Author Interview
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A Conversation With
Author, Noel Hynd

by
Anita Clare

Noel Hynd, author of such supernatural thrillers as Ghosts, Rage of Spirits, Cemetery of Angels and A Room For The Dead, continues to be a driving and successful force.  His books (including his latest, The Prodigy) have sold in excess of three million copies worldwide.  His next novel, The Lost Boy, will appear in hardcover this fall, in October of 1999. 

Contributing editor, Anita Clare, chatted with him one evening, discovering an open individual who spoke with charming frankness and a clear, engaging style.  With refreshing honesty, Mr. Hynd reveals the molding of his career from the espionage genre to the highly successful stories he produces today and talks about his personal vision of the literary industry and what it takes to succeed. 

~

ROSE & THORN:  What authors and books have had the biggest influence in your life? 

NOEL HYND:  My father, Alan Hynd, was an author, so he was the greatest influence. I still like to read his work.  I have had many favorites over the years, including Graham Greene, LeCarré and James Ellroy. 

R&T:  I didn't know about your father. Did he start you writing at a young age? 

Hynd:  I was always able to write well, even in school, for as long as I can remember. 

R&T:  Did you always know you were going to be a writer? 

Hynd:   I always wanted to be one. Getting there is always full of self-doubt. 

R&T:  I imagine it would be even harder with another successful writer already in the family.  Did it take very long for you to get your first story published? 

Hynd:  When I was twenty-six, the first hundred pages of my first novel were shot down by three places in two days. I was devastated. The book sold about two months later, however.  My father was hired by a true crime magazine to write an article. He didn't feel up to it, so I ghosted. 

R&T:  You wrote under his name? 

Hynd:  Yes. For several years toward the end of his life, I wrote dozens of articles (published outside the US) as Alan Hynd. 

R&T:  You must have been very close. 

Hynd:  Yes. We were. 

R&T:  What was your favorite book of his? 

Hynd:  My father did mostly True Crime writing throughout his career.  In 1957, a huge anthology was published called Murder, Mayhem and Mystery and basically all of his best stories were in that book; there's probably about sixty True Crime stories in all.  It almost summed up his career.  His best writing was done at that time and whenever I find a copy of it in a used book store, I always try to buy it. 

R&T:  You obviously had the background in True Crime.  Then you moved into political thrillers? 

Hynd:  Yes.  I had the background in writing and it always appealed to me in terms of not having to go out to an office every day.  Of course, when you're working at home, you're always on duty.  You're never completely free and it's hard to define whether you're working right now or not.  When you have people living with you, that can be hard. 
         In 1974, I was looking to get published under my own name and wanted to be a novelist.  I decided that writing a basic espionage thriller would probably be the easiest way for me to get published. I saw an article in Time magazine about a POW coming back from the Vietnam War after surviving a couple of years of torture. His North Vietnamese torturer was actually a Cuban torture specialist.  When the American returned, he told a reporter that he'd sure like to meet up with that guy.  That was the germ of my first novel, Revenge; a fictional soldier comes back from the war and decides to track down his enemies.  It sounds simplistic, but it really worked out well.  I made a lot of money with that book because it was also going to be a movie, even though the movie never got made. 

R&T:  It must be frustrating to come that close to having your work made into a film and then not having it completed. 

Hynd:  I think Saul Bellow used to say, that situation is the best situation you could ask for because you've got the money from the film company, but you never have to sit through something terrible.  However, if I were looking at it from a business point of view, it would have been better even if a bad film had been made.  It pays off with familiarity in your book, your title.  You'll get new readers out of it. 

R&T:  What happened in your life that brought about the change from writing political thrillers to writing in the horror genre? 

Hynd:  I had written about seven political and espionage thrillers and by 1989, I felt I had said everything I had to say.  I just didn't have anything new to turn into a book the next year.  I had a contract with Kensington and was two books into the contract.  At the same time, I had always been fascinated by ghost stories, so I asked my editor in New York what he thought about it.  He talked to the owners of the company and everyone thought it would be a good idea. 
         It did, in fact, increase sales because when you go into something like the supernatural territory you pick up a lot of female readers that you don't have in espionage. Sixty percent of my readership is now female, whereas before it was only around twenty percent. Just in terms of percentages, more women read so you've got the chance to not just double your audience but actually open it up by 60-70% because you're getting a bigger section of the segment that's reading. 

R&T:  Have you ever had any real-life ghost experiences, or is it just a fascination for you? 

Hynd:  I used to stay in a house in Nantucket in the summer, and I'm convinced there was a presence in that house, but I can't prove it.  My wife, who stayed there at the time, insists she saw and felt something one night.  I didn't see it, but what she claimed she had seen was very close to the feelings I had had.  That's not to say it was a scary house.  If there was something, it was a very benign presence. 

R&T:  So you didn't feel threatened in any way? 

Hynd:  Only once or twice, and I can't really tell if I just psyched myself out or not. Sometimes, late at night, you'd just get the feeling, "don't go into that room...don't turn that light on," and it's a very creepy feeling.  It's very strong.  Other people with ghost experiences in Nantucket had similar experiences.  The funny thing about supernatural stories is once you've written them, and people have read your books, they open up to you and tell you their stories.  People ask me if I really believe or if I'm just making money off of it.  After awhile, it's hard not to believe because so many people have come to me with inexplicable stories. 

R&T:  I've just read The Prodigy.  The haunting was very convincing.  I really wondered if you hadn't had some brushes with real ghosts in the past.  I also have to ask after reading that book, are you a musician? 

Hynd:  No. I'm not unfamiliar with music, but as a musician I am absolutely awful.  I had the idea for the book, and then a friend of mine (who is actually my son's piano teacher in Philadelphia) helped me out with it. I asked him what someone would play under these circumstances.  What would be a challenging piece?  I knew enough about the quirks of some of the virtuosi of our time, so basically I had what I call a reasonable, passing knowledge and then enhanced it by checking with a musicologist. 

R&T:  Do you have any advice that you'd like to share with new writers? 

Hynd:  Yes, learn to write screenplay format.  I give that advice to writers all the time.  It is extremely hard to get a novel published these days, and it is even more frustrating sometimes when you do.  If you just look at what's happening in entertainment, you'll see the real money is in movies and television.  There are a few people making a lot of money writing novels, but not very many writers will write that "big book." 

R&T:  Which, of the books you've written, would you consider your favorite? 

Hynd:  I like Ghosts, The Prodigy, and A Room for the Dead.  I've written about thirteen novels.  The earlier ones are hard to judge anymore because the times are different now. 

R&T:  Do you ever look back and think, "I wish I had written this differently?" 

Hynd:  I think every author does that.  Sometimes I'll pick up something I've written and see that I might have done it another way.   I'll give you a case in point:  I was talking to someone about trying to make The Prodigy into a television movie, and the producer said, "It's too bad that the main character (Rolf Geiger) isn't female." 

R&T:  Why? 

Hynd:  Because television is basically aimed at female viewers.  Could it be done?  Sure.  This producer thought it would be more viable if the story was centered around a female pianist, but of course that would turn into a completely different book.  It would change the whole dynamic, such as would a young female pianist be taken as seriously and have the same relationship with a mentor as Rolf did with his mentor?  But on the other hand, in some ways it could have been a very interesting book. 

R&T:  Then you'd have The Other Prodigy. 

Hynd:  Yes!  

 

The Prodigy
by Noel Hynd

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Hardcover - 329 pages (January 1998) 
Kensington Pub Corp (Trd); ISBN: 157566240X ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.20 x 9.32 x 6.39 
Other Editions: Paperback

Noel Hynd was born in New York City and grew up in New York and Connecticut. He began writing professionally before graduation from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in International Relations.

Mr. Hynd's most recent novel, The Prodigy,  was published in hardcover in January of l998. A mass market paperback edition followed in January of 1999,  published by Pinnacle Books.  Mr. Hynd's  next novel,  The  Lost Child,  will appear in hardcover in October of 1999.  Previous supernatural thrillers, Ghosts ,  Rage of Spirits, Cemetery of Angels and A Room For The Dead, remain very popular and in print from the same publisher.

Earlier works include several novels in the espionage field. Among them are Zigzag (1992) a political thriller set around the 1996 U.S. Presidential election, and Truman's Spy  (1991), an espionage thriller set at the outset of the McCarthy era in 1950.  His first novel, Revenge, was published in 1976. Movie rights were sold to Frank Yablans at Twentieth Century Fox. Other suspense and/or espionage novels which followed were The Sandler Inquiry  (1977),  False Flags (1979),  Flowers From Berlin  (1985), and The Khrushchev Objective, (1987).  In the latter book, Mr. Hynd worked with former British intelligence office 'Christopher Creighton' to tell the inside story of Britain's Crabb Affair, one of the most notorious British diplomatic and intelligence scandals of the 1950's.  His novels have been published around the world, with foreign editions appearing in the U.K., as well as in translation in French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Dutch, Turkish, Finnish and Japanese. Some of  Mr. Hynd's novels have been on regional best seller lists in the U.S. and abroad. Worldwide sales have totaled in excess of three million copies. All are currently in print from Kensington Publishing (Zebra Books), New York.

Mr. Hynd has also written three non-fiction books. 

The first was The Cop and The Kid  (1982) during which Mr. Hynd followed the New York  City Police Department's Emergency Services Unit for more than a year. 

The second was The Giants of the Polo Grounds (1988), an anecdotal informal history of baseball's New York Giants, from 1873 through 1957. The latter book was a nominee for best baseball book of the year by SPITBALL Magazine, the literary  baseball publication based in Cincinnati. It was also cited in "Editor's Choice" by the New York Times'  Sunday Review of Books as one of the year's best books.  The Giants of the Polo Grounds  was also published as a quality trade paperback in the spring of  1996 by Taylor Publishing of Dallas, Texas.

The most recent  non-fiction book, titled Marquard and Seeley, was published in June of 1996. Marquard and Seeley is the true story of Hall of Fame baseball pitcher Rube Marquard, who attempted to quit baseball and join his wife, Blossom Seeley, as a musical hall star in the years before World War One. 

Mr. Hynd is also the author of the screenplay  Agency  which  was produced in 1981 by RSL Films (now Alliance) in Montreal.  Agency starred Robert Mitchum, Lee Majors and Valerie Perrine. A second screenplay, Nairobi Affair ,  was produced for television  by Viacom International in 1984 and starred John Savage and Charlton Heston. A third script, Illegal in Blue was filmed in 1994 by Stu Segall Productions in San Diego for Orion Home Video and has appeared on Showtime and Cinemax. Other recent scripts are under option.

In 1995, the Actor's Guild of Lexington, Kentucky, commissioned Mr. Hynd to adapt one of his novels, A Room For The Dead, as a stage play. The new piece was given a staged reading at the Guild's theater in Lexington in February, l996.

Mr. Hynd has also been a frequent contributor to various magazines, including Harper's, Sports Illustrated, World Traveler, The Reader's Digest,  and The Pennsylvania Gazette, the alumni magazine of the University of Pennsylvania, for whom he is the monthly sports columnist.  His specialties in magazine work are true crime and professional sports.  He  lives in Beverly Hills, California and occasionally teaches courses in novel writing at U.C.L.A.

 

Anita Clare lives in St. Augustine, Florida with her three daughters, Varina, Natalie and Liliana.  She works at a public library during the day and comes home every night with a new pile of books, chanting "So many books...so little time!" 

In addition, she works as Senior Manager for a weekly short story writing contest at The Amazing Instant Novelist on America Online, and as an editor for The Rose & Thorn.  She also does freelance writing and editing when time allows.  Two of her short stories are about to be published in a book about cancer experiences.

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