James Hankins: Swampscott Author With Three Amazon Best Sellers

Meet local author James Hankins. James writes fiction — thrillers — and has three Amazon best sellers. They are Brothers and Bones, Drawn and Jack of Spades.

Brothers and Bones has gotten him the most notice including a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. In addition, some 25,000 people have bought copies of the book.

Here is our Q&A interview:

Q:  How long have you lived in Swampscott?  

A:  I've been living in Swampscott since my wife and I moved here in 2000. In 2003, our twin sons joined us. Frankly, I can't see us ever leaving; we love it here.  

Q:  Tell us a little about you and your family?  

A:  Okay, I'll start with me.  I always wanted to tell stories, though earlier in my life I thought I would do so through films. I wanted to make movies.  I attended N.Y.U. film school, studied screenwriting and filmmaking, and after graduation I moved to Los Angeles and flirted with the film industry. It didn't work out as well as I hoped, though I co-wrote a movie in which Dawn Wells (who played Maryann on "Gilligan's Island") appeared.  I even got to kiss her.  Okay, it was on the cheek, but still...to be honest, I try to work that into as many conversations as I can. It's a miracle if, within 10 minutes of meeting me, you don't find that out.

So, after the film industry didn't roll out a red carpet for me, I went to law school at the University of Connecticut School of Law. Upon graduation, I spent a year clerking for the Honorable Joette Katz, a justice on the Connecticut Supreme Court, before moving to Massachusetts and joining one of the biggest law firms in Boston (in the country, actually). That's where I met Colleen, my wife, who is still an attorney in Boston. I practiced law -- always writing my books at night -- until our twin boys were born in 2003. With two boys suddenly in our lives, it made sense for one of us to stay home with them. Colleen had wanted to be a lawyer literally since she was seven years old. Me, I wanted to be a writer. The choice was easy. So, right before the boys were born, I retired from my law practice to stay home with them and write when I could.

My family? It starts with Colleen, whose unswerving belief in me -- both in my potential to be a good father as well as in my abilities as a writer -- made it possible for me to do what I'm doing.  My wife is the first to read (and critique) my books.  She catches things I can't believe I let slip through.  And it's funny, I never think about movie actors when I write, but invariably, while Colleen reads my books, she tells me which actor she sees in this or that role.  And she's usually dead-on, which tells me that I didn't do a bad job describing the character.  But I truly owe my writing career to Colleen.  She supported the decision for me to leave the law and focus on my writing, her job paid the expenses to get the books off the ground (along with paying the mortgage, food bills, etc.), and even now she is my most tireless promoter.

And finally, there are the boys themselves.  Alex and Zack, nine years old, by far my greatest works, though I can't take much of the credit for them.  But they're great guys with terrific senses of humor and they're just exploding with creativity.  

Q:  Would you tell us a little about your books?

A:  Gladly!  They are all thrillers, though they are very different from each other.  The book that has been my most popular one so far is titled Brothers and Bones.  It's about a federal prosecutor whose life is turned upside down when a deranged homeless man calls him by a secret nickname known to only one other person in the world -- Charlie's brother, who has been missing for thirteen years.  The book is about Charlie's search for answers, which leads him down Boston's darkest streets, into its blackest alleys, and finally, into the criminal underworld.  The book has suspense, mystery, twists and turns, an unusual pairing of main characters, and mob guys.

Drawn is a supernatural/paranormal thriller about four very different people:  (1) a NYC young artist who has been painting a mysterious boy into her landscapes without remembering ever actually seeing him in real life...and the boy seems to be trying to tell her something; (2) an eleven year-old boy from Philadelphia who finds out that the man he's been traveling with isn't the harmless companion he had thought; (3) a partially blind, disfigured agoraphobe who suffers crippling panic attacks if he even tries to leave his house begins to realize that...something invisible and unexplainable wants him out; and (4) an elderly widower who begins to suffer horrifying nightmares that his long presumed-dead son is actually still alive...and in mortal danger.  Drawn is about these very different people who are compelled by various forces -- some supernatural, some not -- toward a single, shared destiny.  It's got creepy visions, ghosts, nightmares, and one really bad man.  The book is meant to be thrilling, a bit scary, and in the end, full of hope.  

Jack of Spades is a cop thriller, a police procedural.  Just two years ago, the media turned Detective John Spader into a hero.  He’d caught a twisted serial killer terrorizing Massachusetts, and the “Jack of Spades,” as the media dubbed Spader, was born.  But when the murderer walked free on a technicality -- free to kill again -- the public turned on Spader.  Now, a new serial killer is on the loose.  He wears the silly, gap-toothed, grinning mask of Galaxo, Starboy Avenger! -- a cartoon alien of unparalleled popularity with children. With the aid of voice-changing technology in the mask, he speaks in the alien’s cheerful, high-pitched, robotic vibrato, the same voice that delights millions of cartoon-watching kids every day.  And he does all this while he does nasty things to his victims.  With the body count rising, and the public’s fear growing, it’s up to the Jack of Spades to find the man beneath the mask and stop the killing.  Jack of Spades is meant to keep you guessing.  

Q:  What are the challenges and advantages of being a stay-at-home dad who writes?

A:  Paradoxically, the greatest challenge and the greatest advantage might be the same thing:  time to write.  What I mean is, finding the time to write when the boys were young was sometimes difficult.  That said, now, I have far more time to write because I'm a stay-at-home dad rather than someone who spends his workday fully engaged in a different field.  First, let me say that I'm a full-service stay-at-home dad, which means that I do the laundry, food shopping, and various other chores to keep the house running (though I'm not much of a cook, to be honest).  So I have to get that stuff done before I can hunker down and write.  When the boys were very young, they required a lot of attention, except during nap time. Nap time was golden.  What I often wanted to do was nap myself, but I forced myself to write.  When the boys got a little older, they stopped napping, and they did so far earlier than all of their friends.  That was not a golden day for me at all.  For a while, I was mostly able to write only at night.  Then time passed and the guys got old enough to really engage each other and I had a little more free time during the day.  Once they entered kindergarten, I had a solid writing day every day.  The first hour or so would be devoted to chores, then I wrote until two o'clock when I had to pick up the boys from school.  I still sprinkle in evening writing when I can, and weekend time now and then.  

Q:  Does Swampscott figure into your writing?

A:  Well, Massachusetts figures prominently in two of the three books I've published, and in my cop thriller, Jack of Spades, Swampscott was the home of the main character, John Spader, before his divorce (his ex-wife still lives in the house, in fact, and she's a big part of the story).  The rest of the novel takes place all over Massachusetts as Spader hunts for a masked serial killer, with scenes in Salem, Beverly, East Boston, Hull, and more.  

There's also my supernatural/paranormal thriller Drawn, which, as I said, has four protagonists, one of whom lives in Chelsea.  So though Swampscott itself has a role in one of my books, Massachusetts is the setting for a lot of my work.

Q:  You have led three lives, of sorts, either as a student or in occupations: film, law and writing novels. How do the experiences complement each other in your work as a writer?

A:  What a great question.  By the way, I never even mentioned the years I worked as the Head of Human Resources and Assistant to the President of a hospital in Los Angeles, which I did while Hollywood was being very reluctant about wanting to pay my bills.  But it's interesting to me how my various "lives" (which was a great way for you to phrase it, because it really does seem like these were different lives to a very large degree) have informed my work.  First, one of my main goals as a writer of thrillers is to write in a way that makes my readers want to keep turning the pages rather than to put my book down.  I have no doubt that my screenwriting experience, and my general knowledge of telling stories cinematically, have helped me in that regard.  Most of the feedback that I get from people, either through communications through my website or on Facebook, and even more so from the many reviews that readers have left on my books' Amazon pages, is that my books are hard to put down.  I have to say that this is my favorite compliment because it's really what I'm striving for.  And as I say, I believe strongly that my film study and work have contributed to that.

As for my work as a lawyer, that's an easy one.  The protagonist of my thriller Brothers and Bones is a lawyer. Now, Charlie Beckham is a federal prosecutor while I was an employment lawyer -- and those are two very different animals -- but I have no doubt that I wouldn't have written this character had it not been for my legal work.  I became familiar with being a lawyer in Boston, and I'd been to the federal courthouse where Charlie works.  Of course, it didn't hurt that there are several other lawyers in my family upon whose experience I could draw, including my wife, two brothers, a sister, and two brothers-in-law.    

Q:  What keeps you going as writer?

A:  As I said, I always wanted to tell stories.  There was a time when I truly thought I was going to be a lawyer for the rest of my life and I still couldn't stop writing at night. It can be a little lonely at times, of course.  Even though I have my family around me, there's something very lonely about sitting by myself in front of a computer spinning a story for months before it's ready to share with anyone. But once I show it to someone else -- always my wife first, then my agent -- it's gratifying to realize that everything I'd been doing for those many solitary hours, over those many months, actually seems to hold together and, even more importantly, entertains somebody.  And now that I've published three books, books to which people have been responding very kindly and even enthusiastically, it's exciting for me.  For a long time, my books were just words on my hard drive.  Now, they're words on thousands of people's Kindles.  I'm very grateful that people spend both their hard earned money and their precious time on my books.    

Q:  How do you deal with stress?

A:  This might sound crazy, but I don't typically feel terribly stressed.  I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing -- raising my sons and writing my books -- so my stress levels aren't very high.  If I feel stress, it's typically about something transient, something that is resolved quickly enough that I don't have to get worked up over it. A house repair, a deck I have to re-paint, etc.  If I'm being totally honest, I think the job of stress bearer in our house has fallen to my wife, Colleen, and she handles it remarkably well (though I don't know how she does it).

Q:  What are your favorite spots in Swampscott?

A:  Five years ago I would have named all the green, grassy, or sandy spots in town where I'd bring my sons on playdates with other four year-olds.  Now, I'd say that though I'm not a beach lover in the sense that I lie in the sun for hours, I do enjoy walking along the various beaches with my family.  The sidewalk along King's Beach is a great walk on summer days, dodging bicyclists and petting dogs.  And probably not surprisingly, I like the library.  I've always loved libraries.  

Q:  What do you hope to achieve, as a writer?

A:  I want to get my books into as many people's hands as possible so they can, hopefully, enjoy them.  How to do that, I'm not sure.  The ultimate dream would be to have a book (well, many books) reach the New York Times Best Seller List.  Though each of my books have been on Amazon's best seller lists for a while now, reaching the NYT Best Seller List is still the gold standard. Maybe one day.  But assuming I don't actually reach the top of that particular metaphorical Everest, I can say that what I really hope for is simply to keep writing books that people like and tell their friends about so that more and more people find and enjoy my books.  

Q:  Who are your favorite authors? What are your favorite books?

A:  I'll assume for the moment that I'm to exclude my own books!  It's actually hard to choose favorite authors and books because there are so, so many wonderful ones.  If I'm forced to choose, I'll say that my favorite authors who are not longer alive are Twain and Dickens.  Of the living variety, I would choose a few who write in my genre.  Certain authors put out books like crazy and never write a clinker.  Among my favorites (and I'm sure I'll leave some out) are Dennis Lehane, Nelson DeMille, Michael Connelly, Stephen King, and Greg Iles (again, to name just a few).

My favorite book of all-time (again, assuming mine are off the table) is To Kill A Mockingbird.  It's an incredible book that I was forced to read in the seventh grade.  Nothing the teacher told the class about it ahead of time had me looking forward to reading it.  But I was so glad I did.  A very moving book with wonderful lessons that you almost don't realize you're learning as you read it.  I re-read it every few years or so.  I also love the Brian Hooker translation of Edmond Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac.  Of more contemporary books, I love Lehane's books (particularly his Kenzi-Gennaro detective series), DeMille'sGold Coast and his John Corey books, Connelly's Harry Bosch series, and a book by Greg Iles called Black Cross, which I think is the most exciting, most moving thriller I've ever read.  It's a book I think must be underappreciated because I've never met another person who has read it.

Q:  What do you hope readers gain from reading your stories?

A:  I hope my readers do gain something from my stories, because I've gained so much from having people read and enjoy them.  Mostly, I guess, I hope that I help readers escape for a while to a new place, a new life, get to walk around in someone else's shoes for a bit, feel a few tingles up their spines, experience excitement and thrills and a sense of mystery and discovery as well as a sense of satisfaction that causes them, when they reach the end of the book, to themselves (and hopefully to all of their friends and family) that reading my books was a worthwhile way to spend their valuable time.  

As I say, I do hope I give some people that because, personally, I've been gaining a tremendous amount of satisfaction simply knowing that people are reading and responding very positively to my books.  As I said, there was a time when my stories never roamed beyond my office walls.  Now they've been all over the country and, literally, in other parts of the world.  I've heard from people from Massachusetts to Oregon and many places in between, and from as far off as England and Dublin, Ireland.  That is incredibly gratifying for me.  

Q:  How does someone order your book or books?

A:  Another great question!  At the moment, my books are available only as e-books, so they must be read on an e-reading device or a tablet/smartphone with a reading app like Kindle or Nook.  There are a few ways to buy the books.  People can go directly to each book's page on Amazon.com (orBarnesandnoble.com or other major bookselling websites).  On each page they can easily find my other books, too.  Here are Amazon's pages:

Brothers and Bones -- http://www.amazon.com/Brothers-and-Bones-ebook/dp/B009XGD2DY/ref=pd_sim_kstore_2. 

Drawn -- http://www.amazon.com/Drawn-ebook/dp/B009XGIHES/ref=pd_sim_kstore_3

Jack of Spades -- http://www.amazon.com/Jack-of-Spades-ebook/dp/B009XGD6LM/ref=pd_sim_kstore_1