M. P. Woodward: Why It Took Me Twenty Years To Write My First Spy Thriller ‹ CrimeReads

I suspect that every author has some novel in their memory banks that initially called them to the pen. For me, that book is James Michener's Pulitzer Prize winning Tales of the South Pacific. Set against the American naval campaign of World War II, its sequentially plotted short stories bring all of humanity's grace, failings, and foibles to life in a way that only literature can. The book's narrator, a naval intelligence officer on an admiral's staff sent to fix one problem after another, illustrates the way personality quirks of minor actors can have an outsize influence on major events.