 Allington was the birthplace of Uncle Sam, the location of the First Public Children's Library and the site of most of the fighting when the British marched through it, returning from the Old North Bridge at the start of the Revolutionary War. Welcome, Gary, and thank you for speaking with us today. This is not your first appearance with us, however, today we would like to create a holistic view of your professional career as a resident of a historic American town, a university professor and author. Thank you, John. Good to be with you. It's good to have you back. To begin, Gary, has Living in Arlington, a place steeped in tradition and history, influenced your work? Yes. All but one of my novels takes place in the Greater Boston area, the first novel taking place in the Mediterranean, and so I needed to have a locale for my characters and because I know Boston well and I know Arlington well, having been here a long time, I decided to make my characters at home in Arlington. For a few of the books, I called the Carleton just to protect the innocent, but then I went back and they've been in Arlington for the last six or seven books. In many ways, not only is Arlington very special in terms of its location to Boston, but it's a cultural center. It has a nice diversified populace. It is close to all the major highways, it's close to all the schools in town, and it's a great location not only to live but to generate a novel from. I spent many, many years in the Arlington Library, in the Robbins Library, in that glorious room in front, reading room where I brought my laptop and wrote several scenes from several of the novels. So Arlington has been good to me. I've been very appreciative of living here. Several of the novels have scenes in some of the eateries in town. Scooter is one of our favorites, the late great Florida, not your average Joe's. There are scenes in Arlington Center and some of the books. So I mean, Arlington is dear to me and it's dear to the books I've written. So it certainly has its place in here. It has its place, yes. That's great. Under your pen name, Gary Braver, you've been the best-selling author of many books, including your first book, Atlantis Fire. Where did you get the idea for that book, Atlantis Fire? Okay, good. Atlantis Fire is an archeological thriller. I had gone to Mayarka, Spain, which is a couple hundred miles off the coast of Spain, and was on a diving expedition with an organization called Earthwatch Located, that was in Belmont originally, it's now in Boston. And I had read for a few hundred dollars I can go to Mayarka, Spain and dive for second century BC, Roman, and Phoenician wrecks. And I had gone there and after the first week or so we found a wreck about a mile and a half off shore, very shallow water, 30 feet of water, so you could stay down there as long as you want, as long as you had air in your tank. And we were fanning away the sand, and we came up with shards of amphoras, ancient coke bottles. They used to move on the decks of ships with oil or almonds or seeds. And I noticed that a speedboat had cut across our bubbles overhead. And we had our rubber zodiac boat anchored, cut across our bubbles, and then he came back and turned around and cut across the bubbles again. Once it's an accident, two, it's kind of dumb, three, it's on purpose, four, by tenth time this was dangerous. So we flattened out on the water. My diaphragm is going like this because I'm almost out of air. My buddy was out of air too, so we flattened out. There was no cavities, no rocks to get behind and nothing to get under. And this guy came at us with a speedboat and two pendant anchors coming at us like robot claws. And I said, if I get out of this alive, I've got a book in it. So I just moved all that experience because what we did not know is we were excavating wrecks and on the edge of a black market operation we didn't know about. The guy who came after us in the boat was a local godfather who had a very hot business in antiquities. He was pulling up from the bottom of the ocean and selling them to collectors and museums all over the world. So this was dangerous stuff. But I said, if I get out of here alive, I'm going to get a book out of it. I had spent some summers in Santorini, Greece, which is the locale of Plato's Atlantis myth, and I just moved it all to the part of the Mediterranean, the GNC, and called Atlantis Fire. And the divers are pulling up artifacts from Minoan civilization, 15th century BC. And that's where Atlantis Fire came from. But it was really from an experience. Wow. Yeah, yeah. Very, very trying, but a terrific experience. Dangerous experience too. Yeah. And then you have four medical thrillers about breakthroughs of various improvements of the human biological condition, mortality and Alexa, human intelligence in gray matter, dementia and flashback, and the scientific experiment to determine if there's an afterlife tunnel vision. Right, right. Tell us about those books. Okay. When you finish a book, it's like getting fired. I had written a book before that called Rough Beast, which is placed in the Arlington-Wuburn area, and that was based on W. R. Grace Company, depositing a lot of toxic chemicals into the Wuburn waters, and that became a very famous court case that became a movie, in fact with John Travolta, Civil Action. At that time, when I saw that book, the publisher said, give us more of these high concept novels, something that would be either a fantasy or a fear of a large readership, has a strong female character, sent it around a family, and something that really is a good page turner. So I said, okay, what would be the greatest fantasy of human life? And that would be living indefinitely. I had spent some time in Papua New Guinea, which is a rainforest, the second largest island on the planet, and there are at least 400 different languages because it's absolutely impossible rainforest that is as thick as fur. And while I was in New Guinea, there were representatives from Eli Lilly and other pharmaceutical companies that were going to remote villages and asking Shaman, which plants heal, which plants kill? They were looking for miracle drugs growing on trees, and that's been going on forever. The tribal people in New Guinea knew for 5,000 years that if they ate or made a tea out of the bark of the Quintona tree, that they would prevent it from getting malaria. So I mean, there are a lot of pharmaceuticals that are from jungles. And I thought, what if there were in a very, very remote area of New Guinea an orchid that the business compound of which could prolong life? And that, I came up with elixir, which means a fountain of youth drug. And I had a scientist living in Arlington. I think I called it Carlton at that time. And he synthesizes a business compound in this orchid, gives it to his animals, and lo and behold, the Shaman told them, who claims he's 140 years old, that this would prolong life, and lo and behold, the test animals, his primates in his lab, are living very long, well beyond their allotted time. And of course, something like if you're going to have a compound that is in fiction, a compound or anything that is going to cheat nature, there's going to be a downside. If you get off your elixir shots, you have fast forward age and die. So that's the tension within the book. And it becomes the hottest drug on the planet. This guy injects it in himself, of course, because he wants to live indefinitely. And it's the old Frankenstein caveat. In fact, all the next several books are caveats. Watch out what you wish for. And elixir, it's a fantasy I have, which had a gallon of this stuff myself. But the warning about tampering with the natural order is dramatized in the book. Not only would it be a population nightmare, but it would be the elixirs and the elixir nuts, those countries that have the elixir versus those countries that don't. It could be almost a kind of genetic apartheid. Also if you have a six-year-old child and you inject the child with elixir, that kid will be six years old indefinitely. And that could be parental hell, not to match it with a child. And so all these aberrations, if you take it and you stay at 35 years old and everyone in your family gets older than you, those are aberrations. Your son could biologically be older than you, and your mate would age and die. So there are all sorts of issues there. That did well, and the publisher said, give us more of the same. And so I was, thank you, I need now another kind of McGuffin, an Alfred Hitchcock term for something that gets everyone scrambling. And I remember watching, I remember back in the 80s and early 90s, that there were reports that parents can turn their kids into geniuses. And there are all sorts of products that came out, baby Einstein, baby Shakespeare, baby Bach. And if you play these games or play the music to these kids as they're very, very young, they grow up to be geniuses. In fact, there was something put up by Sony, a device that attached to a pregnant woman's belly that would play classical music to her fetus. And climbing the fetal charts today is Beethoven's fifth. So it was absurd. But there had been a study in the 70s out of Harvard that said you can make your kids smarter than they ordinarily be if you expose them to intellectual and cultural things like music and art. So that was gray matter. And it centered on a woman who adores her kid, but he's slow. And she lives in an upscale community where the rewards for intelligence are very obvious, all the fancy cars and fancy homes, and the kids go to fancy schools. And she's got a kid who's not going to live up to that kind of competition. And she is tempted to have a very clandestine, a very expensive and a very dangerous medical procedure that enhances the IQ of a slow child. And then everything goes awry from there. And that did fine. And then the next book was Flashback, Where That Come From. My aunt, who was a very bright woman whose presence would fill a room, got dementia. And she was slowly bumping down the staircase to the end. And she was at a nursing home nearby in Watertown. And by that time, she was just something attached to wires in a bed. And I had gone there with my aunt, my cousin rather, her daughter. And my aunt was just sitting there kind of babbling, and Alice and I were talking. And all of a sudden, something very, very strange, a Stephen King moment happened. She began, my aunt in bed who was not even verbal anymore, started speaking in a little girl voice in Armenian to her mother who had died 80 years before that. And I was one of those, oh my God, movements. And at Currieville, what if someone were to develop a chemical that normally retards the development of the amyloid plaque that destroys the brain and leads to Alzheimer's, which is Alzheimer's disease. But what if it could reverse that process, not only stop it, reverse that process and restore memory. And that gave me the idea for Flashback. At the time, I needed, and this is a question I always have to confront. What's the first thing I want to know about writing this book before I start writing it? Can I convince the readers of the science? And so I went online and I googled Cures for Dementia. I got four million hits, if not more. But right at the top, right at the top, there was a paper that was about to be delivered in Zurich, Switzerland, the next month by a team of elite neurosurgeons. And it was on curing, or doing something about Alzheimer's. And they had found a neurotoxin that exists in Gila monsters, those orange and black beaded looking reptiles that live in Arizona and down into Mexico. The saliva of the Gila monster apparently is a neurotoxin that is poisonous. If you were to diminish the potency of that chemical and dilute it, it was used to retard dementia and even reverse some of the Alzheimer's horrors. And I said, okay, I'm Boston based, I live in Arlington, my family's going to probably live in Arlington. Where am I going to find a Gila monster looking around? But it took me back to Cape Cod when I was there bringing our children up, my wife Kathy, off of Craigsville Beach, there is a float, a raft, and all the kids would pile on top of the raft and play chicken and tip it up this way, try to knock somebody off. One day, someone yelled, jellyfish! And they all bunched up in the middle. I said jellyfish, and I said neurotoxin, these little buggers really stink and they could do a number. And I had been diving in the barrier reef in Australia. And there is a jellyfish, or a kunji jellyfish whose toxin is brutal, you touch it and you're dead. And there's absolutely no antidote for it. And we have a warm stream going up the Massachusetts coast. What if it got caught into a freakishly warm gulf stream and these ended up on Cape Cod? And that is where the idea for flashbacks and somebody gets in the water and also a pharmaceutical company, and this is ten years before Previgin, the stuff that's on the market now and not approved by the FDA, you see it every night in the commercials to improve your memory, just way before them. But I had an eight-show jellyfish and I thought that ten years before, in any case. And of course, the issue is, again, they caveat, watch out what you wish for. This stuff works well, however, some people get thrown into flashbacks and relive on almost like a mobius strip, the same scene over and over again. So if your father committed suicide by hanging himself, you could relive that over and over again. Yeah, there are always these repeats. Do you doubt that they are not researching these very things today? They are researching these things. Oh, I mean, that would be a $50 billion pill. If you can get something that's going through reverse, we are an older generation. And then, that was done and it was fine, but again, I fired again and got to come up with a new novel idea. I was at a cocktail party and you're gabbing as people gab at cocktail parties and a woman came up and said, I understand you teach science fiction, you teach horror fiction. And then she said, I've had near-death experiences. I said, okay, tell me about your near-death experiences. She said she was in delivery for her fourth child and she thinks she died on the operating table and she thinks she ended up by a well where a male figure looked like Jesus was standing next to her and she's Jewish. So she's not brought up in the Catholicism or Christianity. But he was the iconic image of Jesus and Jesus said to her, she wanted to die. You cannot die. You still have other children. You just lost your baby of other children back home. Look down the world. You can see the other children. And a magician's finger, she said, I woke up and I was post-delivery. I guess she lost her child of stillborn. And she said, I just knew it was so much more real than a dream. I believe that I had had an out-of-the-body experience and a near-death experience and I saw this figure of Jesus. So that actually fascinated me. Near-death experiences go back to Plato where soldiers died and I think they meet their battlemates in the afterlife. So that gave me the idea, what if there were a local neuroscientist who wants to take him to her lab or prove that there might be or demonstrate there might be an afterlife. And that was an idea that came out of also a lot of readings. In the 70s, there were stories that became non-fiction books by scientists, apparently, that became national bestsellers. And even a term near-death experience was coined in the 70s, even though the concept goes back to Plato. And then there were several books that made the bestsellers lists of people. I saw God in these kinds of religious non-fiction books. So I decided to write this book. And of course, the tunnel vision is also, again, as a thriller, there is that sense of dread and that sense that watch out what you wish for. And it works out very well, but the first thing I had to do was go to his neuroscientist before he started even typing, can this be done? Can we measure the mind living the brain? He said, yeah, you could flat-line a person and wake up in three minutes and wire them up to a functioning MRI machine and see if the mind leaves the brain. I said, great. And he gave me all these kind of technical stuff, and I said, so I laced that in. And you can see the trend, the older I get, and I don't believe in an afterlife, but the older I get, the more I hope there is one. So that was tunnel vision, and that did very nicely, too. And 1,000 years from now, that debate will still be going on. Oh, yeah. Right. By the way, it was a nice way to merge science and religion without taking a side on either one, even though it was a kind of a kick at the end. Now one of the courses you taught at Northeastern was science fiction. What drew you to that genre, in particular? I read science fiction by the pound as a kid. I went to Worcester Tech and major in physics, and so I was very science-minded. And it was in the 70s when they then chaired the English department, said that the number of people taking electives in Northeastern's English department was dropping, come up with what you call jazzy new courses that would draw more people. And because I read a lot of science fiction, I proposed a course in science fiction. It was really one of the first around, the college level. I mean, I had nothing to drop. I had no one I could write to, and say, 70 years syllabus. So I put together what I thought were literally academically respectable books, and so my favorites. And it took off. But I started with the caveat that I've used all throughout all my writing, and so many other writers have you, and that is Victor Frankenstein, the Frankenstein novel by Mary Shelly. He makes something, trying to improve on nature, built an eight-foot human being put together by scraps, and hoping to kill death. And so that was what I was doing in Tunnel Vision. And there is a warning. Watch out what you wish for, but I won't give anything away. Yeah. Well, as you might remember. Science fiction, really. Science fiction has that in all these books. That's the same kind of thing. And it was fun to teach, and it took off. Yeah. I grok that. You remember that. You know. Robert Heinlein. Yeah. Strangely, strangely. What do you find most rewarding about science fiction? It does keep, the writers keep a finger in the pulse of technology, and say, watch out that technology science doesn't mess up our dreams of the future. I mean, it's future-oriented. I mean, it is a genre that warrants, that has long before the ecological crisis where, now, climate change, people were writing about back in the early 20th century. It says that there's wonders of science and wonders in technology. It is what the imaginings of imagination of writers gave us the concept of aliens in other worlds. War of the worlds is the very first real science fiction alien invasion stuff. So it's always this wonderfully imaginative kinds of stories coming out of these writers. And it always, it will always be popular. Popular because of the imaginings, and popular because of the warnings, and popular because of the possibilities of human future. Is modern science fiction very different from the Heinlein days, Isaac Asimov days? What is the emphasis of modern science fiction? I think the emphasis that it really comes from the publishers give us series, series because they're looking about marketing and selling. So what many writers today are doing, and it had done in the last 15, 20 years, take a federation intergalactic or interplanetary federation and, in a sense, these old paradigms of us versus them, aliens versus humans, or aliens versus robots, or artificial intelligence creatures, or creatures with artificial intelligence. So you're always, you're in these kind of, the Romans in the ancient Rome, ancient Greek, but set into the stars. And, you know, Star Wars is essentially that old paradigm of our empire versus your empire. Yeah. Yeah. I remember from my early science fiction days, a lot of the books I read, that started my love for reading, was about us going to other planets and inhabiting them and living in them. Just simple stories. Is science fiction today story oriented, or is it more, is a change in that regard too? Because going to other planets might not be as exciting as... You want to keep the excitement level up. You want to keep the interesting science and the imaginings of other worlds and other creatures. But it's really character, I would say, the kinds of stuff being written out is character based. There's more emphasis on the personalities of the protagonist and the antagonists. Just like Star Wars. I mean, think about that. It's really Skywalker and Darth Vader and the others. Who are these creatures? Who are these people? The other stuff is ancillary. It's like a stage dressing, your rockets and aliens and this and that, getting it from here to there. But it really is about characters. And good science fiction writers who can create credible characters is the way to go. Yeah. Those are the ones that are best sellers. Yeah. Yeah. And the readers will take away from your books. That they got ours a good reading pleasure. That it was a good tale, well-written, and that it made them think. And they want to come back and buy a lot more books from Gary Braver. And what about advice for aspiring young authors? I'm sure teaching it, there were a lot of those in your classes. What is your advice to them? My advice is to read the authors you want to emulate. But don't speed read, read them slowly, study them, look at another person's book the way a carpenter looks at a house, the angles, how they get in and out of scenes, how a strip of dialogue is not the way we talk, but the way dialogue happens in movies and in books where you can have characters distinguish from each other, even though it's only five or six inches of dialogue, but read and, like I said, read slowly. I remember years ago at Northeastern there were signs for speed reading courses where you were taught to read a strip of words on the middle of the page. I tore all those signs down. This is crazy professor tearing down the posters. But really, that is my advice. And write every day, I was telling Karen earlier, write every day to take notes even if you're not with a three by five card or you have one of your devices, pick up what people say, how they look with how they dress, and take a journal that helps, yeah. Do you know of any of the students along the way who have become publisher authors from your classes? Yeah, a few of them, a few students from the science fiction course back in the 1990s, so one of two students had written novels and had published some short stories in Asimov's magazine of the science fiction, yeah, they had been, yeah. Do you think students came into these classes mostly hoping to do that someday or? I think so, and maybe I had reputation of being an easy grader too. But I mean the genres are attractive, I mean science fiction, horror fiction, I mean they're attractive and maybe some of them, in fact some of them did say I'd like to grow up to be a writer of this particular genre. Sure. Yeah, okay. Now from your medically oriented books you kind of departed when you collaborated with Tess Gerritsen for the book Choose Me. Yeah, yeah. I got a copy, look at this, I happen to have a copy right here. And even Choose Me in Chinese, which is great. And that was the Me Too movement, the emphasis on the Me Too movement. Now your new book, do you want to say something about this? Oh yeah, sure. Good. How did Choose Me come about? I have known Tess Gerritsen for 25 years. We are on a panel together back in mid-90s in Concord at a book festival. And I had read a few of her books and I was teaching a modern bestsellers course and she said, would you be interested coming in as a guest author? And she said, sure. So we set it up and she came in four times over the years, became good friends. And about five years ago at a Christmas party, we were chatting away and she said, do you want to write a book together? Give me a nanosecond. This is a number one bestselling international author. I think we can pull this off. Yeah. It was right at the high of the Me Too movement, as you mentioned. And all sorts of celebrity males are being put away or being hauled in, like Harvey Weinstein and Matt Lauer and others. Yeah. And she said, what do you think? I said, yes. But I would, instead of having a medical setting as she had done in several books, how about a university setting, because I could handle that better. And we decided that there's two sides to any kind of relationship, two sides to an illicit affair, the male and female. I would do the male chapters and she would do female chapters. So I did all the male point of view chapters. I came up with the storyline and she liked that. And she did the female point of view chapters. And we did over the next 18 months, sent chapters to each other over email. We met only once, talked on the phone twice, but everything was done by email. And because she knew my books, I knew her books, we kind of spoke the same language. What I did learn from this, it was really exciting, a lot of fun. How she, we learned about her audience, because that was going to be the, she's brand name. And her audience was female and over 50, 80% with female over 50. So I had to temper some of the male point of view chapters, not to be offensive, not to, you know, make it too guy-ish. And so it was really interesting going back and forth. And she came back to me and said, do men really think this way? And I said, yes. And she checked with her husband, Jacob. Yeah, men think this way. So it was a lot of fun writing the book. And it took off and got a lot of translations and yeah. Yeah, obviously. This is great. Although I'm unable to read the Chinese version. Yeah, this is Chinese. The only two things that are in Roman Scripler, her name and my name, and they're almost the same size. Great. Yeah, that's quite an honor to have all of those. Well, now your new book, Rumor of Eva, that's coming out October 10th. October 10th, yeah. Speaking, and that's the second one in your departure from medical friends. Correct. So, correct. I had had some police and some police, I had had police procedures and touches in a few back novels like Grey Matter. But since the success of Choose Me with Tess, my agent said, why don't you write your own series? I said, oh, yeah. So I came up with two detectives. They are from Cambridge for reasons that I won't get into. They're from Cambridge and even though there are scenes in Arlington. And it is a, there's a cold case and there's a current case. The current case is that the two police detectives, homicide detectives are investigating what appears to be a suicide in Cambridge. And the character, the cops smell a rat. This is not, this is staged. This is not suicide. And it comes out, turns out to be a murder, a homicide. And as they investigate this particular homicide, they begin to realize there's a cold case from almost 20 years ago behind this thing. Somebody is covering up for something that happened in Cambridge and Lexington actually nearly 20 years ago. To an actual case. This is made up, but to an actual case back then where a exchange student from Slovakia who has Romani blood, Gypsy, is here and she is, she's killed and the cops think it was a cover-up. That is rumor of evil. The rumor had to do with the fact that she, the kids who she hangs around in school see her at a pizza party reading poems and they think she is a witch. Nothing supernatural in the book, but it's a rumor of evil. Wow, it's exciting to be looking forward to that. Now, you already have sent in the second book in this series. I don't know if you can tell us anything about that title, anything where it's not even, it's just done. And the working title, maybe the final title is Heat of the Moment. It involves the killing of a college professor in the Boston area and there are five suspects and it's maddening to the cops because they don't know which one, they're all tied for first place and it's a who done it and a why done it and it's called Heat of the Moment which is the follow-up, the same characters, the follow-up to rumor of evil. So you've sent that next one in. I have to ask you, are you already working on another one or are you taking a hiatus for a couple of weeks? I'm crawling out of the bunker and taking a breather. Good for you. Well, Gary, thank you for coming today. This has been a pleasure to have you back and when your new book comes out, you can come back and tell us more about that and how many more languages it's been translated into and if you're going to be doing book events in Europe and China and wherever. But until then, good luck with your writing and we look forward to the next venture and you help the town of Arlington being a resident artist and you help the world of literature. So that's a terrific thing to have. Good luck to you and see you in October. Thank you.