It kept me reading with
my hands glued to the cover as if my life depended upon reaching the end.
It provoked thought and
reflection, while it constantly made me smile and at several points - laugh out
loud. It also made my eyes moist as I considered [and contextualised] my own
life.
In a crazy world that
depresses me and fills me with anxiety whenever I view the TV News – The Whyte Python World Tour – became an
antidote as it made me feel good – it put a big smile on my face as it held me
in its grip.
Without going totally hyperbolic
– this debut novel was / is life-affirming.
I was first made aware
of this extraordinary debut by Publisher Rowland White during the Michael
Joseph Crime Party, held in February [Crypt at St Martins-in-the-Fields Trafalgar
Square in London].
This year [2025] marks the 90th anniversary of the
formation of Penguin Publishing.
Michael Joseph was a bestselling author before he turned
publisher in 1935 – the same year Penguin paperbacks were launched. In 1985,
exactly half a century after their mutual founding, Michael Joseph became the
commercial imprint of Penguin Books. And now, it forms an important part of the
PenguinRandomHouse Global Publishing Conglomerate.
Read More HERE
So what is The Whyte Python World Tour all about?
Set in the late 1980s, the author weaves the collapse of
the Soviet Bloc into the era of peak heavy metal with the rise of a fictitious
Los Angeles rock band Whyte Python. The band consists of four weird misfits -
on Vocals Davy Bones (aka Lawrence Barkly), on Bass Guitar Spencer Dooley, on
Lead Guitar (Robert) Buck Sweet and finally on Drums Richard Henderson aka
Rikki Thunder.
Whyte Python is managed by the wimpy British producer Kirby
Smoot for Andromeda Records and unbeknownst to the band, manipulated by the
American Central Intelligence Agency’s Asian Intelligence Division [AID].
It appears that the Deputy Director of the CIA Ed Lonsa is
reluctantly tasked to orchestrate a Cold War Psychological Operation against
the Soviet Bloc. The Psy-Ops entitled Operation Facemelt is born, peopled by
agents undergoing ‘disciplinary process’ though only three of them are aware
that they are in this process. Firstly we have Amanda Price [aka Shawna
Peppers] who works under the identity of rock and roll journalist Tawny Spice
who is tasked with manipulating Drummer Rikki Thunders [from his band Qyksand]
into joining Whyte Python. The other CIA agents being the insubordinates
Catherine Stryker and Daryl Boone with the more conformist Bradford Mancuso.
As a thriller it is outstanding.
When I put the book down, I sat in silent contemplation and
then downloaded the audio book narrated by Wil Wheaton as I wanted to revisit
this crazy world again.
Read More HERE
After I put the book
down, I had a few questions for the author Travis Kennedy, who kindly agreed to
answer my queries.
I smiled during our dialogue,
because it was little surprise to discover that I share the author’s enthusiasm
for reading, including a passion for the works of Dennis
Lehane - which I was unaware of when I read the book – and which may help
[in part] to explain my own admiration for Travis Kennedy’s writing ability.
Ali: Welcome to Great Britain’s Shots Magazine.
Travis: Thank you for having me!
TK: Well, yes and no. It’s my first traditionally published
novel, but I’ve had several short stories placed over the last dozen years or
so - and I have been writing for my whole life. For many years, my career in
public service demanded all of my creative energy, and I had to take a break
from writing for myself. I was able to find my way back about twelve years ago,
beginning with short stories and humour pieces. Believe it or not, this is
chronologically the third complete novel that I have written. My team made a decision to lead with THE
WHYTE PYTHON WORLD TOUR, in part because of the speed of development on the film
adaptation - but you will see the others!
AK: From your acknowledgements I see you come from a family
that values books, libraries and reading. So would you care to tell us a little
about your childhood and your reading?
TK: Oh, absolutely. Reading has been coded deeply into my
personality since I was four years old. It’s the hobby that I love to do most.
It makes my brain happy! My parents recognized this trait in me very early –
especially my father, who I inherited it from. When I was very young, my family
lived on a lake in New Hampshire. In many pictures from that era, you can see
my parents and brothers playing in the water while I’m off in the distance,
happily sitting under a tree with my nose in a book. When I was six years old,
we moved to southern Maine, just outside of the City of Portland; and that
first week, before all of the bags were unpacked, my father brought me to the
Portland Public Library and signed me up for a library card. “There,” he said. “You’re home.”
What’s remarkable to me now as a dad myself is seeing the
same quality in my own kids. My daughter is nine years old as I write this, and
she is just like me. She reads relentlessly. Her school backpack is very heavy,
because she never has fewer than two novels stuffed in between her lunchbox and
schoolwork. Needless to say, she is delighted that her dad works in the
publishing business now. She travels with me to book stores when I go in to
sign stock, and she keeps a record of each store and what she found special
about it. My son is six, and so he’s less impressed by Dad’s new line of work;
it’s not strange or exciting to him at all, it's just what I do for a living.
But reading came to him even more naturally than it did for me. Our house is
absolutely littered with books.
AK: And of that time can you tell us which novels / stories
were you favourites and why?
TK: I was an absolute book vacuum. I loved books across all
genres, and had countless favourites. But I gravitated the strongest toward
storytelling that put kids in the middle of adventures with genuine stakes. I
probably loved Roald Dahl’s books the most. I read CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE
FACTORY at least a dozen times throughout my childhood – in one instance, three
times in a row. There’s a real ominous feeling in his work, that the little
heroes actually might not make it out okay. I loved the film The Goonies
for the same reason. Stories that took their child heroes seriously.
AK:….But what books was/were the one[s] that made you want to
pick up a pen / pc and write yourself?
TK: Jumping ahead to the modern era: think the two biggest
inspirations for me as an adult to really GO FOR IT and dedicate myself to
writing were Elmore
Leonard and Dennis Lehane.
When reading Elmore, you always get the feeling that he was smiling on the
other side of his typewriter. There’s so much charm to his work, a sense that
he’s enjoying himself. Elmore
made it clear to me that you’re allowed to have fun with writing,
and to let that sense of fun and joy in the exercise make its way onto the
page. And then I picked up A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR by Dennis Lehane, and that voice
just grabbed me with both hands in the first chapter and wouldn’t let me go. He
was rewriting my own inner monologue in Patrick
Kenzie’s sly Boston accent. I had to try to do that, too. I got such joy
from reading both of those writers’ work, and I felt a kinship with them in how
my own mind likes to tell stories, and together they pushed me into going for
it.
TK: I’m still a vacuum! I still bounce around from genre to
genre, fiction to non-fiction and back. I love great crime thrillers that break
the standard mold. Every Michael
Koryta book is a must-read for me. There’s a great writer who is also from
Maine named Ron Currie Jr, who wrote an amazing crime fiction book called THE
SAVAGE, NOBLE DEATH OF BABS DIONNE that has that grand, operatic feeling of
Dennis Lehane and Don Winslow’s work. But I read everything. On the other end
of the spectrum, I loved ATMOSPHERE by Taylor Jenkins Reid. John Scalzi’s WHEN
THE MOON HITS YOUR EYE. Chris Whitaker, Fredrik Backman, Benjamin Stevenson,
Richard Osman, Stephen King.
I love Percival Everett. The book about Lorne Michaels was great.
AK: So onto The Whyte Python World Tour…..the central premise is
what could be described as ‘Cherry’ - the CIA using a Heavy Metal band in the
1980s to influence disaffected East Europeans fed of Soviet Oppression…where
did this weird idea come from?
TK: Good question!
I’ve had a longtime fascination with that specific era of music called “glam
metal,” the party-themed rock anthems played by so-called “hair bands” of the
1980s. I was just a kid when they were on top of the world, and so they were
really comical in my eyes. Like feral real-life muppets, wearing leather and
spandex with makeup and wild hair and singing these infectious, harmless
anthems. About twenty years ago, I started to read autobiographies of some of
the big stars from that time – Slash, Motley Crue, Poison, etc – and I
discovered that more often than not, the rock Gods on stage often came from
challenging childhoods and were misfits until they found each other through
music. They were overlooked and underappreciated, and then playing in these
bands unlocked their superpowers. It seemed like there was a fun story in that;
the idea that they had these secret identities that you only saw when the stage
lights came on.
Then five years ago, I listened to a podcast called “Wind
of Change,” produced by the very talented investigative reporter Patrick Radden
Keefe. He was chasing a pervasive rumour that the CIA wrote the song “Wind of
Change” for the hit German metal band The
Scorpions, as a psyop to usher the Eastern Bloc’s youth into democracy at
the end of the Cold War through the power of soft metal. He couldn’t prove it,
of course; and I suspect that it isn’t true. But the concept married perfectly
with the theme I had been chewing on, on and off, for almost twenty years about
the glam metal guys having secret powers. This was it! And as a fiction story,
divorced from any responsibility to tell the truth, I could make it whatever I
wanted.
AK: And so did you plot extensively or run with the idea
until you had a narrative that could be licked into shape? And end-to-end how
long did it take to physically write the novel?
TK: Before I wrote a word, I wrestled with the idea of how
to tell the story. I wanted it to be a first-person narrative, like you’re
reading a rockstar’s autobiography; but I also wanted the readers to understand
pretty quickly what was going on, unbeknownst to our hero, Rikki Thunder. I
didn’t really let myself think about the arc of the story until I figured out
how to tell it, which took a little time. Once the solution came to me that the
correct way to write this book is to break all narrative rules – it can be
first person sometimes, and third person sometimes, and occasionally told
through music montage – the book poured out of me as fast as I could keep up
with it. Because breaking all the rules is metal! The unique format didn’t just
allow me to tell the story how I wanted to tell it; it made it FEEL more like a
frenzied, rule-breaking hair band video. The first draft took about three
months. But that being said, I’ve worked more on this book than anything I’ve
done in my life. There were, easily, twenty rounds of revisions; the first
several by me alone, then a bunch with my agent and more again with my editor
at Doubleday. So, while the first draft happened fast, the book took a little
over two years to truly complete.
AK: I consider a major strength in the narrative are the [very]
minor characters, who you define so very deftly, but yet they sit up straight
on the page, such as Bass Guitarist Spencer Dooley’s [possibly] imaginary
friend ‘Kevin’ or the East Berlin shopkeeper Josef Weidermann, or the Plumber
Ben Pratt and Rikki’s old school friend Ron……less is more….would you care to
comment?
TK: First, thank you! That compliment means a lot to me,
because there is definitely some risk in introducing a large cast of characters
in a novel and asking your readership to try to keep them all arranged in their
minds. I’m glad to hear it worked for you. I think if you’re going to create a
character, you owe it to them to make them unique and feel lived-in, and cared
about. I think the old writing adage of “show, don’t tell” is CRITICAL when
you’re creating minor characters who still need to feel real; we don’t need to
know everything about Ron and his personal backstory, but we feel like we know
it anyway only because of how he looks and dresses and moves. Same with Ben
Pratt; the minor details (clean shirt, soft voice, big, pawlike hands) tell us
he’s a gentle giant, and give us the warm feelings toward him that Rikki feels
and remembers. That should be enough for the reader to get an imprint without
feeling smothered by description about someone they’re not going to spend much
time with, especially because I’m going to ask you to keep track of a lot of
supporting characters more thoroughly.
TK: I am – but not at all exclusively. Music is very much
like books to me – I love it if it’s done well, and spend time in whatever
genre that matches my mood. I’ve mellowed quite a bit in my 40s now, but
writing the book has been a really fun exercise in reconnecting with these musical
roots from my youth! The fun thing about “metal” or “glam metal” or “hair
bands” is that they’re all such flexible terms, and a lot of music aficionados
love to fight over your exact question:
what qualifies? Because Poison is so different from Guns N’
Roses, which is so different from Van Halen or Motley Crue, or Def Leppard, or
Iron Maiden, or Motorhead or Metallica or Bon Jovi and so on. Fans of all of
that music – which is an enormous spectrum of sound – love to fight over this.
I think that when we think of the era, we qualify bands with these titles
(metal, glam, hair, etc) based on the look and the attitude, more than the
melodies and the themes. We see massive hair, defying gravity thanks to cans of
Aquanet; and ripped jeans, and spandex, and makeup, and we say “that’s metal.”
It’s a time and a place and a vibe, more than a uniform style of music.
AK: So what’s next for Travis Kennedy?
TK: Lots! I’m plotting out a new novel now – it’s not in
the world of Whyte Python, but I have a strong feeling that those muppets will
be back eventually. I’m also supporting the work of the film adaptation of the
book, and I have a few other film projects in various stages of development.
I’m incredibly fortunate to be able to write full-time now, and it feels like I
finally have time for all of the ideas that have been scrambling over each
other to get to the front of the line. It’s a very exciting time!
AK: Thank you your time and insight.
TK: Truly, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for reading!
Shots Magazine would
like to thank Publisher and Senior Editor Rowland White and from Publicity Lily
Evans at Michael Joseph imprint of PenguinRandomHouse UK
For more information
> https://whytepython.com/ and https://traviskennedy.com/
Promotional Photos / Images are © Brian Fitzgerald / Fitzgerald Photo / Travis Kennedy / PenguinRandomHouse / Little Brown Publishing / Ali Karim / Audible
