Jeremy D. Baker grew up in Italy, Florida, and Maryland. After dropping out of college at 19, he joined the US Army as a counterintelligence agent and HUMINT collector. He is a combat veteran and PTSD survivor. For the last 20 years he’s worked in national security, with a focus on intelligence, counterterrorism, and transnational organized crime. He lives with his wonderful family in Maryland, where he keeps a little garden and writes about the things that keep him up at night.
His debut novel, The Guilty Sleep, follows veteran Dexter Grant, who is suffering from PTSD and on the verge of divorce when he is approached by his former Army buddies to help save the life of their interpreter in Afghanistan. It means robbing a lot of money from a vicious queen pin. But not to worry. They have it all worked out, and if anyone can pull it off, it's Dexter's former team lead Staff Sergeant Saenz. Tempted by an easy score that could make his own problems disappear and imbued with new purpose, Dex agrees to play his part. But as in combat, the best laid plans don't survive first contact, and when the heist goes off the rails, Dex's wife and daughter become targets for bloody revenge. Dex must call on all his strength and training to save them, and in his quest he will learn there was much more to this robbery than he ever imagined.
Jeremy Baker stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about researching and writing the book:
Disclaimer: As with all writing experience and advice, my take here is very subjective to my own personal experience. And now that that is out of the way, let me lay down a gold-plated, iron-clad, tungsten-hearted absolute maxim of writing: have some freaking fun with it. If what you’re writing doesn’t bring you at least a modicum of enjoyment or entertainment, what are you even doing? Yeah, sometimes we’re going to write about dark, challenging, hurtful stuff—this is a key to compelling fiction, right? But you should also be enjoying the act of writing, the act of creation, the act of telling your story as only you can.
For me, one of the main elements of my personality that has directly translated into enjoying my writing, is that I am a fundamentally curious person. I always like to learn more about the world we live in, how it works, where we came from, and where we’re going. This inherent curiosity made me a decent interrogator an adequate intelligence analyst, and a good investigator. And it’s made me an author who loves to research!
My novel, The Guilty Sleep, is about an Afghanistan vet and former Army Counterintelligence Agent, Dexter Grant, who’s broke, reeling from PTSD, and on the verge of divorce when his old Army crew approaches him to help save the life of their former interpreter. To do that, they need to rip off a vicious drug lord’s illicit proceeds. Things, as they do in these scenarios, go very south very quickly, placing Dex’s family squarely in the crosshairs.
Now, I’m a former Army Counterintelligence Agent and combat veteran of the war in Afghanistan. I battled PTSD for years, and my life was once saved by one of our interpreters. And for the last 20 years I’ve worked in law enforcement, intelligence, and national security. In other words, writing The Guilty Sleep was squarely in my wheelhouse of personal knowledge and experience. That said, I never personally ripped off a drug lord, engaged in money laundering, got in a shootout with corrupt cops, or many of the other things that happen in my novel.
Which meant I had plenty of things I needed to research, even for such a personal novel: Maryland divorce law, for starters, plus things like vehicle kill switches, anti-listening device technology, the geography of west Africa, cargo ship transatlantic travel timetables, and successful bank heists. These were just a few of the things I dove into. Why? Well, partly because I wanted to tell a good story, and good stories have an underlying current of absolute truth, even if they’re fictional. Readers, I think, want believability and verisimilitude in crime thrillers. They want to know that the way you describe, say, a criminal enterprise’s operations, at least roughly corresponds to how a criminal enterprise operates in the real world. Just as important to my way of writing, the other reason I dove into these issues was that good ol’ curiosity. Is there such as thing as a little box the size of a deck of cards which, when switched on, automatically create a 20-foot buffer that subsumes listening devices, wi-fi and cell signals, and video surveillance? Is there such a thing as a chip that can be plugged into a vehicle’s on-board diagnostic port that allows remote access via phone app? How would I pull off a bank heist with three teammates, an unmarked van, and 30 miles of country roads, going up against a feckless bank manager and some very annoyed drug dealers? (The answer to those questions is—maybe, not yet that I could find, and with extreme caution.) Taking the time to dive into those details through extensive research (internet, interviews, and the library were my friends) brought an extra level of detail and believability to my novel that wouldn’t exist if I’d just winged it!
Here's the other great thing about curiosity and research in my writing experience. I could be looking for one particular piece of information and follow my yen to learn new and interesting things down a series of research rabbit holes that uncover completely unrelated stuff that either fits into the current story, or sparks a completely new idea. I write in both the crime/thriller and speculative fiction genres. In researching the idea of a vehicle kill switch that plugs into the on-board diagnostic port, my research trail directly led to point-to-point encrypted communication phone apps used in furtherance of crime (which makes an appearance in my novel), then somehow onward to a discussion of the old Silk Road caravan route in Central Asia, which led to a comparison of Ummayad versus Abbasid caliphates, which led to a deep dive into the Umayyad state of Córdoba circa 800 CE and the fascinating Andalusian polymath Abbas ibn Firnas, the DaVinci of the Islamic world, who may have been the first person to achieve (unpowered) flight…which led to the idea for a short story that I’m still unraveling!
What I’m getting at is, for me, curiosity begets research begets knowledge begets verisimilitude begets writing, and a curious writer is a happy writer. Give your curiosity free rein, because you never know where it’s going to take you.
Now, about that Andalusian polymath…
You can learn more about Jeremy D. Baker via his website and follow him on BlueSky, Instagram, and Facebook. The Guilty Sleep is now available via Diversion Books and can be purchased from all major booksellers.
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