One Year Later: Jason Pinter, Happily Unemployed (By Choice)

By Ron Hogan on March 14, 2008 9:00 AM

Jason Pinter was an assistant editor at Warner Books when he began his first thriller, The Mark, writing “everywhere I had time.” He finished the first draft of the book, which he describes as “a straight-up chase novel, an anti-Da Vinci Code,” in six months, spent another three revising, and quickly sold the book to Mira, the division of Harlequin devoted to thrillers and suspense novels.

Even before the sale, though, Pinter had come up with a hook for another thriller, with a killer connected to one of America’s most notorious legends. If The Mark hadn’t sold, he was prepared to take the idea and turn it into a standalone; when he needed a sequel, he simply took that villain and set him up against his protagonist—and, in the meantime, he left Warner for Crown and a bump from assistant editor to editor. He was still working on that book, The Guilty (in stores now, as they say), when he left Crown after a post he wrote on his personal blog last March comparing sales on one of the company’s books to A Long Way Gone was determined by top brass to violate the corporate policy on blogging, an incident that was covered by Gawker, then clarified here by Sarah Weinman. “I was scared to death,” he says now, just past the one-year anniversary of that firing. “I’d only been married six months. I knew I wanted to leave editing to write full-time eventually, but I wasn’t ready then. I had a book deal, but it wasn’t enough to make a living. I was very fortunate that St. Martin’s hired me [a week later].”

And then, after eight months at that position, Pinter finally decided to take the plunge. His contract with Mira had been extended to a total of seven books, on a schedule that had him delivering a new novel roughly every six months. “It was hard to keep writing at that pace and devote enough time to my writers at St. Martin’s,” he explains, adding that he was able to leave “with all my bridges intact.”

Pinter did work with several thriller writers at his various gigs, and says the experience taught him “how much work goes into a good thriller,” but points out that he never raised his own writing with them. “There’s nobody nicer in the world than crime writers,” he says, “and after The Mark was published, some of my writers noticed and mentioned it to me, so I would say thanks, but then we got back to work.” These days, he’s busy working on the next books in his series—The Stolen is already slated for publication this fall—but he recognizes that he’ll only be able to spend so much time with his lead characters before risking atrophy, and at some point he wants to explore standalone options, maybe even some YA fiction. He also says he’s “not reading as much as I’d like,” but then talks about how much he’s enjoying World War Z, and just finished Jodi Picoult‘s 19 Minutes, plus he’s picking up Then We Came to the End for his wife’s book club. Heck, some people who write about books for a living don’t get to read that much!