Mark Greaney's The Gray Man Zeroes In on the Details

Note: Text has been edited and will not match audio exactly.

Nicole Ransome: Hi, I'm Audible Editor Nicole, and I am happy to welcome New York Times best-selling author Mark Greaney, author of Relentless, book 10 of The Gray Man series, which is now being adapted into a feature film starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans. Welcome, Mark.

Mark Greaney: Hi. Thanks for having me, Nicole.

NR: Nice to have you. So you have your book 10, Relentless, coming out, and one of the things I have enjoyed about specifically the main character is, truthfully, his badassery. I've always been a big fan of highly skilled, badass characters, and one of the things I wanted to first ask is, what is it like writing Court Gentry as your main character?

MG: It's a lot of fun. He's an extension of me in every way other than his badassness. His sarcasm, his worldview, his strong feelings about right and wrong—I can identify with all that. I said very early on, I do a lot of the physical research that one needs to do to write these types of books, and I said very early on that I don't have to be good at it, like he is, I just have to feel like it can be done or know enough about a situation to be able to explain it in print.

"[Jay Snyder] has captured Gentry in the dialogue and Gentry in the inner thoughts in a way to where I'm out researching and when I'm writing dialogue or thinking about something, I hear Jay's voice."

So it's actually a lot of fun, and I love doing the travel and everything else that comes along with this character and this series. Every aspect of it is fun and I never want to stop writing it.

NR: What has been your favorite place to travel to for this series specifically, during your research process?

MG: Well, I know what my best location research trip was, and it was for book four in the series, which is called Dead Eye. I live in the south of the US, I live in Tennessee, and I live in a low, flat, warm part of Tennessee, so we don't really get any snow or anything like that. So I went to Estonia and Sweden and Denmark and Belgium and Germany in December. I was in Stockholm during a blizzard and it was just a completely different world for me. It was like something you only read about. So that would be one of them. I've been to Moscow to research, right there where the Russian intelligence is and all that, and that was all super exciting. And I do have these moments where I'm like, I can't believe I'm getting to do this. I was bartending into my 30s and here I am in Moscow skulking around.

There have been a lot of great trips. I think I've been to 35 countries so far researching the series, and other than COVID, I have no plans to stop.

NR: I was going to say, you must have itchy feet during this pandemic.

MG: For sure, yeah. Relentless takes place, the majority of it takes place in Berlin, and I used to live in Germany for a little while. I speak some German, I've been to Berlin a half-dozen times. I wrote a book with Tom Clancy that was based in Berlin and I did location research for that. I was back in Germany a couple years ago, researching another novel.

So I wasn't able to go research Relentless, but fortunately I had already picked a location I knew pretty well. My intention was to rent an apartment and stay there for four, six weeks and really get to know the fabric of the city. But I just basically based it on where I lived in
Germany. I lived in Cologne and visited Berlin a lot. So it worked out pretty good. But I did miss the travel.

NR: I think that's really cool. I also am a big fan of travel. I also have itchy feet at the current moment.

MG: It's great to get out there as a writer. Obviously I like the tourism aspect of it as well, but to go to research the locations just to make your story a little more authentic is real important to me….

NR: That's really great. One of the things I really enjoy about Gentry are the moments of confliction he has between doing what's easy versus doing what's right, especially when it's really inconvenient for him to do what's right. In the last audiobook, One Minute Out, you made the switch from third-person writing to give readers that new outlook from Gentry's point of view, and I was a really big fan, because I feel like it made those moments better. Will readers continue to hear that same first-person storytelling from Gentry?

MG: Not in Relentless. I may bounce around back and forth. I think it worked well in One Minute Out because, for periods of the book, he was sort of by himself. And Gentry is the best when he has someone to bounce off of, as far as dialogue and explaining what he's doing, because, obviously a real special operations guy isn't walking down the street saying, "Okay, I'm, doing this or doing that." And you want the reader to know that and not have it all in the exposition, so that's why I did it then.

Relentless is a different story, so we're not in that. But you definitely see his, I guess, as you said, his conflictions here and there. I always say about him, he's a guy that does the right thing, but he does it kind of kicking and screaming and complaining along the way. He doesn't want to be in the situations he finds himself in, although he continues to find himself in these situations.

NR: I think a lot of fans probably like that about the character too. Because it's really human of him, you know? Sometimes it's not really about doing the right thing. It's like, “This is so convenient,” but then you have to do the right thing sometimes.

MG: He has this moral compass that he is shackled to. A lot of times he can get out of a situation with more ease, but he does things the hard way because, at the end of the day, he feels like that's what he needs to do….

NR: You have the same narrator for all of the series, Jay Snyder, and he's really outdone himself with properly portraying that dry, sarcastic tone that you get from The Gray Man. How's it been working with Jay Snyder on the narration for your series?

MG: Well, I never read my books. I've never read a single one of my books after I've written it because you spend so much time on it. But I've listened to every audiobook and that's only because of Jay Snyder. People ask me, or compliment me for choosing him, and I usually tell them, "Well, I was only given two choices and they were both great, actually." And I said, "But there's something about this guy's voice."

And he, from the beginning, has captured Gentry in the dialogue and Gentry in the inner thoughts in a way to where I'm out researching and when I'm writing dialogue or thinking about something, I hear Jay's voice, and I have for a long time. And it's made me appreciate… I listen to a ton of audiobooks. I'm one of your biggest customers. But it's made me appreciate narrators. And I'll actually write things and think like, okay, I wouldn't say write for audio, but there's some dialogue that I write in there that it's important to me it's written this way because I think it will just sound really good in audio.

That's not something I ever thought about before, when I first started converting my print into audiobooks. I didn't understand the art form or the impact of this medium. But it's been so much fun to be there with Jay the whole way. He's a really, really nice guy. We've had some back and forth and he just knocks it out of the park every year.

NR: Sounds so great. Thank you. Your Gray Man series has been picked up by Netflix starring some huge names, like Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans. What has that been like?

MG: When the Russo brothers, who are directing it, first got on board years ago and they wrote the script, they had me come out to California. This was not something that was part of the contract or anything like that. They just asked me if I'd come out and spend a few days with them and we'd talk about the character, we would talk about where the series goes, because from the very beginning, they understood that this was a series and they wanted to make a franchise.

So I spent a few days with them and then we've just stayed in touch ever since. As soon as Joe was done with the first version of the script, he sent it to me to see what I thought about it. And to this day this film thing has been going on forever and we've gotten really close a couple times before. So I've learned to not count my chickens before they hatch. But things, obviously, now are proceeding.

But the whole time I've just been treated really, really well by Joe and Anthony Russo and they reach out to me when they have a question. I just texted back and forth last week about something. I have no official involvement. My involvement is the 101,000 words in the novel that they adapted.

I always think, if the directors want to know what I think, they probably already know what I think about this story. But they're great guys, and they've always shot straight by me and I'm here to help them if they ever need me.

NR: That's super exciting. Since it's your first book to movie adaptation, what's it like having your words being adapted into film?

MG: My first book came out in 2009. I think it came out in audiobook in 2011. But back in 2009, about a month before the book came out, I sold an option for the film to a studio for the first time and so that means I'm 12 years into this, and every year it's like we're getting a little bit closer, they're going to do another script, they're talking to another actor. From the very beginning, I thought it's a bazillion to one chance that your book is going to be made into a movie, and then I was like, okay, it's a million to one now, because things are looking good, then it's like 10,000 to one.

And now it’s happening, and there is still this disbelief about it, which my friends and family think is kind of funny. I don't talk about it that much. My wife just the other day, she's like, "Oh, I totally forget that that's happening," because something had happened, I talked to somebody involved in the film. She's like, "It's so funny. I forget that that's happening sometimes because it's just not part of your day-to-day life."

I think that's just a defense mechanism because I've gotten close a couple times and it's all been snatched away from me. But things look really good now. They're supposed to start shooting at the beginning of March, which is just not any time at all, and they've built sets and the script is the way they want it and everything is proceeding. It's really exciting. I'm just very slow to let myself emote about it.

NR: I totally understand. You don't want to get it snatched out of the air before it's actually manifested. I completely understand.

MG: Exactly, yeah….

NR: One of the things I also wanted to ask you about is that you've also coauthored seven Tom Clancy titles, and it seems like you are a great person to collaborate with and work with a lot of people. How has working on the Clancy titles helped inform your own individual projects and stories?

MG: I changed so much as a writer in the years that I worked on the Clancy novels. I look at my first three books in The Gray Man series as one type of writing and then book four came out after I'd already had a Clancy book under my belt, and I was working on another and then suddenly the books are a little bit more in-depth, they're a little bit more intrigue, a little bit more harnessed to reality, but still big and over the top and explosive and all that.

"I want there to be as little friction between my idea of a story that's in my brain and your idea of the story that's in your brain."

I learned from working in the Clancy world that you can go wide and you can go deep with the story, and my books got longer. I mean, Tom Clancy books are huge doorstops of novels, and my books went from being about 100,000 to 120,000 words to 150,000 words, 160,000 words. I wrote a book in 2019 that was not a Gray Man book that was 217,000 words. So that's the Clancy effect, pretty obviously. It's definitely made me a better writer. It's also gotten me a lot of attention and a lot of doors opened. You say you're writing a book with Tom Clancy and you can get into the place in the Pentagon where you want to go or you can get onto that destroyer if you want to. It helped me as a writer in every conceivable way.

NR: One of the things I was going to say, you mentioned that as you kept working on the Clancy novels and developed The Gray Man series more, you really started paying more attention to the detail. That's one of the things that I really enjoy about the books, there's a lot of details, especially within those mission scenes, when he's shooting people from afar, like his sniping. Those sniping scenes are pretty amazing.

So my question is, what is your writing process like? When you're writing those action scenes, how do you really know what details to focus on, which details to put to the side? How do you go about those scenes specifically?

MG: I do a lot of research with firearms and I've done a lot of training. I've been to schools where everybody else in a class was either law enforcement, SWAT, or military. And I don't have to be as good as them. I just have, well, A, I have to be safe, because it's live fire and guns, and, B, I have to learn about it enough to talk about it and to figure out what's important.

So when I write a sniper scene, I don't just talk about the real general stuff. I will talk about the sweat dripping off of your eyelash into your eye and you're having to hold a position a certain amount of time and how that feels on your neck. And when I'm writing a scene about scuba diving, which—I do a lot of scuba diving—I will talk about how the air tastes
in your regulator or some specific little thing like that.

You don't want to put that stuff in there just to say you did. You want to bring the reader into the story as much as possible. I always say I want there to be as little friction between my idea of a story that's in my brain and your idea of the story that's in your brain, and if you do things to really make people feel like they're there, people might not think about, if
you're in a sniper hide for a long time, you might really have to go to the bathroom. But I'll put that in my book, because that's real life and I want people to feel like they're experiencing the things that the different characters are experiencing.

NR: I definitely remember a few scenes where he's complaining about getting himself into some more trouble and then he's like, "I have to hide before this extraction." I never actually thought about those kind of things: if you do have to do a hideout, you're probably going to have to really go through some tough things. It's not all just about the action, the fun stuff, like in the movies.

MG: Right.

NR: There's some pretty rough moments.

One of the topics that I wanted to go back to is that you mentioned that you're a really big fan of audio. Why do you love audio so much? And also what is your favorite audiobook from Audible?

MG: Oh, my favorite audiobook is the Don Winslow series, The Cartel and The Power of the Dog, and—it was a three-book series—and The Border. Those were all very, very long books, and Ray Porter narrated them and Ray Porter, he's never narrated one of my books, but he's an amazing guy. I tell people, like I literally grab people who love the Don Winslow stuff, and I'm like, "You gotta hear it on audio!" Because there's probably 14 female Mexican characters that Ray Porter does and they all sound completely different and you know who's who, and I don't even understand how that magic works.

That's a series that I thought was so elevated. I'd read The Power of the Dog, the novel, and then I listened to the audiobook and I understand the power of what an audiobook can do. I love it, honestly, I love it because I have three dogs and I walk them at the park for… We have a big hundred-acre off-leash dog park near where I live and we'll go out there for 45 minutes or an hour and I'm always listening to an audiobook. And sometimes it's fiction,
sometimes it's nonfiction. I listen to a lot of self development. I've gone down a self development rabbit hole of Audible stuff, and really love it.

So I have no trouble doing two things at once, and I'm focused on the book and every 20 minutes, I'll look around to make sure my dogs are still with me and that they're not rolling in something somewhere else. But no, I get lost within the audiobooks and I'm listening to one just yesterday afternoon, just sitting here on my coach in my office, and just getting stuck in it.

NR: What have you been listening to as of lately? Do you have any
recommendations for your listeners?

MG: Sure. Not for the first time, but for the second time, I listened to 13 Hours, which is the true story of what happened in Benghazi. It's nonfiction, but it is an amazing story and it really dials you into a lot of reality, but still it reads like fiction. It's an incredible story.

I've been listening to a lot of military stuff, kind of tied to a project I have coming up. So, gosh, I listened to The Outpostand House to House, which is a fantastic book by David Bellavia, who was in Iraq, and the audiobook of that is really good. The Operator, which
is written by Rob O'Neill, he actually narrates it himself. He was the Navy SEAL who killed bin Laden. And his audiobook, The Operator, is really, really fascinating. And I love the fact that he does it himself. I would never do… You couldn't pay me enough to do my own audiobook, and it would benefit no one.

But for him, it works. You just really feel like this is a guy talking to you about, what went on. And there's a lot of great audio titles, I got a bunch.

NR: You've mentioned a couple of projects that you're working on. Are you able to tell us about any?

MG: Yeah. So this is my 10th Gray Man book, Relentless, that's coming out right now. I'm working on the 11th, which is called Sierra Six, and it'll be out this time next year. And as soon as I'm done with that, I've got to finish a novelization of a story called "Armored," which I originally wrote for Audible and it's an Audible Original audio play. And they're supposedly recording it in MARC [machine-readable cataloging record, a type of format], and they've hired actors, and they do have sound effects and all that sort of thing.

I was asked a couple years ago by Audible if I would write something for an audio play. I thought it was pretty exciting. It was funny. What I did was, I had a screenplay that I'd been working on for years that I just kept putting aside, because it's hard to write a screenplay. And I was like, well, if Audible will let me do this and rewrite it as an audio play, then
suddenly I'll have a deadline and I'll quit putting it to the side. It'll make me disciplined, which is exactly what happened. It took me a while to do it, but that story that Audible should have, coming out in the fall or something like that, is called "Armored." I sold the movie option to Michael Bay for that, so that's in Hollywood, but I'm also writing the novel of that and there'll be an audio version of that novel as well. So that's what I've
gotta do.

Then I have to do another book called Red Metal 2, which we don't actually have a name for it yet.

NR: Red Metal?

MG: Yeah. I did a book in 2019 called Red Metal with a good buddy of mine I met at the Pentagon and we're doing the sequel to that one. But we really need to wait for COVID to allow us to travel again, because that's a book you couldn't do without a lot of travel in Asia and there's a lot of stuff I need to know before I write that book. I won't say it's on hold. I just have fingers crossed, like the rest of the world, that things will open back up.

NR: I'm so excited for these movies and the books, the listens, I'm so excited, literally. You have some of the best people, like the directors working on these films, Michael Bay, the Russo brothers, and then also the fact that you're going to the scripted audio. I'm a big fan of the scripted. I love the sound effects and the sound design. I feel like with your action scenes, that'll make it even 25 times better.

MG: I hope so. When I agreed to do it, they sent me several scripts and then they just suggested some things, so I used a bunch of credits that I had and listened to a bunch of these scripted audio plays and really loved it. But as a writer, immediately, you're like, oh, this is hard. How do you do this without having a narrator going, "All right, Joe's about to open the door…"? You can't do any of that. It all has to come out in the dialogue and the sound effects or whatever.

It took me a while to do it, but I learned a lot during the process and it was a ton of fun. I was up at Audible's offices in New Jersey last year for a preproduction meeting, then COVID delayed everything for about a year, but it looks like they're back on track.

NR: So, is there anything that you want to tell listeners as a takeaway?

MG: Well, I hope that everybody will give a listen to Relentless. Let's say you're a reader and you buy the books. I would love for you to try one of the audiobooks and just listen to that as a different experience and to enjoy Jay Snyder. I tell this to Jay all the time. I get so many emails of people complimenting the audiobook, and I feel like I'm always mentioned below Jay. It's like I'm his support person that gives him some words to read. He's very well respected by fans of my books, and deservedly so. I would love for people to just pick one of the books and listen to it, even if it's one you've already read before, you might find that you really enjoy hearing it from another angle like that. It's a lot of fun.

NR: Mark, thank you for speaking with me today. Listeners, you can get Relentless on Audible now.

MG: Thanks, Nicole.