A KILLER MEETS HIS MOM
Gregg Hurwitz peels back more emotional layers of Orphan X in ‘Prodigal Son’
Gregg Hurwitz was already a successful author of standalone thrillers and mysteries when he started to think about writing the kind of big, action-packed series he’d long loved as a reader. “There’s so many characters I grew up with and just love,” he says. “Whether it’s Jack Reacher, James Bond, Jason Bourne.”
But he couldn’t quite get his head around what would make his hero — a character he thought of as Orphan X, a boy raised to be a secret government assassin — different from such legends of thriller fiction.
And so he waited. “What’s funny is I wrote about four other standalone novels while I kept letting this one percolate on a back burner,” Hurwitz says.
Orphan X eventually took clearer shape in his imagination, and five years ago, the eponymous first book in the series was published. Evan Smoak, as he’s known in the real world, is every bit as talented and deadly an agent as Jack, James and Jason, but the humanity with which Hurwitz imbues him sets him apart.
His handler, Jack Johns, becomes his father figure over the course of what is now six books — the latest, “Prodigal Son,” comes out Tuesday — and that gives Evan a beating heart.
“There’s a line that I use in each of the books around which for me the whole series coalesces,” says Hurwitz, who has a pair of Southern California virtual book events over the next two weeks. “It’s when Jack says to him, ‘The hardest part isn’t making you a killer; the hardest part is keeping you human.’
“I realized that it’s what I wanted to do — a series about somebody evolving past the strictures and rules, the assassin’s 10 commandments, and sort of thawing into the imperfections and awareness of being human.”
The second key that unlocked the character was the decision to show Evan in the world beyond the secret missions he undertakes, which he does first for the government and later as a do-gooder known as the Nowhere Man.
“He toggles between these larger-than-life missions and him coming back and getting stuck in a HOA meeting, or being dressed down by the highly irritable, elderly Jewish woman who lives downstairs who may or may not be based on my late grandmother,” Hurwitz says.
“All of these things, that was the fun of it for me,” he says. “We don’t ever see James Bond go home, right? We never see Jason Bourne trying to figure how to make small talk.
“I thought, what a fun thing if I have this character who is perfectly at home calculating the wind drift of a sniper round but gets completely undone if he has to make small talk by the mail slots.”
Mother and son
Hurwitz says “Prodigal Son” represents the biggest step forward so far in Evan’s discovery of his own humanity. Part of that’s reflected in the care he increasingly feels for people in his orbit, whether it’s single mother Mia and her young son, Peter, who live downstairs, or Joey, the 16-year-old girl who previously had been part of the Orphan program and now serves as his tech wizard and personal hacker.
But it’s the arrival of Veronica, the mother he never knew, that pushes Evan the most in “Prodigal Son.” Creating the mother character six books into the series was a challenge, Hurwitz says, one on which he let his protagonist take the lead.
“A lot of it I poached from his point of view,” he says. “Like, there’s all these feelings that are elicited in him that he never knew. He never contemplated, because he had shut the feelings away so tightly, what it was to be wanted.”
When Evan tells Veronica he’s a government agent who kills people for a living, she’s disappointed, and that changes him, too.
“It hasn’t ever occurred to him that he could disappoint somebody in who he is and his identity,” Hurwitz says. “Part of what was interesting for me to see, as she appeared, was how much had to alter and change in his worldview.”
Killer tech
In “Prodigal Son,” Evan is drawn into the investigation of an off-the-books military technology that involves minidrones modeled on dragonflies that can swarm and attack autonomously, using their artificial intelligence hive mind to make life-or-death decisions without human oversight.
It might sound like science fiction, but a quick online search reveals plenty of proof of concept.
“I have a hell of a Rolodex,” Hurwitz says. “I’m fortunate in that regard. I have former spies, Navy Seals, professors, porn stars, demolition experts, scientists, people who deal with stuff out of DARPA labs,” the latter a reference to the Defense Department’s research and development arm.
“And I’m always looking at what’s the cutting-edge technology,” he says. “The next thing that’s going to start to break into the public awareness two or three years hence.”
The drone technology he incorporates in “Prodigal Son” fascinated not just because of its terrifying potential, but also for its ability to remove the moral consequences of war from the men and women who have always borne them.
“What’s so interesting is that what we ask soldiers in war to bear is their suffering,” Hurwitz says. “It’s like this really weird thing that if you don’t suffer from the guilt of knowing that you’re responsible directly for bloodshed or death, then you’re unhooked from the moral responsibility of inflicting it.”
That’s something Evan has carried with him throughout the series, as he continues to in “Prodigal Son.”
“He suffers from, and deals with, these missions that he’s conducted,” Hurwitz says. “Evan doesn’t just know where the bodies are buried; he’s the one who buried most of them for the U.S. government.”
Shakespearean thrills
As a graduate student at Trinity College at the University of Oxford, Hurwitz earned a master’s degree in Shakespearean tragedies, studies that turned out to be more relevant to his own work than one might think.
“It’s funny, I focused on the tragedies, and those are really, you know, early thrillers,” Hurwitz says. “They’re tales of lust, intrigue and murder. They’re highly convention-bound and structured. Narrative-driven, based on preexisting themes or stories that are repurposed.
“And the action and the narrative comes out of a fault or moral misstep from the main character.”
The Orphan X series has been in development for film or TV for a few years now. Actor Bradley Cooper had been attached to play Evan Smoak before bowing out to work on “A Star Is Born.”
Hurwitz is working on a pilot for a potential series, and in that sense, he’s also following in the footsteps of Shakespeare, who strove for and achieved huge commercial success.
“If you slice the Globe Theater in half, it’s a perfect cross-section of all of Elizabethan society,” Hurwitz says. “And Shakespeare was writing, trying to put asses in chairs and sell out the Globe. So he’ll have some refined, glancing reference to Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ for the royalty in the box, and then he’ll make a [private parts] joke for the groundlings.
“He’s trying to keep everybody engaged in this venture that’s high class or low class, just broadly commercial,” he says, then refers to Hollywood’s dream scenario of movies that appeal to men and women above and below the age of 25. “That was four-quadrant entertainment before there was four-quadrant entertainment.
“So that’s what thriller writing is.”