Vincent Zandri is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. His latest release is “The Shroud Key,” which Zandri calls “a few years in the making.” In this interview, the man who wears many different writing hats talks about how the novel came about and his dedication to the craft of writing.
“I’ve always been fascinated with one man up against it all,” said Zandri. “I’m interested in how a man or woman holds up under incredible stress and seemingly unbeatable odds. Then, just when you think their situation can’t get any worse, it gets worse and then some. I like to see how they react to that as well.”
In “The Shroud Key,” Zandri’s protagonist has a knack for finding trouble, yet that character did not come to him without a great deal of thought. According to Zandri, it all began with an old movie. He said, “I read an obscure article somewhere that attributed an obscure B movie from 1954 as being the inspiration for Indiana Jones. It was called ‘Secret of the Incas’ and it starred Charlton Heston as a former pilot turned tour guide in Peru who was out for the big score in the form of ancient Incan gold. The character intrigued me because he was as smart of Indy, but much rougher around the edges. I wanted to come up with a similar character who was both smart and tough, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.”
Zandri is a part-time resident of Florence, Italy. He spends a few months there every year. Zandri said, “It was there, while walking the cobbled streets that I came up with Chase Baker, an ex-patriot resident of Florence who is a novelist and a part-time tour guide/part-time excavator/part-time private detective who goes on the hunt for an archaeology professor who’s gone missing in Post Revolutionary Egypt. The hunt for the professor inevitably puts him on the trail of the most elusive archaeological treasure known to man: The mortal remains of Jesus Christ.”
With a Renaissance Man protagonist in mind, Zandri set out to write a book that brought in exotic foreign locales and was part archaeological hunt, part adventure, and part romance. One of his first steps was to begin researching the locations, which took him far closer to danger than he thought it might.
“I traveled to Post-Revolutionary Egypt to research The Shroud Key,” Zandri said. “The burned out state building, which is situated directly beside the Egyptian Museum, still smelled of smoke, and there were signs of unrest everywhere, especially in the square. The Muslim Brotherhood was entirely entrenched in Cairo and all the walls of the buildings were painted with portraits of black-masked members of the Brotherhood who had sacrificed their lives in the name of their beliefs. They were depicted as floating to heaven with a pair of black wings on their backs and an AK-47 gripped in their hands.”
While Zandri might have been able to garner some sense of the pervasive unrest and violence in the area through news reports and pictures taken by journalists, none of that would have given him the first-hand sense of danger experienced by those who live there, such as the man hired as his guide. “I was riding in the back seat of a van my fixer was driving between Cairo and Aswan when we were deliberately run off the road. As we sat in the ditch shaking our heads, trying to get our bearings, I was convinced that the van would soon be riddled with bullets. The bullets never came, but ‘The Shroud Key’ did.
In addition to his work as a novelist, Zandri is also a photo-journalist, a travel writer, an essayist, a blogger, and a screenwriter. Zandri also said he strives to improve his writing skills with every book so readers will enthusiastically tell their friends about his books. “I am fascinated with writing, writers, and the writing life,” said Zandri. “If I were to draw a parallel to another line of work, it would be like the fishing guides down in the Keys who fish every day for their daily bread, and then spend their free time fishing. I’m fascinated by words.”
For those who are aspiring writers themselves, Zandri has a piece of advice he learned from a colleague at RT. “If you want to be a successful writer, you must learn to write interestingly about a teabag.”
More Information
Learn more about Vincent Zandri and all of his novels on his website at www.vincentzandri.com.
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