For more than a decade, novelist Ace Atkins kept a rigorous schedule and a prolific pace in his small writing office in Oxford, Mississippi.
A cup of coffee, and then to work, writing 21 books – 11 in his Quinn Colson series, another 10 in Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series – from 2011 to 2022.
“That was kind of my life for about a decade,” Atkins says. “I would write about North Mississippi and Sheriff Quinn Colson and the Dixie Mafia and that kind of thing.
“And then I go and take a trip up to Boston and start researching what was going to be the next Spenser book,” he says. “Essentially, what it took was that I didn’t take a lot of time off. I worked every day.”
Atkins says he still maintains that kind of discipline at the keyboard, but the narratives have changed. His new book, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and its 2024 predecessor, “Let the Devil Ride,” are his first standalone thrillers in 15 years.
The comedic thriller “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” takes place in 1985 Atlanta. Teenager Peter Bennett isn’t old enough to drive yet, but when he realizes his mom’s boyfriend might be a Soviet spy, he starts to investigate – sometimes with his best buds Scott and Brenda, eventually with the almost-forgotten crime writer Dennis X. Hotchner and Hotch’s best friend, a former Atlanta Falcons’ defensive turned drag queen Jackie Demure.
The story’s twists and turns include Soviet agents undercover in Atlanta, a lovelorn KGB defector, and FBI agents of different qualities, with the Reagan-era Star Wars missile defense system at the center of their spy games.
“I think the story had been kind of rolling around my head for some decades,” Atkins says of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” which arrived the month. “It was kind of my fantasy life as a 14- or 15-year-old.”
A voracious reader, he devoured spy fiction at the time. “Everything from Clive Cussler to Robert Ludlum to John le Carré to the first books from Tom Clancy,” he says. “I was very much into that world of the spy, which was in the zeitgeist at the time.”
On trips with his mother to the Lenox Square shopping mall in Atlanta’s Buckhead district, he’d replay the spy scenarios he read.
“My mom was an epic shopper, and so while she was whiling her time away shopping, I was kind of in my fantasy life, pretending I was a spy,” Atkins says on a recent call from his book tour in New York City. “Maybe I was watching a dead drop. Maybe there was a KGB agent in the food court.
“I wasn’t insane,” he says with a laugh. “It was just a game I was playing.
“I loved James Bond films. There were a lot of spy films in that period. ‘The Falcon and the Snowman’ had just come out. Even a lot of the [Steven Spielberg-produced] Amblin films, where you had kids wrapped up into dangerous situations, were very much of the mid-’80s.
Now, four decades later, his adolescent pleasures return in fictional form, with the memories of Atkins’ suburban Atlanta life scattered through the action and humor of his new book.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Atkins talked about the inspiration real people and events played in his storytelling, what thriller legend Elmore Leonard warned him about, the challenges of finding a title everyone likes, and more.
Q: When were you in Atlanta?
A: My dad was a professional football coach [and player in the American Football League]. We’re originally from the South, from Alabama, but from a very early age, we bounced around many different teams. We came back to Atlanta around ’81, and lived through 1986, I think.
Q: Peter’s friends Scott, Brenda and Stacey – they were your real friends and those are their real names?
A: They are. I hadn’t seen Stacey in person for 40 years, and she was at my book signing yesterday. And tomorrow night in New York City, Brenda Yee will be at my book signing.
It’s funny. When I started writing it, I wanted everything to be accurate as far as the pop culture and just my life in the suburbs. The places where I hung out, the places where I ate. I wanted all of that to be completely authentic to my own experiences. And so when I first started writing, I put real people in there that I was friends with.
I really did hang out in Scott Adams’ basement, and Brenda was there. If we were putting together a cast for a “Goonies” spinoff, that would have been kind of the group.
When I finished the book, I was going to [change their names]. Instead, I called them or messaged them and said, “Hey, are you OK with your name being in this book?” And they agreed to it. I said, “You guys are such great characters, I don’t want to fictionalize it, so I’ve drawn you guys exactly the way it was.
Everything is spot-on true, except for, you know, being hunted by a KGB asset. That part was a little stretch.
Q: And Stacey actually was your eighth-grade girlfriend?
A: She was. Things like that are how I remembered it. Once I finished, I just couldn’t change it. It was a fictional autobiography, I guess.
Q: Did you really kiss another girl on the Monster Mansion ride at Six Flags? [In the book, Stacey dumps him for this reason.]
A: [He laughs] Yes. It was a different girl, but all those things are pretty spot-on.
Q: There are so many great pop culture references from that era. Did it take much research?
A: Very little. You always have those time periods growing up that things are so vividly clear in your memory. My wife [Angela] would say, “No, no, I don’t believe that was there. I believe that was ’86, that was ’87.” So we would fact-check to make sure the details were correct.
Q: What was it like to use Atlanta as your setting and not the familiar settings of the series?
A: In the way [Robert] Crais‘ books are very specific to Los Angeles, I wanted the Quinn Colson books to be very specific to Mississippi. Then I wrote a book that came out last year called “Don’t Let the Devil Ride” that is set in Memphis, but I decided to broaden the canvas. There are a lot of scenes that are in Paris, there are scenes in Washington D.C.
Really, it’s no different for me the way I do characters from a small county in Mississippi than changing it up to Rome and Washington D.C. and Atlanta. The setting did not change the way that I would write.
Q: And writing your first spy novels?
A: I got into writing not from reading crime novels. Crime novels kind of became an obsession with me later as an older teenager. When I was 14 or 15, my gateway drug into becoming a big reader was Ian Fleming and Len Deighton and Ludlum and all that. So I was very familiar with the genre.
When I set out to write this book, I wanted it to feel like the tradecraft and espionage of that period, so I went back and read some of those books. I also went back and read Martin Cruz Smith, the fantastic “Gorky Park” and the Renko books set in Russia. Those were very influential on me.
Q: I saw you thanked Frank Figliuzzi, the former FBI agent and TV pundit now, for help on the ’80s FBI in Atlanta.
A: I met Frank at a writers’ event in Tucson a number of years ago and we became friends. He’s a terrific guy. He started his career in Atlanta in the ’80s, and he was very helpful. Not only just telling me that my paranoia and my fantasy world was correct, which was a big thing for me.
But telling me that there really were Soviets when he was working counter-intelligence in Atlanta. And also just the day-to-day of what it was like to be a rookie agent in Atlanta at that period. We’re so used to seeing fancy high-tech spy stuff now, and back then I liked all the mundane stuff he gave me.
Like the squad of six, eight agents had to share one telephone with a 10-foot cord, and they had to share one sedan that they had to check out. Just the way they would work. It was a lot like old-time detective work as far as following people, which was fun for me to write.
Q: Tell me how your fellow thriller author Lee Goldberg tipped you off to Ralph Dennis, who served as a model for Hotch.
A: I had been looking for the missing piece of the puzzle to tell the story. I’d always had the idea of a version of me as a kid involved in this kind of thing, but I didn’t want to make it strictly just that. Lee introduced me to [the late] Ralph Dennis. I had no idea that he had done all these fantastic crime novels in the early ’70s in Atlanta.
He has this heavy that [protagonist Hardman] works with, this guy named Hump Evans, a former defensive end. I just liked Ralph. Kind of a crusty guy. He held court at this bar where I was just yesterday called George’s Bar in Atlanta. One of those serious places where serious drinkers go in the afternoon, and [Dennis] would sometimes write pages in the back.
Hotch is not fictionalized largely. Ralph Dennis is more than an inspiration for Hotch.
Q: George’s Bar has a lot of character in the book.
A: Yeah, it looks exactly like it probably did in 1985. I think the dust is still the same. It’s got really good burgers, but it’s one of those really dimly lit polished bars with little banquettes on the side. I sat in the booth and had a beer for Ralph yesterday in the place where I think he used to write.
Q: Tell me why you stepped away from the series for these two books.
A: These were in my queue for quite some time, and it was just something that I felt like I needed to do now. But there’s also a business component to it as well, which is something Elmore Leonard told me a long time ago. I said, “Why don’t you write a series?” He said, “Well, you can only sell your characters once to film.” And I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s the truth.
Quinn Colson has been tied up for quite some time. It bounced around for development and was at HBO for a while. So even if I had 100 Quinn Colson books, I can’t sell movie and TV rights.
There’s the creative component of finally being able to write these books and do something new and different. But also the fact that “Don’t Let the Devil Ride” is probably further along of any of my projects. There was an article in Deadline about two weeks ago about what’s going on with it. There’s a great showrunner who’s written a script, and it’s very exciting.
Q: That advice sounds like an Elmore Leonard kind of thing to say.
A: [He laughs] He was just very blunt about it.
Q: What about rights for “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”?
A: It just went out for submissions around Thanksgiving, so I hope so. Hopefully, they could find a good filmmaker and do something fun with it. Something like “Stranger Things” only with spies. I think it could be fantastic, but we shall see.
Q: I think the title is perfect. The song fits the era and the Cold War themes.
A: Usually, there’s more discussion about a title than there is about the story. That’s the one thing I hate about the business, when they say, you know, the title’s not working. And you can do nothing else than just think about this title, that title.
My wife worked for the St. Petersburg Times, and I was at the Tampa Tribune when we met. I was telling her about Peter and writing about ’80s Atlanta, and she loved the idea. She’s a very honest and brutal critic. She’s the one who said, “You have to call this ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World.’ You can’t call it anything else.”
Of course, the publisher comes back and says, ‘We’re not sure about this, can you think of something else?’ I just said to him, “If you can come up with a better title for a book about the mid-80s and about spy games and world domination, please have at it.”
I said, “Other than that, this is the best title I have.” So, fortunately, they kept it and it never changed.