Superstar crime writer David Baldacci says American Dream ‘fractured’ | Books | Entertainment

Having sold 200 million copies of his thrillers, it’s fair to say David Baldacci knows a good story when he sees one. But today’s biggest scandal by his telling isn’t fiction – it’s the “fracturing” of the American Dream and its promise of a better life. According to the prolific US author, who has 54 bestsellers to his name, corporate greed has left ordinary Americans unable to buy a home or ever retire.

“As the world continues to change and evolve, one thing that seems to be lacking – at least in my country – is accountability,” Baldacci warns. “People do things and there are no consequences. And being human beings, with no consequences, they continue to do them. Looking at the world when I was young, we had this concept of the American Dream – you’re going to get a good education, you work hard and you’re going to have a good life.

“That’s the dream but it’s completely fractured. When I was coming up, I knew I had an opportunity at some point to buy a house and put money away for retirement. Generations now, they’ve gone to college and now they have a mortgage without a house, because college is so expensive. They don’t see a pathway to homeownership or even retirement – just having to work until they drop – and that’s not much of a life.

In fairness , it’s a familiar picture across the West – younger generations increasingly saddled with debts they will never be able to pay, whether college or university fees or just rent and the cost-of-living, amid falling living standards and even lifespans. But it’s clear Baldacci, a thoughtful 65-year-old from Virginia, is deeply troubled.

“You compound all that with the effects of AI (artificial intelligence) on top of it and people feel like they have to spend every waking moment of their life staying six months ahead of AI until AI learns their new skill, and then they have to go too,” he continues. “What kind of a life is that? So when people say, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ I’m like, ‘I just wake up every day and look at the world’. How could you not have ideas?”

His own parents grew up facing, in his words, a “hardscrabble life”. His mother, Joyce, was the youngest of ten children growing up in a down-at-heel mining town in Northwestern Virginia, where her family lived without electricity or running water and she foraged for coal from an open scrape mine. He later based his novel, Wish You Well, on her story.

But she played a crucial role in his career. “I was the kid who never shut up,” he smiles. “I was always talking and making up stories. My mother gave me a notepad and told me to start writing – so she could get a break.”

Incredibly, it set him on the path to literary stardom. Having qualified as a corporate lawyer, working in Washington DC, he spent 12 years writing short stories before struggling to get a screenplay made. When it was dropped by Hollywood unmade, he came up with the story that became Absolute Power – what if a burglar saw a crime committed by the most powerful man on earth. It was an immediate success and became a hit Clint Eastwood movie. Baldacci never looked back.

Since then, as well as a number of bestselling standalones, he has created several series – from Amos Decker, the ‘Memory Man’, who remembers everything after he banged his head playing American Football, to Atlee Pine, an FBI special agent whose twin sister was abducted and never seen again; to ex-Army Ranger turned investigator Travis Devine.

Baldacci’s been visiting the UK to promote his new book, Hope Rises, and was one of the stars at this weekend’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate where was presented with an outstanding achievement award. While avoiding preachiness, his concerns about laws governing ordinary people not being applied to media and tech billionaires come through in his latest two-book series.

Nash Falls and Hope Rises tell the story of Walter Nash, who is recruited by the FBI to spy on his employer after learning the investment firm he has worked loyally for has been used to launder money for a major Chinese drug cartel. When the ruthless mastermind behind this suspects Nash is a mole, she destroys his life, setting him on a path of vengeance. He must reinvent himself physically and mentally and become a different person – Dylan Hope – to survive.

“Nash did all those things (for the American Dream),” says Baldacci. “He got a good education, worked his butt off, travelled the world, built his business up and then it was all taken away. It had nothing to do with him, but he got knocked down. And around the world, a lot of people feel like they’ve been knocked down. How do they get back up? This was a theme in the novel… how you get back up.”

It’s a typically gripping read from the master thriller writer. Walter’s physical transformation at the hand of an army buddy of his late father, former Green Beret Shock, is deeply satisfying as he plots his path to revenge.

It’s classic Baldacci and you would almost say no one writes anything like this – except he admits today that, with the advent of AI, that’s no longer true. He was rocked to the core when his son Colin asked AI to create a novel plot in his father’s style. Within seconds the chatbot had generated an entire story outline with plot twists, characters and narrative pacing similar to Baldacci. It was a wake-up call for the author.

“It truly felt like someone had backed up a truck to my imagination and stolen everything I’d ever created,” he said at the time.

Subsequently he joined a group lawsuit involving the likes of George RR Martin, Michael Connelly, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham and dozens of other major authors who are suing Microsoft and OpenAI for stealing their work. He recalls being quizzed by attorneys for the defendants earlier this year.

“‘Mr Baldacci, you wrote a novel called Strangers in Time?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Set in London in 1944?’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘It has an orphan boy as one of the characters?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Mr Baldacci, have you read Oliver Twist?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘That has an orphan boy. Did you copy Charles Dickens? And if you copied Charles Dickens, why are you suing OpenAI?’”

He sighs: “I had to sit through nine hours of that.” The case is ongoing but is being watched closely by publishers and other creative industries around the world. But it’s not just AI that concerns him and he is at pains to insist he is not a technophobe.

“Everybody said social media was going to be the greatest thing ever but it’s been weaponised and kids are committing suicide, and it’s a cesspool. It’s driving people to be paranoid and believe all this crazy stuff,” he continues.

“Why do we think AI is going to be any different? Why do we think AI is not going to be weaponised? Of course it is. That’s what human beings do. With the internet at least you could say, ‘I don’t want to be on the internet, you know, chuck it.’ But how do you say, ‘I don’t want AI in my life?’ There really is no off-ramp and you have a small group of very wealthy men deciding what the world’s going to look like, and I don’t remember their name being on the ballot that I voted for.”

Baldacci has a proud history of philanthropy with his wife Michelle, having spread adult literacy in America through their Wish You Well Foundation since 2002.

But seeing the negative impact of social media on younger generations prompted them to dig deep to help even more people. The couple committed $13 million to establish a new nonpartisan program called the Civil Discourse and Collaboration Initiative as a joint effort between Virginia Commonwealth University and the Library of Virginia.

Its aim, he explains, is to promote constructive, respectful dialogue and civic engagement on complex issues. “The plan is to re-teach people how to be citizens in a democracy,” he says. “How to get off social media, how to come together and speak to each other across a table, to have venues and platforms and symposiums and opportunities for people to sit down peacefully.

“To reach across the divide, talk about issues, try to reach consensus, make better decisions in the voting booth and try to elect politicians who will actually work together instead of working apart.”

Frankly, it can’t come soon enough. Baldacci adds: “We’re hoping that it’ll be a model for other states to do as well, because my wife and I, about a year ago, we just looked at the country and were like, ‘This is an unsustainable trajectory we’re on.’ You can try to fix the upper storey of a house but if the foundation is bad, the house is going to fall down anyway. And the foundation for our country is our citizens, the voters. So if we can’t get along, nothing else is going to work.

“We have other charities that we’re involved in with literacy and libraries and things, but that one is really important for us right now.”

The writer says he was honoured to be invited back to Harrogate more than a decade after his last visit: “It’s one of the world’s great crime writing festivals. There is a tradition of crime fiction going back a century and it’s wonderful to be part of something like that. Part of my acceptance speech for the award was that the whole world now is talking about AI and how books are no longer important, and yet here we are at this crime festival, and it’s more popular and vibrant than it’s ever been.”

There’s no sign of his slowing down, either. Baldacci’s next book out will be All In, a Travis Devine 6:20 Man thriller set in Australia, in the autumn, with a crime noir detective story called Boomtown, set in LA in 1958, due to be published next spring.

Several of his books are in development for film or TV, including a Netflix adaptation of The 6:20 Man and The Memory Man Amos Decker is in active development with Amazon, which could see that character brought back for a final time in a new book.

But if Baldacci could achieve one thing he says he wants people to “put down your phone and pick up books”. He adds: “I travel a lot and whether I’m on a plane, a train, in a restaurant or at a hotel, I see one defining thing – everybody’s on their phone scrolling like zombies.”

Nash Falls by David Baldacci (Macmillan, £9.99) is out now in paperback, while Hope Rises (Macmillan, £22) is in hardback