CT: I have to tell you, I finished your book in 4 hours 

MQ: Really? It's a little bit more of a new direction for me. There are elements I've had in the first couple of books, but then I just went all the way with them in terms of having it be fast-paced from the beginning. Thank you

CT: Cold Barrel Zero was truly suspenseful and completely unpredictable. I usually find that most military adventure novels are unbalanced. There’s either too much action or not enough

MQ: Where it's a lot of people strategizing and talking to each other, then suddenly there's a big blow up at the end?

CT: Exactly! Cold Barrel Zero had its perfect peaks, and you were able to keep your reader engaged in result of that

MQ: That's great! It's tricky because it's hard to write action and have mystery, because with a mystery you need a balance of exposition and dialogue; whereas action needs to be really straight forward, or else it seems like you have too much going on. The idea of a nuclear fallout killing everyone in the world, for example, is so abstract that it doesn't really grab you, and often isn't as compelling as just the idea of someone you love getting hurt. 

CT: How long did it take you to write this novel?

MQ: Probably took a year or 14 months because it overlapped something else I was working on. I wrote a draft and only realized what the big twist was going to be at the very end. I love it when a book surprises me and takes on a life of its own, and this was a great instance where I did something sort of by the seat of my pants in the end, and was glad it worked out

CT: How were you able to keep it consistent?

If you have a pretty tightly plotted book you do need to outline it to set up those surprises. Some say that the surprises should almost surprise you, but it's better if you could plot them out and be very tactical about it. 

CT: And how much of it evolved?

This particular book was a little more of an evolution. I met some people in the Special Ops and researched their training and locations, and it was incredible. Cold Barrel Zero was really scene driven because I had strong set pieces in my mind that i wanted to do, and the plot naturally grew out of them. There's always some interesting way in, and you sort of run with it

CT: It's subtle but powerfully striking

MQ: it's hard, logistically, in the plot to have this high stakes stuff happening in the US. I do like to use familiar settings, and for the reader it can be a little strange to pick up a book if they don’t have a clear picture of the location. The challenge for this was to have set pieces plausibly happen inside the US

CT: Your extensive research amazed me, especially because you don’t have any formal military training yourself. Could you go into more detail about your process?

MQ: I am by happenstance friendly with a few guys to do different Special Operations work and it really helped me understand them as individuals, and realize they have a home lives. Even though they’re depicted as much, they're not comic book action figures that you sometimes see in movies

I was able to talk to a well known Navy SEAL Senior Chief and just the final scene in the book is a pretty long combat diving episode where people with these specialized rebreathing scuba equipment go against the ship and you know people and people are trained to do that. It was really fun to talk to guys who do that, and he actually knew the people who did the last major combat diving attack at the US reforms during the invasion of Panama

Just one of those moments where you've been reading all these stories that seem larger than life and then talking to guys who are in the know really brings it home. I also took the Kidnapping and Evasion Escape class where I learned how to break out of all sort of restraints, and what to do if you're kidnapped or being tracked down to the city. On the last day, they actually kidnap you and throw you in the back of the van with a hood over your head. You then break out, and they chase you all around LA It was fun to have the dickens scared out of me for a while.

The thing I joke about was that the scariest part wasn’t getting kidnapped or chased through LA, it was giving it to the military guys who do this work in real life because you want to make sure every detail is accurate. So when that checked out, it was a huge relief.                         

CT: You were telling me about your Escape and Evasion partner when we met, could you go into more detail about that experience?

MQ: He was great, and he was much more hardcore than I was. He had his own Wilderness Survival company -an amazing company where teaches classes where you just walk into the desert with nothing and survive for 2 days -

We started near Playa Vista, and after suspecting people of following us, he found a homeless encampment and he changed his clothes out - which is a little bit more than I was really ready for. He got in really deep on it, doing a lot of crazy stuff. Since we were partners, we spent the rest the day traveling on parallel sides of the street, looking out for each other as strangers

CT: Reminds me of the relationship between Byrne and Hayes, where Hayes was the mastermind, and while Byrne was also strategizing his next move, and his trust- he was constantly confused about which way to go 

MQ: It’s funny you think you can get it all and you can get an extraordinary amount of detail from the internet, but then there's things you learn like how your hands tremble when you’re scared, and you can't really do fine motor skills stuff. People actually do this for their job and I think that's the most valuable thing. You really feel for the characters, but you're also calculated because you're the author – you step back as you're setting these things up. You really know if it's going to work until you read it yourself. You can think something is genius and then you go to read it and think that is terrible and vice versa. When you're setting up like an emotional thing you'll go back and reread it and then you'll start to get choked up - that stuff is really funny because you know you made it up and you calculate it is affecting a certain way 

CT: Speaking of details - why did you name the ship Odessa? It seems as though that tiny detail of what the woman was reading foreshadowed the book

MQ: Yes, there’s a small reference to The Odyssey in an early scene. All Byrne wants to do is get home and then bunch of obstacles come in his way, just like Odysseus. So after playing around with a few names, I liked Odessa because it sounded very mysterious 

CT: There was the Odyssey in the beginning and the references to the Bible throughout. Why the Bible?

MQ: The Bible has so many amazing phrases that we just think of being great turns of phrase in our language. Even if he's never really study the Bible you use biblical quotes all the time like, for example, reap what you sow. I had a class in college where the professor walked us through all the amazing literary terms that we’ve picked up so it has incredible language in it. For Hayes, I haven’t talked about this much before, he has a right to be angry, but he also knows he can't really give into that anger. It was an interesting way to draw out the two sides to this character. Then there’s the Bible codein the book which has a purpose, in terms of him running the operation

CT: Hayes was that guy i was always rooting for, even if his intentions were unconventional. I feel like I want to know more about him because he was just a fantastic complex character

MQ: Well, I’m just finishing the next Hayes book. He comes back, so more to come!

CT: Which character inherited the most of your personality?

MQ: Different pieces and moves for different characters, but mostly Byrne because he's a character who has one foot kind of in the civilian world, and his job in the narrative is to be a relatable person. He brings people into this world of Special Operations and action, so you know he's the most relatable because he is suddenly thrust into the middle of it. We all have stuff that troubles us or that we’re afraid of. Those emotions and reactions are pretty Universal so I think most people have things they can call on even if it has nothing near the scale of what you're writing about your book

CT: Cook was by far my favorite character because I love terrible jokes - the worse it is the better. 

MQ: Special Operations guys, I realized, are not all like drill instructor hard asses. They can be as varied as all the people I know. I have a friend who tells incredibly corny jokes and when you have a larger cast of Special Operations guys, you have to make sure that they’re fleshed out. I thought I would be so funny if this guy tells corny jokes, and they’re good corny jokes which is really hard to find but I love doing that

CT: There’s a lot of truth masked in fiction isn’t there?

MQ: I do love writing in fiction because I really like to being able to plot it out and to make it you know to have the twists and surprises and other things that come with fiction - it's my favorite thing to do in the world - to plot these things out. In retrospect, I worked at The Atlantic for a while and there are a lot of incredibly great non-fiction guys there. Black Hawk Down reads like a thriller and every detail is true and I’m in awe what Mark is able to do with books like that. 

CT: Why did you choose to write this story?

MQ: I moved to San Diego, and for the first time was surrounded by a lot of the military on the operations side whereas, in Washington, I a lot of friends who worked in the Pentagon. In San Diego, I would go out and I would see Marine attack helicopters coming over and V 22 Ospreys. I can drive past Camp Pendleton and see them using a hovercraft to plan giant amphibious assault. They were doing a dry run of it right in front of me, and I was really inspired by that and the sense of place here. They all just found their way into the book

CT: Do you believe that villains are monstrous because they truly believe that their way is the righteous way? 

MQ: That’s such an important writing lesson. The shorthand for this is “mustache twisting.” The bad guy in some old cartoon where the guy was twisting his mustache while the woman was tied to the train tracks. Every villain is the hero of the story from his point of you or else he’s there as a convenience. It’s funny because sometimes, when I write from the villain’s point of view, creep myself out a bit.

There’s a larger issue of that’s the subject matter of thriller villains doing villainous things. It’s the villains who set the plot in motion, and there is some funny thing where we seek out books or movies so can get close to danger without endangering ourselves

I was glad i could draw on the time I spent on The Atlantic where everyone was talking about terrorism and wars in Iraq. Terrorists are depicted as bloodthirsty killers with no real motive.\hat they're doing as evil and vile, but there is logic to it. It's called terrorism because of terror: they're trying to induce a reaction. Al-Qaeda stopped beheading people because it stopped getting media attention. Terrorism is about getting a reaction, and often an overreaction, and that is a very critical thing to be thinking about. We have to be doing something about the violence happening now in Islamic state, but you have to calibrate to make sure you're not giving the reaction they want. So I’m glad, with my antagonist, I could write about what i learned while reporting on this subject

CT: Do you think it’s important that we have redemption?

MQ: You definitely want a change for every person. You have to walk that line and bring it all to close without it all seeming too buttoned up. You also have to take your hero down as low as they can possible go -- that’s how you really bring the story so it has a lot of emotional punch. 

CT: Is it beneficial to see the line and still cross it?

MQ: Sometimes. It’s so important to read a lot because you develop this sixth sense. There’s some things you don’t do like the classic example of killing a dog. You come to find that some of these are conventions are conventions for a reason. You need to develop this sixth sense of what will work and not try too hard to be shocking. The hardest thing is to be true to your premise and also unpredictable

CT: Do you have a title for your next “Hayes” book?

MQ: Yes! Dead Man Switch