Honor, Underworld & Koi Fish: Crafting Tokyo Black with Andrew Warren
In this episode of The Adventure Story Podcast, I sit down with thriller author Andrew Warren to dive into one of the world’s most enthralling cities—Tokyo.
We explore what makes Tokyo such a captivating backdrop for storytelling and how Andrew strikes the balance between cultural authenticity and fast-paced fiction. Andrew shares vivid memories from his time in Tokyo that shaped the novel, along with insights into how he weaves setting, character values, and action into his books.
We also delve into the research behind writing about the Yakuza, and how Andrew blends gritty realism with the cinematic flair that keeps readers turning the pages!
Whether you’re a fan of thrillers, fascinated by Tokyo, or just love a good story well told, this episode is for you.
Tokyo Black by Andrew Warren is available here. Here's what it's all about:
Thomas Caine was the CIA’s deadliest killer. Then he was burned, betrayed, and left for dead.
Now he survives off the grid, currently in Pattaya, Thailand. But when a feud with local criminals lands him in jail, his old CIA masters return with an offer he can’t refuse… Rot in a Thai prison, or accept one last mission in Tokyo, Japan.
Forced to hunt the neon-lit city for a CIA asset’s runaway daughter, Caine soon crosses paths with a sinister faction of the yakuza crime syndicate and finds himself drawn into a terror plot that could throw the US and Japan into chaos.
But Caine knows a double cross when he sees one. He’s convinced someone in the CIA is manipulating him from behind the scenes. Someone who knows his past in intimate detail.
But this time, he’s not going down without a fight…
Takeaways:
- Tokyo Black captures Tokyo’s unique blend of ancient shrines and high-tech sprawl, reflecting the city’s layered identity.
- Themes of honor, duty, and redemption run through the story, reflecting the protagonist’s search for moral clarity.
- Andrew's book taps into Japanese mythology, specifically the koi fish that transforms into a dragon to mirror the hero’s journey.
- Andrew's research into the Yakuza included books, films, and Japanese video games, helping him avoid clichés while keeping things dramatic!
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Transcript
Tokyo, a city of shadows and neon where ancient tradition meets high tech chaos.
Speaker A:In this episode, we dive into the heart of Japan's capital with thriller author Andrew Warren, whose novel Tokyo Black takes you into a world of espionage, of betrayal, and the deadly grip of the Yakuza.
Speaker A:Hey, I'm Luke.
Speaker A:I'm an author of archaeological adventure novels.
Speaker A:I travel the world looking for stories to put into my books and share with you right here on the Adventure Story podcast.
Speaker A:Andrew's novels are known for gritty espionage, exotic locations, and pulse pounding action.
Speaker A:So if you've ever wondered what it's like to navigate the blurred lines of spycraft, the and survival in one of the most exciting cities in Asia, then this one is definitely for you.
Speaker A:Andrew, thank you for joining me.
Speaker B:Yeah, thanks for having me, Luke.
Speaker B:Good to see you again.
Speaker A:Yeah, and you.
Speaker A:And you.
Speaker A:And I'm excited to talk about this book because I remember reading it and I remember enjoying it quite a lot.
Speaker A:But specifically, we're talking about Tokyo.
Speaker A:Now, it's a city of neon lights and hidden alleyways and centuries old traditions.
Speaker A:This is the thing that I'm picturing as I think about it now.
Speaker A:But what drew you to set this book there?
Speaker B:Well, so there's sort of like the things you could say about Tokyo and why it's such an amazing city, as you just hinted at.
Speaker B:I think one of the things that's most fascinating is the collision of old and new, right.
Speaker B:Tokyo.
Speaker B:You simultaneously picture something like Blade Runner, you know, with the neon lights and the towering buildings and the people everywhere.
Speaker B:But then at the same time, you turn a corner and you could find like an ancient temple just in an alleyway between buildings.
Speaker B:Or even like, there's some buildings in Tokyo where they've actually built lobbies of giant office buildings around like ancient monuments and temples.
Speaker B:Like, you walk into this atrium of a bank and there'll be a hundreds of year old Shinto shrine, like in the lobby because they built around it.
Speaker B:I love that.
Speaker B:But what actually made me want to set a book there was I had visited Tokyo many years before I started writing.
Speaker B:And one night I was working in a job that I didn't really like and I'd gone through a divorce and I was kind of at a low point in my life and I'd always wanted to write a book and I just woke up in the middle of the night and I was like, you know, I really want to revisit Tokyo and go back to Tokyo.
Speaker B:The city just made this huge impression on me.
Speaker B:It really just became a Part of me from that one first visit, but I couldn't afford to go on a trip.
Speaker B:And so I was like, if you write a book set in Tokyo, that could be like a virtual vacation.
Speaker B:I could kind of mentally project myself there.
Speaker B:And that was what really inspired the whole thing and created the whole book series, was my love of Tokyo and my desire to go back there.
Speaker A:That's fantastic.
Speaker A:That's fascinating.
Speaker A:I can really resonate with that.
Speaker A: at place, and I visited it in: Speaker A:And it did feel like revisiting it, because my character was in that bus alongside in the place that I'd sat and looked out at the same things and felt that same sort of excitement that I did.
Speaker B:Absolutely.
Speaker B:When you read Tokyo Black.
Speaker B:So in the book, the character is returning to Japan.
Speaker B:He'd spent time in Japan in the past, like, undercover, and he's going back.
Speaker B:And so I structured it that way so that I can put all my kind of recollections into this character.
Speaker B:And, like, just all the things that I found quirky or charming, like, he kind of reflects upon as he goes through the book.
Speaker A:So, yeah, fascinating.
Speaker A:How did you.
Speaker A:And this isn't a question I plan to ask, but I'm intrigued.
Speaker A:From a writer's perspective, how do you balance that love of the place and your want to revisit that place with a plot and a story?
Speaker A:Because they need to marry.
Speaker A:Otherwise, it just becomes a literary book about your own trip, doesn't it?
Speaker B:I don't know if there's a real simple set of instructions I can give there.
Speaker B:All I can really say is you're 100% right, and it's something you have to watch out for.
Speaker B:You have to be careful that your book doesn't turn into a travelogue.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Because it's not a guidebook.
Speaker B:It's a fiction book.
Speaker B:And so it's always this balance and how much is too much?
Speaker B:I think a lot of that is just instinct.
Speaker B:So usually on my first drafts, I just pile in all the details I can remember.
Speaker B:And then when I go back on my revision pass, I'm like, all right, what's really critical here?
Speaker B:What do I need to bring this location alive?
Speaker B:Everything else has to go.
Speaker B:And so usually I find, like, I can whittle it down to maybe two or three key details of a certain place.
Speaker B:And I think a big thing is to keep in mind the other senses besides sight, of course.
Speaker B:You need to describe what it looks like.
Speaker B:But I also try to think of, like, what does it smell like?
Speaker B:Or there are food vendors in this area.
Speaker B:What kind of food would you smell like?
Speaker B:What kind of sounds are there?
Speaker B:I think if you get a couple of those details, it doesn't really take as much as people think.
Speaker B:Maybe two or three things, and that'll kind of bring the location alive for the reader.
Speaker A:Yeah, I totally agree with that, and I can imagine that from my own descriptions of places.
Speaker A:Although Tokyo is somewhere I still haven't been.
Speaker A:But we'll change that soon.
Speaker B:Oh, you gotta go.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:So you dial into the sort of the underbelly of Tokyo, as I suppose you have to in a book like the one that you wrote, and you talk about the Yakuza, the organized crime part of Japan.
Speaker A:What sort of research did you have to do to capture that?
Speaker B:You know, it's funny, that was one of the things I was most worried about writing the book because my.
Speaker B:My natural inclinations were to write those scenes very almost like Shakespearean melodramatic.
Speaker B:I was very influenced by things like Shogun.
Speaker B:I read that when I was a kid.
Speaker B:But at the same time, I'm like, all right, I don't want to be super stereotypical, and I certainly don't want to be offensive to a Japanese reader.
Speaker B:And these are criminals we're talking about.
Speaker B:I really wasn't sure what angle to tackle it.
Speaker B:So I did do some historical research.
Speaker B:I read some books like Tokyo Vice was one of them, and some other books about the Yakuza, of course.
Speaker B:But then I also watched a lot of.
Speaker B:Of Japanese movies about the Yakuza and an American movie called the Yakuza, which was also a big influence on me.
Speaker B:It's from, like, the 70s, I believe.
Speaker B:Great movie.
Speaker B:But ultimately, what really informed those scenes, believe it or not, was a series of video games.
Speaker B:So SEGA publishes a series of video games called Yakuza.
Speaker B:They are brought to the Western market, but they're primarily popular in Japan in the Eastern market.
Speaker B:And I played through some of these games, and these games are just bonkers of things that happen.
Speaker B:It's like a soap opera with Yakuza gangsters and just there's, like evil twins and people come back from the dead with cyborg arms and stuff.
Speaker B:And so when I played through these games, I was like, all right, if the Japanese audience likes these, I'm way more realistic than this.
Speaker B:So I figured, okay.
Speaker B:That kind of gave me the confidence to move forward with the way I depicted them in the book.
Speaker B:So it was a Combination of research plus just my imagination of how I imagine these characters to behave.
Speaker A:Mm.
Speaker A:I think you're right.
Speaker A:And I.
Speaker A:It's hard when you write a city about a place, particularly one that is important to you, to not make it a caricature.
Speaker A:And you sort of try not to, don't you?
Speaker A:It has to have that authenticity, that realism there.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Like a blend.
Speaker B:And you want someone from Japan to read it and not roll their eyes, but at the same time you want to be dramatic and exciting, so.
Speaker A:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Without hitting those stereotypes.
Speaker A:Every single one that you'll see on all the travel programs, you see them eating some bugs or going to some particular place and you want to just sort of keep that bit out, don't you?
Speaker A:Because that's not the real people.
Speaker B:No bugs were harmed in the writing of Turkey Black, I assure you.
Speaker A:Did any real locations or events there or what real locations or events there influenced the story for you?
Speaker B:I mean, a bunch.
Speaker B:Like, really, as you read the book, most of the places that he goes are places that I went because I found those easiest to write.
Speaker B:But one location that really stands out to me, that became a huge part of the book was.
Speaker B:And to this day, I don't exactly know what it actually was.
Speaker B:It was just this fascinating site.
Speaker B:This was the first time I ever visited to Tokyo.
Speaker B:So my knowledge of the city's geography wasn't very good.
Speaker B:But I believe it had to have been around Roppongi because that's where my hotel was.
Speaker B:And I was walking down this side street and I saw all these little kind of like stores, but they almost looked like tiny warehouses.
Speaker B:And they had those roll up garage doors and one of them was open and there were all these kiddie pools inside.
Speaker B:And it was raining and I had an umbrella, so I couldn't see too clearly.
Speaker B:I was like, oh, what's that?
Speaker B:So I walked up closer and there was this elderly man walking among these kiddie pools tossing something.
Speaker B:And as I got closer, I realized they were pools filled with koi, like koi fish.
Speaker B:And he was feeding the koi fish and he was making these sounds.
Speaker B:I don't know if he was talking to himself.
Speaker B:It sounded like he was singing.
Speaker B:So in my head I'm like, wow, this old man is like walking around singing to these fish as he's feeding them.
Speaker B:And so in my mind I had no idea if this was true.
Speaker B:But in my mind I was like, maybe he's trained them so that when he sings they know it's like feeding time and they come up to the surface to eat.
Speaker B:And this was years before I wrote the book.
Speaker B:But when I wrote the book, that memory was stuck in my head.
Speaker B:So I made the yakuza's main sort of headquarters, where most of their scenes take place, in this warehouse with this koi farm out front with that old guy described in the way.
Speaker B:I remembered him feeding the fish.
Speaker B:And a couple people ask him, like, why he's singing to the fish.
Speaker B:And he never says what I thought.
Speaker B:He always makes up a different reason.
Speaker B:Like when they ask him, you know, just, oh, I just think they like it.
Speaker B:But in my mind, I think he was.
Speaker B:He's telling them, oh, it's feeding time.
Speaker B:But that was just this memory that I still never really 100% knew what it was.
Speaker B:But that was like kind of my author's imagination filling in the blanks.
Speaker B:And then I put that in the book.
Speaker A:That is so fascinating.
Speaker A:And I remember that scene now you've described it, even though it's been a long time since I read the book.
Speaker A:And it was just one of those really authentic.
Speaker A:It felt very authentic.
Speaker A:Like on those little vignettes of a character that isn't necessarily part of the story, but is sort of like a touch point within the story, you know?
Speaker B:You know, it's funny, too, and I don't want to.
Speaker B:This may dovetail into another question you can ask later.
Speaker B:But that scene and that memory led to a bunch of other things.
Speaker B:Because once I established that their headquarters is in this koi farm, based on this place that I really saw, I decided that their tattoos, their clan tattoos, would have koi fish in them.
Speaker B:And then that made me do research on koi, which is an important animal in Japanese mythology.
Speaker B:And there's this famous myth or story, One of the reasons they revere the koi is the story of a koi fish that, like, swims up a waterfall and manages to get through the waterfall and jump through this gate, like a torii gate at the top of the waterfall.
Speaker B:And the gods who see this are so impressed that they turn the koi into a dragon.
Speaker B:And as I went through the story at the end, Cain, who is sort of.
Speaker B:The whole story is sort of about Cain kind of trying to recover his old life and come back in from exile.
Speaker B:And at the end, he's going up this big tower.
Speaker B:And I was like, oh, wow.
Speaker B:This is almost like the koi going up the waterfall, you know, like.
Speaker B:Cause this is the end.
Speaker B:And if he can do this, he can kind of get his old life back.
Speaker B:So I Changed that scene to make it take place in the rain so that I could describe the tower.
Speaker B:Almost like a waterfall.
Speaker B:The water's cascading down the tower.
Speaker B:And that all came from working in that little memory, you know, and just kind of extrapolating it through the book.
Speaker A:And I like how you've tapped into the mythology there and you've almost laid your story on top of one that's important to that place.
Speaker B:Right?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:In a very respectful way.
Speaker A:I like that a lot.
Speaker B:I could have never planned that.
Speaker B:That was just one of those things that grows from the memories and experiences you have while traveling.
Speaker B:If I didn't see that guy in that place on that night, we would have gone a totally different way.
Speaker A:And that's the wonderful thing of discovering through the writing process, isn't it?
Speaker A:And adventuring through the writing process that you rediscovered that and you put that into your book.
Speaker A:You immortalized it in the book.
Speaker B:I know.
Speaker B:I sometimes wonder if that old guy, if he's still alive or I would love to believe maybe he saw the book someday.
Speaker B:Probably not, but you never know.
Speaker A:Or what he was singing.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Or what he was singing alive.
Speaker A:Maybe he was learning something and just.
Speaker B:Repeating his practicing English, maybe.
Speaker A:So talking of that, that leads us quite nicely into the next question, I think, because there is a tension in a lot of big Asian cities between this east meets West.
Speaker A:They've got the skyscrapers, the glass fronted skyscrapers which could be anywhere in the world.
Speaker A:There's the expatriates from Europe and America and wherever, plus this culture, the temples and the ancient buildings and this sort of thing contrasting one another.
Speaker A:What fascinated you in the story about that dynamic, about that east meets west sort of compari.
Speaker B:Listen, any sort of juxtaposition is fascinating, right?
Speaker B:The cognitive dissonance involved.
Speaker B:So for me personally, I don't know if I could tell you.
Speaker B:Why do we find things fascinating?
Speaker B:I don't know, it just really grabbed me.
Speaker B:I just felt fascinated there.
Speaker B:I feel like Japan in general and Tokyo and other cities are like these labyrinths of mysteries.
Speaker B:You can just wander that city and you will never get bored.
Speaker B:And you will find amazing things that you would never imagine.
Speaker B:I think it just bubbles up from that clash of the old and the new.
Speaker B:Like you can find these like neon lit skill crane parlors that are completely automated where no people are working there.
Speaker B:And like the prizes come out of little holes in the wall.
Speaker B:And then you turn another corner and you can find like a little tea shop run by an old woman that's been there for hundreds of years and in her family, that just, for whatever reason, resonates with me.
Speaker B:But with the Kane character in the book, I think what kind of resonated with him was he comes from this world of very, like, morally gray areas where, like, things like trust are unheard of.
Speaker B:But in the Japanese culture, there's, like, this very strong focus on duty and honor.
Speaker B:And so I think for him, those values are kind of missing.
Speaker B:And so I think, although this isn't spelled out explicitly, I think he is finding something in that culture that he feels he's missing in his own life.
Speaker B:There's a couple points in the story where people ask him, like, why he's doing this.
Speaker B:Why are you trying to help this girl?
Speaker B:And he just says, because I said I would.
Speaker B:And to him, I think he's trying to rediscover those kinds of values.
Speaker A:Fascinating.
Speaker A:Yeah, I can see that a lot.
Speaker A:I know this isn't the only unique setting you explore in your books.
Speaker A:Every single one of them seems to go somewhere else.
Speaker A:Interesting.
Speaker A:I know that in that series, the main character goes to China, to Sudan, to back to Asia, Singapore, Vietnam, all these different places.
Speaker A:How important is this setting in your thrillers?
Speaker A:And how do you choose the places for things to go?
Speaker B:Well, I think the setting is critical.
Speaker B:And it all goes back to, like I said, that one of the goals of all my books is to take the reader on a virtual vacation, like, to make them feel the experience of going somewhere else, whether they've actually been there or whether they've never been there.
Speaker B:I want them to feel like they've taken a trip to a place because that was really the reason why I wrote that first book.
Speaker B:So that's always been one of my kind of guiding principles.
Speaker B:So a lot of the books take place in those locations because those are the locations I visited.
Speaker B:I have been lucky enough to visit China and Vietnam and Indonesia, Korea.
Speaker B:But for other books, like, I've never been to Sudan, and I doubt I ever will, but I was just fascinated with the political situation there, that there's Sudan is split into Sudan and South Sudan.
Speaker B:And so you've got this East African nation tied to this Arabic nation with very different values and cultures and clashes.
Speaker B:And then you throw in all the foreign influences, influence over oil, the US and the Chinese fighting over the oil there.
Speaker B:And it just seemed like a really fascinating location for me.
Speaker B:Another place I said a book that I've never been to was Siberia, originally published as Cold Kill, but it's now going to be combined with another Novella and repackaged as a new book called Hell and Ice.
Speaker B:But Siberia, I saw a documentary about these farmers who.
Speaker B:They're loggers, essentially, where they go out into the tundra, and they built these like shacks and live out there for a certain part of the year when they're chopping down trees and collecting lumber.
Speaker B:And then it gets just too cold and brutal.
Speaker B:And then they go back to the villages where they're from.
Speaker B:And the idea of these abandoned shacks littering this tundra, kind of icy wasteland, I thought, wow, that's a great location for a story.
Speaker B:It just fascinated with me, and the images of it were so beautiful.
Speaker B:So sometimes it's based on my personal recollections.
Speaker B:Other times it's just locations that I think seem fascinating and I have to rely on research.
Speaker A:I feel that myself in my writing, too.
Speaker A:I don't make not visiting there put me off from going.
Speaker A:But often going is the spark.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Because once you're there, I feel like a lot of times stories just suggest themselves.
Speaker B:When I was in Vietnam, I didn't have any particular idea for a book there, but I loved the country.
Speaker B:It was amazing.
Speaker B:I'm like, oh, this would be great for a book.
Speaker B:And I was walking around the lake in the middle of Hanoi, Hoan something.
Speaker B:But anyway, there's a big lake in the center of Vietnam.
Speaker B:And on the weekends, they close off the street that goes around and make it a walking street.
Speaker B:And it becomes like this big festival every weekend.
Speaker B:And there were these people playing this game, almost like hopscotch, but it involved these bamboo sticks.
Speaker B:And they would slam the bamboo sticks down in a certain pattern and then stop.
Speaker B:And the kids have to jump through the sticks, and then they start moving the sticks again.
Speaker B:So everywhere around the lake as you're walking, you hear these sticks, like, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack, crack.
Speaker B:Like this beat, like a percussion beat.
Speaker B:And it.
Speaker B:It was like a soundtrack.
Speaker B:And I was like, oh, man, this would be a great scene where he's, like, following somebody around this lake.
Speaker B:And you just keep hearing this crack, crack, crack of the sticks, like a drumbeat.
Speaker B:And the whole book stemmed from that idea.
Speaker B:I don't know why he's here or what happens next, but this has to be in a book.
Speaker B:And so I kind of extrapolated in both directions.
Speaker A:Yeah, I feel that I understand that completely.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So thrillers often, and mine included this as well, often ride the edge between realism, what we see and experience on those adventures and fantasy.
Speaker A:You know, the things I don't mean like High fantasy.
Speaker A:I mean, what we've made up to fill the gaps.
Speaker A:How much of Tokyo Black and your stories in general, I suppose, are actually grounded in the politics and the stuff you see and experience and the stuff you find and how much of it is just pure sort of pumping the adrenaline and set the characters off to go.
Speaker B:So, you know, like it's interesting.
Speaker B:Like thrillers, there's this vast spectrum, right?
Speaker B:You've got on one side authors like John Le Carre or people who write these very realistic, gritty military thrillers.
Speaker B:And then on the other side you've got the Mac Bolan, utterly fantastical, one man army kind of fiction.
Speaker B:I think I fall somewhere in the middle on that spectrum.
Speaker B:For me, the politics and the history of an area are like the background spice.
Speaker B:They're not the main thing I'm interested in, in the story.
Speaker B:For me, the stories are always really about personal values or conflicts.
Speaker B:With Cain, it's always about redemption or making up for a mistake he's made in his past or protecting someone that's important to him.
Speaker B:I try to really ground the stories around like personal values like that because I just feel they're more universal.
Speaker B:And when I read political thrillers where the politics are the point, those just don't fascinate me as much.
Speaker B:I'm more interested in just the personal morality of the characters.
Speaker B:So I try to kind of just strike a balance, using the politics and the history to kind of of acting as a backdrop for these really sort of personal stories.
Speaker B:Mostly about redemption, in my opinion.
Speaker A:It's a good point and it's a lovely way you've answered that.
Speaker A:Focusing in on the characters and thinking about their motivations.
Speaker B:But then I will say in terms of like action scenes, I definitely, I like to go a little bit more cinematic.
Speaker B:So they're definitely less on the realistic side and more on something you'd see in a Mission Impossible movie or a James Bond movie.
Speaker B:One of the things I always try to do another thing.
Speaker B:So like I said, the virtual vacation is a principle I always try to keep in mind when I'm writing.
Speaker B:Another principle I try to keep in mind is escalating action.
Speaker B:So for me, sometimes I'll read a thriller and you're at the climax and the hero chases a guy upstairs to the roof of a building and he shoots the guy and the guy falls off and that's the end, you know.
Speaker B:Well, if I was imagining that as a scene in a movie, that would be kind of anti climactic.
Speaker B:I feel like each action should lead to something a little bigger.
Speaker B:So I think he should chase the guy to the roof of the building, but the guy jumps over to the next building and then the hero jumps, but he misses and he hits the fire escape.
Speaker B:So he has to run through the building to catch up on the other side.
Speaker B:I try to find ways to keep increasing the stakes and making the action a little bit bigger, always keeping in mind trying not to get to the point of complete utter unbelievability, but try to find ride that line.
Speaker B:So I. I think my action scenes are a bit more cinematic, but the story and the core values at their heart tend to be more on the personal side.
Speaker A:I ask this question to everyone on the podcast at the end and looking back, what adventure stories, whether they're books or legends, first sparked your imagination and made you want to write adventure stories yourself?
Speaker B:Wow.
Speaker B:There's a couple things that stand out to me that really were critical to my writing, and a big one were the original Ian Fleming Bond novels.
Speaker B:I saw the James Bond movies as a kid, and I became addicted mostly because of the gadgets and the cars and all that.
Speaker B:I love those.
Speaker B:But then when I was, I'd say in my young teenage years, I started reading the books.
Speaker B:And the books are very different.
Speaker B:They're a lot more grounded.
Speaker B:You get a lot more of Bond's personal character.
Speaker B:They were written a long time ago.
Speaker B:Of course, they were written in the 50s, so they're not contemporary.
Speaker B:But there was something about Fleming's style that really stuck with me and influenced my writing quite a bit.
Speaker B:He also was an avid traveler at a time when most people didn't have the chance to travel and most people didn't leave the country where they were from.
Speaker B:And so his writing, I think, was a way for him to bring readers along with him on these experiences that he had.
Speaker B:And that really clicked with me.
Speaker B:Obviously, it was a big influence.
Speaker B:And then another big influence on me, strangely enough, very different, were the Conan short stories from Robert E. Howard.
Speaker B:Because when I was young, I always wanted to write.
Speaker B:And of course, when you're 8 or 10 years old, you're not going to finish a novel.
Speaker B:And I always try to start these books and I wouldn't peter out and lose interest.
Speaker B:But the Conan stories were these collections of short stories all featuring the same character and all set in one world.
Speaker B:And so I was like, oh, well, maybe that's a way that I could create a bigger body of work, but in smaller chunks.
Speaker B:So I started writing short stories, and those were the first works of writing.
Speaker B:That I actually completed and finished.
Speaker B:And so I think that's critical.
Speaker B:You know, learning to finish something is obviously very important for a writer.
Speaker B:So those two things I think were really critical to my development as a writer and they also influenced my style quite a bit.
Speaker B:I think if you read the Conan stories and the Fleming novels and then read one of my books, I think you'd see a lot of the influence rubbing off.
Speaker A:And I think that's a great challenge to everyone, isn't it, who feels like they would like your stories and have enjoyed those books that that's something that they should go ahead and do.
Speaker A:So where would we find your books online?
Speaker A:Specifically Tokyo Black?
Speaker B:Of course it's on Amazon.
Speaker B:It's on all the other platforms as well.
Speaker B:So it's on Apple and Kobo.
Speaker B:But if you go to my website, andrewwarrenbooks.com, there's links there for all the vendors.
Speaker A:Andrew, thank you so much.
Speaker A:That was fantastic.
Speaker B:Oh, thanks for having me, Luke.
Speaker B:It's always good to catch up.
Speaker A:This is the Adventure Story podcast.
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