The following is an online extra accompanying the interview with David Baldacci in our September 2026 issue.
Bestselling author and Richmond native David Baldacci (Photo by Zaid Hamid)
“Come into my cell. Make yourself at home. Take the chair; I’ll sit on the cot. No? You prefer to stand by the window? I understand. You like my little view. Have you noticed that the narrower the view the more you can see? For the first time I understand how old ladies can sit on their front porches for years.”
This is the first paragraph from novelist Walker Percy’s 1977 “Lancelot,” his most streamlined narrative. The enormously successful mystery thriller writer David Baldacci absorbed the words as a lesson and became a master at igniting a rattling good story. He recalls how much Percy’s words meant to him while he was still a practicing lawyer in Washington, D.C., before he transitioned into a full-time author.
“I wrote short stories for about 15 years; I was a fan of Raymond Carver and his pieces sculpted of words,” Baldacci says. “I cut my teeth with those stories. I still remember the opening scene of Walker Percy’s ‘Lancelot.’ Those books spoke to me. They were rooted in place. Look at Faulkner, people think of him as writing these dense novels, but he also wrote some great short stories, he even wrote a mystery, ‘Intruder in the Dust.’ I never had an ambition to be a mystery or thriller writer, but I enjoyed reading them.”
Learning From the Greats
Baldacci grew up on Austin Avenue in Henrico County near Richmond Raceway. He describes himself during those early days as, “The little boy who wouldn’t shut up. … I was the kid designated as the one who’d make up the adventures during the summer, the battles we’d fight, the journeys we’d take.”
When he was 8 years old, his mother gifted him a blank notebook that set him on a trajectory neither of them anticipated. More than 50 books and film and television adaptations later, he’s still spinning tales. Although he’s also aware of time — and legacy.
“Look, I’m into my 60s,” he says with frankness. “I have limited opportunities, and I want every book I write in the future to have meaning for me, and I hope meaning for other people.”
An author learns with each book while hoping they are closer to getting the hang of it. He may please a reader, but there’s more to the process than that. During his formative years, Baldacci acquired a sense of how the engine of a narrative should work from some of the best.
He read the British pantheon, from Agatha Christie to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and from John le Carré to Graham Greene.
“On the American side, I read a lot of crime noir,” he says. “Raymond Chandler, he took up the mantle. Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald, they took up the mantle and took it to an even higher level. Robert Ludlum, a huge mystery writer. Tom Clancy, the techno-thrillers of the ’70s and ’80s. Ludlum had the Jason Bourne series with the international flavor, and I enjoyed those.”
These books provided escapist excitement, but from their international settings of espionage, one could also learn some things about geopolitics.
“They can teach you a few things about that, some things about spycraft” he says, adding with a humorous sigh, “and how some people are trying to screw over other people.”
Curiosity as Passport
For any writer, but especially one as prolific as Baldacci, curiosity — about everything — is a prerequisite. Wonder is the ticket into the parallel world where these stories occur. Which is how he’s managed to make two books a year for the past 16. On occasion there may be a third; that’s the tale that won’t let go. These occur because, he explains, “Something happened in my life where I saw something of interest, and a story came out of it.”
He keeps notebooks for every project. He maintains a garden of ideas in boxes of files. But he doesn’t commit his fiction to a scaffolding of circumstances. He rather prefers an organic method of growing his stories.
“I have to meet my characters. I can’t outline a whole book before I know what the character is capable of,” he says. “I like to sit down and have the same journey and figure it out as I go along. Ideas come up as I get to know the characters. And you may have an idea earlier, but as you go along, a better one comes out of it, and if you have any level of imagination, ideas are going to flow from that.”
Some ideas come quickly. Others marinate. And picking titles can be a challenge, especially with publishers who need them to grab attention so that readers are enticed to purchase the novels. Popular fiction is entertainment, and as such, part of the business of show.
In 2024, Baldacci wrote about a Virginia lawyer during the 1960s in “A Calamity of Souls.” The element of autobiography in the story made the concept more of a challenge. The Richmond of his early youth maintained statutory racial segregation. But for him, the story needed telling. His process involved yet another blank book. This one was a Christmas present from his wife, Michelle.
“I went into my office and wrote the first 150 pages of that novel by hand,” he recalls, adding, “I think better in cursive. The buffer between the keys and the screen loses something, but in cursive it’s as smooth as it gets. So, the book took a long time. Didn’t know if I would finish it, or if I had the juice to finish it.”
In the meantime, he didn’t lay off his other books. This one arrived at his publisher unexpected.
“The publisher said, ‘We love this book.’ And then they said the words no writer wants to hear,” Baldacci relates with a chuckle: “‘We focus-grouped the title.’”
“A Calamity of Souls” confused them. They offered instead one approved by committee, “The Trial.” Baldacci lets out a huge laugh. “I think Kafka already beat me to that one. While they’re all on this Zoom, 14 people, and I went on Amazon, and there were 487 books with the title ‘The Trial.’”
He followed up with a search for “Calamity of Souls,” which produced no results. So “Calamity of Souls” it was.
“The book came out, and the publisher’s like, ‘What a book, and that great title we all came up with.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, OK, whatever. Whatever works for you,’” he says.
The Consultant
Baldacci knows his territory. Those operating in other components of the entertainment industry have caught onto the fact that his works are suited for adaptation. Early in his literary career, when he was moving out of the realm of short stories, he wanted to move into screenwriting. His response to the entreaties of Hollywood has evolved over time.
Castle Rock Entertainment and Warner Bros. bought the rights to Baldacci’s first published novel, “Absolute Power,” and Academy Award-winner William Goldman adapted the book into a screenplay. “The picture got greenlighted, Clint [Eastwood] signed on,” Baldacci explains. Eastwood both directed and starred in the motion picture, which also included the late Gene Hackman as a U.S. president amid a fatal peccadillo. “I wasn’t going to tell them how to do the film,” he says. “That’s changed.”
Baldacci is presently in discussions about projects at Netflix, Amazon, NBC, “one at AMC, one someplace else, and hopefully a few of them will make it through the gauntlet,” he shares.
His “6:20 Man” series is heading toward Netflix. Two other series could go into transformation. There’s the two-book Walter Nash collection, which dives into the life of Nash as it’s turned inside out after recruitment by the FBI to expose a criminal syndicate. Then there’s the six-book King and Maxwell series, with former Secret Service agents Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, both with pasts they want to redeem.
Baldacci is not the newcomer anymore.
He explains how, before signing any contracts, he asks the producers, “Do you have a writer or showrunner on board? Yes, I want to meet with them. And I interrogate them, basically. ‘How do you see this thing running? Which character are you focusing on? Which will be in it? Which aren’t? What’s the arc? How closely are you going to follow the book? How are you going to do this five seasons out?’ And if they come back with stuff I don’t like, I don’t sign the deal.”
Baldacci is an executive producer for these enterprises. Fulfilling that role, to him, means accepting questions about the characters, plot and evolutionary arcs. He reads the scripts and offers casting input, but he draws a significant line.
He relates, “Here’s my litmus test, and it’s a really smart one, and it’s saved me a lot of trouble over the years. I don’t want to have so much control over a book, film or TV project that, if it fails, they can blame and sue me. I have consulting rights, they have the final word, but if it all goes a-- up, they can’t come after me.” He laughs, but there is a sense of experience in these matters.
Man Versus Machine
Baldacci wants these efforts to be as good as possible, and if he can contribute and give support by assisting the adapters in their work, he will. Though his literary efforts have garnered a larger audience, he’s still the kid making up adventures for the others in the neighborhood.
Nowadays, however, there’s a bit of a bully in the neighborhood, and it goes by the initials of AI.
Baldacci is a main plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft that began three years ago. He’s been through discovery along with other recognizable authors John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult and Michael Connelly.
Their contention is that the AI companies Hoovered up every book written during the past 70 years, and academic papers, in part from a pirate Russian website.
“And that’s all been proven,” Baldacci says. “They admit it. Their sole defense is that AI is so transformative that copyright law shouldn’t apply.”
As wild as this claim sounds, one California federal court held that the Anthropic company feeding books into large language models is “fair use.” In that decision, however, the court also ruled that Anthropic’s acquisition of the material from the internet’s darker regions constituted copyright infringement and piracy. With this split decision about liability, Anthropic chose to make a $1.5 billion settlement with the authors. That came down to $3,000 per registered work for each writer in the suit.
For the case against Anthropic, Baldacci turned over his financial information, emails and all other communications. In addition, he sat for a nine-hour deposition that he describes went along the lines of the following conversation.
“Mr. Baldacci, you wrote a novel called ‘Strangers in Time.’”
“Yes.”
“Set in London in 1944.”
“Correct.”
“Has an orphan boy character named Charlie Matters.”
“That’s right.”
“Mr. Baldacci, have you read ‘Oliver Twist’?”
“Yes, I have.”
“There’s an orphan in that novel as well.”
“Yes, that’s Oliver.”
“So, did you copy Charles Dickens? If you copied Charles Dickens, why are you suing my client for stealing your books? Isn’t that hypocritical?”
Baldacci shakes his head.
“Nine hours of that. So, they’re playing rough tough, and I was a lawyer, and I know how the game is played. The bottom line is, we’re quickly being told by seven or eight billionaires that this is the way the world is going to be, and they’re telling us we don’t have a choice. You won’t have to think anymore because Elon Musk says money will rain down on you from the heavens because so much prosperity is going to be created by this.”
The next phase of the suit against OpenAI is going to the Southern District of New York. There, Baldacci believes the judges will see through what he feels is the fallacy of the “transformative” argument.
Baldacci sees AI as a monster its makers are unable to control. Unlike Frankenstein’s creature, who sought basic understanding and acceptance, in this case the creature possesses no empathy. “It doesn’t have any human qualities,” Baldacci emphasizes. “AI doesn’t care about us. It could kill all of us.”
The potential is that AI could drag humanity into the most dystopian of dystopian novels.
Today Is …
Baldacci cites that forewarnings of the potential dangers of AI have existed in literary works for decades. An example is Ray Bradbury’s haunting 1950 short story “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which takes place on Aug. 4, 2026. During the 1950s, the date seemed sufficiently distant.
The main character is a lone fully automated house continuing to serve the needs of its residents and their pets despite the fact that they have died in a nuclear blast. A humanoid voice announces the weather and birthdays and the need to pay bills, the computer runs animations on the walls of the children’s room, and meals are prepared but not eaten and the plates washed and put away.
Later in the evening, that same voice recites for the vanished woman of the house a poem by Sara Teasdale, from which Bradbury took the title. Teasdale wrote the lines in 1918, toward the end of the cataclysmic First World War. The poem depicts nature continuing whether humanity survives or not. It reads, “Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree. If mankind perished utterly. And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn. Would scarcely know that we were gone.”
A falling tree ignites a fire that the house tries putting out, but its safety measures cannot mount a saving defense. Somehow, one of the robotic voices survives to repeatedly announce, “Today is August 5, 2026. … Today is August 5, 2026.”
Baldacci cites another seminal Bradbury work carrying eerie resonance to our day, “Fahrenheit 451.”
“I tell people, ‘Did you know that Ray Bradbury came up with Facebook 70 years before Mark Zuckerberg did?’”
In “Fahrenheit 451,” reading and books are outlawed, and teams of firemen burn them and the places where the volumes are stored. Video screens on the walls entrance people so they don’t deal with real people. Illiteracy is rampant. “You can have followers, you can have this grand thing online,” Baldacci says.
The latest entry in his “6:20 Man” Travis Devine series is “All In,” publishing in November, with the serialized protagonist contending with billionaires and the ominous possibilities of AI.
“This is my take on what things are going to look like in the near future if things continue the way they are,” he says.
Future Plans
Baldacci is confronting what he sees as elements eroding the fabric of daily living: the decline of reading, critical thinking and non-inflammatory discussion about pressing matters.
He and Michelle, through enduring relationships with both Virginia Commonwealth University and the Library of Virginia, have established programs to mitigate these circumstances. They’ve given millions to literacy programs and scholastic endowments and founded the Baldacci Institute for Civil Discourse.
Baldacci understood long ago that an informed writer of fiction can use contemporary events as sources for their work. He’s also an actual person living in a fraught world, who through philanthropy seeks to make a difference by trying to guide the cataracts of misfortune along better-run courses. He wants people to read, think and have access to educational opportunities.
He’s able to do this because he’s written more than 50 books with characters riddled by frailties and flaws, and their struggles to succeed over them, or surrender, and the implications in that dynamic are what readers enjoy.
H.G. Wells, the author and polymath who gave us “The War of the Worlds” and “The Time Machine,” observed in a lesser-known title of 1920, the massive “The Outline of History,” “Human history is more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
The through line from Homer to Shakespeare to Dante runs straight into Baldacci’s fiction, which is popular for a reason. The drivers of power, money, greed and lust are not always enviable traits, but people enjoy the vicarious experience of the struggle among these qualities.
Baldacci reflects, “If you’re well read, and you think about these things, you can actually predict where things are going to go. When I write novels, if I task extraordinary actions for my characters, I have to provide extraordinary motivation.”
His characters often face their personal bedevilments while confronting situations with massive complications and worldwide implications.
Baldacci underscores how when Bradbury wrote “Fahrenheit 451” in 1953, the world had gone through the experience of nationalism and control, of book burnings and suppression of free thinking. It was also the time of McCarthyism, the Second Red Scare and unfounded allegations that destroyed people’s lives.
“The Cold War was starting, the defense buildup, serious money going into the development of weaponry and technology,” Baldacci says. “We traded millionaires for billionaires and billionaires for trillionaires. It’s the same through line today. This whole bulls--t about AI making everybody’s life better, they could give a crap about that. They just want to make their next trillion dollars and be even more powerful, and go colonize Mars, screw up another planet.”
His mission of combating AI, and continuing to think better in cursive for his next great thriller, “that’s really what drives me these days,” he says.
