House of Mystery podcast
When I was chatting with House of Mystery podcast co-hosts Alan Warren and Joe Goldberg, one of them asked that given my long CIA career, “Why don’t you write spy thrillers instead of police procedurals?”
It was a fair question. Many retired CIA officers go on to write spy thrillers, like Joe (DEVIL’S OWN DAY, etc) and Jason Matthews (RED SPARROW, etc). But I didn’t have anything clever or different to say that would make me stand out in that crowd.
I did, however, have something to say about how cartels and corruption are eroding Mexico’s rich culture and civil authority. The situation tugs at my heartstrings after years living in the region. Hence the Detective Emilia Cruz series set in Acapulco, otherwise known as Ground Zero for drug war violence.
New YouTube channel
But I’m not averse to talking about books and spycraft, even on my brand new YouTube channel with UK thriller author Jane Harvey-Berrick: Amato2Berrick Crime Conversations. We’ll be having a series of trans-Atlantic conversations about all things crime fiction.
In one of our first videos, I show off two CIA challenge coins.
Lived to tell the tale
Recently, I shared how my personal experiences have inspired more than one scene in the Detective Emilia Cruz books with fellow author Debra Goldstein. I know she can relate.
Debra is a former judge with meaningful professional experiences that lie behind her award-winning fiction. She left the bench to follow her passion for writing mysteries. Her novels and short stories have received Silver Falchion, IPPY, BWR, and AWC awards and been named as Agatha, Anthony, Derringer, and Claymore finalists.
Her most recent release is With Our Bellies Full and the Fire Dying, a collection of 18 award-winning short mysteries, from cozy to dark, centering around family and friends, their sins and sometimes redemption.
Here’s how my little “I lived to tell the tale” memoir for Debra began:
“If the police show up, make sure you’re holding the package.”
The fellow CIA officer prepping me to meet a deep cover agent wasn’t trying to scare me, although he sure succeeded.
No, he was simply being practical. I was expendable. The source wasn’t.
Meeting a CIA source in a foreign country involved a head-spinning number of variables, not least of which were avoiding local cops and hostile intelligence services like those from China and Russia.
As my heart hammered, I memorized the details of the upcoming rendezvous. I’d been a CIA officer for 12 years, but meeting agents was never my job.
In the language of modern espionage, the officer who was supposed to meet the agent had been “burned.” Basically, the bad guys knew who he was. With a hostile service on his tail, the compromised officer could not meet the agent, whose situation already simmered with danger.
Part of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology, I wasn’t the kind of officer you read about in John Le Carré novels, furtively doing brush passes with agents or leaving coded messages in dead drops. I ran a technical collection platform which kept me behind a computer keyboard.
This meant that I was completely unknown to the opposition. Thus, the perfect candidate to replace the compromised officer.
You can read the entire post here: https://www.debrahgoldstein.com/the-gift-that-keeps-on-giving-by-carmen-amato/
MY BACKSTORY— I learned a few things about danger, deception and resilience during a 30-year career with the CIA focusing on counterdrug efforts and technical collection. Now a mystery author, those lessons play out on the page, especially in the Detective Emilia Cruz mystery series set in Acapulco. Starting with Cliff Diver, the series is a back-to-back winner of the Poison Cup Award for Outstanding Series from CrimeMasters of America. I’ve also written historical and political thrillers, essays about the craft of crime fiction, and live with a very large white dog named Bear.
