Max McCoy Bio Page

An Explanation

My 14-year-old daughter, Meg, recently pointed out (with the self-assurance that only a precocious adolescent can muster) that my website had morphed from being about me and my books to being about my... well, obsessions. Take, for example, my Amateur Radio and Weird Radio pages, she said. They're interesting -- she especially liked the Weird Radio stuff -- but they really don't have anything to do with my career as a novelist or my books. I'm spending too much time thinking about this stuff, she said, and I need to focus on what people really want read about, which is me and my books. Okay, I have to admit she's right. So, here is the stuff that some people might come to the site looking for. So, let's switch to the third person...

.Max McCoy: A Biography

Max McCoy is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and investigative reporter. His subjects have ranged from serial killers to atomic bomb survivors. His newest book, The Moon Pool, is a thriller set against the background of cave diving. It will be released in June 2004 by Leisure Books.

He was born in Baxter Springs and has lived in Kansas all of his life, although he travels frequently for research and speaking engagements. Kansas and Missouri tend to figure heavily in his novels, and his most recent novel, The Moon Pool, is set largely in the Ozarks.

McCoy has won first place investigative reporting awards from the Associated Press for The Killing Season, a story about a pair of missing teen-aged girls from rural Oklahoma, a double murder, and a serial killer on Texas Death Row. The year before, he won first place awards for Ordained by Hate, an investigation into white supremacists in the Ozarks and the Christian Identity movement, which holds that Anglo-Saxons are the true chosen people of the Bible, that modern Jews are the biological children of Satan and that a cataclysmic war between good and evil is imminent. Both pieces were published as special sections in the Joplin (Missouri) Globe, and the competition included investigations by the Kansas City Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. McCoy was also one of the first journalists (after J.D. Cash) to link the Aryan Republican Army, bandits who robbed more than two dozen banks in the mid-1990s to finance a race war, with the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City. The series was called Shadow Wars.

His last novel was Jesse: A Novel of the Outlaw Jesse James, which was noted for its offbeat take on the mythic outlaw – who survives the assassin’s bullet and lives to tell his story to Mark Twain. Jesse was a named a finalist for Best Original Paperback by the Western Writers of America. McCoy is also the author of four original novels featuring Indiana Jones for Lucasfilm, including Indiana Jones and the Secret of the Sphinx. “Full of vivid subplots and ancient lore, the book reads like a rollicking history lesson,” said Publisher’s Weekly. The Indiana Jones novels were published by Bantam.

In 1992, McCoy won the 1992 Medicine Pipe Bearer’s Award for Best First Novel from the Western Writers of America for The Sixth Rider, a novel about the 1892 Dalton raid on Coffeyville's banks. His other books include Sons of Fire (a finalist for best novel), Home to Texas, and The Wild Rider. All were published by Doubleday or Bantam.

As an investigative writer, he has written hundreds of freelance magazine and newspaper stories, many under the pseudonym of Rheuben Buckner. The magazines he’s written for include The Wilson Quarterly, Fortean Times, Front Page Detective, American Photographer, and a host of others. Recently, he won a fellowship in Computer Assisted Reported at the National Institute for Computer Assisted Reporting (NICAR) at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

In 1986, McCoy was the recipient of the Hibakusha Travel Grant, funded by a consortium of Japanese and American newspapers, to travel to Japan and spend six weeks interviewing survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The result was a series of reports and a photo essay entitled Ghosts.

The Moon Pool is also a screenplay that was first optioned to a Hollywood production company. In addition, McCoy is an independent filmmaker, and Spoils of War, a short film based on his award-winning stories, is in post-production.

McCoy has an MA in English from Emporia State University and a BA in Communication from Pittsburg State University. He’s a member of the Western Writers of America and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. He regularly speaks at writers conferences across the country.

Max McCoy: Q&A

The following questions were submitted by my publicist. I thought they were damn good questions, so I'm including them here. Thanks, Caitlin.

Q: How long have you been a diver?

A: I’ve been certified since I was a teen-ager.

Q: Have you ever had a diving scare?

A: Yes, and it was my own fault. Years ago, I was diving with an old J-valve tank in an overhead environment (read cave). The idea behind the J-valve is that once you start feeling some breathing resistance, you pull a lever down, and you have 300-500 pounds of air on which to surface. Somehow, the reserve was already down when I started the dive. So, at about 90 feet , it starts getting hard to pull air through my regulator. No worries, I thought. We’re about out of here, anyway. So I flip down the J-valve, and the breathing didn’t get any easier. In fact, the next few breaths were harder. That’s the only time I felt a jolt of panic while diving. But, it lasted only a few seconds – I got a grip, summoned my buddy’s attention, and I gave the universal slash-across-the-throat hand signal for out of air. Then I spat my regulator out to emphasize the point. The story has a happy ending, because we calmly buddy-breathed to the surface, as we had practiced in training. But you know, the sky looking awfully good that day on the drive back home (Note: This scenario violates several of the laws of caving that have been established by way of fatality analysis by the Cave Diving Section of the National Speleological Society, including the one about saving one-third of your air for emergencies. J-valves are now considered unsafe, for the very reason cited above. And finally, I had no business being in a cave in the first place with an open water certification. I’m lucky that I didn’t end up a statistic in the CDD-NSS accident database).

Q: What kind of research did this thriller (The Moon Pool) require? Do you think, being an investigative journalist, the research was easier for you to do than it might be for others?

A: Yes and no. Yes, in that my interview subjects have included serial killers. They’re seldom as charming as they are portrayed in the movies, by the way. Also, in my journalism I tend to do something I call “extended narrative” stories which have a beginning, middle, and end – and may run to twenty newspaper pages or so. This is an unusual approach, and it shows how heavily I was influenced when I was a kid by “the New Journalism” – Tom Wolfe and the gang that followed. Of course, he’s best known as a novelist, but back in the seventies he was turning journalism on its ear by examining subcultures – such as stock car racing, the customized car show circuit, and the drug scene – and he single-handedly gave us the depth we now expect in a magazine feature story. So, following that lead, I tend to become immersed (pun intended) in both my journalism and my novels. So, that’s where the “no” part comes in. It would be easier not to become immersed in your stories. The more you know about a subject, the more difficult it is to write about a subject, because you’re shattering whatever preconceptions and biases you started with. In the case of The Moon Pool, this process continued, in fits and starts, for more than a decade. At the same time, technology was changing so fast in the cave diving world that by the time I reached the end of the story, I had to go back and update it. Also, I visited most of the places that are in the book. When I describe a rest stop on Interstate 44 outside of Springfield, Missouri, I try to get the details right. I attempted to accurately portray Bonne Terre, and that 300-year-old grandfather clock in the entrance to the public library is really there. Main Street in Joplin, Missouri, really looks the way I describe it, even though it has a somewhat surreal tone. About the only place I didn’t visit was South America, where our killer visits in some dream/flashback sequences, but Geiger is insane – his POV would have been unreliable, anyway. Finally, to make sure the ending of the novel was believable, I contact the Navy Experimental Diving Unit at Panama City, Florida, and asked them if what I had in mind would work. They were interested, and their scientific director generously invited me to come talk to their medical staff about it. The answer, after working out a few kinks, was a qualified yes. Also, I should point out that my publisher is making a big deal out of me being an “Advanced Open Water Scuba Diver.” Well, that’s not such a big deal. Some of the people I met at the NEDU are big deals. Bob Barth, for example. He was one of the original Sealab aquanauts under George "Papa Topside" Bond. Good lord, I remember avidly reading about Sealab in my Weekly Reader or something in grade school. Now, there’s a diver. Ditto with the person the book is dedicated to, an older friend of mine named Doc Benelli. He was a terrific dive buddy, he had been in on recreational scuba since it became popular in the sixties, and he had been a medic in WWII and later a hardhat diver. Doc is gone now, and I truly miss him. There’s just no comparison to what I do, as a weekend diver, to what these guys did on a daily basis.

Q: How did the idea of thriller set in the diving world first come to you?

A: I dove the historic St. Joe lead mine in Bonne Terre in the late eighties, and it was stunning experience. Gin-clear water. I had the sensation that I was flying in space instead of swimming. Also, it was very spooky. You don’t know how dark things really are until you go into a mine or a cave. I knew it was a terrific environment for a thriller. So, in The Moon Pool, I created a mine that had features of several mines in the Bonne Terre area, and added a few of my own. The result was the fictional St. Joan mine.

Q: How is writing a thriller different from writing a Western? What about an investigative piece of journalism? How is writing always the same?

A: Writing is the same in that to do it well is always hard work. I tend to avoid such hard work by doing heavy car repair, building ham radios, playing guitar. My cover story is that I’m thinking during these activities. The only thing I’ve found harder than to attempt to make an honest attempt to write well is to write movies and actually make them, and there you have added orders of difficulty because you have to deal with the weather, other people, and any other damned thing that can go wrong. I try never to badmouth other people’s novels or movies because, in my heart, I know how genuinely hard it is to make either. And actually write a good movie or book... now, that's a blessing.

Q: Why do you write across genres?

A: I tend not to group my novels in genres. To me, they’re all my stories, from the westerns to the Indiana Jones adventures. They have recurring themes. In many cases, the protagonists are me, or version of me in some kind of twisted alternate reality. This is especially true of The Moon Pool. I think, however, if I must identify a “genre” I’m most comfortable in, I think the thriller is it.

Q: How did you get involved writing the Indiana Jones books?

A: Tom Dupree, my editor at Bantam when I was writing westerns and historical, thought I wrote action well and asked if I would be interested in doing a sample chapter for Lucas film. Yes, I said, if I can come up with my own plots. Now, I can remember watching Raiders when it first came out in the early eighties. I was skeptical, because it sounded like some kind of B-movie with an odd name. It was in a drive-in at Joplin, Mo. But by the time the boulder chases Indy out of the South American temple, I was hooked. And I remember sitting there (in my car, it was a drive-in) and thinking, somebody gets paid to write this. Who knew that eventually I would be asked to contribute to the Indiana Jones universe?

Q: Is there a genre or kind of writing you enjoy most?

A: As I said, I think I’m most comfortable with the thriller, at least in terms of novels. But you know, I love doing deep features for newspapers and magazines. If only it paid more…

Q: What is the next Richard Dahlgren book about? When will we see it?

A: I don’t know. Sooner than later, if The Moon Pool does well.

Q: What advice do you have for young writers?

A: Believe in yourself and have something to say. Then, write. If you must take classes in how to write, that’s okay, but don’t let it stand in your way of actually writing for publication instead of a grade. Ditto with teaching writing instead of actually writing. Teaching writing is fine, but I see so many writing teachers who have no credentials – they’ve never sold anything, they’ve just earned grades for their work. There are exceptions, of course, but the best writing teachers I’ve had were writers first. Reaching an audience is important. And, I think so many people are waiting for somebody to give them permission to write. Their teachers, their family, an agent, a well-known novelist. This is deadly, because the only one who can really give you permission is yourself. Also, when you start regarding yourself as a writer, and acting accordingly, it shakes up the status quo. When it moves from the realm of just a hobby, this is going to bug the hell out of your family and friends, because it is threatening the status quo. Stick to your guns. Write with your heart. Also, in the sense of the word “young” writers, I’m addressing all beginning writers, no matter what age. Writing is one of the most democratic of pursuits. It doesn’t matter how old you are, or your education, or what you look like. What does matter is what you get down on the page, and expect to write around half a million words before you start writing publishable material.

Q: What do you most enjoy about teaching?

A: Telling people that they don’t really need a teacher. Most people who are truly writers would write whether they were paid for it or not, and the best thing teachers can do is to help these students find their own way to write well. Everybody approaches it differently, and the question that students want to know most – do I have talent? – is something that writing teachers can’t answer. There is all sorts of talent, and tastes, and just because you don’t write what I personally like to read doesn’t mean you have talent. It’s more than a little like Einstein flunking math as a kid. You just never know. A good writing teacher is more of a coach and cheerleader than anything else.

Q: When you write a book & have the dramatic rights sold, do you also get to write the screenplay? What control do you retain of the story?

A: The author of the novel never gets to write the screenplay and generally has no creative control, unless that author happens to be a King or a Grisham. There are exceptions, but they are few. The cost for even a modest movie is a few million bucks, and the average studio price tag is in the tens millions. Would you trust somebody who has never written a script before with that kind of responsibility? My situation is a little different. I actually optioned The Moon Pool as an original feature screenplay first, to a Lesli Masoner Productions in Hollywood. Lesli, unlike some “producers” optioning material in Hollywood, has actually made features films. Sadly, the option expired without The Moon Pool being made (and no complaints here to Lesli, because she’s in business to make money, and in the end my script, with it’s extensive underwater sequences and exotic locations, proved just too expensive). After being bummed for a while that I wouldn’t see The Moon Pool as a film, I decided that I truly believed in the story, and that if it couldn’t be a movie, I would go back and rewrite and update it as a novel. That’s what I pitched to Don D’Auria, an executive editor at Leisure Books, at a horror convention in Kansas City in the spring of 2003. Don and I had previously worked together when I was writing for Bantam, and we got along well. With The Moon Pool, that terrific relationship has continued. Funny, but I meet many writers who seem to regard editors as the enemy. They aren’t. Most editors want to produce good books just as badly as the writers do, but they have the added responsibility of investing lots of money in your book in the hopes of making a profit. Production costs can be considerable. So these aren’t easy decisions. Don, fortunately, has done a terrific job with the horror line at Leisure, and is doing the same thing for the new thriller line. For example: one of Leisure’s thriller writers is William F. Nolan, of Logan’s Run fame. This is very good company indeed (and again, another movie I sat glued to when I was a kid, and then was riveted by the book). And, this is just one example, because I don’t have the space to name all of the good company I’ve had the pleasure of enjoying at Leisure, and before at Bantam and Doubleday..

Q: Do you see the cast in your mind when you write a book with film potential?

A: Yes, although this is another are in which the writer has very little control. But want to know who I imagined playing Dahlgren and Matheson in The Moon Pool? Okay, I’ll tell you: Johnny Depp and Mary-Louise Parker. And for our serial killer? Ed Harris. Now, there’s a fantasy for you. And ego.

Q: Tell us about your films.

A: My films are digital productions with modest budgets, aimed at the film festival circuit. The first is a short film called Spoils of War, which is a based on one of my award-winning short stories. It is a Civil War piece and we shot on location across Missouri, including inside a jail at Palmyra that was built in 1858. The original cells are still in place. Most of the shooting took place two years ago, and it has taken that long for post-production. It is now ready, I think (fingers crossed), for release. The lead is a Los Angeles actress named Christina Weiber, who did a fantastic job, as did Kerry Leigh Pettinger, a girl from Eureka Springs, Arkansas, who played the part of a 13-year-old boy. Also, there is a lot of music in the film. Connie Dover, a fantastically talented Celtic artist from Weston, Mo., was gracious enough to provide the theme music. She is going to be very, very famous.

Q: Is there a theme to your projects–a thread running among them all, regardless of medium?

A: I’m fascinated by Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and coming of age stories. Then you add the elements of redemption, love lost and regained, salvation, and the occasional altered state of consciousness. Mythology and folklore, of course. Missouri in general and the Ozarks in particular reappear in my work. Bank robbery keeps coming back as well, from Jesse James to the thriller I’m now working on, about a gang of white supremacist bank robbers. Once again, this is set in the Ozarks.