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They Don’t Write Em Like That Anymore

October 23, 2023

SPECIAL GUEST


Author Nelson DeMille


The Deserter and Blood Lines and Plum Island


Charm School – Spy School: delivers an explosive thriller of international intrigue and high-voltage political tension set in contemporary Russia.On a dark road deep inside Russia, a young American tourist picks up a most unusual passenger a U.S. POW on the run with an incredible secret to reveal to an unsuspecting world. The secret concerns “The Charm School,” a vast and astounding KGB conspiracy that stands poised against the very heartland of America. Arrayed against this renegade power of the Soviet state are three Americans: an Air Force officer, who will fly one last covert mission into the center of a mad experiment; an embassy liaison, who will have her hopes for a saner superpower balance brutally tested; and the chief of the CIA’s Moscow station, who will find his intricate dance of destiny and death reaching its devastating conclusion.


  • Different generations are interested in the cold war.
  • Sounds like 
  • What is a CID agent – criminal investigation agent.
  • They are basically detectives or special agents.
  • They are assigned the tough problematic assignments.
  • You try to figure out what the detectives are trying to figure out while reading the books.
  • Civilians don’t pay a lot of attention to things.
  • They typically investigate army or military people.
  • An Army detective vs a Civilian detective. 
  • It was the private investigators that ruled the late 60’s TV from McMillian and Wife to the Rockford Files.
  • The studio was so in love w/ James Garner that they said…hey what if I write Maverick in an RV on the beach?
  • The PI shows and books are just so entertaining. 
  • PI’s are endlessly fascinating. 
  • The Maze – book – people respond to the PI’s.
  • Many guys think to themselves, hey I could be a PI.
  • Everyone wanted to be Sherlock Holmes. 
  • We all want to be the smartest guy in the room and figure the mystery out.
  • Did you guys have to travel to Germany b/c most of the book is set in Germany?
  • We had already been to Berlin in 2000 and we were going to go for this book but then COVID hit.
  • Normally we would go for research but my son and I both had already been to Germany many times so we just went off of memory and the experiences we had.
  • Berlin is a city w/ a tragic history, it was bombed into ruble during WWII.
  • You see some of these old buildings that are scared but still standing after this.
  • It was a city trying to recapture itself, they had this past WWII and the Communist Secret Police.
  • You saw the divided city, the Berlin airlift and the Red curtain….you saw a lot if you were in Berlin.
  • The American government and the Cold War – when you investigate the murder it reveals a lot about the society in which the murder was committed.
  • The neo-Nazi movement in Germany and the neo-Nazi regime.