It's interesting to see the many varied paths writers take before they hit their stride. Some labor away in fields you might expect for a crime-fiction author such as the legal field, journalism, law enforcement, etc.
Eric Van Lustbader graduated from Columbia College with a degree in Sociology and first went to work as a teacher in the New York City public school system before turning to the music business, for Elektra Records and CBS Records. It seems like a long hop from that point to becoming author of more than 25 best-selling novels (including taking over the late Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne series), as well as short stories, screenplays and novellas, but that's where Lustbader finds himself today.
He credits that success to a writing teacher at Stuyvesant High School who didn't impose any of his own prejudices, but made Lustbader confident about his own talent. Later, when he was in the music business, he ran into an old friend from that same high school who was writing westerns for Avon books, and his success inspired Lustbader to try his hand at writing a novel. It turned out to be the first of a five-volume fantasy series called
The Sunset Warrior, and was published by Doubleday, the first publisher to whom his agent pitched the project.
First came fantasies and then the thrillers, both series and standalones, with his latest,
Last Snow, a sequel to 2008's
First Daughter, in which ATF agent Jack McClure is chosen to find Alli Carson, the 19-year-old daughter of the U.S. president-elect Edward Carson who's abducted a month before her father's inauguration. Since
Last Snow is a sequel, it's not too much of a spoiler to tell you that McClure was successful (long story short), because both McClure and Alli are back in the sequel.
This time, McClure has become an advisor to President Carson who is negotiating an important treaty with Russian president Yukin. When minority whip Sen. Lloyd Berns dies in a mysterious hit-and-run accident while on a diplomatic mission, the president asks Jack to investigate. Accompanied by Alli and Annika Dementieva, a Federal Security Bureau agent who's part of a complicated Russian trap, Jack uncovers a secret agency called Trinadtsat, a shadowy group of Russian oligarchs, while dodging a retired American general out to have him killed.
Lustbader created McClure as a dyslexic, taking inspiration from the author's own mother who suffered from the disorder. But in McClure's case, it helps him to see the world in a different way from most people
—it’s his greatest liability, but also his greatest asset in using his three-dimensional approach to problem solving. As Lustbader has said, "I wanted Jack to be something of a tragic figure because life is a struggle, and it's the heroes who succeed in overcoming the tragedies in their life. Jack is dyslexic, misunderstood by his parents, beaten by his father for being unable to learn as others do. He ran away and was taken in by an African-American pawnbroker. His life has been on the streets of D.C. No doubt, he's my most complex and interesting protagonist since Nicholas Linnear" (a reference to the author's popular Ninja cycle).
Bourne fans, despair not: Lustbader's new Jason Bourne novel,
The Bourne Objective, will be published by Grand Central Publishing in June, 2010. It's his fifth offering in that series and the third in the trilogy featuring Leonid Arkadin, the first graduate of Treadstone.
