Before Glen Hellman wrote a novel about a tech blogger who exposes a fraud and gets threatened for it, he was a tech blogger who exposed frauds and got threatened for it.
Mr. Cranky
For most of a decade, Hellman wrote about the Washington technology scene under the name Mr. Cranky, and the people he wrote about did not enjoy it.
The premise was simple and unpopular: the local tech press had stopped asking second questions. Funding rounds got applause. Founders got adjectives. Nobody checked the résumés. So Hellman checked them, and published what he found—the fabricated degrees, the undisclosed convictions, the investors who had done no diligence at all and were about to light other people’s money on fire.
The work had consequences he did not entirely plan. His reporting fed federal fraud investigations, and the resulting cases were covered by the Washington Post and the Washington Business Journal. Two chief executives went to prison. Somewhere in there, a company pitching itself as the Uber of private detectives had a lawyer send him a letter demanding he stop.
He did not stop. He published the letter.
That is where Write to Die starts, and it is the reason the novel’s opening act reads like something that happened rather than something invented. It did happen. The difference is that in the novel, the people behind the fraud are not merely litigious.
The Day Job Is the Material
Hellman came to blogging the way he comes to most things—sideways, and from inside the industry he was criticizing.
He spent his operating career as a turnaround executive, taking over companies that were failing and deciding what could be saved. The exits total more than $350 million. He has been an angel investor long enough to have been taken by a few of the people he later wrote about, which is a useful credential for a satirist and an expensive one to earn.
He now runs CxO Elevate, an executive coaching and CEO peer advisory practice in the directive tradition of Marshall Goldsmith—the school of coaching that tells a chief executive what is wrong rather than asking how it makes them feel. He is also faculty at the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering, where he runs NSF I-Corps programs teaching PhDs and postdocs how to find out whether anyone wants the thing they spent six years inventing. He is the author of Intentionality: How to Lead When You’re Not in the Room.
All of which shows up on the page. Greg Newsome, the series’ protagonist, is a blogger who pays the bills as an executive coach, and his coaching method—rate your business one to five, now tell me what’s keeping it from a four—is the one Hellman uses on actual clients. The scenes where Newsome solves a problem by asking four questions and waiting are not invented procedure. They are a transcript of a working day, dropped into a thriller.
The Voice
The books are funny, and the humor is not decoration. It is the subject.
Hellman has done stand-up—four sets, which is enough to learn what a room feels like when a joke dies and you still have three minutes. He is a performing songwriter. He was a University of Maryland cheerleader from 1976 to 1978 and captained the squad his senior year, a fact he volunteers, which tells you something about his relationship to dignity. His influences are the writers who built books out of talk: Elmore Leonard, George V. Higgins, Carl Hiaasen, Joe Lansdale, Robert B. Parker, Dennis Lehane.
What he does with that inheritance is specific. His characters joke when they are frightened, and the joke is how you know how frightened they are. A man cracks wise in a parking garage and the reader understands that he has nothing else to defend himself with. Then the book stops being funny, without warning, and the whiplash is the point rather than a flaw in the welding.
He writes in plain English on purpose. No one in these novels says anything lyrically. Asked what he is actually good at, Hellman points not to a line but to a silence—the thing he leaves out, the parallel he declines to explain, the connection he trusts a reader to make unassisted. A father says one sentence on a back porch and walks inside, and the book never tells you what it meant. Seven novels later, it pays.
Nine Books, One Arc
The Greg Newsome novels are not a series in the sense of a character having a new adventure every eighteen months. They are one story in nine installments, and Hellman planned the whole shape before he wrote the first line of it.
Each title ends in the word Die. Three of them are puns. The arc runs from a blogger with a laptop and a grudge to something considerably larger, and it is built so that details planted in the first book do not pay off until the sixth or seventh—a throwaway line about a man’s uncle, a nickname nobody explains, a sentence on a back porch in New Jersey. Readers who start at the beginning get the architecture. Readers who start anywhere else get a thriller, which is also fine.
Write to Die is the front door. It is the shortest book in the series and the one closest to Hellman’s own life, and it does the job a first book has to do: a man who is good with words finds out what words cost when the people on the other end of them don’t argue back.
Hellman lives in Oakton, Virginia. He has walked nearly every location in these novels himself—the exceptions, he will tell you, are Belfast and Bosnia.