Political intrigue, assassination and espionage aren’t commonly associated with Athens, Ohio — but Ohio University Press has brought ink to paper to create an award-winning novel based on just those themes.
Ministers of Fire, by Mark Saunders, was rated as a Top 50 work of fiction by The Washington Post in 2012 and chosen as one of the “Top Ten Mysteries of 2012” by The Wall Street Journal, all because of a conversation that occurred in Sept. 2010.
“(Mark and I) met under somewhat unusual circumstances,” said Gillian Berchowitz, editorial director of OU Press. “(Mark) was part of a three-person external review of the Press in September of 2010.”
While in Athens for the review, Berchowitz recalled she drove Mark, who is the interim director of the University of Virginia Press, to and from the airport where they discussed a novel fictionalizing the aftermath of the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 and the role a Chinese dissident plays in making an ex-CIA station chief return to the field.
Characters in the novel are acutely alert to all threats and terrorism, while the book itself keeps the reader guessing as to who is honest and who is good until the very end, Saunders said, adding global politics play a role in the story but not in making a point.
“What I try to do is put a group of people who are all flawed human beings who are trying to do the right thing … in conflict with one another,” Saunders said. “Throughout the book, there is an interplay of personal and public events.”
The book’s writing, which Tom Nolan of The Wall Street Journal wrote in his review “makes (the) large cast of international characters come to life with quick strokes,” hits close to home for Saunders as his father worked for the United States Department of State.
“I was a foreign-service brat; I grew up in that world,” Saunders said, adding that while he knew of the “tradecraft” of the State Department, he has found himself more interested in the human aspect of the job.
So far, 3,500 copies of the book have been printed — a high run for OU Press — while it was the top seller for the publishing house on Kindle last year, Berchowitz said.
“Literary fiction and spy thrillers are highly competitive genres and newspapers devote less and less space to book reviews so … I think it's a feather in the Press's cap to have garnered this attention for a debut work of fiction,” Berchowitz said.
Saunders has not preoccupied himself with the publishing aspect of this book, as he is all too familiar with it in his day job, opting instead to enjoy the praise of his work and use it as motivation to work on another novel.
“I don’t think any first novelist could be any happier than I’ve been (as) I got a number of good reviews,” Saunders said. “People come to novels to be entertained and as a writer, you should keep that in front of you all the time.”
dd195710@ohiou.edu
