An Interview with Allan Leverone, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author

AN INTERVIEW WITH ALLAN LEVERONE Allan Leverone is an air traffic controller and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of nearly twenty novels in the thriller and horror genres. He is a former Derringer Award winner for excellence in short mystery fiction, and his dark thriller, MR. MIDNIGHT, was featured in Suspense Magazine’s “Best of 2013” issue. Allan lives in Londonderry, NH with his wife, three grown children and two beautiful grandchildren. Learn more on Facebook, Twitter @AllanLeverone, or at AllanLeverone.com. Please tell us a little about your latest Tracie Tanner thriller, The Bashkir Extraction. Tracie Tanner has evolved over the course of six books from a traditional, if unconventional, CIA field operative to one of the blackest of black ops assets in the U.S. intelligence arsenal. Reporting directly to CIA Director Aaron Stallings, Tanner is given the most dangerous and risky assignments, where the stakes are the highest. She almost always operates alone, with little backup. In The Bashkir Extraction, the U.S. intelligence services learn of a highly secret Soviet military base located deep inside the Ural Mountains, in the Soviet satellite state of Bashkir. Tanner is dispatched to place the facility under surveillance, with instructions to then return to D.C. and brief intelligence specialists on what she has learned. It should be a relatively easy assignment, but while in Bashkir, Tracie observes something so shocking and unexpected it changes the nature of her mission completely. She must now attempt to infiltrate this highly secure military facility, where if successful she will face a moral dilemma for which there is no acceptable solution. You’ve had your character Tracie Tanner go through some pretty difficult situations in the past, but this time she definitely had to face the hardest choice of her career. Without giving away spoilers, why did you think it important for her to evolve down this path? Even though the Tracie Tanner novels are action-packed, in my mind everything boils down to characterization. If the reader doesn’t care about Tracie, nothing about the dilemma she’s facing will matter.

With that as my guiding principle, it’s clear as you read through the six Tanner books that taking on the types of assignments Tracie is asked to complete would take a psychological toll on anyone. She believes strongly in what she’s doing and in the rightness of freedom versus oppression, but still, she carries the weight of things she has done on her shoulders everywhere she goes. The moral dilemma she faces in The Bashkir Extraction is an extension of the burden she carries. Life does not get any easier for Tracie in this book. In your experience traveling from bookstore to bookstore, doing signings and other events, what have to discovered are some of the best ways to captivate readers and get people into your bookstore events? Honestly, I rarely do bookstore events. Unless your name is Lee Child or Steve Berry, as an author it’s hard to get people to come out to an event when they’re not familiar with you or your work. Most of my interactions with readers take place on social media, where an author can have a reach far beyond what is possible through in-person appearances. I did a “Noir at the Bar” reading a couple of years ago in Boston that was a lot of fun and very well received, but that’s definitely the exception for me and not the rule. I would certainly be receptive to a bookstore appearance if asked, but it’s not the sort of thing I typically pursue. Have you come across any marketing strategies used by booksellers in your travels that have struck you as particularly impressive or effective? Again, I’m far from an expert on this topic, but I think it’s common knowledge that booksellers need to develop a strategy to allow them to compete more effectively in an era of electronic books and bookselling. One of the ways they could do so is through aggressively promoting local/Indie authors to their core customer group. It surprises me that this doesn’t happen more than it does. Is there anything that you could offer aspiring authors that you feel could be of substantial value in their quest to hit the bestseller list? Hitting bestseller lists is a total crapshoot. I only made it because I was fortunate enough to have my thriller, Final Vector, included in the Deadly Dozen collection along with books by a number of other authors, nearly all of whom was much higher-profile than myself. We sold over 100,000 copies and spent two weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and six weeks on USA Today’s list. Read this and other interviews at: www.TopShelfMagazine.net INTERVIEWS TO P Shelf magazine MARCH 2020