Jeffery Deaver’s new novel The Never Game finds master tracker Colter Shaw in pursuit of a kidnapper who seems to be re-enacting a popular videogame. The idea came to Deaver after his niece unexpectedly murdered him during a round of Minecraft.
“We had a lot of fun playing, but in the back of my mind I thought, ‘What if someone were to take a videogame and bring it out of the digital world and re-enact it in real life?’” Deaver says in Episode 362 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “What if the people who were trying to solve the crime and rescue the victims had to get a feel for the videogame? Had to work with somebody who knew the videogame?”
In Deaver’s fictional game The Whispering Man, players wake up in dangerous situations with only five everyday objects to help them survive. As research for the book, Deaver spent months studying survival skills, though he admits that his research was purely internet-based.
“Probably a better author than I would have gone out west somewhere and gotten nice and buff, and then insisted that he or she be dropped with a container of crackers and one safety pin and have to make their way back to civilization,” he says.
Deaver notes that there’s a lack of thrillers about the videogame industry, which is strange considering that videogames are now bigger business than movies. “Occasionally there’ll be a murder mystery that involves data mining or hacking,” he says, “but nothing in Silicon Valley that I could find. So I like to be on the cutting edge of that.”
For Deaver’s 2009 novel Roadside Crosses, which also involves videogames, he hired a college student to show him the ropes of games like Doom and World of Warcraft. But when he asked her what sort of lingo his teenage characters might employ, she was unable to help.
“She said, ‘Oh I don’t know that. That was four years ago. But you can hire my younger sister,’” Deaver says. “I thought that was so funny. We had to outsource the research to a middle schooler.”
Listen to the complete interview with Jeffery Deaver in Episode 362 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). And check out some highlights from the discussion below.
Jeffery Deaver on Silicon Valley:
“My sister lives in Monterey, which is—on a good day—probably a little over two hours drive. There are people moving there to commute to Silicon Valley, and of course that would be during rush hour, so they’ve got three hours each way. And of course there has to be a subplot in The Never Game about—and I’m not going to give anything away here—but is perhaps real estate behind what’s going on? When we authors who write murder mysteries and thrillers create villains, you really don’t have to sketch out the bad guy in much detail. All you have to do is say they run a bank, they own a drug company, or they’re in real estate, and right away the Snideley Whiplash image comes to mind.”
Jeffery Deaver on research:
“I bugged the New York City police. I’d say, ‘I’ve got to get into your radio dispatch center, I’ve got to listen to the radio calls as they come in, and see what buttons they push.’ And then I did a book that featured the bomb squad, out of the Sixth Precinct. So they said, ‘Oh sure, come on in.’ So I walk in at the appointed time, and these two guys are staring down at a thing that looks like a stick of dynamite, and one of them says, ‘Oh god,’ and he stands up and pitches it to me. Of course they knew the ‘green’ writer was in. And I had a fun time with them—petted the bomb-sniffing dogs and so forth, and took voluminous notes, probably a tenth of which I used. I found that when you actually talk to people, you tend to get so enamored of their story that it skews you away from yours.”
Jeffery Deaver on the media:
“It’s just shocking. I mean, I went to journalism school at the University of Missouri, and worked as a reporter for some years, and we would not think of reporting any story—I did print journalism, magazines mostly—we would not think of publishing anything unless we had multiple sources of attribution. We researched for weeks, sometimes months, before we published the story. We stood by everything, it was completely accurate. And now there’s this cavalier attitude about news—’I say it so it must be true’—and then the weaponizing of information. And that was true in [my novel Roadside Crosses], but now we see it on a daily basis. It’s intended to destroy careers, both in politics and among business people. I just find it extremely troubling.”
Jeffery Deaver on his novel The Steel Kiss:
“The scene that seems to trouble readers the most is a baby monitor hacking, in which a mom and dad have left the child in the crib, with the baby monitor right there, and go off to try to woo a client. And they leave the baby, but they’ve got the baby monitor right there, and what happens is the bad guy hacks into the system and he is now speaking to the baby. … The parents hear this and they’re absolutely [terrified], and they run into the room and see that he’s not there. It was done basically as a practical joke, because the father had insulted this fellow, not knowing who it was. And people who have kids say, ‘I’m sorry the guy got caught in the elevator in the opening scene,’ but [the baby monitor] was the scariest scene to them, and nobody was actually injured.”
