Global Warming, Modern Day Espionage, and Writing Thrillers: An Interview with Bernard Besson

Global Warming, Modern-day Espionage, and Writing Thrillers:  
An interview with Bernard Besson

Bernard Besson is an award-winning French writer and former top-level French intelligence officer who writes smart, modern spy novels. In his Larivière espionage thrillers, a team of freelance operatives navigates today’s complex world of espionage and global economic warfare while trying to lead normal lives in Paris. Whether they are unravelling the geopolitical consequences of global warming or discovering the intricacy of high-frequency online trading, they struggle to maintain their independence in a world where the loyalties of official agencies are not so clear and corruption and political machinations are everywhere. Here Bernard shares some of his insights about global warming, writing thrillers, and his novels. Anne Trager of Le French Book interviews Bernard Besson.

One of your thrillers is about global warming, which is quite topical these days. What did you learn from writing it? 

The Greenland Breach changed my views on global warming, which I used to consider to be a kind of end of the world. I realized there had been several ends of the world—from both cooling and warming. Humanity is capable of adapting to climate change. It has done so on several occasions in the past and it will do so again in the future. I am more afraid of errors made by governments than I am of changes in the weather. What we have to fear is that nations will not manage to live together peacefully. One of the key battlegrounds is business, and both countries and multinational corporations are fighting for key strategic knowledge they hope to be the first to use. Those with the best information will win the battle.

Why write thrillers? 

I got inspired to write my first thriller when I was at the DST, which is French counter-espionage, or the equivalent of the FBI. I was very lucky to be working during the fall of communism and the Soviet Union. We were able to understand how networks of Russian, Bulgarian, Polish, Czech and Romanian spies worked with their allies in France. There were some good stories to tell. Fiction makes it possible to tell more truth than an academic work filled with numbers and statistics—and it’s much more enjoyable to read.

Two of your titles have been translated into English. What inspired them? 

In our world of rapid climate change, The Greenland Breach gives you an entirely different perspective on how we are all being impacted. The blood splattered on the ice sheets of Greenland belongs to shadow fighters, mercenaries fighting battles we don’t learn about on the evening news.

Similarly, we are living in an age of technological disruption. In The Rare Earth Exchange, you get a heart-pounding story that could have been ripped from the headlines. What happens when a grain of sand throws off the well-oiled international finance machine?

**
Limited-time Giveaway of The Rare Earth Exchange. Sign up by June 25.
 

5 Ways to Keep Readers Turning the Pages: Bernard Besson Guest Post

Today I welcome back award-winning thriller writer Bernard Besson.

Bernard Besson has had a long career in French intelligence and law enforcement. He is a former chief of staff of the French FBI, was involved in dismantling Soviet spy rings in France and Western Europe at the fall of the Soviet Union, and is one of the France’s top specialists in economic intelligence. He has also written nine novels that have been published in French. His latest was translated into English. It’s a spy novel set on a backdrop of global warming—The Greenland Breach —and it hits bookstores on April 30, 2014. Here he talks about how his life experience interacts with his writing, and what he does to keep his readers interested. 

BERNARD BESSON:
5 WAYS TO KEEP READERS TURNING THE PAGES

When I’m writing, it’s impossible for me to forget my “day job,” which consists of auditing companies and teaching them about business intelligence. It’s also hard for me to forget that I used to work in the French intelligence services. My writing stems from and is inseparable from my life experience. The process, however, is sometimes painful, because you can be a police and/or intelligence officer without necessarily having the ability to write a thriller or spy novel. For that matter, you can be a very fine mystery or thriller writer without having ever been a police officer or having worked as a spook. The two activities are very difference and it takes a lot of effort to reconcile them. I personally work very hard at not boring my readers. Here are some things I do.

1) Write through your characters.

I don’t want my novel writing to read like a lecture. To do this, I write through my characters, who then come to life with reactions that sometimes surprise me.

2) Do your research.

Before I plot a story, I do research. So, for The Greenland Breach, I spent time with climate specialists to understand the complex reasons behind global warming and explored how, in the past, periods of glaciation alternated with periods of intense warming, before there was humanity and industry.


3) Discover your inner reader.

Only after I have taken in all this research do I start writing, and that’s when I put myself in the reader’s shoes. What questions would a reader ask about Greenland and global warming? What would a reader’s fears and anxieties be? That is when I discover the reader in me, and that helps me to write.

4) Look for original points of view.

Then, still focusing on not being boring, I try to pull in original points of view, without pretending to recount any truths, as I am not a scientist. For that matter, scientists don’t all agree, which is something my readers also know.

5) Use what you know.

My past and present work experience does contribute a lot to making my characters interaction with the world of intelligence and law enforcement authentic. That, however, in itself is not enough to make readers want to keep turning the pages.

Context, Outlines and Character Mutiny: Bernard Besson

Today I welcome French Thriller writer Bernard Besson. Bernard Besson is the author of the recently published The Greenland Breach, a cli-fi spy novel that has environmental catastrophe, geopolitical stakes, freelance spies and Bond-like action. He is a former top-level official in French intelligence and a prizewinning thriller writer. The English translation was published on October 30 by Le French Book, a digital-first publisher specializing in best-selling mysteries and thrillers from France.

BERNARD BESSON:
CONTEXT, OUTLINES, AND CHARACTER MUTINY

Writing a novel is full of surprises. Before I start writing, I explore current geopolitical situations, which offer a wealth of potential topics. I choose what I call the “context” for the story, which in the case of The Greenland Breach is global climate change. From there, I invent credible characters that could act in the context either as politicians, company leaders, members of the military, religious leaders, scientists, doctors or engineers, for example. I imagine how people living in a same country or in different places around the planet will enter into conflict with each other, or help each other on the sly, which in terms of plotting is the same.

The main idea at this stage is to invent men and women anchored in the real world. The story will rise from the relationships—good or bad—that the characters have among themselves. I sometimes use chance as it occurs in real life so that unexpected bonds can develop that will surprise the reader. I like surprises. I need there to be conflict and love. This has been the basis of stories since Homer recounted the Iliad and the Odyssey.

My next step is to invent an ending and a trigger. When I have these two tips of the chain, I build a very detailed outline that mostly serves to reassure me. In the past, I’ve experienced failures and had publishers reject manuscripts, so I don’t start any writing work lightly. The outline can be at least 100 pages long for a novel that will end up being 350 pages.

 I start writing with the trigger, which could be a crime or a disaster, some event that is out of the ordinary. I have learned to show rather than tell, so readers don’t get bored. I tell my story, based on my outline.

But rather quickly, one of my characters will refuse to play along with my plan. It’s annoying and a little stressful. However, I know that eight times out of ten the character is right. I change the outline. Later, a secondary character will become more important than I expected. I try to understand why and often follow what that character is suggesting, but it can mean that I have to change the outline again. I start sweating and go for a walk or a swim. Then, further on in the story, I realize that some characters aren’t advancing the plot anymore. I get my revenge by eliminating them, which adds action.

So basically, writing can be described as having my characters destroy my outline. There is a conflict between them and my pretentions to be a demiurge. Take The Greenland Breach. At first, it was supposed to last a year and a half. My characters helped me to understand that I’m not in the process of writing a boring lecture on North Pole geopolitics. They reduced the story to a few days. They also reined in my ambitions and got rid of a bunch of useless things that I wanted to explain to the reader. In the end, all the research I did served mostly to keep me from making mistakes in the science.

The Greenland Breach, by Bernard Besson and Julie Rose (translator) The Arctic ice caps are breaking up. Europe and the East Coast of the United States brace for a tidal wave. Meanwhile, former French intelligence officer John Spencer Larivière, his karate-trained, steamy Eurasian partner, Victoire, and their bisexual computer-genius sidekick, Luc, pick up an ordinary freelance assignment that quickly leads them into the glacial silence of the great north, where a merciless war is being waged for control of discoveries that will change the future of humanity. 

The Greenland Breach is available for $4.99 as an ebook for the entire holiday season from LeFrenchBook.  You can also pre-order a print copy.