Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.
Nicole Ransome: Hi, I'm Audible Editor Nicole and I'm super excited to welcome longtime and bestselling thriller author Gregg Hurwitz, who's here to answer my questions on his new release and 11th installment in his Orphan X series, Antihero, which follows protagonist Evan Smoak, a.k.a. the Nowhere Man, on his latest mission for justice. Welcome, Gregg.
Gregg Hurwitz: Well, thanks for having me, Nicole.
NR: It's good to have you. So, Evan Smoak, he is in New York to help an influential man named Luke Devine, and he runs into a woman, Anca, who's been brutally and publicly attacked. Evan, a trained assassin, is given quite the challenge when Anca demands no violence in order for her to agree to his help. What did you want to explore by challenging Evan to bring justice upon the people responsible without his usual tactics?
GH: Well, the key line that underscores the series is when Evan was very young, he was taken out of a foster home and he was trained to be an assassin by the United States government. And his handler, who became a father figure to him, told him back then, "The hard part isn't making you a killer. The hard part is keeping you human." So, what the books are really about are him discovering that.
He started off very much a lone wolf, and he's grown more and more capable of speaking what I call in the series the strange language of intimacy. And now he's called to the aid of a woman who has been brutally assaulted, and she's a devout Orthodox Christian. She says to him that he can't kill anybody who he's pursuing, even the people who assaulted her so brutally. So, the book's really about Evan, who's lived his whole life by this assassin's code, having to integrate a higher ethic, a higher code, from somebody else in order to honor them. Because she's the victim, she's the one who sets the template for how this vengeance must be pursued. So, he's got more handcuffs on him than he's ever had before.
NR: Yeah, I know he abides by his own commandments, his 10 commandments. There's one line that I really enjoyed, he said, "I learned what is right by doing what is wrong." He says that to her, and I really enjoyed that line because I definitely thought that was a good reflection of the character.
GH: One of the lines that I think a lot about is something that Carl Jung wrote, and he said that the power in a man's personality comes from his capacity to commit violence. It's not the committing of the violence, and you hope as somebody gets older that they have a lot of capabilities to have power but use minimal possible force at all times.
I guess what I'm looking at is, here we have Evan who's killed people on six continents, who can defeat anybody almost, whether through a weird combination of hand-to-hand or knife fighting or whatever the scenario calls for. He can pull off impossible assassinations. But is he powerful enough to still go into a deeply human problem and try to solve something while using less force, while using less of the violence that he's capable of? But having that violence, I think, is what allows him to at least have a shot at trying to do something like that, because if he just went in having been a nice, integrated, normal human being his whole life, he wouldn't stand a chance against what he's up against in this book.
NR: Anca tells him, "Some people just need to be slapped, not shot," so that was also a pretty poignant part of the story. Evan is also accompanied and helped along the way by Candy and Joey, two women who have had, not similar experiences to Anca, but have had troubled pasts and have had Evan's help to overcome it. Their perspectives prove valuable when looking at the problem from different angles. Why do you think they reacted the way that they did when confronted with Anca's situation?
GH: Well, one of the things that's happened in Evan's process of becoming more human, and I mentioned this earlier—he's moved from being more of a lone wolf to having trust built between different people—and a lot of the people in his orbit, in Orphan X's orbit, are women who are really sharp and they're really complicated. We have Joey, we have Mia Hall, who is the single-mother district attorney who lives downstairs from him. We have Candy McClure. We have, in this book, Naomi Templeton, who's a very tough and rigorous US Secret Service agent.
So, he's got all these women around him who challenge him and see things in ways differently than he does and who temper him and who push him towards more competent excesses at times. That would be Candy. I think that they respond to this trauma that Anca has been through with a different sort of feminine, bone-felt empathy. Evan works on empathy; that doesn't come as naturally to him. And it's something he really feels and it resonates through them.
"If we take revenge on behalf of somebody else and it's not what they want, we're stealing their trauma from them in a way."
As he feels more and more of this for Anca, the more he has to try and restrain his urge for revenge. Because if we take revenge on behalf of somebody else and it's not what they want, we're stealing their trauma from them in a way. We're subverting it to our own need for something, and he's aware of that very clearly. So, he's trying to navigate all of that. And there's the voices of a number of complex women around him who help him to contend with all this.
NR: And not only just those women’s voices, he also abides by his own commandments to keep him on his straight and narrow path, his path to justice.
GH: Or his crooked, straight, and narrow path. That's right. And those voices are Jack Johns, who is his handler. One of the voices is Tommy Stojack sometimes, who is his beloved friend and armorer who's no longer around.
NR: Antihero explores themes like violence against women and social and economic disparities. What did you want listeners to take away from this story?
GH: Well, I think we're at a point in the life of our culture right now where we're really figuring out if we're going to get back to some foundational unity and value set and common sense and common decency, or are we going to keep letting things deteriorate. One of the key parts of this book, at the center of it, is a pack of young men who are nihilists, who have grown up online, they're sort of overcrazed and overmedicated and they've slipped out of the mainstream of morality and they're nihilists in a manner. The path back to that that Anca suggests or demands of Evan is probably the only one that's transformational. But how do you hold those things in check when there's so much rage and there's been so much damage? How do we try to bring things forward in a way that's transformational, that's more positive in a way? That's what she suggests.
Evan would rather go out and put a bullet through everyone's head, and that's not what she's allowing. And maybe when we see and understand some of the interior life of these kids in this pack, we might understand that we don't necessarily just want them killed. They're so far gone. They're so far gone to nihilism and online toxicity. They're so far fallen out of any sort of real human condition that the hope is that they can be brought back in some way, because that has to be our hope.
NR: Yeah, definitely. I feel like that's very reflective of today, especially as people become much more chronically online. So, with such a long-running series, how have the changes in the world influenced the missions and excursions that your character goes through?
GH: That's a wonderful question. They've started moving much more deeply personal, I would say. They start off where Evan is fighting for a kind of justice that exists in some ways that are more abstract. That's when he's with the government and he realizes the error of abstract political missions or ideological missions, because they start to not align with his own internal moral compass. So, then he moves and becomes the Nowhere Man. He answers a 185, it's 1-855-2-NOWHERE, and you can dial that number and you can see who answers the number when you call it. And that is to help people in desperate need, so he can be aligned with his own moral compass.
But as he starts to enter the real world and starts to contend with all the messiness of human intimacy, then the conflicts get closer and closer to home. In the last book, Nemesis, his conflict was with his best friend, Tommy Stojack, where the ethical and moral dilemma exists in opposition to someone who he's friends with. As a lone wolf, you never think about that. His code could be much more black-and-white. And now, here, it's not just the person who's embodied in the code, it's the code itself that is under conditions that are different than the ones that he would choose. That becomes way more personal because it messes with the way that he proceeds in a mission. It messes with the way that he thinks about how he moves through the world morally, even for himself. And that's how we change. We change in relationship. We change in engagement with other people. We don't always change from reading an op-ed or reading a book or something that's abstract. So, it's very intensely personal, what is happening in Evan and in his heart. It's right there in his chest in this book.
NR: Yeah, and I feel like he repeated the fourth commandment, "Don't make it personal." I feel like that commandment definitely is a big conflict for him.
GH: It’s having a tough go in Antihero, the fourth commandment.
NR: How did you come up with those commandments? What inspired them?
GH: So, the first Orphan X book, when I started this series, it's very weird looking back to the point at which I started it. It would make sense to start when Evan's in the foster home, or when he's recruited out, or when he's being trained for the Orphan program, or when he's in the Orphan program, or even when he first leaves and becomes the Nowhere Man and answers that phone number, that encrypted phone line to help people he doesn't know who are being terrorized in the real world. But that's not where I started the series. Where I started the series was after all those things on the first Nowhere Man mission, where he basically breaks all 10 of the commandments that he was trained with.
"I think we're at a point in the life of our culture right now where we're really figuring out if we're going to get back to some foundational unity and value set and common sense and common decency."
So, the series starts after most series end, really. It starts at the point that his whole set worldview as a kind of archetypal thriller hero and spec-ops guy and doer of good shatters and comes apart. All of his black-and-white thinking disintegrates and turns into him starting to understand the shades of gray that are necessary to be a human being. So, because of that, I think, in some ways, the commandments could illustrate the black-and-white rules that he once lived by that no longer serve him now in this new phase of his life, and that's the phase of his life that I'm writing about, that's the series of books. And so that's how it progressed.
NR: As he becomes more complex, what has been your most challenging mission to write for the Nowhere Man?
GH: I think they're all equally challenging. One of the aims that I have as a writer is to always set my standard and expectations higher and just be on the grasp of what I think I can jump and get to. So, story after story with him, I'm trying to do more that makes the tapestry more ornate, that gets to better depths of his character, that plays with his interactions with others in ways that are illuminating of a plot that's there to exhibit all those things. Every story that I land in, I'm kind of straining and thinking, "Maybe I'm not going to pull this one off." They've all been challenging in that regard.
This one, what was very interesting is what is being demanded of Evan, that we have our first Nowhere Man book, we have our first Orphan X novel, where he doesn't kill anybody. Is that something that can happen? Is that something I can write? Is it something that can be pulled off? Is it something he's capable of? That was one of the challenges of this book. How then does the tension come through? Where's the menace? What are the demons that he's fighting? It turns out, of course, that those demons are much darker and jagged of tooth and claw than some of the more conventional ones, perhaps, that presented themselves earlier in the series.
NR: How do you keep track of all the details as you grow your series? When a character has so much life and he does so much across so many different continents, how do you keep track of all those details?
GH: Imperfectly, but as vigorously as I can. I keep a bible with information, and now and then something will hit and I'll say, "Ugh, where did he break his collarbone again? He's broken it a few times. Where are they?" I have to go back and search all the books in the series for “clavicle” or for “collarbone” and make sure that I am referencing that exactly in the right place. So, it takes a bit of work.
I'd say the bigger problem I have is remembering what happened in what book, because for me it's all sort of a grand mythology, and people say, "Oh, I love that last part of Into the Fire," and I have to think, "Wait, what was Into the Fire? What was the ..." Especially some of the subplots, right? I don't remember when one annoying and vaguely humorous homeowners association meeting went askew in a particular fashion, exactly what book that happened in. So, it takes some doing, but I muddle along.
NR: In order to write such detailed and imaginative missions for your characters, what has been some of your favorite research expeditions that you've gone on to help craft these stories?
GH: Well, the first thing is I shot every gun and virtually every weapon that Orphan X has done. I had a very dear friend who passed away a few books into the series whose name was Billy Stojack. I borrowed his last name for Tommy Stojack, just because spec-ops guys and baseball players have the most unimprovable names for characters. Those are the two subcultures from which I borrow heavily. I would go visit him in Vegas and we would just shoot everything. I mean, Benelli combat shotguns, 357s, you know, played with Strider knives. He'd hoist a rocket propelled grenade and ask me if I want to go play adult lawn darts in the desert. He was a blast and he was a great personality. He wanted to make sure that I knew what it felt like to fire these weapons and to understand and to get them right. That was really important.
I did train in mixed martial arts fighting for a while before I started the series, with somebody who's pretty talented. Sort of solo stuff sparring in a gym, mostly introducing my face to the training mat over and over again. It's not something I will claim to be very good at, but it was something that I trained at enough to know what those kinds of discomforts feel like, what kind of angles to take, what does it feel like. I always want to write about what something feels like, where the reader has a front row seat to it, so that I'm not borrowing cliches from other books and from other movies and TV. Getting choked out on a mat has a very particular kind of claustrophobia to it, and panic, that I can describe better if I've experienced that. So, I go get banged around now and then for research and that's okay. It's fun. It's an adventure.
NR: So, you're kind of a bit of a Nowhere Man yourself.
GH: Yeah. Well, I'd say a less competent Nowhere Man.
NR: So, 2026 marks a decade since the release of the first book of the series. What has been some of your favorite moments you've written for your well-loved protagonist, Evan Smoak?
GH: Probably my favorite scene in the whole series is the scene when he goes and meets his dad for the first time, his biological dad, in a double-wide pink trailer in nowhere Texas. The way he holds himself together in the face of that, and how book after book after book after book, and this far into his life, what that moment is and the pitiful, not-with-a-bang-but-a-whimper climax of that storyline and the way it's sort of quietly tragic, I just loved writing that.
"Working with Scott, it's like working with the conductor of the orchestra and then all of the sections as well, at the same time."
There's a scene in Antihero that's one of my favorites, where he's with Anca at the side of a road. He's in Long Island going somewhere, and she has seizures with some regularity, that's part of what left her vulnerable to her first attack, and she starts to seize. When she does, she has all sorts of things like synesthesia where you can smell colors and you can taste sound and the world kind of goes in and out from her. He's holding her in the wake of a storm, and he's looking around at the way that the sun's breaking through and how this area feels, and he has this heightened feeling that's reflective of when he first visited her, or early on when he went with her to her Orthodox church.
Orthodox churches are very interesting. They're different from Gothics. Gothic churches have these spires that aim to heaven. They direct your attention upward toward heaven. What's really cool about Orthodox churches is they're rounded and the light sources are more diffuse, and they're meant to shine through the saints. You're in this little shell within the church itself, which is supposed to be this encapsulated glow that almost feels like heaven. And he was with her, and this isn't Evan's interest or bearing, right? He's not particularly religious in any manner, but on the course of this mission, he was there with her. And when he's outside in the space with her, he sees the world around him almost through that light as she has the seizure, and it's something that's brought from him, from there, into the real world. I'd say that was probably my favorite part to write.
Then there's a scene in a similar place. It's the same place, but a very different feel, on his way out of the meeting that he has there, where he gets set upon in ambush and he's on this broken, brutal seascape that's mottled with broken bottles. It's where horse carcasses were dumped from old glue factories and it's this sort of hellish landscape. What was heavenly before has now turned hellish, and he has to fight his way out of this for every inch of his life. That was probably my favorite writing in Antihero.
NR: So, what does it feel like to have your series meet 10 years, and then also it's still so loved and everyone's really waiting for the next book?
GH: I will say that, right now, it feels like it's almost like a dream. I can't believe I get to do this every day, and I can't believe I get to be paid for it. It's so much fun. I'm having the best time. The tours have been a blast. I love meeting readers who have familiarity with the characters and with the themes and they have all sorts of different questions. The tour events have been so much fun the last years, of people coming and having emotional questions or personal things or some part that connected with them.
When I started writing, I started really young. I was still an undergraduate. I started my first novel, I was 19, and all I wanted to do is be a writer. I remember thinking back then, if somebody had come along and said, "Look, we'll pay you $2,500 a month for the rest of your life and you can live in a studio and you can just write full time," I would've taken that deal in a heartbeat. Now, I'm sure my agent is happy I didn't take that deal. There's lots of people who say they want to be writers and there's fewer people who actually want to write. And those are the readers who I love encouraging and I love reading.
For me, I love the process of writing. So, to be able to do it at this level and have this much success and readership, it's like a dream. I'm so grateful for it. That's one of the things I love so much about going on tour. I've done a lot of tours—this is going to be my 27th book tour, and I still love it. I mean, the travel gets old sometimes later on, but there's never an event that I go to or walk into where I'm not really happy to be there and to do it. It's just all good all the time in that regard.
NR: Since the very first book, the Orphan X series has been performed by the beloved Scott Brick. How did you choose Scott Brick to be the voice of the Nowhere Man and what do you enjoy the most about his narration?
GH: Scott Brick knew about this book before I'd sold it to any publishers. Scott has been my audiobook narrator since The Crime Writer. He came in on The Crime Writer and just did such a spectacular job that all I've wanted since then was more Scott Brick. It's like he's cowbell, you know? You always need more cowbell; you need more Scott Brick at all times. Even when my old rights come back now, I'll have him rerecord them over. He's a great partner.
When I first wrote Orphan X—Scott has become a friend; he lives in Los Angeles, as do I—and I said, "Hey, man, I gotta come over to your house. I need you to do me a favor." This was before Orphan X, anybody had read it. I went over to his house and I told him, "I bought the phone number 1-855-2-NOWHERE and it's in the manuscript. I wrote about it. And when I submit this manuscript to editors, they're probably going to call it. When they call it, I need you to answer the call, a recording of your voice to come on that is Scott Brick as Orphan X, as the voice of the Nowhere Man." He was like, "Great." So, we cut a little audio flourish and that has been present on that phone line since before I even sold this book in this series.
NR: That's so cool. You did tease that number. If you call it, it does lead to someone, spoiler. Is that number still active? If fans hear this, will they be able to call it?
GH: Yeah, of course. Orphan X can't take a day off.
NR: Oh, that's true. Crime never stops. Well, evil never stops. We interviewed you and Scott Brick back in 2019. How has your relationship grown over time? How has it changed and developed? Do you hear his voice when you're writing since he is the Nowhere Man's voice?
GH: I don't hear his voice when I'm writing. Annoyingly, Scott always comes to my book launch party, and he's interviewed me a number of times, but whenever he's there, it's really funny if he's in the crowd, because if everyone's getting ready, all of a sudden Scott will start talking and everyone starts to turn around and look over their shoulders. Everybody recognizes the golden voice, which is really funny. Scott, he's just got the voice.
"I have an overdeveloped sense of justice, for sure. I hate bullies. I hate bullies and I hate bureaucracy."
We've become much closer over the course of the last decade. He's my partner in crime in all this. I think he's indispensable and essential to the audiobooks. Working with Scott, it's like working with the conductor of the orchestra and then all of the sections as well, at the same time. He just knows how to produce, how to create this symphony of different tones and voices and attitudes and intonations without being overly theatrical. Because that's what just kills you in an audiobook, right? If you get somebody who's doing sort of bad British theater dramatics, you just want to dig a hole with your face. Scott manages to do that, where it's a dramatic performance, where it has us leaning forward, but he never feels like he's being theatrical with a capital T.
NR: Yeah, I definitely think it's very natural. The audiobook narration was so good, honestly. I was locked in from start to finish.
GH: Oh, I'm so glad to hear that.
NR: You also have another series that follows the vigilante hero type, Tim Rackley. He's a former US Marshal. What's your favorite thing about the vigilante character type that really drives home a good thriller?
GH: It's wild, if I look back at my career, how much I've been obsessed with vigilantism. I also wrote for a stint, I wrote comics. I wrote Wolverine, and I wrote Moon Knight, and I wrote Batman, and I wrote The Punisher. There's something that really drew me to these sorts of characters, and the culmination of that has really been Orphan X. In a way, with Orphan X, this is the series that to me is moving out of the more vigilante mind frame, and in Antihero, it's starting to move or signal to what I'm moving to next.
I don't know, I have an overdeveloped sense of justice, for sure. I hate bullies. I hate bullies and I hate bureaucracy. So, there's something in the entrepreneurial, brutal effectiveness of Orphan X, of somebody who takes care of and handles a problem briskly and properly and on the side of good, that's immensely palatable to me.
NR: What are you working on now?
GH: I'm working on Orphan X's next mission. I had a short story come out recently called “The Code.” In a lot of ways, it's one of the most brutal stories yet. We see Evan in the full flush of his early training. He gets sent out, basically, to do a private one-man tour through the BUD/S training facility for Navy SEALs in Coronado. I actually put in a story that's from one of my Navy SEALs buddies, a former 60-gunner in the teams. That was one of the most brutal training stories I ever heard about him and his toenail. So, if you want to grab “The Code” for something to tide you over until Antihero comes out, I think that's a really fun one.
And then I'm working on the next book, which will be the 12th in the Orphan X series, and I've zeroed in on a title and I know what it's all about, but I'm not going to tell any of you people because everyone's gotta go out and buy it, and we got another book to get through first, and so that's how that's going to be.
NR: Okay, I won't request any spoilers. However, if you want to send some, it's totally fine [laughs]. So, with “The Code,” you said it's a prequel to the first book?
GH: Yeah, it's a short story that takes place during his Orphan X training when he's still a teenager.
NR: As a fan of Audible, what would you recommend to your fans as essential listens?
GH: Anything with Scott Brick. For me, I have to lead with a narrator because the performance is so important. I also read very fast, so audiobooks slow down for me some, so I really have to enjoy the performance and the presentation of it. One of my favorite audiobooks was when Christopher Hitchens read his own memoir, which was called Hitch-22. His just unimprovable diction and manner. That was a delightful little memoir.
NR: Well, thanks, Gregg. Listeners, you can get the latest installment of the Orphan X series, Antihero, on Audible Now. Thank you.
GH: Thanks.
