Award winning author E. W. Sullivan (Sully) was born in
Jacksonville, Florida. He worked as an architect and contractor, taught
computer networking, and owned a financial services company before becoming an
author. Sheaves of Zion was Sullivan's
first novel and Readers' Favorite 2013 bronze medal winner for
fiction-mystery-sleuth. His second novel, Swarm Theory, is the second book in
the Thelonious Zones crime series. He
credits his high school English teacher, Mr. Smith, for planting the seed for
his love of writing, his late father for how to tell a great story and his late
mother for how to curse properly. E.W.
Sullivan lives, works and writes in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife Anita and
daughter Paris.Swarm Theory: A Murder Mystery-Thriller
Criminal profiler Dr. Thelonious Zones wants to believe his father didn’t kill his mother. What stops him from believing is the twenty-five years to life he received for her murder. Zones’ avuncular employer and father’s best friend, Sam Drake, defends his innocence. Zones sets out to find the truth to this twenty-four year old question, but his search is interrupted when he is forced to investigate the death of a young Arab college student and the series of bombings engulfing a small southern town. Zones’ theory and profile of the perpetrator(s) are questioned by law enforcement when events change and new suspects emerge. The trail to the truth will lead Zones through a thicket of well-guarded secrets and childhood memories that cause him to question what he believes about how the world truly works.
Who are your influences?
My literary influences are many
and they span both time and genre. Richard Wright and James Baldwin first
showed me the impact a good story could have. JD Salinger brought out the rebel
in my writing. More contemporary are Walter Mosley and George Pelecanos whose
crime fiction is some of the best I’ve ever read.
When did you begin writing?
I became serious about a writing
career ten years ago. It was either stay in corporate America and eat steak or
pursue my passion to write and eat bad Chinese takeout. The former won out for
another seven years (the heart was willing, but the stomach staged a coup
d’etat). I’ve been seriously writing for the last three years.
How do you come up with your
stories, characters, character names, POV, etc?
As a crime mystery writer, coming
up with the stories is easy – death and destruction are all around. The trick
is making it seem fresh. For example, my newest novel, Swarm Theory,
deals with bombs and terrorist – nothing new, right. But then throw in cutting
edge science and corrupt institutions and you got a story with some interesting
angles. As for my characters, I draw on a wealth of both street and classroom
knowledge. A minor character from the novel whose nickname is “Car Wreck” comes
from someone I knew as a child. Professor Landrosky, a character also from the
book, has mannerisms of my college professor. So, for me, real life experiences
play a major role in story and character development.
Do you work from an outline?
Yes! And the more detailed the
better. I’ve tried the pantser route with little success. I like the structure
an outline gives me. It allows me to think ahead as to how a chapter, plot,
character, etc. will be developed. It also keeps me from writing myself into a
hole. The outline, for me, is a road map (or GPS) that keeps me from getting
lost.
Tell me about your favorite scene
in your novel.
No self-respecting novelist would
have just one. But if I must, I’ll have to say that my favorite scene in the
book is “The Hack”, Chapter Forty-nine. It has all the elements of a great
scene: action, tension, dialogue, foreshadowing, etc. The strange thing is that
there’re no fight scenes, no car chases, and no gun fights. Yet, the scene is
weighty. The dialogue between Zones and Stats is some of the best in the book.
There are other scenes with better elements, but as a representative of the
whole, “The Hack” is perhaps the best.
Can you tell us a little about
your writing philosophy?
Soapbox time! I have the same
philosophy about writing as I do about music. If a song doesn’t edify the
listener – provoke thought, action or emotion – then it is noise. One of my
favorite Bible verses is I Corinthians 13:1 which says, “Though I speak with
the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding
brass, or a tinkling cymbal.” Let’s be clear, I write murder-mystery thrillers.
The genre doesn’t lend itself to producing a, To Kill a Mockingbird.
But that doesn’t mean it should be devoid of thought-provoking subject matter.
Early Rap music was a social commentary on the plight and struggles of a people
that raised the art form from an underground lyrical competition to that of a
musical vehicle to air grievances and bring about societal change. In the wrong
hands, as we now see, it has, “…become as…a tinkling cymbal”. Whether you are a
poor writer or a great one, edify the reader. If at the end of reading my
latest novel (Swarm Theory) the reader goes, “Hmmmmm?”, them I’ve done
my job.
Have you ever tried writing in
any other genres?
Yes. In fact, I’m reworking an
early novella titled The Red Heifer. I’ll describe it as an
adventure story with religious overtones. It is, to me, some of my best writing
and storytelling. I hope to finish the revisions soon. Stay tuned. I’m also in
the idea stage of a contemporary piece that revolves around the life of a
young, black man from a North Carolina sharecropping family during reconstruction.
It’ll be loosely based on stories my father told me about his early life
growing up in the Jim Crow South.
Do you have any interesting
writing-related anecdotes to share?
It was my freshman year of
Humanities 101 at a small community college (they were called junior colleges
back then). The professor, a diminutive, bespectacled older woman, assigned the
class to write a one page report on a contemporary topic of our choosing. My
subject matter escapes me, but what I do remember is that I labored over the
assignment for many days, to make sure everything was perfect – it was. Days
later, after grading the papers, the professor held me after class. “Mr.
Sullivan,” she said, holding the folded paper in her hand, “this paper is
perfect, no spelling or grammatical errors.” I recall feeling a slight smile
spread across my face. She looked up at me from behind her glasses. Although I
had no proof of it, something told me she had once been a nun, despite the
wedding band around her ring finger. “Are you sure you wrote this?” She
squinted her eyes like my mother when she didn’t believe the lie I had just
told her. My mother, however, knew me like she knew the lyrics to her favorite
gospel hymn, the one she sang every morning around the house. This woman knew nothing
about me. I was just one of many faces passing before her every day. In that
one instant, the smile my face donned had been wiped away. I remember being
puzzled. I did write this paper. I have the crumpled drafts littering
my bedroom floor to prove it. I stood there, towering over her, but
she held the high ground. “That’s my work. I wrote it,” I said through a
nervous smile. She shoved the paper at me. “It’s boring though. You have a good
day, Mr. Sullivan.” She returned to her work and I turned tail, bolting for the
door. Outside the classroom, I unfolded the paper. Marked in red at the top of
it was a big, fat ‘A-’. An ‘A’ minus for a perfect paper, I
thought. I also thought, bitch (sorry ladies, I was young at
the time). I left school that day feeling that my integrity had been assailed.
It was not a good feeling. I finished her class doing well but feeling
untrustworthy.
I learned a few things from that
experience that stay with me to this day. People don’t trust perfection because
they know that there is no such thing. So, when they see it, there’s an
automatic distrust of it. It’s why we like our protagonist flawed. We love
flawed characters. Saints rarely make a second book. Another thing I learned
from this experience is that your readers must trust you as an author. Better
yet, they must trust your work. Imperfection is okay (that’s what editors are
for). I write imperfectly to this day. I make my editor earn his or her money.
You want to deliver a polished product to the reader, but they expect some
imperfection, just not the glaring subject-verb not in agreement type.
Finally, a perfectly written, boring story in publishing is called an abstract.
So, unless it’s written for an academic journal and the like, readers expect to
be entertained. I wasn’t sure if the half point deduction I received from my
professor was for her believing that I had plagiarized the paper or for its
lack of entertainment value. Either way, I had failed in gaining her trust and
in keeping her interest.
Social Media Links
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