Kristy Madden asked Olen Steinhauer:

I read "The Tourist", just loved it and checked out your Facebook page. I'm suprised to see how young you are. What life experiences prepared you to write so expertly in this genre?

Olen Steinhauer I'm not sure "young" applies anymore, no matter what I'd like to think! But as for experience, I've spent most of my adult life either trying to travel, or living in foreign places. By this point I've had 13 years as a full-time novelist, which gave me leisure time to read and travel and look into things I wanted to write about.

But more importantly, I think, is that it's given me time to think about how humans are, how we treat one another and ourselves. I've often said that I'm more interested in spying as a way to look at human nature. For me, the tradecraft takes a back seat to the effect of espionage and international relations on individuals psyches. Once you get a fix on that--on the "human factor" of espionage--it brings an automatic feeling of realism to a book.

Of course, I still research the hell out of my subjects, but that often comes after I've written much of the story. Everything starts as a story I want to tell, for personal reasons, then branches out into things like international relations and espionage.

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