Blow you off and keep going. He lives in his own world. I think people take his aloofness for rudeness which is not that at all. He used to be a darius outgoing guy and then had a traumatic brain brain injury and it changed his body. I think its evolved and you see in the fall and that my wife is funny, she read this book and she said i finally like him. He reached his humanity level. At the core. It took me four books to get there but i like complicated guys and hes complicated. Host thank you for being with us for our indepth program and in this special series we sit with authors for three hours talking about their life in their work. David baldacci will spend the time with us today and we hope very much for both of us as we enjoy your interaction that you will be a part of the conversation. As we continue along here we put the phone numbers on the screen and our facebook and twitter handles so you can join in on the conversation and we very much would like to from your questions about his writing, characters hes developed and why you are intrigued about them and the key to success over the years. What makes amos decker a good hero . Especially for thrillers. Guest when i first thought about a series of him i thought what would be good to do so i get this guy who is irascible and aloof and does not get along with people and does not get jokes or pick up social cues, he walks out of the room while he talks to you and thought he be popular but it he spoke to me. Ive always been fascinated by the mind and this is guy whose mind changed and had no control over that and also he had to rebuild his life and when you are developing a series you have to have enough material to justify it more one book and its almost like the character will evolve and if people can relate to it and enjoy and watch and see a change and if the characters have not changed as a point to writing a book. With him he had an enormous amount of material. This back story about his brain injury and family being murdered and about this perfect memory. When i first went on tour with the first memory everyone in the on and said raise her hand if you think its cool to have a perfect memory and cant forget anything but a lot of people said that be great but i said raise your hand if you live in something in your life you forget and everyone raised their hand read dads dilemma. There are lots of things he rather forget but for me with school about him is that every time i put him on the page i have no idea what he will do. Host when you start and think about all of your books but much already series and you said you dont want to do the one thing but that do you have a sense of what or how many can play out with him or is this evolve as you write . Guest are not good at predicting stuff like that. I never and im not like jk rowling that said there would be seven books and thats it. For me i written series and ive series that have five and other series have more than that. Its how much gas in the tank does a character have and do i want to keep discovering things about it. Am i excited about finding him or her on the page and if the answers and that our gas then i keep going regardless of what the book count is. Host how did you develop amos decker . Is there a model in the real world that you knew him from . Guest no, it was almost like frankenstein. I knew i wanted a large guy and wanted to have this enormous intimidating presence even though hes not an intimidating guy and i knew he would be a Football Player and that was the source of the brain injury which is all too prevalent these days, professionals more than football. Ive been thinking about that stupid a lot of the players i love going up watching they are either passed away, wheelchairs and if they are 60 years old they are totally gone and the brain is gone and i wanted a story where the characters grapples with those and they have this large presence and build them into a detective with a unique feature but all the other baggage that went along with it and he does not pick up on social cues anymore and on one hand you have a superpower and this perfect memory and on the other hand its difficult to relate which is a downside. Its always a struggle with him but i love that struggle because its innately traumatized and makes and raises the stakes makes people understand this person and what makes them tick and if you can get a reader to say what makes this guy tick they keep turning the pages. Host the setting for, the fallen, is [inaudible] which is fictional but it is problems are real and would you tell our audience about them. Guest much like thousands across the country and other countries and its a coal mining, steel territory and this is where it exists because we figured out a way to make money and there is cold air and i can do river and textiles and now i needed people to work on it so they came. They put down roots, build homes and the textiles went away and everything went away except the people who live there but they still have two build somehow so they have challenges and in this novel and those often take you down a dark path. In burnsville we call come across a small town that has secrets under the skin. And when amos decker starts poking around hard bad things happen. Host one thing is opioids and we are all seen so much of the travesty in the state so what do you want readers to learn about what the country is struggling with . Guest first and foremost, i want to understand this is a manmade problem. Its not a problem that started with drug dealers in the street but Prescription Medication and when you have a West Virginia town that has 900 people and 30 million opioid prescriptions are written for the town thats a problem. Were not selling enough of these painkillers and we want to sell more so they made pain a fifth element of a diagnosis and said its good for anything that ails you. Opioids described for back pain have almost no effect on back pain but this is not addictive and dont worry about it but its all addictive. I want people to understand is a manmade problem and its decimating and its called the drug of despair. These towns have no hope and they spiral into this. Its not Getting Better and it needs to be addressed and it is not being addressed. An Advertising Campaign just say no will not work when youre talking about sentinel which you can be addicted to fentanyl after just one use. Theres a whole host of factors that needs to be addressed because we have two and next year if the trends continue the next hundred thousand people will overdose on opioids and thats the population of the city. I want people to take away the fact that even though this is fictional all the stuff is nonfiction. Host in one scene you get into that narcan debate. Guest in a lot of places there giving it to First Responders and a lot are saying theyll give that to everybody so even if you are there and the person youre with overdose, take out the north can and save his life because it is a lifesaver. People state that will encourage people and i said no, it will save lives on so we can figure out how to solve the problem. You dont want to say dont do it and well figure out the problem later but lets do both at the same time and it needs to be art out there. Everybody needs to have it particularly in this town. Give it to the Addiction Treatment centers and everybody have it in restaurants and bars because a lot of time people dont realize is that people will overdose in a public place because they know they can be resuscitated. Put it in a bar and a restaurant and a public place and its almost like having a defibrillator these days. Someone goes into cardiac racks, the glass and its the same thing with narcan. Pop it in their nose and bring them back to life. Host do you see this when you travel . Guest absolutely. My family came from the gold mining town in West Virginia pretty much like this. You have in place where they were good pain coal mining jobs where you can make 7,080,000 a year without a College Education but those are all gone. The towns are still there and when you drive through these places and through the midwest it is unlike washington dc areas and people have never finished high school and the work there is service oriented, medial, low pay, low benefits and its an old cars and old homes and a lot of that is what america is. Im not surprised people have turned to opioids to break out of this because they dont feel like they have any hope. Thats the bad thing. Greatest country on earth, richest country on earth and every citizen should have hope in life could get better but we need to get that back. Host what is the lesson of capitalism then . Guest the lesson of capitalism is an, look, im a capitalist. I have my own Small Business and there has to be a balance as well. It would be better for one person to make 3 billion a year or that person to make one billiondollar and other people instead of making 30000 a year to make 60000 a year. Buy more stuff, have a better life and have Better Health insurance and send their kids to college and with that make Society Better than everybody or is the guy that lives on 2 billion less that better for him . I think theres weve seen this before and this thing happened before we had income tax and yet phenomenally wealthy people, robert baron, railroad barons, magnates, rockefellers, carnegies and people like that and a lot of people had almost nothing and that balance is out of whack and Teddy Roosevelt came in and broke the monopolies up and indians came up and collective bargaining and that build a middle class in this country. Unions are pretty much dead. There are a very few who make an extraordinary amounts of money and the rest of the people not so much. I dont think its sustainable. I cant argue two people plausibly, at least in the United States that there should be redistribution. As soon as you say that youre a socialist but im not a socialist but but the track whereon doesnt seem to be sustainable. Host in baron built what has given people jobs to say Fulfillment Center for an online unnamed online company. Have you visited one of those . Guest yes, i have. Host what are they like . Guest first of all, the scale is unbelievable. They are football fields time 12. You have never seen so much cardboard in your life and shelves in robots and people running literally all day. If you think about it, think about the packages to get at the house or the fact that the Postal Service only operates on sunday to deliver amazon packages and when you see a mail truck on sunday look inside the truck is piled high with amazon packages. [inaudible] Fulfillment Centers are how they do it so if you have millions of americans bind billions of packages then youve got places to have the hold that capacity and volume and when you go in there. The scales are breathtaking and the speed with it moves with 400 packages processed in a sec. Come out the door and on its way and i was absolutely overwhelmed and these people dwarf the scale but its a phenomenon and grew in the last ten years. The one major growth industry for people and it was unbelievable to me. Host i will give these phone numbers and in about 15 minutes we will take telephone calls for David Baldacci. 202 7488000, mountain or pacific, 202 7488001 and use the indepth or get in the queue and we can get to your questions but we look forward to them and we have a facebook page, blast away so if youd like to get involved. In the very first amos decker book the memory man the the central plot is around a School Shooting. What year did you write that . Guest the first memory man was about five years ago. Host 2015. Yeah, since then weve seen the number of what are the thinking about whats happening with society and why did you use us as a device and what we are hoping to gain for your readers . Guest the School Shooting in memory man for me it was amos deckers hometown. She would have gone on to live in my school and you can write any story a different way and go bake and shallow or small. I wanted my memory man to have this intimate space to work hard. You see him prowling the hallways at this high school after this horrific event. Its a very small stage taking everything in an all points in building this template of what actually is the truth and in this small state i was able to go deep in the novel and thats what i wanted to do. I did not want to go broad and shallow so it was all most like hitchcock in reflecting that it was just the school and an accident moved off but primary focus when he had to figure out what happened and i think when i was overseas when i was in england they called me crying fiction had overtaken on general fiction and its the most popular genre in the uk for the First Time Ever people asked me why i thought that was and i thought everything is being equal if you cant get what you want in the real world so in thrillers and conviction we have good people and bad people and the good people get justice in the end and truth will come out and it is supposed to end. You cant go on the bad people winning. Host i was apprised when i read in the publishing trades but this is the home of Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes so you think thrillers have always been a part of the british popular choice. Guest they really have an crime fiction is really big over there and always has been. I dont know what happened this year but they overtook general literature in the genre. Host let me get into how this all started but you have a color so lets listen to what has to say. Brian in sioux city, iowa welcome to the conversation. Caller good morning. The question is about the memory condition. You said it started because of an injury he suffered in football. This is perfect recall something where he can recall things before that injury perfectly or is the perfect triggered by things after the football inju injury . Guest good question. Its different for different people. For amos decker it can be before the injury occurred so we have memories and things that happen to us from day one moving up but sometimes our memories arent good about bringing that back out but its there somehow and with that is that in 2018 we know very little about how the brain works, we just dont. Its almost like the traumatic brain injury unlocked in our head all along and when you think about his bandwidth went from normal to the resilient and he could access the information but he had never been able to access it before so his ramp went up significantly if you want to talk about it on a computer basis and but Going Forward everything he sees he will remember exactly what he sees and exactly but sometimes thats tricky because it will lie to him for it if your member that light and he will not say this but he remembers and down the road he finds it contradictory to that and the template over it and maybe that statement was not true at all but he can member everything from day one. Host all the amos decker books and in fact in all of the novels of yours that i have read there is always state and local local and federal agencies and there is always lots of bureaucracy to deal with. Where did you develop that worldview of Inter Agency Relations . Speak. Guest from dealing with inter agencies and personal experience in my office one time that it is to federal agencies almost came to blows in the lobby in my office because one was doing something and had not told the other what they were doing. They had somebody at the station in their office with vernaculars and walkietalkie and looking in this other agency full body armor and ak 15s and it was like what is going on and the other guys came in and coats and i wont name the agency but they came in with trenchcoat and they said he works for us and we dont tell anybody anything in whoever we are, you got to tell us but it evolved quickly into chaos but i worked and dealt with acronyms agencies over the years and one thing they will tell you is the cooperation and good mitigation is always what it should be. There is a lot of people in paperwork and intrinsic values of these places were they like to be independent and its a turf battle two. They created the federal budget and you get more money if you have more responsibility and more stuff you do. You dont want to give a piece of the pie to anyone else. Host the changes we made after 2001 was supposed solve the stuff after 911. Agencies all communicated with each other and actual ban with that for medications, Difficult Communications so what happened . Guest easier said than done but the irs is having new consist or assumes are like 40 years in the dod is to do a lot of stuff and that has been warty thousand dollars on a hammer but all those things still happen because these are, look these are aircraft carriers been if you think you will move those things in three minutes in an new direction it will not happen. They are enormous on wielding beasts and it takes times. Im not saying changes arent happening and it cannot get better but its a long slog. Host martin is in san francisco. Good morning. Caller good morning. Mr. Baldacci, good morning. I just finished the fallen recently and went through all amos deckers series. The question is there are in all your books but especially deckers there are some pretty heavy, deep emotional elements in it and do you plan those or do they come about spontaneously . Host martin, what is a scene you remember from the book that really struck you as an emotional one . Caller the latest one, the last page and i will leave it at that. Host will sambar all brewers. Guest great question, margin. For me i would have to make these characters feel like they are real and human and one way i can do that is through relating to the readers are not emotional level but we all have problems in our lives and fall down and have losses in grief and things we have to suffer through. In this book in particular with amos decker one of the shows even though he had this tremendous brain injury and was not who he used to be he seems aloof and not even part of the world anymore that he still had heart and soul and could still feel things. I know exactly what youre talking about so the relations between decker and that particular character that is my way to show this guy might have changed in a lot of ways but is still big and you c