Welcome, Khalid. So could you please introduce yourself to our
readers by telling them a little bit about yourself?
Sure,
Chris. First, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to speak with me about
my writing and my debut spy thriller, Agency Rules – Never an Easy Day at the
Office.
In
terms of my background, I was born in Pakistan, raised and educated in the
United States and returned to Pakistan in 1997 to pursue emerging business
opportunities. I’ve spent my time in the country comparing the on-ground
Pakistan with everything that I heard in the media. What a difference! There
are times when I think they make up the stories that are written about the
country.
As
an entrepreneur, I have been able to build a successful marketing and brand
management company in Karachi that services both domestic and international
clients, which has helped with supporting my family while I build my writing
career. Since publishing Agency Rules in
January 2014, I have written for a number of domestic publications and a few
international ones, while I work on the next two books of the Agency Rules
series.
So, if you were put in the spotlight, how would you describe
Agency Rules – Never an Easy Day in the Office to a potential reader?
It’s
a real and unflinching look at the history of Pakistan that has led to the
whole problem with terrorism in our country. When you read what is printed in
the media about Pakistan, you would be hard pressed to believe that the average
Pakistani citizen stands against terrorism. We, as a nation, are branded with
that nasty word. The truth is that 9 out of 10 Pakistanis stand firmly against
terrorism in every form within the country and from our soil. The media doesn’t
tell you that.
At
the same time, our army has taken it pretty firmly on the chin with media
reports claiming that it supports various terrorist and extremist outfits. When
I sat down to write Agency Rules, I wanted to tell the story from two points of
view – the average citizen and the enlisted military officer. The result is a
fast-paced, harsh and honest look at Pakistan from the Presidency to the
streets of the country, all encompassed in the internal fight against
terrorism.
What a competitive genre! Who are your influences and how did
you make Agency Rules different from the other books out there?
Espionage
thrillers as a genre is extremely competitive! That’s for sure, but I think
that makes writers have to lift their standard higher to be able to compete
with the big names like Helen MacInnes, Alistair McLean, John Le Carre and Tom
Clancy.
My
own personal influences are Le Carre for the way he crafts his characters and
develops his storylines. There is a level of reality in his books that I aspire
to reach. I also look to Fredrick Forsyth because his writing draws the reader
into the story and keeps them there. He paints a graphic that puts the reader
into the action. And anyone who writes in this genre can’t talk about
influences without including Tom Clancy. Clancy is a master of taking real life
events and crafting individual stories around them. I worked very hard to bring
each of these pieces in my own writing and Agency Rules.
What
makes Agency Rules different is that it brings a very unfamiliar, but highly
discussed, country into the public eye. When you look at the books in this
genre, they typically revolve around Langley, Moscow, London or Tel Aviv. They
are stories about the intelligence services that the world knows very well.
Agency Rules isn’t. The whole story is based in Pakistan during the 1990s after
the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the flood of Mujahideen that
returned to Pakistan without a war to fight. They turned their sights on
Pakistan.
This setting for this genre of book is usually somewhere like
Moscow or London. So why Pakistan, and did you have any reservations about this
setting?
You
know that is something that really concerned me when I was writing. Would
people be interested in a story that originated in Pakistan? The more time I
put into crafting the story, the more I found that the story developed into
something that really is a must read in today’s world. Pakistan has received a
great deal of negative media coverage over the past 12 years, but no one has
really ever told Pakistan’s story.
For
those who are considering reading Agency Rules, you need to understand that I
take no prisoners in my book. This is not propaganda for Pakistan. It is a
hard, unflinching look at a nation that has been struggling with forces within
its own borders. Those forces include the religious parties that demand an
Islamic Pakistan; the political forces that demand a pseudo-democratic Pakistan
and a military that must fight to defend the nation no matter what threatens
it. There is much more to the story of Pakistan than what the media would like
people to know. We are a people that have been betrayed throughout history by
those who claimed to serve the nation. We are a citizenry that is searching for
a single identity that we can claim as our own, while being pulled in every
direction rather than forward. This is our story.
What was your motivation for writing the book? Are there key
messages or beliefs that you wanted to get across to the reader?
That’s
a great question, Chris! I know that when I started writing the book, the only
message/motivation in my mind was to tell the real story of Pakistan without
the spin and political bias. While writing the book, I found that I was taking
the reader to some very uncomfortable places that would, in some cases, shock,
anger and outrage them, but to understand how we got to where we are today, I
had to take them there.
I
think the main undertone message of Agency Rules is that Pakistanis are a proud
people from a proud nation that have just been misjudged, misunderstood and
misrepresented around the world. I wanted people to see my Pakistan, the
country that I call home, with all of its problems, struggles and challenges.
We are just like every other country in the world, just more mismanaged.
Of
course, there are other messages within the book, but I will leave those to the
reader to find. I always find it interesting how readers highlight things that
even I have missed when writing. My job is to craft a story that will touch the
reader in places that they don’t want to go. Thus far, from the reviews, I
think that journey has been started.
It must take an incredible amount of research for such a book.
How did you go about that? Any tips for any budding writers when it comes to
researching?
When
you live in a country like Pakistan, where information is not easily attained,
research is the hardest thing. Add to that, I was writing about the Pakistan
Army and the nation’s premier intelligence organization, it made things
significantly harder. So I spent roughly 5 years reading anything and
everything I could get my hands on from domestic memos to international
dossiers. I spoke to serving and retired army and intelligence officers to get
a better understanding of life within the secretive world of the ISI. Writing a
spy thriller about a military and an intelligence service that is rarely
written about was a challenge, but I was fortunate to have the support of many
people who could read for accuracy, realism and authenticity which eased the
tensions I had with writing.
For
the budding writer, don’t think that you can write without research. The mark
of a quality story is that you get the details right, because it’s the details
that will facilitate your reader to experience your words from the mountains in
Bajaur to the lavish dinner in Washington, D.C. You must spend the time to get
to know what you are writing about to make the story come alive on the pages.
What was the most challenging aspect of writing the book?
The
most challenging, and I would say enjoyable, part of writing Agency Rules was
the authenticity. I spent hours visiting the places that I have talked about in
my book. I went to construction sites and spent hours watching the workers and
their relationships. I visited the terrorist and suicide bomber training camps
after the army had cleared them of munitions and terrorists. I think the most
emotional part for me, and this is included in the next two books, was visiting
the re-programming centers where the captured terrorists were taken. Their
stories tore at my heart. They were children who had lost their family members
in natural disasters. They had no one and the terrorists turned them into
fodder for their misguided wars. These children told how they were brainwashed,
drugged and pushed into the battlefield believing that they were fighting a war
for Islam, when they were actually just pawns.
Kamal Khan is not your usual robotic action-hero – he actually
has a sensitive side! How did you develop this character?
My
wife likes to tell me that the debut novel always has a character that is based
on the author’s own personal life. I think that is what we got with Kamal, who
is loosely based on my own life.
Kamal
Khan comes from an upper-middle class family with enough opportunities to never
have to consider a life in the armed forces. But he didn’t feel comfortable in
that life, so he enlisted in the armed forces, rather than attending
university. His father is very hard on him, almost excluding him from the
family from the day he joined the military, but the most intriguing part of
Kamal is that he is struggling with his own values.
When
you look at Kamal in the beginning of the story, he is ruthless, uncompromising
in his dedication to his duty. He is truly, as one reviewer put it, an angel of
death. But as the story moves forward, you start to put yourself into Kamal’s
shoes, walk the path with him and see how he struggles with decisions that
should be easy for a soldier or an intelligence officer. Nothing is black and
white for him, it’s all shades of grey.
You
see him struggle to make decisions, stop to support a friend, and defend his
actions to the military high command. He’s not the typical operative that we
see in books and movies. He doesn’t come with self-assuredness or arrogance. He
behaves like a human, guided by relationships and, at some points, you wonder
how he makes such a great intelligence officer. In my opinion, that is what
makes him so good at what he does – he feels the other person’s situation and
pain, using it to build relationships and turn them into assets, without
letting on what he is doing.
I understand that you are a Business Executive. How do you
organize your time and your writing schedule?
I
don’t honestly. I find myself walking around with a notebook or using the
digital recorder on my phone. I have written paragraphs while waiting for
meetings to start, one the road to someone’s home or while on a flight. I never
know when an idea is going to start to germinate, so I make sure that the tools
I need are with me at all times.
When
it comes to actually writing, I do that after my day has ended. Typically, I
will settle down to write after midnight when everyone has gone to bed and I
can slip on my headphones to get lost in the world that I create for my
readers.
What are your writing aims?
Right now, I am
primarily focused on writing the next two books in the series. There is still a
great deal of ground to cover before we get to modern day Pakistan, which I
would like to do in the next two installments. I also have submission schedules
for other publications that I write for that I need to maintain and deliver on.
I do want to write
for as many publications that I can, while writing the Agency Rules series, to
get the real story of Pakistan, our struggles and challenges into the world
discourse.
Khalid, where can readers find out more about you and where can
we buy your books?
The easiest place
to find information about Agency Rules and me is from the Agency rules website
(http://www.agencyrules.com). I have tried to build a fluid author platform that has
excerpts from the book, storylines that I have written but not included in the
published novel, as well as the reviews and media coverage that has generated
since the debut novel was published. I am also on Facebook (http://facebook.com/AgencyRulesPK) and I tweet from @AgencyRulesPK. I love reader
interactions and questions, so please do feel free to ask anything you would
like. I’ll do my best to answer your questions.
You can buy Agency
Rules – Never an Easy Day at the Office at all the major online book retailers
including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, iTunes and Kobo. The links to each are
provided below.
B&N -
http://bit.ly/BN-AR
Amazon - http://smarturl.it/amazon-ar
iTunes -
http://bit.ly/IT-AR
Kobo -
http://bit.ly/K-AR
Once again, Chris, I want to
thank you and your readers for taking the time out to read this interview. I
hope that I have been able to give them enough of a tease to get them
interested in reading Agency Rules and finding out more about the most discussed/misunderstood
country in the media today.
Thank you again!
