DM: Writing any book is a big undertaking that takes many months if not years. How long did you work on this book?
JS: I wrote the first full draft in 2018, but I was drawing from much older material. I had an editor, an agent, and a few beta readers weigh in on it back then, but I set it aside to clean up other works for publication. When I finally picked it back up, I had one big problem: there was a plotline about Russian aggression in Ukraine, which no longer made sense in 2023. I updated the story to be set in 2024 and cut about ten thousand words to tighten it up, and here we are.
DM: What motivated or inspired you to write about this story?
JS: My first novel, The Whiskey Baron, was set in a fictional version of Chester County, SC, in the 1930s. Around 2012 or so, I started thinking about another novel set there, maybe in the 1950s, and wrote about a local guy who married an old-money Connecticut woman whose family was part of the CIA. I had a present-time story set around 2001, which was set up like an interrogation to frame all the back story. I didn’t have it in me to write this sprawling multi-generational thing, so I eventually pared most of the back story out and fleshed out the present-time story.
DM: Did any particular character really speak to you?
Donna Meredith
JS: There are two central characters here. The first is Wyatt Brewer, a middle-aged newspaper reporter who has been harboring a secret and eventually gets hauled in for interrogation by a pair of intelligence officers. The second is one of those officers, the twenty-something Penelope Lowe. Wyatt was my way into the story and is a comfortable character for me, a middle-aged writer myself, but Penelope became more and more interesting as I got further into the story. She’s got a lot of grit but is kind of caught in a big machine.
DM: What details were most challenging to get right about the setting?
JS: The book is set in Charleston, South Carolina. I went to college there so know the city well as it was in the early 2000s. Because the novel is now set in present-day, I had my work cut out for me to update the details given how much the city has changed over the past 15 years. Fortunately, some of what makes Charleston special still feels the same, to me at least.
DM: Tell us a little about your writing process. (Do you write every day? For how long? Do you work from an outline or wing it? Long hand or computer? Where do you write?)
Jon Sealy
JS: I used to have a real process, where I aimed for a thousand words every morning (including weekends), working on a computer with no outline. I don’t have that kind of time anymore, so I’ve started outlining books, beginning with the revision of The King Street Affair. The last substantial thing I wrote, I dictated the first draft into my phone while sitting in the car line to pick up my children, and I revised the dictation at night after they went to bed.
DM: Tell us a little about your background and what got you started as a writer.
JS: This question about beginnings is tricky to answer because I’m feeling a bit like Rip Van Winkle—like, where’s the time gone? I began writing seriously in college and have an MFA from Purdue. From there, I wrote several novels before Hub City Press picked up my first one. When I was in MFA-school, I thought I was going to be a professor, but the world and the job market all changed so much between 2005-2010. After adjuncting a little, I did a stint at the Richmond Times-Dispatch before moving into freelance corporate communications-type work.
DM: What writers or works have influenced your writing?
JS: At this point, I might steal from Raymond Carver to answer to this question. In an essay called “Fires,” he talked about all the things that influenced his writing beyond other writers. I could point to writers who influenced me—for The King Street Affair in particular, Graham Greene and John Le Carre—but the book is about a couple of ideas rooted in life rather than other books.
First, stories tend to have a lot in common with conspiracies—the idea that some big shadowy force is pulling the strings—but real life tends to play out via individuals within systems, rather than the systems themselves. I’ve spent nearly twenty years inside or adjacent to large organizations and have seen the pattern play out where individuals kind of freelance and create these mini-fiefdoms inside a corporation. The book is born out of observing these decentralized human power struggles.
The second big idea inside this book is the nature of time. I almost called the book Contrition because of the secret Wyatt has been harboring. I’ve hit an age where you experience the consequences of your young adulthood. In your twenties, you make decisions without realizing it; you walk through doors without necessarily understanding how other doors are closing. Sheer dumb luck—or the grace of God—determines your life in middle age, and seeing this play out in myself and the people I know is one of the biggest influences on the book.
DM: What are you working on next?
JS: I’ve got a series of detective novels set in upstate South Carolina. Two are finished, and I’ve got the crime for the third.
DM: Thank you for taking the time to talk about your writing. SLR wishes you the best with your upcoming detective series.
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