The Gray Man with Mark Greaney

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1:30Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know, I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

2:04Anyways, let's get to it.

2:14Today, I am sitting down with one of the masters of the high-stakes thrillers, Mark Greeney, to talk about his latest book, Midnight Black. You know him from the Gray Man series, which was adapted into the movie with Ryan Gosling. But this time he's taking us into a dark, adrenaline-fueled world of crime, corruption, and redemption. So let's get into it.

2:48Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining me today on Open Book is Mark Greeney. The title of the book is Midnight Black. What a great title, by the way. It's a Gray Man novel, so we're going to get into the Gray Man series as well with this number one New York Times bestselling author. First of all, Mark, welcome to the show. Congratulations on the release. Many listeners know your work, but give us a little bit of your background before becoming this great thriller writer. What were you doing? Well, thanks for having me, first off. You know, Honestly, I don't have the same background.

3:22Some thriller writers do. I was just a guy working in an office. I was interested in international affairs and political science. My dad ran the NBC affiliate here in Memphis, Tennessee, where I grew up and where I still live. So I just kind of grew up around the news and I had a great interest in it. Studied political science, international relations in college, got out and did nothing with it for basically 20 years until I became a published author. I was in international business. And so I spent a lot of time I'm traveling and doing things of that nature. But I was a big reader and I was obsessed with Tom Clancy and Nelson DeMille and these Cold War era authors and guys that continued on.

4:03And I got an idea to write a book when I was actually still in college. And I spent 15 years just picking away at it and finished it, did nothing with it, and then wrote my second book in seven months. And The Gray Man, which is my first published novel, was my fourth completed novel. So it took me it took me 20 years to get published. But say 85 percent of that time was me not not working very hard at it. But there's a yeah, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, because you're very, very good at this. There's a calling to this. Right. So you were doing something else. You're like, you know, I always wanted to write a great thriller novel.

4:37I got to get myself busy. Right. The fingers started itching for the keyboard. Right. Yeah. So, I mean, I was just such a, I was obsessed with reading. I would have six books going at the same time, pretty much all through my twenties and my thirties. And, and I just had this idea that I could write something. And so there, it was a calling to, you know, people go like, wow, you were great for never giving up. And it's like, I didn't give up because I actually enjoyed what I was doing. If it felt like work, if I was digging a ditch for 20 years, I would have been pretty miserable, but I was doing something that I really liked.

5:06So it paid off finally. Yeah. The people that survive are the ones that don't even realize they're working, but, but, uh, what's on your nightstand right now, if you don't mind me asking, cause I, as you know, I'm a big reader. What are you reading right now? Cause I'm sure you've got three or four books going at the same time. So what are they? I do. I'm reading a lot of nonfiction, which is research for my next gray man book. And a lot of it has to do with Northern Ireland and the troubles, the Irish Republican army, things of that nature. Um, I I'm a big fan of kind of a new thriller author named David McCloskey.

5:37I don't know if you know who he is. So I've got his new one, The Seventh Floor, on deck. And, you know, I like all the guys in my genre. I like to, you know, I say I'm not a jealous person. I'm never jealous of anyone's success, but I get really jealous of people's ideas. I'll read somebody's book and I'll be like, God, I should have thought of that. And I'm furious that I didn't. So I love to pick through stuff like that. But right now it's a lot of history about Northern Ireland and the Troubles. So on this podcast, I've had Brad Thor. I have had Daniel Silva, the legendary Ken Follett, who writes thriller novels, but then also writes these historical novels.

6:19There's something you're doing that's unique though, because I am a thriller reader. I'm not a thriller writer, but I'm a thriller reader. And I feel like your plot lines are so compelling and the character development is such, but then you slam people at the end of these paragraphs. I mean, it's impossible not to go to the next chapter. Okay. You're almost like you invented book streaming. Okay. What I mean by that is if I'm streaming something, a good stream, you know, if you're watching Yellowstone, you probably have to watch the next episode. You hit play, stay up an extra two hours. How do you do that?

6:58What's in your brain as you're coming to the end of a chapter? You know, a lot of it happens in the editing, to be perfectly honest. Like nobody wants to see how the sausage is made. But the truth is, is I will be reading back something I read and go like, this just isn't propulsive enough. Or, you know, the ending of this chapter isn't leading me into the next thing. You really want to finish every chapter with the reader going. And then what, you know, instead of feeling like anything's wrapped up, you want to keep people moving. So I'm just a fan of that style of writing. The faster, the better.

7:33I mean, I do like moments of lightness and dark and moments of speed and maybe some reflection and, you know, vulnerability in your characters. These things, I don't ever want anything to be really one dimensional. It's not just it's not, you know, even a John Wick movie has moments where, you know, where they take a breath. But I like to keep things just about as propulsive as I can. All right. So I don't want to ruin the plot for Midnight Black, but you've got a great scene going on in here. We have a lover entrapped in a Russian gulag. There's got to be really bad prisons around the world, Mark Green, but I don't know if there's many that are worse than a Russian gulag.

8:15And so tell us, set the scene for us. You throw us into this icy Russian story. Tell us what happened. Set a little bit of a scene for us without giving away too much. Sure. The protagonist of the entire Gray Man series is a guy named Court Gentry, who's a former CIA paramilitary officer. And he's had different relationships with the CIA throughout the 14 books of the series. But in this one, he is on his own because the woman that he loves, who is a former Russian foreign intelligence officer, her name is Zoya Zakharova. And she has been thrown, as you said, in a gulag, a prison in the center of Russia and its winter.

9:00And he doesn't think she has long to live. And, you know, the Russians are actually hiding her presence there. So there's a lot of cloak and dagger work for him to figure out where she is. And then he realizes that he doesn't have a lot of support, but he's got to go in there and try and get her out. So, you know, I said earlier, I'm just a huge fan of Cold War novels. I grew up on that. So in this story, it kind of harkens back to that because he actually does develop an affiliation with some Cold War era resistance members in Latvia and then some younger present day Russian resistance fighters in Moscow.

9:33And, you know, he creates these alliances of convenience and he scratches their back and they scratch his. And it's his job to try and get into this into this gulag and get her out. But at the same time, there's a very cunning FSB, Russian foreign intelligence colonel who is laying a trap for the gray man to walk right into. So there's you know, the other side gets a vote in this in this story, too. It's not just all about him going in there and kicking butt. Okay. But let's talk about the reality of this because it's, of course, all your books have to say that this is not based on anybody. It's all fictional.

10:07But there's a lot of real worldness in your book. There are Russian gulags. There are CIA operatives that are entwined with Russian operatives. Some of them are double agents. Some are triple agents. You've got a whole morass of different things that are going on on the membrane between the free world and the world of totalitarianism. And so when you do your research for these books, what shocks you? I guess let me start out by saying this. When I read the first presidential daily brief, when I was read into what was going on, at least at that level, I was in a state of shock. And I actually, George W.

10:45Bush said to me, well, when you read the brief, did it change you as a person? And I said, yes, yes, it did. It made me see the world totally differently than I saw the world just through the prism of the news or the New York Times. You seem to have that perspective on the world. So tell us a little bit about the world that people don't know that you're trying to share with them in your books. Yeah, I think as a storyteller, when you do research and you come across something, you're just like really passionate about telling people about it. I will come across some research. My books come out in February.

11:18You know, here we are in January and I will come up with something. I'll read something tomorrow and some research material that won't be in a book for a year. And I'm just so, you know, passionate about getting that out because I'm interested in it. Everything that all the research I've done in Russia, this book is very accurate in a whole lot of ways, but I kind of realized late in writing this book that out of all the books I've written, and I've written Tom Clancy, Jack Ryan novels, and then my own stuff and parts of other series, I always try and predict geopolitically where we're going to be when the book comes out.

11:53But this is the one book that's kind of different because I told myself it was okay for me to be more hopeful than I really expected to find the world in 2025 when the book was released. So there's a more robust Russian resistance in my book than actually exists or that I actually know about. But I did do all the research on what's happening with the Russian resistance. I did a lot of research on Ukraine and the technology they have and Russian missile defenses, things like that. I tried to get the information. I tried to understand the information before I kind of departed from it and made things a little bit more hopeful, I guess you could say.

12:33But I will say that I was actually I am actually surprised that now when the book comes out, I make a lot of a big deal in the book that Ukraine is able to strike a thousand kilometers into Russia and try to explain how that was feasible. And now it's happening almost every other day that it's actually happening. So I was a little worried about people not buying that part of the story, but I don't think that's going to be a problem. The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in America, and Google is helping Americans innovate in ways both big and small. From improving emergency response times to protecting against cyber attacks, local, state, and federal governments are innovating with Google AI.

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13:50Yeah. So love and morality and danger and courage are all mixed into this book. OK, and so our great protagonist, Court Gentry, has got all these things inside his personality. He had a pretty decent moral compass, doesn't he? He has a very strong moral compass, whether or not it's the right thing or not. skewed. He sort of grew up as an assassin, but at the same time he does what he believes is right. So I think that's an important part of his character and his vulnerability. You fall in love with this guy. You want this guy to succeed, but you also see there's a chink in his armor. So tell me that chink in the armor.

14:41Yeah, his vulnerability is, in this book, to a large degree, it's Zoya. He's not had a lot of relationships in his life, and he has a difficult relationship with Zoya, but he is in love with her. She was kidnapped in a previous book. All my novels are standalone. You don't have to read any of the other books. I set it up very early in this book, who's who and what their relationships are. But in a previous book, you see how their relationship has developed. And he's willing to sacrifice anything. And the book opens with him saying, you know, he's making a bunch of poor decisions in his attempt to rescue this woman, or at least to verify that she's alive.

15:21And, you know, and I think his chink in his armor is always, he's kind of a slave to doing what he thinks is right. And sometimes that has him walking straight into fire. Well, I just want to point out to viewers and listeners, these, it's your 14th book, but they are standalone books. I had not read a gray, I have to confess I did not read a Gray Man book prior to this. Right. Yeah. And so I jumped right in. And I just want people to know you can start right here and go forward. I'm going to go back now that I've read the book. But but the but the process, the research, the interviews, the field research.

15:59Have you traveled to Russia recently? Yes, I've traveled to Russia, but previous to the war, the State Department, it's basically they call it it's a do not travel advisory. I've been to many countries where there's a lot of risks or, you know, code orange or something like that. But Russia would be a terrible place to go now. But I did get to go before the initial invasion. I was actually writing a Tom Clancy novel, the last book with Tom before he passed away called Command Authority. So I spent a couple of weeks in Moscow and some time up in St. Petersburg. And I still have thousands of photos and videos and notes and all my recollections.

16:38So that went straight into this book. Well, you could feel it. So be my CIA briefing agent for a second. You know a lot about the world. You know a lot about America's adversaries, Western liberal democracies, the adversaries of freedom. Brief me. Tell me where we are in the world right now. What should we be worried about? Well, I mean, specifically to Russia, you know, I think Mitt Romney was right back in 2012 when he said that that was our major geopolitical foe. And I think Obama kind of during the debate made fun of that. But look where we are a dozen years later. I think what's important is that Russia is waging hybrid warfare against the West, and the West will sort of begrudgingly call it destabilizing actions or malicious actions and not warfare, but everything from Havana syndrome to destroying the pipelines and telecommunication cables under sea to the attempted assassination of some political figures and some industry figures in Europe.

17:44Gosh, they almost killed the head of Reinmetall, a German defense company, because they were going to put a panzer factory in Ukraine and a plot was uncovered. There's so much of this. And I spend a lot of time looking at sabotage operations. I do discuss it in the book. Over 400 Russian spies have been expelled from from the West just in the last two years since since the invasion, almost three years now. And now the Russians are doing something. It's kind of jokingly referred to as like gig economy spying or gig economy sabotage, where they're hiring people in the West via Telegram and paying them money to set fires and things like that.

18:26They're hiring influencers to disrupt our markets. And hugely, hugely influential people are getting paid lots of money to kind of disseminate their propaganda. Is our leadership, and when I say our leadership, I say collectively Western leadership, American, European leadership, are we up for the task of handling it? I mean, it's monumental to me. The Russians only have the GDP comparable to Italy or the state of Texas. Texas is a large state, economically prosperous. But if you think of the landmass of Russia, it's a poor country punching over its weight. Are we up for the fight? Yeah, Putin has always bet heavy with a bad hand.

19:12I've heard it explained. And I think he's been very successful with that. And whether or not we're up against the fight, it kind of you kind of have to ask me on the day. Just, you know, Europe spent a couple of years kind of realizing how wrong it was for them to be so dependent on on Russian energy. And they've done so much to, you know, dial back from that. But just this week, Germany is talking about, you know, reopening trade with Russia, you know, and importing natural gas again and things like that, as if they hadn't learned a thing from where they found themselves a couple of years ago.

19:46I think greed sort of takes over. And so you see things like that and you go, are we just going to keep making the same mistakes until the end of the world? I don't know. I mean, I think, you know, we haven't done enough to support Ukraine. That's my personal opinion. Ukraine is the sixth largest army in the world. And I think Russia is the fourth largest army in the world. If Russia takes over Ukraine and gets themselves control over the sixth largest army in the world, I think it's going to end up costing a heck of a lot more than the 5 % of our defense spending that we've given to Russia in the past few years.

20:21But a lot of people just, in my opinion, are short-sighted and they don't see that. So I'm cautiously hopeful, but not particularly optimistic about where things are going to be a year from now. But, you know, let me just throw this at you and get you to react to it, Mark. The Russians have been very successful. They've infiltrated the Republican Party. The Russian talking points have showed up in Republican campaign and political platforms. And so I don't know. Are they useful idiots? Are they paid conspirators? What are they exactly? Well, you know, they caught a lot of paid conspirators in the governments in several European nations.

20:58And you see the election influence that I mean, you only see it if you pay attention. But there's a lot of election influence in in Georgia and Romania and these other big elections that have happened in Europe that Russia directly was involved in. I was Moldova too, right? Yeah, and Moldova as well. The attempt was there. I look back when in 2014, when Russia took over Crimea, they immediately held a referendum in the country. Once they had their little green men on the streets and their guns at the election facilities, they held a referendum and the Crimeans said, yeah, we'd like to be Russian.

21:35And I remember at the time thinking, well, no one's going to buy this because obviously this is under duress. A year before they had voted, you know, 58 % said they did not want to beat Russia. But now I look how naive I was to think that the average person was going to know that. And I've heard so many people in the media say, well, the Crimeans actually voted to become Russia. And I just think that's the most ridiculous thing in the world. But I don't think people pay attention to it quite well enough. And they just take that line. Exactly. They see the superficial propaganda, you know, it'd be like if the Russians invaded the state of North Carolina and they put their operatives there and then they had a vote.

22:13What do you think would happen? Of course, they would vote on a hundred percent to be a part of Russia. I mean, it's just the way it works. I mean, you know, I, I, uh, I have, um, you know, unfortunately I get too much knowledge about all this stuff, which frustrates me a lot. And I was blown away by your book because I, I see that you have that knowledge. Thank you. Okay. So there's five words that we came up with from your book, my producer, Holly and I dig through the book. I'm going to say the word and then I want you to react to it. You can give me a sentence or two. Okay. You ready? Yeah.

22:44So if I say the word thriller, what comes to mind for you? I thought you were going to ask me Russian words. I'm very glad. You know, a thriller is the genre and a thriller is any type of a story that, as you said at the beginning, keeps you turning the pages. And it's not necessarily crime, my books. I mean, they're more geopolitical. But at the end of the day, my books are human condition stories. So it's the thrills are you getting behind these characters and really sort of chasing their plights across across the length of the book. If I say the word Zoya, you say what? Well, Zoya is the love of court's life.

23:28I've turned her into a character. She's probably been in four or five books. And gosh, she might have her own book someday. She's a big part of this story. She's a very flawed character, just like Court, but she's also a very, very strong woman who has a lot of agency in this story. She's the one that he's going in to rescue, but she handles a lot of stuff on her own. He's ready to give up his life for her. Absolutely. And you create that emotional tension between the two characters quite brilliantly. Thank you. I say the word midnight black or the two words, midnight black. You say what? You know, that became the title because there's just a simple line in the story when And Cort slips into the water in the Baltic Sea or the Gulf of Finland outside of St.

24:08Petersburg. And it's at that moment where he enters Russia, which is halfway through the book. It takes him a while to figure out what's going on and get there and get the resources. But there's this moment where he sinks into the midnight black water in the middle of the night to make his way into Russia. And to me, that was this sort of stark delineation in the story to where it's like, OK, he's in bandit country now and will be for the rest of the story. So it was kind of a powerful moment in the book to me. and turned into a title. I mean, I love the title. I say the three words, the gray man.

24:39The gray man is a term that I didn't coin. I've heard it a long time ago. I was, when I was trying to become a published author, I was going to a lot of firearm schools and there were a lot of military guys there, a lot of law enforcement SWAT guys, and that you would hear them talk about the gray man as, as, you know, not showing off that that's what, what you are, you know, moving without tactical gear, clothes on, just sort of making your way through the ether as a normal person, even though you're not. You're one of the sheepdogs and not one of the sheep. Last word, and I'm going to give you the last word, of course, is court gentry.