Sexy Warrior Dreams

by

Lev Raphael

Back in the 1990s when the Michigan Militia and other similar groups were making headlines, an amazing book was published that firmly set these groups in the context of American history. James William Gibson's Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America showed that these militias weren't an aberration, but grew out of our long mythic tradition of the lone gunman (like the sheriff cleaning up a corrupt town against huge odds). This tradition got an infusion of rage after Vietnam, and led to a culture obsessed with masculine violence in new forms. Though for most men paintball weekends were the simplest expression of the new paradigm, anyone could theoretically become a “new warrior,” someone who often worked outside the system, occasionally employing confederates in small elite, independent units. His quest was usually vengeance of one kind or another; writ large, he was making the corrupt world right again, battle by battle.
 
Rambo is the most obvious example. But the latest, wittiest, sexiest incarnation of this dream has been appearing in Burn Notice on the USA Network. The show features Jeffrey Donovan as Michael Westen, an American spy who's been burned and dumped in Miami. To be burned is to bear the espionage mark of Cain: his hefty bank accounts are frozen; he's under universal suspicion; and he's been expelled from the community that’s been his uncertain home. Whatever protection he’s had from his own government has seemingly been withdrawn, and he’s no longer safe—or as safe as spies ever get.

Determined to find out who burned him and why—since he’s innocent of anything that might have brought it about—Westen has meanwhile effectively become an urban mercenary, helping friends of friends with problems that can’t be brought to the police. This freelance knight errantry involves danger and deception, with hefty doses of explosives, gunplay, and scamming the bad guys. The whole package is wrapped in quietly sardonic voice-overs that clue ordinary viewers into the secret life of spies, which is often far less glamorous than we might imagine. We also learn practical methods of destroying or at least diverting our enemies (think Martha Stewart with C-4 and cool shades).

The show is smart, hip, beautifully written, with characters that are achingly real, no matter how over-the-top they might seem at any given moment. Michael's little team consists of partners often at odds with each other, Fiona and Sam. Played by Gabrielle Anwar, Fiona is the drop-dead gorgeous ex-IRA member whose on-again, off-again relationship with Westen is highlighted by the tight corners they continually find themselves in. Their theme song?  Electric Six's “Danger! High Voltage” (Brad and Angelina can't even compare).

Sam is played by Bruce Campbell. He’s the older ex-Navy Seal whose job has been to mind Michael but who is in effect Friar Tuck to Westen’s Robin Hood. En route he manages to mix it up with plenty of beers and rich women who have a yen to give him gifts. Michael’s brother Nate (Seth Peterson) is occasionally pressed into service to aid the team, but reluctantly, because he longs to be cool, yet always stumbles over his own dumb stratagems. And then there’s Michael’s long-suffering mother (Sharon Gless) who treats his being a spy as just another example of her son having fallen beneath her impossibly high standards for filial respect and devotion. 

It’s a heady, comic, perpetually fascinating brew, but you don’t have to have seen even one episode of the show to enjoy the two novels written by Tod Goldberg that are based on the series’ characters.

A mystery novelist, short story writer, and director of a creative writing program, Goldberg has now published his second Burn Notice tie-in novel, The End Game, and if that term makes you shudder, don’t. These books—both The End Game and the series’ first, The Fix—are terrific thrillers. They don’t just capture the zing of the show, they’re well-plotted and deftly written in their own right, plunging you into Miami’s lush life and its roiling international drug underworld, lingering at the sharp points where the two intersect. The End Game is about a kidnapping connected to a yacht race and gives all of us the opportunity to relish Michael, Fiona and Sam manifesting their inimitable, quirky, quarrelsome selves. We also get the chance to see wealthy people behaving badly—something that’s become a national past time in the last few years.

I interviewed Tod recently via email about the show, his craft, and his teaching.

Lev: How did you get this amazing job anyway? I can’t think of a better writing gig than moving in with Michael, Fiona, and Sam. 

Tod: Penguin initially came to my brother, Lee, to see if he might be interested in doing the books as he’s been very successful in turning Monk into a very popular series of novels and previously did the same with Diagnosis Murder, both of which he’d written for on television as well (he actually ran DM for several years with his partner Bill Rabkin). He wasn’t interested, but thought that I might be, particularly since I loved the show and he knew that Matt Nix, the show's creator, was someone I’d known casually for many years. Lee had swung similar offers my way before, but frankly I was never interested in doing any kind of tie-in work. And I’d say that I’m not really interested in doing any other tie-in work now, apart from Burn Notice. It’s a great show, one that I watch every week, and working with Matt is great because we have, I think, a similar aesthetic in terms of crime dramas—I’ve said this in other places before, but I’ve always felt like Burn Notice was just a great Elmore Leonard novel that he never published and instead it became this very cool show. So after talking to Matt about what my ideas were for the novels, how I wanted to write them, the kinds of stories I wanted to tell, we came to a very quick deal and I think within just a few days of the initial phone call from my brother, I was writing the words “when you're a spy” for the first time.

As a fan of Burn Notice and an author, I’m really curious to know what it was like stepping into someone else’s world and assuming the voice of a character you hadn’t created yourself. Did you feel daunted at all? How did you prepare? Did you make any false starts? Did you have any models?

It was hard at first. I re-watched all of the first season (this all came about in November of 2007, so the first season had just concluded), read all of the scripts, talked to Matt about how he created the characters, their motivations, fears, etc. because I really wasn’t comfortable stepping into an established character. I’d never done it before. But I’m a pretty good mimic in general, so once I was able to get the logic of the characters, figure out how Matt viewed them, it was largely up to me to figure out how to get them to feel like the characters from the show, but in print. It’s not as simple as getting the voice-over effect, because that’s actually pretty generic, but about understanding why Michael Westen might think X or Y or Z. I said this in an essay I wrote in the Los Angeles Times about the process, which is that I essentially decided once I started writing that I’d treat the books like a band doing a cover song. I wasn’t going to get it exactly right and I really couldn’t hope to. It wasn’t going to be the same as the show, because, uh, it’s a book. You want a different thing from a book than a television show. But it would be pretty close and I’d put my own spin on it. The fans will recognize everything and then I have to try to give them something more, too. My only real model was reading a few of my brother’s books again. Apart from that, I just told myself I was going to write some good pulp fiction with lots of jokes vs. my usual navel gazing literary fiction where everyone invariably is mordantly depressed, which is my other wheelhouse . . .

One of the great things about your Burn Notice novels is that you not only have Michael  Westen’s TV voice down cold, you’ve also captured the rhythms of the other characters’ voices, too. Was anyone in the cast harder to pin down than anyone else? Did you read your dialogue aloud to hear it, or have someone else do that?

Well, Michael is actually the hardest because it’s not just about getting the “when you're a spy” stuff, it’s also about having his interior narrative thought drive the story forward . . . and god knows what that guy is thinking! So that was the one thing I really have to always concentrate on. The dialog for everyone comes pretty easily because they have really defined subtext. I don’t usually read my dialog aloud intentionally, though I do find myself sitting at my desk speaking the dialog aloud as I write, which always makes me feel slightly insane.

You’ve also got the Miami setting just right. Have you spent time in Miami? Have you read thrillers set there?

I’ve never been to Miami, but that’s why god made Google Maps and Google Earth and blogs and Facebook. If I need to know something about Miami that I can’t find in the stacks of guidebooks on the city that I have, or can’t find online, I generally throw a line out into the water on my blog or Facebook with a question like, “If something blows up on the MacArthur Causeway, would you be able to see it from the TGI Friday’s in South Beach?” and get 8,000 bites back. I have lived in resort cities most of my life,  however, so that’s been helpful in capturing that always-on-vacation feel.

I’m sure I’ve read some thrillers that take place there—Tim Dorsey, maybe? Elmore Leonard? Carl Hiasson?—but none jump out at me as particular influences.

In The Fix you call Miami a city that was always home to ruffians and rogues, and is now overwhelmed by ostentatious wealth and envy. Does it share those qualities with Los Angeles? And Michael Westen seems completely removed from envy, but is he a rogue or a ruffian in your view?

I think Michael Westen is an anti-hero, which is part rogue and ruffian and, in his case, a guy who goes and fixes his mother’s sink. He’s done bad things. He’s killed people. And yet we feel empathy for him because there is someone worse than him, someone without conscience who has burned him. Plus he’s got an ex-girlfriend he still sleeps with, a dumb brother, dad issues . . . he’s a guy who has a job that has made him into something unusual, but he’s still just a guy with problems, which is why I think people are drawn to the character.

I think most places are overwhelmed by envy—or at least the people who live in those places are. Los Angeles is a strange place in that you meet an accountant or a rabbi and they both want to get into the entertainment industry . . . or at least want to be famous. I’ve written about this before, in other books and stories, but I find that LA is unique in the sense that it’s the only place in the world where people who are file clerks at a studio say they work in the entertainment industry.
 
Do you read any spy novelists, people like Alan Furst or John le Carré?

No, not really. The last proper spy novel I read was The Brotherhood of the Rose by David Morrell, and that was about twenty years ago. I read a lot of crime fiction, but most of it hews more closely to noir.

To write these books you had to do research into the world of real espionage. Did anything surprise or delight you in your journeys through that underworld? Did it give you ideas for a spy thriller of your own? Or have you just started learning Krav Maga and turned your home into a fortress?

Yeah, I’ve been surprised by how much spy technology has filtered down into our everyday life—things that ten or fifteen years ago were the height of espionage (like, say, a telephone that can take a picture) are now in everyday use everywhere. Particularly devices to bug houses. You can get them all online for fifty bucks. Satellite technology. GPS. All that stuff. I’ve also been surprised to find how little spies actually do. They mostly sit around reading stuff. Not a lot of gun fights and hot sex with Russian agents, sadly.

I don't imagine I’d want to write a spy thriller of my own. Having now written three Notice Burn novels, I can’t imagine I’d be able to write a convincing spy novel that didn’t sound a lot like Burn Notice.

In The Fix Michael says that “one of the first things you learn about being a spy is that there is no chaos. Everything that appears random and disorganized is ultimately connected.” That's a sort of Don DeLillo observation. Did you find that thinking the way Michael did, seeing the world from his POV changed how  you perceived the world? And did his character ever rub off on you in other ways?

No, not really. I don’t care to be that paranoid. I mean, I think in some sense a lot of things are connected if you look at them closely, relationships and friendships and networks of people tend to collide without you ever knowing about it. One thing I’ve learned reading about spies and the history of the CIA and such is that there is always evidence of things happening, it’s about whether or not anyone cares to put all of the pieces together. The only way the character has rubbed off on me is in my choice of sunglasses and my desire to have rock hard abs.

Has taking on these characters changed you as a writer? Have you learned anything that you can teach your writing students at the University of California Riverside?

It’s taught me that I can write quickly if I’m writing in a particular voice or am writing a particular kind of story. All three of the books have taken me three months or less to write. My novel Living Dead Girl took me two years to write. The stories in my upcoming collection Other Resort Cities probably took me, on average, a month each to write over the course of two years. The stories in my collection Simplify took me a good month each, too, over many years. My first novel Fake Liar Cheat took me a year. Even a novel I wrote and couldn’t sell because it wasn’t very good took me two years. The difference is that these books are sort of like screenplays in that I don’t do much more than write dialog and action vs. the loads of interior dialog I have in my more literary fiction, which tends to take me a long time to come up with because, well, I don't know why. Maybe because I’m thinking really hard about each and every thing the characters are going through in my literary fiction, whereas in Burn Notice I know how it’s all going to end, no matter what. So in that way the novels are fast to write because I know on page 300, everyone will be standing. The good guys will win. That’s been the biggest change for me as a writer—I turn off the literary brain and focus on making popcorn, which is to say I tell a lot of jokes, focus on the repartee of the characters and don’t delve to deeply into Fiona’s existential angst.

It’s provided me with at least one tangible teaching tool: When my students come into my office and tell me that the classes are too difficult, that I’ve told the professors to give them too much work and how could anyone be asked to write twenty-five pages in one month while also reading five books, I’m able to say, well, let’s see, this month I wrote 150 pages of a novel, ran this creative writing program, reviewed three books for different newspapers and also read 100 pages of student work . . . and here I am, alive and well and still married, too.

Are there ways you personally connect with Michael Westen’s sense of being an outsider, both to his family, and now that he’s been burned, to the spy community?

Well, let’s see. I had an insane father who I never had a relationship with and then he died. My mother smokes a lot and once moved next door to me while I was on a book tour. I also briefly dated Gabrielle Anwar . . .

Fiona is such an unusual character that the New York Times recently did a piece on Gabrielle Anwar's luscious portrayal of a woman as hung up on guns as she is on Michael. Did you find yourself tempted to let her take over any scenes? Or was keeping her and Sam subsidiary not a problem?

In The End Game I decided to give Gabrielle her own point of view for a chapter, in essence to see if I could. You don’t want to get too far into that head, because once you know why she is as she is, you lose a bit of that careful mystique, but it’s hard to just have her there as a comic foil. I felt like I wanted to take her out for a spin just to see how it felt. I liked it. Plus, it gives the readers something they don’t get on the show, which is why I also use Sam’s point of view—otherwise, both of them can really become expository characters. In the new book I’m writing, I give her another chapter, this one fairly pivotal, because I felt like, well, she’s the one person who can inflict a lot of violence and get away with it, because she’s smaller and weaker than the bad guys (at least in appearance) whereas if you have Michael beat up everyone he sees, he ends up like a bully.

Speaking of Sam, he seems to know everyone, and he even says in The End Game “I have friends who don’t even know they’re my friends yet.” This made me laugh not just because it fit him so well, but because of your hilarious take on your web site about Facebook and “friending.” You have some juicy things to say about some Facebook nudnicks—have they really pissed you off that much?

There was a woman on Huffington Post who wrote about my particular rant about Facebook’s annoying “25 Things” trend from a few months ago as if what I’d written was some sociological statement about social networking, when in truth it was just something funny I thought I’d post up about how annoyed I was that people kept asking me to read their 25 things (and by people I also mean: my family). But it wasn’t real, of course. I’m no more the person on my blog than I am the characters in my books, which is to say that if I was really that angry I’d have stroked out by nineteen. I think people forget that I’m a writer when they read my blog, that if I’m putting something up there, it’s likely because it seems like something people might find entertaining vs. something they should treat like a thesis. (And I’ve added 125 friends since I posted that bit . . . though I did befriend a woman who, in the comments, said she’d love to read a good, self published novel about the Mayan calendar; that's a person I can’t be friends with, clearly.)

One more about Sam: you switch to his POV (or his reflected through Michael’s) for a while in each book. What made you choose those particular scenes?

Sam needs his own POV in the books, or else all of the investigative work is expository conversation, which it often is on the show because they don’t have time to show Sam meeting with his buddies. He just shows up with information and the story goes forward. I decided that was something the reader really needed to see, plus I like writing Sam. He’s fun. He’s a wild card. I also tend to go a little deeper into an observatory voice with Sam than I do in the first person voice I use for Michael, which is a nice artistic shift for me when writing.

Like you, I have an MFA in Creative Writing and I was just on a panel with Michigan State's Poet-in-Residence Diane Wakoski, who urged students in the audience to avoid the programs and just “go off somewhere and write.” What's your take on the usefulness of MFA programs?

So, would Diane then opt to be the Poet-in-Residence at Kinko’s? I know that’s catty of me to say, but I’m of the opinion that if you don't approve of the experience, don’t take the coveted (and lucrative) academic spots . . . go out and live, write your poetry, but don’t say you believe one thing and do another for personal gain. But the other side of this is that I’m only just now getting my MFA from Bennington (I graduate in June). Prior to applying, I’d already published five books, dozens of stories, essays, book reviews, etc., so I certainly didn’t need an MFA to become a professional writer, nor a professor, as I’d taught at UC Riverside’s Palm Desert campus for a few years at that point and had taught at the Writers' Program at UCLA Extension for eight years, and also at California State University State Fullerton and CSU Northridge, too. In fact, three of my classmates at Bennington had been my students at UCLA. I went for my MFA for professional reasons, namely that I love to teach, and the MFA was required for me to continue forward in my job directing the creative writing program. In process, however, I learned a great deal and, I think, improved as a writer.

I think MFA programs are useful in that you get that intensive indoctrination into letters and you get that important apprenticeship time—which I really did at UCLA Extension, where I took creative writing classes for two years after college while working in stultifying corporate jobs. Writing is the one job everyone thinks they’re capable of doing, but it’s simply not the case. Not everyone has talent, just as not everyone has the talent to be a plumber or a surgeon, either. Not everyone knows how to tell a story. Can writing be taught? No, not really. But a foundation in the art can be taught and if you have talent, it can be very productive. Particularly since many universities provide full funding. I think spending two years writing while being subsidized sounds particularly inviting. I would say, also, that going out to live is a good idea, too, as that's where the great grist of drama is found, so I’d advocate that people should wait a few years before going to be an MFA. Get a few scars.  Do you need an MFA to write? Certainly not. I’m proof of that. Will an MFA hurt a writer? Certainly not. And it may just one day get them a job being Poet-in-Residence somewhere.

Is there a special book that set you on your path as a story-teller? 

Rock Springs by Richard Ford. It was given to me my sophomore year in college by my creative writing professor at Cal State Northridge and that same dog-eared copy has lived with me ever since.


Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His new memoir My Germany was published in April 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report, and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.