Publishers Weekly Q&A with TJ Slee

Q&A by Nicole Spector

T.J. Slee: Espionage, Psychopaths, and Bad Karma

TJ Slee, a finalist in not one but two of the PW BookLife Fiction Prize contest categories (in the mystery/thriller category with the novel Cloister, and the sci-fi/fantasy/horror section with The Vanirim), declines to give his real name. He also declines to name his city of origin, share his age, or show his face. Slee is a man of mystery, but there’s a good reason for that, he says: he was formerly a security intelligence officer working in counterterrorism.


Portrait supplied by the author...

You mentioned off the bat that we can’t discuss many personal details, but can you tell us where you’re writing from and whether you have a job outside of writing?

I’m currently based in Copenhagen. Yes, I have a day job, which pays the bills so that I can donate all the money I earn from my writing to Doctors without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières. Yep, every cent. Why would I do that? Let’s just say I have a lot of bad karma from my time as an intelligence officer that I am trying to compensate for. A lot, of very bad karma.

Tell us about Cloister and The Vanirim.

Cloister is an espionage thriller laced with dark humor, featuring a very unorthodox heroine. Sister Charlie Jones is not your typical Mercy Sister nun, but she’s doing her best. Thirty years old, shaved head, pierced and tattooed, she’s a year into her novitiate after quitting the Australian security service to find some inner peace. Then she gets a call from the archbishop: there’s been a terrorist threat against the papal visit, police have overrun his office, the Vatican protocol team is threatening to call the whole tour off, and he’s just been told Jones is a decorated former counterterrorist officer who maybe can step in and help him regain control. In no time, Charlie Jones finds herself drawn into a web of Vatican intrigue.

Vanirim is a crime noir story set in a postapocalyptic universe. Five years after the Pacification, the war in which the old Norse demigods, the Vanir, returned to reclaim the Earth, 19-year-old Tully McIntyre stumbles upon the impossible: a dead Vanir. Nuclear weapons couldn’t kill them, but he finds one lying gutted inside a human house. For investigator Stella Valiente, McIntyre is the only suspect—except it can’t be him. McIntyre has been “sanctioned,” a process by which the Vanir punish criminals by stripping them of all emotion. He can’t love, feel passion or sorrow, he can’t hate, and most of all, he can’t kill. Can he?

Are any of these characters inspired by real people?

Charlie [from Cloister] is loosely based on a real character I worked with in the security service. She was lazy, annoyingly self-absorbed, hopelessly disorganized, and unreliable; everyone loved her. Being who she was, she could move in circles no one else in the agency could. Tragically, she was fired when they found drugs in her desk at work—but, if you ask me, the jury is still out as to whether they were hers or not.

The character at the center of Vanirim is not based on any real person, but I have to admit that McIntyre is a metaphor for the sort of person that intelligence work turns some people into if they aren’t careful. McIntyre is the person I might have become if I didn’t leave when I did.

You self-published five books this year, including The Vanirim and Cloister. What prompted you to go indie?

Last year the refugee crisis in Europe provoked me to look for ways I could raise some money to help, and I realized I had all these novels lying around, so I published them this year. I had no idea if anyone would buy/read my work, so in January I set a modest fund-raising target, and I hit it by June, which was fantastic! Now I’ve doubled it. It’s not much in the big picture, but every little bit helps these days.

Being able to reap all the royalties of your books must be particularly rewarding, given your charitable efforts. Would you ever sign with a traditional publisher?

I’d be more than happy to pull the books from Amazon, rebrand, and relaunch, bringing current and future titles under new management. I would continue to send my royalties to charity, but that’s just a personal choice. The help of a publisher to reach a wider audience would be a win-win, and I hope my results in the BookLife competition so far might give an agent or publisher the confidence to take a chance!

The Publishers Weekly BookLife Fiction Prize Winner will be announced on January 23 2017.

Read interviews with all shortlisted authors here: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by...