The Origins of "The Blinds" by Adam Sternbergh

Every story has a thousand inspirations, but I can safely say ‘The Blinds’ was born of three ideas: 1) My fascination with isolated communities, whether it’s the Amish in Pennsylvania or the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas; 2) the very real notion of memory erasure as a treatment for severe trauma, and 3) my on-going obsession with the fundamental weirdness of the Witness Protection Program. (The notion of a government program in which criminals are not punished, but rather relocated to unsuspecting communities and given new identities is, to me, so fantastical that, if you invented in a book, no one would believe it.)

All three of these ideas were rattling around in my brain until one day, magically, they collided — and I had the inspiration to write a story of an isolated community in which witnesses and criminals escape their former lives by having all memories of their criminal pasts erased.

The other inspiration for ‘The Blinds,’ of course, is Westerns — and the classic myth of the frontier town where people go to forget their pasts. In the US, the frontier was itself a kind of isolated community, not because it was purposefully cut off from society, but because it was established in a place where society did not yet exist. So communities of people were left to invent their own mini-societies. In today’s world, there are few if any geographical places that still offer this kind of freedom — we’ve navigated, conquered, and colonised nearly every inch of the planet — but I think this spirit still survives online. What is a role-playing game like Second Life but a chance to be someone new in a new world?

Of course, the urge to reinvent yourself often comes hand in hand with a desire to outrun your past — so I was especially taken with the notion that you could have your past, or at least the worst parts of it, erased. On its face, it’s easy to see the appeal of this — all your mistakes, forgotten! All your sins, forgiven! But those mistakes and sins are as much a part of who we are as our successes and our triumphs. The extent to which those sins still haunt us, even when we’ve technically erased them, is a classic topic for noir novels and a big part of what made this story appealing to me to explore.

Some people have asked, in light of ‘The Blinds,’ whether I believe in nature or nurture, but I think that’s beside the point. The nature versus nurture question is about what causes us to do what we do. In ‘The Blinds,’ I was more interested in what happens once the deed is done and we have to reckon with our actions — and whether there’s any hope for redemption. That’s the question that truly intrigued me. It still does.

The Blinds by Adam Sternbergh is published  on February 01, 2018 by Faber & Faber (£7.99)

Imagine a place populated by criminals - people plucked from their lives, with their memories altered, who have been granted new identities and a second chance. Welcome to The Blinds, a dusty town in rural Texas populated by misfits who don't know if they've perpetrated a crime or just witnessed one. All they do know is that they opted into the programme and that if they try to leave, they will end up dead.  For eight years, Sheriff Calvin Cooper has kept an uneasy peace - but after a suicide and a murder in quick succession, the town's residents revolt. Cooper has his own secrets to protect, so when his new deputy starts digging, he needs to keep one step ahead of her - and the mysterious outsiders who threaten to tear the whole place down. The more he learns, the more the hard truth is revealed: The Blinds is no sleepy hideaway, it's simmering with violence and deception, heartbreak and betrayal, and it's fit to burst.

More information about the author and his books can be found on his website.  You can also find him on Twitter @Sternbergh.

Paradise Isn't What It's Cracked Up To Be

Paradise Island, my new standalone thriller, has been a long time coming.  I first had the idea for a story set on one of the Georgia and Carolina Barrier Isles when I visited several as part of a mammoth one year trek around America way back in 1978.  I was trying to write The Great Novel back then so parked the idea of something bad happening on one of these isolated islands in a half page of my notebook.

The rest of the notebook was full of deeply significant ruminations on the human condition – a.k.a pretentious twaddle – with bad poetry thrown in.  I dumped The Great Novel all this horrible stuff was going to go in the minute I got back to England.  Although, had I known Morrissey was going to have that kind of turgid rubbish published as a Penguin Classic years later, I might have persevered.   

Anyway, fast forward to the nineteen nineties and a journalist friend, who was a large part of the inspiration for Bridget in my Nick Madrid comic crime novels (for those of you with long memories), bought a place on one of the Barrier Isles and reignited my interest in them.

I started making notes for this thriller between writing the Nick Madrid silliness.  Then I started writing it in earnest in the early Noughties.  Then I put it aside because I had this idea for a complicated, confusingly plotted trilogy of novels set in Brighton that would infuriate as many readers as it pleased because I wasn’t going for the big resolutions in book one or book two and then only obliquely in book three.  (I do have a book on essential rules for writing a crime bestseller but haven’t read it.)

Anyway, five books into my Brighton trilogy I yearned for those barrier isle breakers and freshwater alligators and humidity that turned me into a human sprinkler – and the And Then There Were None idea of a closed community cut off from the rest of the world. 

Mobile phones and wifi are a major problem for that kind of scenario to work but I was also feeling nostalgic for the heady couple of years I spent in America (I stayed on into 1979 too) when I still had hair and punk and New Wave were colliding with the old guard and Bob Marley was bringing reggae into the mainstream.  (I played five a side soccer with Marley a couple of times but that is definitely another story.)

I wanted to write an American novel.  An Elmore Leonard, Harlan Coben, Robert Crais kind of thing.  (Yeah, I know - don’t we all?)  Cleanly plotted, with a kind of narrative that has an inevitability about it because actions have reactions and consequences – but, of course, with twists.  Set in 1978 (and 1970).  Told through three or four characters.  A former big city cop with a shameful secret.  A heist crew with a lunatic among them.  A WitSec guy whose bloody past is catching up with him as someone comes onto the island to kill him.  Oh and a Brit couple recovering from a savage house invasion who’ve come to the island for quiet and recuperation.  Good luck with that.

So I did write it.  I havered between titles.  For ages it was called The Boogaloo Twist but I also liked Paradise Island.  I decided to keep the former for something else I’m writing.  Paradise Island it is.  

I hope it’s a fast read because I hope it’s a page-turner.  I’ve decided to publish it as an e-book original to see how that might work.  A snip at $4.99.  Now back to the sixth book of the Brighton trilogy.