A
lawyer who can't sleep finds a second career writing thrillers
About
David Dun, author of THE BLACK SILENT
David Dun was born and grew up in western
Washington but moved to northern California to begin his legal
career. He holds a B.A. in psychology from the University of
Washington and earned his law degree at Seattle University.
At first he was a typical country lawyer living in the extremely
rural northern end of California. He started a law firm and
eventually began spending all of his professional time managing
the legal affairs of a large, privately-held family corporation.
He now divides his time between offices in Redding and Eureka,
California. He and his wife reside in a secluded home perched
on the side of a mountain. “It’s an ideal way to
live,” says Dun. “I live in a forest and it takes
me 10 minutes to drive to my office downtown.”
Dun manages to run his law practice on
only four to five hours of sleep a day. A few years ago, without
any previous experience, he decided he would take up some of
his free time to write. “At first, I told nobody about
my writing. My wife found out soon enough, but I really kept
it to myself.” When he finally told friends what he was
doing, they thought he was nuts. “The statistical odds
against success are slim to none,” remarked one friend.
“But I kept at it, writing in the middle of the night
when everyone else is sleeping from 2:00 to 8:00 AM. I enjoyed
the thrillers of Ludlum and Clancy’s The Hunt for
Red October,” he admits. “Then one of my friends
sent a manuscript I was working on to a professor of literature,
asking her ‘is there any hope for this guy as a writer?’”
She said to me, “There was one scene in the entire manuscript
that showed some promise. What you write well is suspense, and
when you write a book with a series of suspenseful scenes, it
is called a thriller. You should consider writing thrillers,”
she concluded. “But I was a complete Neanderthal. I hired
a coach but he had a master’s degree in literary writing,
and although very helpful in many respects, our styles were
somewhat different. The way he explained it, he was into making
beef Wellington (literary fiction) and I was into something
more akin to hamburgers (popular fiction). There is a bit of
a gulf between the character emphasis of literary fiction and
the “pulse-pounding pace” of most popular fiction.
I thought…well I want to sell a book, so in frustration,
I called a friend and asked, ‘What do you consider a good
suspense novel?’” She replied, “I just read
something called Vertical Run, which was a New
York Times bestseller.”
“I bought and read it, and discovered
my area of interest,” says Dun. “The eventual underlying
theme in all my books is the conflict of natural life and the
life we get through technology. You could look at it as the
mystic vs the PHD or if you like social stereo types, the hippie
vs the geek. For the whole earth part of the equation I used
a native American semi-mystic who also was a veterinarian so
I was able to put part of the struggle within one character.
I wanted to use this as a backdrop. I want the hero to struggle
with these two elements.” His first effort, Necessary
Evil was published in 2001 and became a USA Today
bestseller. At the time he was writing Necessary Evil
he found a nuts and bolts thriller editor by the name of Ed
Stackler. Ed has been giving him advice ever since. A year later
Dun followed it up with At the
Edge (2002). He has since produced one thriller a year
and subsequently delivered Overfall
in 2003 and Unacceptable Risk
in 2004 (all published by Pinnacle Books). So far, Dun has written
about cloning, forestry science, molecular biology, and genetic
science. “I have a good friend who is a molecular biologist.
I read Nature and Discover magazines. When
I pick up a newspaper, I go straight to the science section.
But I’m interested in science only when it’s about
to leap into something else. The
Black Silent is about the enormous potential
of methane-generated energy, and a very strange source for it.
It really caught my interest when I learned that some new research
on the methane had been funded by Congress. Even more intriguing
is the apparent life span of the real but strange organisms
that form a key plot element.”
David Dun’s wife Laura has worked
as a nurse, a pilot, and an office manager. She is now administering
scholarships for a private educational foundation. During her
days as a pilot, she flew Dun over the San Juan Islands near
Seattle, the setting for The Black Silent. “It’s
just so satisfying and beautiful up there, “ says Dun.
“I often pilot my own boat through those amazing waters,
so it was great to set the new book in an area of the world
that I really love.”
Good reading!
More
About David Dun
Read
an interview with David
