Bazaar: Debut Techno-Thriller
Bazaar by Miles Joyner
Author Interview + Book & Author Info + Author Pet Corner!Don’t miss any ITW Debut Author interviews! Click the link here.Bazaar by Miles Joyner
A high-profile homicide of a former ambassador’s son in the nightlife district of the nation’s capital gets connected to an assassination market on the dark web, turning the DC area into a battlefield over a new generation of class warfare.
When the ex-diplomat, Chiedu Attah, hires an elite executive protection team headed by siblings Yemi and Karen Uzunma to guarantee his safety, the security firm realizes they are going up against a young, inventive contract killer who is determined to finish off the political VIP by any means necessary.
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Interview with Bazaar Author Miles Joyner
Bazaar is set in Washington DC. Tell us about that city as it appears in the novel:
Outside of the first chapter and a few other scenes, the vast majority of Bazaar takes place in the surrounding suburbs of D.C. Especially Montgomery County, Prince George’s County, and northern Virginia.
Policy is handled in D.C. yet the headquarters for most of the contractors are found in Maryland or the Commonwealth. The DMV is host to some of the wealthiest areas in the nation including the Dulles Technology Corridor which is nicknamed Data Center Alley where more than half of all internet traffic comes travels.
At the same time, some of these suburbs (especially in Maryland) have seen their crime rates rise as an effect from displacement from the inner city’s rapid gentrification among other factors. Bazaar was my way of using a fictionalized conflict to explore my fascination with these social dynamics
Bazaar is a techno-thriller. What does that genre mean to you? And what do you love about reading and writing in that specific style:
A viewing of RoboCop right before my freshman of high school made me want to pursue storytelling as a serious profession and it’s pretty much a technothriller that’s also a sci-fi classic. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six was probably my first time hearing the genre’s name and exposure to it in the book format. Technology’s relationship to urban warfare also played a role in The Spook Who Sat By the Door, a thriller which had a huge effect on how I approached Bazaar.
You get a little bit of the futurism and wonder you see in sci-fi, but grounded in the reality of our modern world. Obviously there’s overlap, but the ability to tell a story about places I’ve experienced with just a slight addition of a dark net assassination market in the mix brings a joy I can’t express in words other than what comes out as the novel.
Before penning Bazaar, you worked for nearly a decade editing television. How does that kind of storytelling compare to prose?
While there are some similarities, they’re different enough that switching gears from one to the other is always refreshing.
If I’ve been spending all day at work cutting a 60 second highlight reel, I love getting to create a whole new world from scratch when I get home to knock out my daily word count. On the flip side, when I’m a bit exhausted from constant rewriting, cutting visuals allows my creative spirit to get some satisfaction from a medium I’ll see more immediate results.
Tell us about Yemi and Karen Uzunma, two important characters in Bazaar:
Yemi was born in Nigeria while Karen was born in the diverse city of Rockville, MD where the two mostly grew up after their parents migrated.
After getting into some trouble in high school, Yemi was sent to boarding school back in Lagos where he eventually joins the country’s State Security Service after completing his studies. He gets recruited to a security consultant firm back in the USA, but grows restless in an office and soon is enlisted by Karen to run the executive protection team for her new security startup, Raptor.
Yemi hates inefficiency, ego, and bureaucracy. Karen dislikes those things to an extant, but the two lock horns about the future of Raptor when it comes to selecting clientele and who they should collaborate with.
Yemi argues their advantage is staying nimble and lean while Karen shows signs she has ambitions for Raptor to join the ranks of firms like DynCorp or Tripoly. Another thing is that Yemi hates the social scene surrounding the Black professional class in DC while Karen not only embraces it, but uses her position as a woman minority business owner to push Raptor further up the ladder.
This may seem conflicting, but the two realize at certain points that they need the other’s antics to keep their business afloat.
What can we find you doing when you aren’t reading and writing thrillers?
Filmmaking, watching documentaries, reading nonfiction or other genres, playing tactical video games, and getting my a** kicked in the boxing gym every chance I get.
What are you working on now?I’m currently getting the audiobook produced while I’m putting final edits on the second book in the Bazaar series, Shifta. I’m also working on another technothriller series called Compound. Most of the film has been shot and I’m about halfway through the first draft of the novelization.
Words of Wisdom for Aspiring Writers:
Find your voice, bleed on the page, and finish the damn thing. You can always seek ways to explore your prose, but you can’t improve what’s not written. Also, I’m not in the business of telling people how to be artists, (I’m still trying to figure that out myself) but please don’t use chatGPT or similar AI tools for creative fiction.
Great advice!Author Pet Corner!
The spider on my window sill is by far the best roommate I ever had.
A fly was annoying me during a writing session and after coming back from the kitchen, I found the winged bastard caught in the homie’s web.
Charlotte got nothing on him!
Bazaar Author Miles Joyner
Elena Hartwell/Elena Taylor
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