Greg "Gregor" Pratt is a former Ohio attorney who retired after 40 years of general practice focused on litigation in the Cincinnati area. But he always wanted to be a fiction writer, and with the winding down of the practice of law, found time over the last several years to write his first novel, Ebola Island, drawing on his experience as a trial lawyer. Ebola Island is the first in a series featuring class action lawyer, Jack Gamble, who is thrust into the middle of a pandemic on an island with a cast of dynamic characters who must grow to trust each other in their dire circumstances if they want to survive.
Pratt's second novel in that series is Dragon's Eye, in which Jack's wife Maddy, a teacher, goes missing. The police think Maddy has run off with one of her students even though there are no clues—she’s simply vanished. When the police and other agents of the New Zealand government begin to pull back the veil on hidden evidence, Jack and friends embark on a harrowing journey to rescue Maddy from the grips of the Chinese government. But how do private citizens challenge an overreaching totalitarian government with limitless resources and connections?
Greg stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about writing and researching the novel:
Each author and each novel are different. Like most authors my very first novel is still in a box under my desk. It needs so much work! Researching it was great fun and I mention it because the research process was so much different than my later novels.
Since most of my first took place in Newport, Kentucky, which was close to my home at the time I was able to go there and see the streets and some of the buildings for myself. Of course that meant I had to separate out the new buildings. Focus was on the buildings that were there in the 1960s when the Kennedy Justice Department investigated Newport, which had been a vice hot spot since the Civil War. But buildings and streets are just a start. What was life like? I read a number of books about Newport in those days. One that I remember is Razzle Dazzle, which described the lives of people back then and how the legal operations were used to mask the illegal ones. Razzle Dazzle was a dice game where the player often appeared about to make a big win and somehow they never did. I was lucky to have an acquaintance whose father had been quite the gambler. He played cards regularly with a character named Sleep Out Louie, who got his nickname because he would sleep out a few hands in his chair while the game went on around me. The shared stories were invaluable. For instance Louie and my friend’s father would play gin for stakes so high that major league baseball players who were in town would come by to watch the action. They would keep score but would not play. And one of my brothers in law had an ancestor who was a member of “the mob” in Newport. The real life touches of those “true” stories helped give feeling to those chapters of the book and helped define the characters and their interactions.
On my second and third books which were actually published I was not so well placed geographically. Ebola Island (2019) takes place largely in Madagascar and Dragon’s Eye (2022) takes place in New Zealand and Vanuatu. Not only does my budget not allow travel to far away places like that , when I was writing Dragon’s Eye New Zealand was not admitting visitors due to COVID. So I had to come up with other methods to develop the background for my stories.
Ebola Island is a pandemic novel and as you have likely guessed the island reference is to Madagascar. The conditions of the people the island in my novel are wholly a product of my imagination: the physical attributes of the island itself I gleaned or tried to from Google Earth and online research. What routes would my characters travel? What is the terrain like? What landmarks would they see or cross? How far could they be expected to travel in a day/how many days would an overland journey take? What were the flora and fauna like? What creatures inhabit those lands? How available is water? What does the countryside look like if viewed from a mountain’s edge? These are all items I want to represent as accurately as possible. From Google Earth I could travel visually across the island from one identifiable place to another and the terrain changed as the journey went on just like it would if we were really traversing the island. Flora, fauna, creatures and water were all subject to research. Before I started writing I purchased several books on Madagascar , read them and went back to them for reference while writing. In that fashion the big issues were largely correctly represented and hopefully realistic with some specific areas crafted to fit the story. This is fiction after all.
The locale for Dragon’s Eye was predetermined at the end of Ebola Island when Jack announced that after he and Maddy married they were going to New Zealand. In 2019 I was hoping to go to New Zealand, research locations and specifics and then start writing. And I planned to do a little sightseeing and some fly fishing while there.
That didn’t exactly work out. Ebola Island is a pandemic novel published just weeks before we heard of COVID for the first time. And I am proud to say I got a number of things right in that scenario. And some not, for instance I did not anticipate face masks. And I definitely did not anticipate New Zealand being essentially closed to visitors. So here using Google Earth again I visited Nelson, New Zealand remotely and I was able to identify Jack and Maddy’s house, the school their children would attend and walking routes to get there as well as many other physical attributes that played into my novel. I find the satellite view most helpful.
Other facts needed research. For instance, how long does it take to fly a small plane from Tauranga, New Zealand to Port Vila, Vanuatu,? Is there an airport there? What is the name of the airfield in Port Vila and what is its condition? What are the politics, economy, population of Vanuatu? What nations are they friendly with? Are there any ongoing international issues? For issues like that I prefer to start with the CIA World Factbook or just World Factbook sites for each country. These sites are very comprehensive and are attributed to the CIA. They are readily accessible online. By way of example the World Factbook site for New Zealand has twelve sections identified covering such things as Geography, People and Society, Energy, Military and Security. It is often a good place to start to get to know a new and remote area. And it can even spark additional issues or twists and turns for your novel or perhaps just accurate historical references to give your work more gravitas. That type of site will give you ideas on what to explore in more detail. It can help you spell place names correctly and alert you to historic and cultural issues. And best of all, it fits right in our budget.
You can learn more about Greg and his writing via his website and follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. You can find the ebook version of Dragon's Eye via Amazon's Kindle Unlimited, with print versions available via most major booksellers.
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