Why I Brought McCracken Back

on Nov 27 in Blog Posts, Normal by

Okay, confession time. The truth behind the return of my original series hero Blaine McCracken was not based on planning or inspiration. It was based instead on seizing a fresh and wonderful opportunity based on another opportunity lost.

See, around a year and a half ago Clive Cussler parted ways with one of his long-time co-authors. Turned out my agent happened to represent another of those co-authors and was intimately aware of the opening as well as the whole process, certainly enough to believe I’d be the perfect fit given that my McCracken books owe a lot of their inspiration to Cussler’s terrific Dirk Pitt series.

Now I’m somebody who attacks such an opportunity like a pit bull; I wasn’t about to just put my name forward with a resume of titles and hope for the best. No, I decided instead to go all-in by writing an extended sample. Here’s where the fun begins because, like my nine-book McCracken series, all of Cussler’s series are high-concept based. So I put brain to the grindstone, did some thinking followed by research, and discovered that no thriller writer had ever done a book using the mythical Pandora’s box as a jumping off point. Such historical speculation has long been the basis of this kind of book, Clive’s and mine included, so I had the germ of an idea I knew rocked:

What if Pandora’s box was real?


Click to watch

Well, it turns out the box was really a jar, but that’s beside the point. The real
point for our purposes anyway is that Clive decided to go in a different direction.
Disappointing for sure, but this business is all about getting up off the mat, brushing
yourself off, and getting back into the fight. To digress slightly, I had recently placed the
first five long-out-of-print McCracken titles with a wonderful company called Open
Road Integrated Media that had reissued them in digital format, giving new life to the
series and the character. So here I was with a hundred and fifty pages of a potentially
great adventure and nothing to do with them. But not for long because, thanks to Open
Road, I had something to do with them indeed: convert the story that was basically made
for Blaine McCracken into a McCracken story.

It was one of the smartest things I ever did and also one of the easiest, since
trying to tailor my writing for someone else hadn’t been much fun at all, while going
back to my old pal Blaine was a blast from the start. I added an extended rescue
sequence prologue to reintroduce McCracken to readers and rewrote the original pages
which exploded with the kind of life, energy and pacing that had come to typify the nine
previous McCracken books. I’m not saying it was easy, because the high-action thriller
form requires an elegant and seamless choreography to make the extended action
sequences seem fresh and original, as big and broad as what long-time McCracken fans
had come to expect.

Look, I stopped writing books featuring him fifteen years ago mostly because I
thought I’d taken his character as far as I could, along with the fact that the end of the
Cold War sort of sounded a death knell for these kind of thrillers. Fortunately I was
wrong on the first count and, thanks to the great writing of authors like James Rollins,
Steve Berry, Vince Flynn and Brad Thor among others, this kind of thriller found itself
very much back in vogue in the wake of 9/11.

In other words, the timing was perfect to bring Blaine McCracken back. Perfect
but also challenging. First off, the stakes had to be typically high. The McCracken
books were highly influenced by Ian Fleming’s James Bond. That meant the fate of
the world, or at least the country, had to be hanging in the balance. Good thing I had
my Pandora’s box idea, along with something else I’d been playing around with: dark
matter, the least understood and potentially most powerful (and, thus, deadly) force in
the universe. The disaster aboard the Deepwater Horizon stuck in my mind, planting a
seed of an even more epic disaster on an offshore oilrig as the basis for maybe the biggest
action-adventure tale I’d ever penned. Absolutely perfect to center around McCracken
and certain to please his most ardent fans who expect nothing less of him.

Uh-oh, though, I had another problem: as a deep cover operative who cut his
teeth in Vietnam’s Operation Phoenix, he’d have to be around 60 years old unless I
wanted to cheat a la Robert Parker who made the mistake of making his wondrous
Spenser a Korean War vet meaning he’d be around eighty-five now and still kicking butt.
But cheating the reader was no way to reintroduce McCracken and had I made him, say,
forty-five, he’d have been killing Vietcong at the age of ten. So I decided to age him
normally and introduce him in Pandora’s Temple about to celebrate his 60th birthday.
The phone has pretty much stopped ringing and time seems to have passed Blaine by,
when the call that brings him back to action comes.

And that’s one of the things that brought him back to life for me. I realized he
made the perfect metaphor for so many successful businessmen and women who find
their jobs outsourced or phased out when they reach the same age, thanks to the current
economy. I knew I had a theme that would create an emotional resonance in Pandora
that would help elevate it above the run-of-the-mill thriller and make it not just a worthy
addition to the series, but maybe the best one yet. Lucky number ten!

Once I realized that, I was able to swiftly recapture McCracken’s voice and his
sharp, thoughtful exchanges with his right-hand man, the seven-foot indestructible and
wise Johnny Wareagle. It happened organically and didn’t need to be forced at all,
although I did go back and add some scenes to help recapture the magic between them
that helps define who they are and the eternal quest they find themselves on.

Because at heart all great thrillers are quest stories and McCracken’s quest here is
to find Pandora’s box because that’s the only way to save the world. But this time out in
saving the world, Blaine is also saving himself from the scrapheap, and watching him
come to embrace that opportunity as the story goes on imbues the book with just the
verve it needed to do justice to a hero who’s been away from the page since 1998.

Based on the early response to Pandora’s Temple there’s no way he’ll be away
for that long again and I’m already dreaming up his next challenge, the next topic no
one’s ever written about before, that will serve Blaine well. While we await that time,
and while you enjoy this book, I have a question for you:

Who’s your favorite series hero and why?

Love to hear what you’ve got to say. After all, without you there’d be no Blaine
McCracken and there’d be no Jon Land.

13 Comments

  • Roger Weston says:

    I came across your new book on Amazon and it seems your fans are thrilled to have McCracken back. Great post.

  • HOWARD says:

    what a treat to see the return of McCracken. i have your last two McCracken books that were published in hardcover and enjoyed them as I had the previous books. after a few years I kind of thought that was the end of the series. so thanks so much for bringing him back. my copy of the book arrives tomorrow and it should be a great xmas treat.

  • Mark says:

    Thank you for bringing McCracken and Wareagle back. They are two of my favorite literary characters of all time. Hope there are more to come! THANKS

  • Bill says:

    Thank you Jon for the great Christmas present you just gave me and all of your fans by bringing Blaine back. Look forward to reading it and others to follow. Now, if we can only get you to bring back Ben Kamal too.

  • Glen Shevlin says:

    I wish you would bring back jarred kimberlain,as he is my favourite character out of all of your books – better than McCracken,or Caitlin and kamal and danielle

  • Jerry says:

    I had actually e-mailed you years ago asking if you would ever bring him back, you told me how much you loved the character but that it would be a hard sell to your publisher. I’m so happy that you were able to convince them to let McCracken return. I’ve read most of your books and he’s easily my favorite character. When they were both active, I preferred him to Dirk Pitt (tho loved reading each of them).

  • David Schechter says:

    Hi Jon,

    Read the new McCracken book while I was in Central America – nice to have him back.

    David

  • J.P. says:

    Im looking forward to reading this book. is there a place i can buy epub versons of your past books with Mccracken? I have read 6 of the series however the books are in bad condition and would be interested in purchasing the whole blaine mccracken series in epub format. so far amazon has the kindle version for most of what i have but I dont have a kindle.

  • susan weidner says:

    I noticed on your fan comments that they are all men.I am a woman and I have been reading political thrillers or just thrillers since I was a teen and it saddens me to think women are missing out on a exciting genre.I have
    been reading your books since your third I think ,it took me years to get ahold of The Lucifer Directive,Doomsday Spiral and the Vortex.When the internet got big I hit the jackpot and got all three.I scrimped and picked up any change I came across since one of them I could only find for 42.00 for a paperback but I had been looking forever and I was determined to have your entire collection so I went nuts and paid it,I do wish the money went to you though.Times here in Flint are not good so I have been unable to get the new Blaine Mccrackenballs novel but it will happen.Keep up the good writing and thanks for bringing Blaine back, at any age he kicks ass.
    Always a fan
    Susan

  • Marty Stepalavich says:

    Hey Jon

    I am the manager from Lechmere that is in your Fires of midnight book. We use to work out at N.E. Health and racquet. Very glad Blain is back, now its time for the return of the Sandman!! You have been will always be my favorite Author. Keep making them, Ill keep reading them!

    Marty Stepalavich

  • Lessa Montgomerie says:

    Welcome back, Blaine! McCracken’s early adventures were what hooked me on the genre and led me to Rollins and Child and Reilly and Thor and others. But I always missed Blaine and Wareagle. Like all of us, they’ve aged a bit but there’s still life in them yet!

  • Karen Ann Stathis says:

    Hello, Jon. I started re-reading all the McCracken books. I had been disappointed when you stopped his adventures and very happy with the latest two continuation of his adventures. I like a series type of book where you get to know the characters and they become like old friends. Sometimes I wonder what the future gad in store for a character in storyline. That was my thought as I finished re-reading Fires of Midnight. What did the future hold for Josh Wolf? Did Blaine ever see him again? Anyway, I do enjoy your stories, thank you.

  • Rick avery says:

    Jon Land is a mastery storyteller and one of my all time fav writers in this genre.
    Funny I thought the Pandora Temple was a bit cussler like when I read it and now I know why.

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