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| photo: Kate Lamb | |
Thomas Mullen is the author of seven novels, including Darktown, an NPR Best Book, which was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Southern Book Prize, and the Indies Choice Book Award; Lightning Men, named one of the Top Ten Crime Novels of 2017 by the New York Times and shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger; and The Last Town on Earth, named Best Debut Novel of 2006 by USA Today and awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize. His novel Blind Spots (Minotaur, April 4, 2023) plays with ways our perceptions of reality can be manipulated.
Handsell readers your book in 25 words or less:
Blind Spots is a speculative crime novel, akin to Blade Runner or Minority Report, set in a world where people use devices to see.
On your nightstand now:
Metropolis by Philip Kerr: I've slowly been making my way through his Bernie Gunther series and have been saving this, his last, until what feels like the right time. I just don't want it to end. The Sentence by Louise Erdrich and The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai: I'm mostly a fiction reader and typically have a stack in my to-be-read pile. The Third Rainbow Girl by Emma Copley Eisenberg: I've been reading more true crime lately and am always interested in books set in Appalachia. American Dreams by Studs Terkel: I find his oral histories both fascinating and inspirational for my own work. (Hard Times was a big help when I wrote my Depression-era second novel, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, and his The Good War was invaluable as I wrote the book I'll be publishing in 2024, which is set in Boston during World War II.)
Favorite book when you were a child:
I became a huge fan of the Spenser novels by Robert B. Parker when I was a seventh grader. For a few years in my early teens, I read only crime/mysteries, then I pivoted for a while, for reasons unexplained and mysterious, before returning to the genre with a vengeance about 15 years ago.
Your top five authors:
Toni Morrison for her combination of lyrical language and complex stories that she always found a completely new way to tell. Jess Walter for his sense of humor, perfectly formed characters, and great plots. Edward P. Jones for packing so much into his short stories and for writing maybe the greatest novel of this century, The Known World. Don Winslow for absolutely bringing it in his crime stories. And Michael Chabon for his ability to play so well in different genres.
Book you're an evangelist for:
I've given Citizen Vince by Jess Walter as a gift so many times to so many different kinds of readers, and no one's been disappointed. Do you like great characters? Or crime/mystery? Or literary fiction? Or interesting settings? Or plot twists? Or humor? Or politics? Or words? You'll love it.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier. Okay, the reviews were great, too, but that's a perfect cover. I'd never been to the Smoky Mountains at that time in my life, but I've been several times since, and it almost feels like I'm re-entering his story.
Book you hid from your parents:
I never had to hide anything. Maybe I was just a good kid? Also, my parents are voracious readers, so I don't know that they would have truly disapproved of any reading material.
Book that changed your life:
It's a tie: Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem and The Intuitionist by Colson Whitehead, which I read within a few months of each other in 2001. They opened my eyes to how you can take the classic hardboiled noir structure and do crazy things with it to create a fun, nuanced story that brings the reader to new places. Books that take elements of those classic mystery tropes but do something unexpected with them tend to be my favorites, and it's what I've tried to do with both my Atlanta series and now Blind Spots.
Favorite line from a book:
From Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: It's only a tiny part of a very long sentence, but it's hard to beat the economy, or the revealing coldness, of the narrator's offhand parenthetical mention of "(picnic, lightning)" when describing his mother's death.
Five books you'll never part with:
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon. I already knew I wanted to be a novelist, but I received that book (about a writer) as a gift right after college graduation, when I felt confused and overwhelmed by the real world and the challenge of getting published, and it reaffirmed my desire to find a way to succeed.
My signed copy of Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace--from a reading I saw him give in Cambridge, Mass., in the late '90s. He was so funny and so down-to-earth and so, so smart.
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. Partly because I love it to death and deeply admire the way Mitchell plays with so many genres in that beautiful monster of a book. And partly because, when I signed my first book deal with Random House, my editor, Jennifer Hershey, sent me a copy of that then-new book as a "welcome to the club" gift.
My collection of Dr. Seuss books. The dude was a mad genius. Now that I have kids, we have tons of his books, but even when I was 22 and working an awful job at a consulting firm in Boston, I would sometimes cross the street to the giant Borders (remember them?), walk into the kids' section, and flip through If I Ran the Circus or The Sneetches and Other Stories for a hit of inspiration.
Hiking Atlanta's Hidden Forests by Jonah McDonald. This book helped keep my family sane during the first year or so of the pandemic when there was nothing to do but take long hikes. To avoid being near other people during those early, confusing days, we'd bookmark any hikes he called "underused gems" or "off the beaten track" and head out there.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières. I read it during my first year out of college, and it's everything I want a book to be: expansive and emotionally powerful, an amazing story with lots of interwoven subplots and great characters and a fully realized setting that captures a moment in time perfectly.
The thing that made you want to be a writer:
People ask me this a lot, and the only answer I can think of is: honestly, I've always wanted to be a writer, for as long as I can remember. My parents bought me books like Mr. Happy and Mr. Worry by Roger Hargreaves, and I'd copy them. Then I started writing my own ("Mr. Invisible" was my first complete work, I believe). I've always loved to tell stories.