Thriller Instinct

Baldacci, 48, has brown hair threaded with a few strands of gray, a jutting chin and a solid, broad-shouldered build. He acquired his strong work ethic early, as a child growing up in the suburbs of Richmond, Va. From junior high until his senior year, he delivered newspapers before school, and as a student at Virginia Commonwealth University and then at the University of Virginia School of Law he worked as a night guard, a construction worker and a vacuum-cleaner salesman. After law school, Baldacci toiled for nine years as a trial lawyer and corporate attorney. (Several of his novels feature lawyers: those in private practice are invariably miserable.) At night, he wrote screenplays and stories, for which he received rejection after rejection. Then, in 1994, he finished a novel about a burglar who inadvertently witnesses a murder and a cover-up involving the president. Finally, there was interest—big interest. Baldacci signed with Priest, an agent known for representing mass-market thriller writers. Larry Kirshbaum, then the head of Time Warner Book Group, started reading the manuscript of "Absolute Power" on the evening he received it from Priest. "It's one of these amazing kind of epiphanies that happen so rarely in one's editorial life," Kirshbaum says. "Before I know it it's 4 in the morning and I'm reading the end. So I literally took a shower, put my feet up for an hour and went into the office. I called Aaron [Baldacci's agent] and said, 'I want to buy this book.' He said, 'You can't possibly have read it!' I said, 'Oh, yes, I did—you can quiz me'."

With a $2 million advance—plus another $3 million for the movie (directed by and starring Clint Eastwood) and foreign rights—Baldacci was suddenly rich. After paying off debts, he, his wife and their two kids moved into a seven-bedroom house in northern Virginia, paid for in cash. Baldacci clearly has an ambivalent relationship to his wealth. His house is huge and his Reston office is well appointed—the enormous wooden conference table is polished to a shine; the library furniture is soft and deep. ("I always wanted a room like this," he says as he looks around the library, his tone more surprised than satisfied.) At the same time, he wears old bluejeans, sends his kids to parochial schools instead of one of the tonier private D.C.-area schools, and his favorite restaurant in D.C. is still Nathans, the Georgetown pub where he took his wife on their first date. (Nathans makes many appearances in Baldacci's books.) His characters, tellingly, have a contentious relationship to money, and it is one of the subjects that seems to make his writing least artful. Rich characters wear "yet another gown" or suits described simply as "very expensive." They wear diamond necklaces, and decorate their mansions with murals; they are forever having extramarital affairs. The worst psychopaths are in it for the money alone.

Baldacci himself is insistent that he writes for more than money. He wants to get inside a terrorist's head, or to keep people vigilant to abuses of power, or to set up situations in which good people are pushed past their breaking point to see how they respond. At one point, he suggests that his novels offer a kind of reworking of justice. "As a lawyer, as a private citizen, you see a lot of injustice. You see a lot of people who should have been punished and are not, and people who were punished wrongfully are not vindicated," he says. "Fiction is sort of a way to set the record straight, and let people at least believe that justice can be achieved and the right outcomes can occur." He talks about being inspired by the rectitude of his father, who would bring his son on weekends to the trucking firm where he worked. "They had in the shop a black bathroom and a white bathroom, and the white bathroom was much better," Baldacci says. "My dad was a mechanic, and then he moved up and became foreman. The first thing he did when he became foreman was he nailed shut the white bathroom. And he said, 'Everybody will use one bathroom. And if you don't like that bathroom, we'll shut that one and use the white bathroom. But we have only one bathroom here.' Some of my themes of injustice come from that."

When Baldacci talks about the moral complexity of his books—how the bad guys can be good and the presidents scum—his soft Southern accent speeds up. It's clear that he believes what he's saying—and it's true that he likes to blur the lines between good and evil. But more than any moral calculus, it's his eager, expansive imagination that drives his books. He loses himself in the hands-on process of immersive research and writing—and fans in the fields he writes about claim that he gets their world right. Baldacci reads books on taxidermy and terrorism and concocts ways to fix the lottery, and studs his books with little lessons on geography, history, ballistics, rare-book facts—whatever. (This is another key to the thriller: an overwhelming abundance of sheer—and fun, if sometimes useless—information.) He's staked out landing strips, shot machine guns and befriended snipers and Secret Service agents. Baldacci does have his limits: for one book involving hypnosis, a psychologist offered to hypnotize the author, but Baldacci became skittish and refused. "He is an extraordinarily detailed interviewer," Dimunation says. Writing books has allowed Baldacci to turn his life into a giant field trip. His friend and former neighbor Robert Schule, a special assistant to President Carter and a founder of a lobbying firm, remembers coming home one day and spotting a horse trailer down the road, parked in front of Baldacci's house. "We said, what the hell?" Schule recalls. Baldacci was writing about an agent working undercover at a ranch in the Virginia countryside, and he wanted to get inside a horse trailer to figure out if someone could successfully hide drugs in one.

Baldacci's audience extends from Poughkeepsie to Pennsylvania Avenue. His office suite, which is sandwiched between a Department of Homeland Security campus and Lockheed Martin, is decorated with bestseller lists mounted on plaques and posters of his novels, and the bookshelves lining the walls of his reception area—which eerily resembles a doctor's office—are filled almost exclusively with his books—many of them in unrecognizable languages. There are framed fan letters from several first ladies, the former South African president F. W. de Klerk, Dolly Parton and a couple of U.S. presidents ("If you get a letter from the president, you gotta put it in a frame," he says). In 1999, Bill Clinton called Baldacci's "The Simple Truth" his favorite book of the year. George H.W. Bush, who signed one note "from your No. 1 fan in Houston," likes Baldacci's books so much that he invited the author to visit him in Kennebunkport, Maine. "Boy, can he drive a boat," Baldacci says.

Baldacci clearly relishes the chance to mingle with the mighty, casually mentioning that Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee chairman now running for governor of Virginia, was stopping by the office the next day. He's proud that he's been contacted by contractors to the government to imagine "doomsday scenarios"—how to blow up the Super Bowl, say—and by agencies lobbying him to be featured in his books. But he still projects the air of a regular guy who just happened to be thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Then again—in Baldacci's world, where everything is a conspiracy, nothing is really accidental.

Clues You Can Use: The Best of Baldacci
He may not write "serious literature," but Baldacci's books aren't devoid of useful information—or guilty pleasures:

Best secret code technique: A chemical wash applied to rare copies of 19th-century dime novels. From "The Collectors"
Best terrible motto: "Why waste time trying to discover the truth, when you can so easily create it?" From "The Whole Truth"
Best money-making scheme: A lottery scam that was so ingenious, some Italian thieves used it. From "The Winner"
Best random factoid: Polk's wife played "Hail to the Chief" so people would notice her short husband. From "The Camel Club"
Best worst line: " 'Survival is always intoxicating,' Thornhill thought as he turned out the light." From "Saving Faith"

© 2009