David Stone Books

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

David Stone

David Stone served in the military as an intelligence officer and as an investigator for a state-level law enforcement agency. Stone has lived and worked in North and Central America, Southeast Asia, and Europe.

DAVID STONE – A Short Conversation …

Your latest novel THE SKORPION DIRECTIVE, contains an intriguing little fable in the first pages ...

DS: The story about the scorpion and the crocodile who meet at a river?

Yes. The scorpion asks the crocodile to carry him across the river. The crocodile agrees, although he’s afraid that the scorpion will sting him once they get to the middle of the river ...

DS: And he does ...

Yes, and they both die ... I know this relates to THE SKORPION DIRECTIVE, but I’m not sure quite how?

DS: It relates directly to the effort the ACLU and some people in the DOJ are making to have CIA officials retroactively prosecuted for alleged “crimes” committed during the interrogation of Islamic extremists in the early months after September Eleventh. It staggers me that there are people in public life so removed from the hard realities of the counter-terrorism struggle that they’d like to see serving CIA officers standing trial for trying to save innocent American lives. I just don’t get. I cannot begin to understand how someone could be so preeningly fastidious, so supremely sanctimonious, that they could think that the mass murder of innocent Americans – or Brits or Italians or Russians – is an acceptable trade-off for adhering to their insane standards of due process and what constitutes “excessive force” in an urgent interrogation situation, with lives in the balance. Honestly, it staggers me. I cannot begin to place myself in their hearts and minds, I cannot comprehend this state of mind at all.

Is THE SKORPION DIRECTIVE an allegory, then?

DS: Dear God, I hope not. I hate being lectured by other writers, writers with whom I may disagree politically – for example John LeCarré, who seems to think there is no moral distinction between America and The Soviet Union, which is simply NUTS – and I can see how readers who don’t agree with ME would be alienated by the intrusion of a pushy AUTHOR”S MESSAGE into the middle of a good story. Whenever I run across that, it bounces me right out of the story. I have committed that sin from time to time – the DALTON books do deal with international issues, after all – but I’ve tried to keep it out of SKORPION.

Did you vote for Barack Obama?

DS: You’re a nosey-parker, aren’t you?

Won’t find out if I don’t ask, will I?

DS: I didn’t vote for him – I had a higher opinion of Hillary Clinton than a lot of my military friends - but I did ROOT for him. I liked what I saw, an intelligent and charismatic young man with great gifts, a wonderful wife and family, and we desperately needed – or at least wanted – a change. As a military man, and a sometime Republican, I supported a lot of the Bush – Cheney agenda – nobody seems to wonder what the world would be like right now if we had Iran, North Korea, and Iraq under Saddam Hussein, to worry about - but I hate “nation building” – the US needs enough attention. Saddam had to go, but once they dragged him out of his rat-hole, they should have tossed him to the crowds and walked away. And when Bremer fired the entire Iraqi army and “cleansed” the government of all the people who knew how to RUN the country’s infrastructure, we were doomed. I saw that coming as soon as Bremer did it. At the end of the Second World War, we kept people in place if they knew how to keep the water running and the power on, no matter what they did during the war. So, about Obama, , even though I’m not a democrat, I wanted to be open to him, to give him a decent chance to make America a better place. I can be wrong, I can be mistaken about political ideas, about issues of Right and Left. I’m willing to LEARN new ideas. So I felt that The New Guy, whoever he or she was, needed to be given a chance, not condemned out of hand the way Bush and Cheney were, hated beyond reason. That was just nuts.

So THE SKORPION DIRECTIVE is ...?

DS: My best so far, a wild ride for Micah Dalton, with some serious bad guys to come up against, and a couple of stunning women to make the story hum.

People, mainly women, have commented on how well you write your female characters. I take it you like women?

DS: I like and admire women. I’m married to one of the finest editions of womanhood ever put out by God, and I have two grown daughters who are her equal in every way. I love their strength, their dangerous wit, their incredible beauty, inside and out, and their sheer courage in facing life. I won’t put a woman in any of my books just so she can get killed early and justify a blood-bath. Women make my world run, and women make my books run. A good female character adds tremendous power and range to a novel. An all-male novel staffed with brainless and disposable broads is an utter bore. Try to take out one of my female characters, my friend, and see how far you get. They’re dangerous the way REAL women are dangerous.

What’s coming up after SKORPION?

DS: REQUIEM in PRAGUE, my longest and my best so far.

Another DALTON book?

DS: Of course! I’m a one-trick pony, but at that one trick, I’m very damn good.

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