slow drip. So it drips, drips, drips and melts the sugar cube into the absinthe. And the cold water causes the various herbal oils that are dissolved in the alcohol to come out of solution. And it makes the absinthe change color from clear green to this sort of milky, opalescent color. It changes the taste as against just pouring water into it. Yeah, it does change the taste. You've become an expert. I suppose. No, you've actually bought a bunch of it and drank it, right? Yeah, well I bought five bottles and I gave three away but I did drink the other two. Well, you can drink it very slowly. You're a lawyer, you've been a lawyer for quite a long time but you don't write legal thrillers. My goal is to write books that people would want to read and to write books that keep turning the pages. And from what I've seen of the law, I like it but I haven't figured out how to make a legal story into a thrilling story. And I know that some people are fully capable of doing it. I mean, to kill a Mockingbird is a legal story and it's a great one. But for whatever reason, that's just not my forte. Well, you've got, you said yourself quite a reading list in January of this year. You say somewhere, what are you reading now? Right now I'm reading Blake Crouch. I'm reading his novel Dark Matter and I'm about halfway through it and it's compelling and strange. Well, that wraps it up. The Night Market is being published in January and Jonathan, I hope, will show up with the Hawaii Book and Music Festival in May. And again, thank you very much. Thank you, Roger.