Jeremy D. Baker is the author of the new novel The Guilty Sleep. A former U.S. Army counterintelligence agent and combat veteran, he lives in Maryland.
Q: What inspired you to write The Guilty Sleep, and how did you create your character Dex?
A: I was inspired to write The Guilty Sleep because 1) I was an Afghanistan combat veteran, and the U.S. (in August 2021) had just pulled out of Afghanistan, leading to its precipitous collapse in the face of a resurgent Taliban; 2) I had battled PTSD after my time there, and struggled to find The Next Right Thing (a key theme of the book); 3) I'd read some really excellent crime thrillers recently and thought "I want to do that."
It made all the sense in the world to me to pull threads together on an Afghanistan combat vet trying to find his Next Right Thing in the face of PTSD, his collapsing family, set during the fall of Afghanistan, built around a (hopefully) kickass crime thriller.
Dex is in large part influenced by my own experiences, his battles with PTSD, his care for his family, even some of the things that happened to him in Afghanistan.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I had a general idea how it would end, and key signposts along the way, but navigating the journey there was a winding and, at times, treacherous one.
I'm neither an exacting plotter or a complete pantser. I keep a general outline (which often ends up majorly tweaked), but my characters have an awful habit of going off script and doing whatever the heck they want in any given moment.
In terms of the specific ending, I did end up completely rewriting the ending from my initial draft--I think this new version works much better.
Q: How was the novel’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: The title comes from a piece of dialogue between my main character, Dexter Grant, and his mentor, friend, and Army squad leader, Stuart Saenz. It refers to an interrogation technique where you keep a suspect in custody overnight. If they sleep comfortably, it's because they're guilty.
The novel deals with themes of guilt (including survivor's guilt), criminality, regret, and the battle to secure inner peace in the face of your own demons--in a way, "The Guilty Sleep" sprang right out of that soil.
Q: How did your own background in national security affect the creation of the novel?
A: As an Afghanistan veteran and former U.S. Army Counterintelligence Agent, the portions of the book that dealt with Dex's training and experience, and his combat tours, were directly influenced by my own experiences.
And since I left the Army in 2005, I've been working across the national security space: human trafficking, counternarcotics, arms smuggling, transnational organized crime, and so forth.
So I have a good amount of knowledge, say, about how a money laundering organization might wash hard currency through a casino, which is a key plot element of The Guilty Sleep.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I've got way too many irons in the fire, but somehow the iron store just keeps shipping more my way. I'm working on a sequel to The Guilty Sleep, as well as a separate crime/spy thriller.
But I also love genre fiction! I have an outline and a few chapters written on a military action thriller that's like Predator meets Raiders of the Lost Ark, and a depression-era bank robbers plus a badlands town of vampires thing happening as well.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I primarily wrote The Guilty Sleep by tearing open my chest, ripping my still-beating heart out from behind my sternum, and smashing it into the keyboard over and over again, hoping for the best.
I've been writing for over 20 years, and although I'm constantly beset by the author's standard-issue crippling self-doubt, I do think this is the best thing I've ever written. I think anyone who likes a ripping crime thriller with a real soul to it will like The Guilty Sleep.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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