Robert E. “Bob” McDermott has been around ships and the sea since childhood. He grew up on the Texas Gulf Coast and later graduated from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. He’s had a long career working in positions from ship’s officer to shipping company management, traveling widely and living and working in a number of countries. These days he splits his time between the United States and Singapore, where he operates a marine consultancy, advising clients on ship construction and operations.
But Bob McDermott has always had the writing bug. During “down time” after a particularly grueling work project, he finally completed his first thriller, Deadly Straits. It has gone on to sell over 130,000 copies, garnering an incredible 800 customer reviews on Amazon — 750 of them four- or five-star raves. Since then, he’s released two other high-rated bestsellers in the Tom Dugan thriller series, Deadly Coast and Deadly Crossing.
From now until February 24, 2015, Bob’s second thriller, Deadly Coast, is available as a free ebook download from Amazon, while the debut in the series, Deadly Straits, and the most recent entry, Deadly Crossing, are both on sale for only 99 cents. Once you’ve finished reading this captivating interview, I’m sure you will want to scoop them up. (By the way, click the images below for larger views.)
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The Vigilante Author: Bob, congratulations on your Tom Dugan series and its impressive success.
RE McDermott: Well Robert, first of all I’d like to thank you for inviting me to be part of your interview series. I’ve been a fan of yours since I first read HUNTER shortly after you released it, and it’s an honor to be interviewed on your site.
Author RE McDermott with one of his ships in dry dock
The Vigilante Author: Thanks for that. But let’s get right down to it. You’ve been writing an unusual series of thrillers, each with “Deadly” in its title. Tell us about them.
RE McDermott: The Dugan books all feature Tom Dugan as the protagonist, a late-middle-aged marine-surveyor-turned-shipowner, through a partnership with his former client and best friend Alex Kairouz, a self-made Anglo-Lebanese shipping tycoon. Dugan has a somewhat tenuous part-time relationship with the CIA, which in the past convinced him to gather intelligence using his regular employment as a globe-trotting marine trouble-shooter as a natural cover. And while Dugan is the protagonist, there are a lot of equally strong supporting characters of various nationalities and genders.
The Vigilante Author: Does a reader have to start at the beginning, with Deadly Straits? Or are these stand-alone tales?
RE McDermott: The books are a “series,” to the extent they feature the same characters and do occur in chronological order; but each book is a stand-alone story and — hopefully — provides a satisfying read regardless of the order in which the books are read. I also try to address a topical issue in each story.
For example, Deadly Straits addressed the threat of loaded tankers as weapons of mass destruction, Deadly Coast focused on piracy off the Somali coast, and the latest book, Deadly Crossing, addressed the very serious problem of human trafficking.
The Vigilante Author: Given the range of topics and the nautical setting of your books, how would you categorize them by genre?
RE McDermott: That’s actually something I struggle with a bit. I suppose it would be espionage, action-adventure, or some combination, but none of them are an exact fit. Given my background, I try to make things technically accurate, so to that extent my stuff might be best described as Clancy-like technothrillers. I guess in the end, I’m content to let the readers figure it out, and that seems to vary a lot depending on the reader. How’s that for being vague?
The Vigilante Author: Well, like Clancy, you may be carving out a unique sub-genre of your own. “Nautical thrillers”? Or maybe there’s a clue in the character of Dugan. What do you think is unique about him that makes him stand out from the rest of the thriller-hero pack? And also, how much do you draw the origins of your characters from real life, as opposed to your imagination?
RE McDermott: I have no problem with strong, capable central characters — I’m a huge [Jack] Reacher fan, for example. But the heroes’ actions and abilities have to be at least somewhat grounded in reality.
For example, I have a real aversion to larger-than-life superheroes that seem to be brain surgeons, nuclear physicists, ace helicopter pilots, black belts in a dozen martial arts, and capable of getting shot ten times and still saving the day. Dugan screws up regularly, and when someone sucker punches him, he goes down. A big part of the tension in the story is anticipation of how he extricates himself from the latest screw-up or setback.
As far as origins, I’d say most of my characters begin as combinations of people I’ve known in real life, augmented by a healthy dose of imagination. The real-life part is background, setting, dialogue, etc. I use all those to build the character, and only then do I insert them into extreme situations. At that point, they pretty much have a life of their own.
So while I don’t actually know people who’ve done the things the characters do in my stories, I have known people I think could and would do those things if placed in the same circumstances. Of course, we’re all masters of our own daydreams, and I think that’s one of the rewarding things about being an author. You can share and entertain other people with your daydreams, and even get paid for it. That’s cool on a lot of levels.
The Vigilante Author: Yep. People actually pay us to fantasize for them. What a job, huh?
Bob, you’ve had a colorful career — or series of careers. I’d be interested to hear more about your background, and I’m sure our readers would, too.
RE McDermott: I was born on the Texas Gulf Coast and grew up working in several small family businesses, including a beach-front motel and fishing pier, so I had a natural affinity for the sea. I was lucky enough to get an appointment to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, and upon graduation sailed merchant ships for several years before coming ashore to work in ship management.
That was a winding path: a year working for the Navy in the nuke sub program, several years as ship superintendent for a couple of major oil companies, and then starting my own marine surveying/consulting business. Early in the process I married my wonderful and patient wife of 39 years, who gave me two great sons. I traveled worldwide and lived for extended periods in three different countries, and managed several major shipbuilding projects in the U.S., Japan, Singapore, and China. Along the way, I met a lot of great, and some not-so-great, people. I started scaling back on the marine work to try my hand at writing in 2007.
The Vigilante Author: With such an interesting, active, and outdoorsy background, what prompted you to settle down to a new career so sedate and indoorsy as writing?
RE McDermott: I suspect ninety percent of the population has literary aspirations. I’m basing that on the fact that when I tell folks I’m a writer, about that percentage expresses their intention to write a book “some day.” [Chuckles] But seriously, I was pretty much in the “some day” group for years. I always wanted to give it a try and actually started on a couple of different occasions, but never got beyond a few pages. Essentially, life got in the way, and I didn’t really have the drive to push through the obstacles.
The Vigilante Author: Sounds familiar, I hate to admit.
RE McDermott: That changed in early 2007. The previous year, we’d been living in Singapore, where I was doing ship inspections and other short-term contract work. Against my better judgment I took a contract job as construction manager on a project underway in Shanghai, China. The delivery date for the ship was only six months away, but it was way behind schedule; there were a lot of quality issues and a whole laundry list of other problems. However, the contract was very attractive — lucrative — so I took the job and we moved to Shanghai.
We managed to get the ship delivered in seven months, but it was the longest seven months of my life. I won’t bore you with the details, except to say enforcing quality in China is a pretty daunting task, and twelve-to-fourteen hours of daily conflict for six and often seven days a week took its toll. When we moved back to Singapore in early 2007, I was a complete burn-out, and I didn’t want to look at another ship or shipyard for a while.
That was the bad news. The good news was that we were pretty flush from the China contract, and I decided to take a twelve-month sabbatical to try this “writing thing.” To be truthful, it started as a “bucket list” aspiration, and proved to be a lot harder than I’d figured.
The Vigilante Author: Again — that sounds completely familiar. But continue.
RE McDermott: I hadn’t finished my book in the year allotted, but by that time I was hooked on writing. So we moved home to the U.S., cut our expenses, and rearranged our lives to allow me to continue.
The Vigilante Author: Was this the kind of writing you had always aspired to do?
RE McDermott: As far as the specific kind of writing, I thought it made sense to concentrate on what I knew, so I set my thrillers in the marine world. Also, and because I knew folks in my own industry might one day read the books, I was determined to make the novels realistic.
Additionally, I have a pretty high threshold for the whole “suspension of disbelief” thing, and that sometimes makes it difficult for me to enjoy books with a shipboard setting if the author gets things wrong. I didn’t want to be “that guy,” so anything I didn’t know cold, I researched thoroughly.
For example, my latest book [Deadly Crossing] deals with human trafficking, a subject about which I knew very little until I started the book. I learned a lot more than I ever wanted to know, some of it pretty horrific. There are some truly evil people in the world, and fiction often palls beside reality. I usually end my books with notes as to what parts of the story were reality-based and indications of where I’ve stretched the truth a bit. In the case of Deadly Crossing, I included a link to The Polaris Project, which is an organization dedicated to ending human slavery worldwide, in all its forms. I spread that link around wherever I can, so if you’re amenable, I’d like to include it here. It’s an extensive site, but this link accesses the “about” page, and readers can explore from there.
The Vigilante Author: Bob, consider it done.
Let me ask you about influences. What other writers have left their stamp on you, and in what way?
The author, in his element.
RE McDermott: I’ve always been a voracious reader with wide-ranging tastes, from pulp fiction to the classics. History and historical fiction of all periods is also a favorite, so it’s difficult to say what may influence me subconsciously.
However, when I actually began to write and think consciously about what I was trying to achieve, the book that stood out for me was The Sand Pebbles by Richard McKenna. Most people — at least most folks our age — remember the 1966 movie starring Steve McQueen and Candice Bergen, but not too many have a clue about Richard McKenna. He was a farm boy from Idaho who didn’t start writing until his late forties, after having spent twenty-plus years in the U.S. Navy, retiring as a Chief Machinist Mate. His first, and last, novel was The Sand Pebbles, which was published in 1962, won the Harper Award the following year, and was on the New York Times bestseller list for 28 weeks. The movie won nine Golden Globes and was nominated for eight Academy Awards. He died from a heart attack in 1964 while he was working on his second novel, and two years before the movie version of The Sand Pebbles was released. Several of his short stories were released posthumously, and one won the Nebula Award for Science Fiction.
The Vigilante Author: This is the first I’ve heard about him.
RE McDermott: I didn’t know any of this when I first read The Sand Pebbles. What I knew was that I could smell the Yangtze River mud, feel the heat of the engine room, and sense the tension among the crew as if I was there. I knew that whoever wrote those words had lived at least some of them, and I wanted to give readers the same experience. I don’t think I’m quite there yet, but hopefully I’m moving in that direction.
The Vigilante Author: You’ve attracted thousands of readers who are leaving hundreds of reviews on Amazon filled with extravagant praise, so I guess you are well on your way. Still, what’s your biggest challenge as a writer?
RE McDermott: Far and away the toughest obstacle for me is starting a new story after I’ve just finished one. And to be honest, it’s not something I’ve totally conquered just yet, and I still procrastinate a lot. My late sister was a journalist turned freelance writer, and she described it as “pencil-sharpening mode,” a term I think is pretty accurate. Fortunately, it’s getting a bit easier each time, so I guess there’s hope for me yet.
The Vigilante Author: Ouch. Yet again, I can personally relate.
As you know, Bob, my own fiction contains strong political and philosophical themes. What about yours?
RE McDermott: To a degree, I suppose, but not overtly or consciously. Dugan and some of my other characters definitely share my views, but I suspect that comes through subtly, if at all. Truthfully, my political/philosophical views are a bit of a mixed bag. I’m somewhere in the center-right/libertarian area of the political spectrum, I guess, and I do have strong opinions on a lot of issues; but I don’t consciously address them, or suppress them, in my writing. I just write what feels natural and figure, it is what it is.
The Vigilante Author: What do you find difficult about writing? And what do you like best about this crazy profession of making up stories?
RE McDermott: Well, I already covered the hardest thing above — starting a new story. And the greatest reward, easily, is getting email from readers. I truly appreciate it when a reader reaches out, and I answer every single email, usually at length. And as you know from personal experience, my emails can be as long as other folks’ chapters!
The Vigilante Author: Ha! You should talk. Friends tell me that I can’t even sign my name in less than five thousand words.
RE McDermott: I’ve gotten to know a great many of my readers and exchange a lot of email with them, but perhaps the messages that touched me most deeply were from two different readers in similar circumstances. One was a gentleman undergoing chemotherapy for an aggressive cancer, and the other was the wife of a fellow in similar unfortunate circumstances. Both wrote to thank me for taking their minds off their problems for a few hours during difficult times. If I never receive another benefit from writing, those emails are reward enough. By the way, I now exchange email with both those folks regularly, and I’m pleased to say that both patients recovered.
The Vigilante Author: I’m always moved by the letters and email I get from readers. It’s amazing how stories touch so many people in such unexpected ways. Amazing, humbling, and so gratifying.
You have self-published your novels, and that decision has turned out to be unusually rewarding for you. What prompted you to pursue the “indie” route to publication?
RE McDermott: I didn’t really start out to be self-published. When I finished Deadly Straits in early 2010, only “losers” self-published — or so I was led to believe. I jumped on the query-go-round with all the other aspirants, trying to attract an agent. It was easily the least productive and most discouraging year of my life. I did get requests for partials [of manuscripts] and even a couple of “fulls,” but they all resulted in complete silence or the “I just didn’t love it enough” response.
During that time, I was also learning as much as I could about the publishing business. I stumbled upon blogs by Joe Konrath, Dean Wesley Smith, and others, and slowly formed the opinion that traditional publishing was seriously flawed and inefficient. That opinion was validated by my own experience in another industry.
For example, I’d never considered the marine industry to be particularly efficient, but in 2000, I’d run a project where we took a ship design from the back of a napkin to a finished state-of-the-art cableship, delivered in sixteen months. That included detailed design and engineering, model testing, construction, sea trials, and not incidentally, compilation and publishing of about 200 technical manuals translated from seven different languages. That wasn’t considered a big deal, nor was it particularly profitable — shipyard margins are about five to six percent. Somehow when viewed through that lens, the fact that traditional publishing takes a year to eighteen months to get a book on the store shelf after it’s written seemed absurd.
After that epiphany, I knew I probably wouldn’t be happy in traditional publishing, even if I succeeded in getting agent and a publishing deal. I learned everything I could about self-publishing, hired an editor, proofreader, cover artist, etc., and released Deadly Straits in August 2011. It’s easily one of the best decisions I ever made.
The Vigilante Author: It’s just amazing how parallel our paths and conclusions are on so many of these things, Bob. So, then what publishing route would you recommend to aspiring writers today?
RE McDermott: You’re joking, right?
The Vigilante Author: Just checking to see if you’re still paying attention. What can readers expect from you in the future?
RE McDermott: Well, the Dugan series will continue, at least for the foreseeable future, but I’m working on a couple of other projects as well.
I’ve always liked post-apocalyptic fiction, even before it was hot, and I’ll be launching a PA series, also with a marine/maritime component. Another project near and dear to my heart is a World War II series focusing on the merchant mariners of that era. That will probably be a trilogy. I’ve worked on it on and off for some time. Ideally, I’d like to put out one Dugan book, one PA book, and one WWII-themed book a year; but given my writing speed and tendency to get bogged down in research, that’s more of a target at present.
The Vigilante Author: I too tend to mull, ponder, research, and outline a lot before I feel comfortable enough to get started with the actual writing.
RE McDermott: On other fronts, I hope to get Deadly Crossing, the third Dugan book, out in audio format, to join the first two Dugan books. And Amazon Crossing has just released a German translation of Deadly Straits. It’s my first step into the German market, and I’m optimistic that it will be well received.
The Vigilante Author: Well, congratulations on that, Bob. Your books have international settings and appeal, and I’m sure that the translations will succeed. Now, where can readers buy your novels? And where can they find out more about you and the Dugan series?
RE McDermott: Readers can contact me via my website, or they can visit my Amazon Author Page to learn more about me and my work.
I enrolled all my books in the Kindle Select program last year, so at present, my ebooks are only available on Amazon, at the following links: Deadly Straits; Deadly Coast; Deadly Crossing; and in addition to the just-released German translation, there’s the Spanish translation of Deadly Straits, titled Estrecho Mortal.
Paperback editions can be had from Amazon at the same links, as well as audiobook editions of Deadly Straits and Deadly Coast. The paperbacks also are available on Barnes & Noble.
The Vigilante Author: Bob, thanks so much. This has been terrific. I hope publication of this interview helps a lot of new thriller fans discover your work, especially during your late-February 2015 sales promotion.
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Photo (c) by Debbie Scott
