I’ve been writing literary historical thrillers for over 40 years. My novel THE DAMASCUS COVER published when I was 26 was filmed forty years after its release and stars Sir John Hurt of ELEPHANT MAN and 1984, in his final picture.

It also stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers of THE TUDORS and BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM. I typically, as in my latest thriller, THE SYRIAN SUNSET, about the Syrian Civil War, move fictional characters through lesser-known periods of actual history. In this novel, as in others, all the events are true. I think a great novel educates as well as entertains as does the novel, alas not mine, A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW which about everyone I talk to has read or is reading.

I have difficulty coming up with ideas to start a new novel but once I do I’m at it 6-7 days a week, though for less hours on the weekends when I like to hike in Temescal Canyon especially when the cacti bloom in the spring on the Rivas Trail. I thank Authors’ Lounge for the opportunity to introduce myself here. I suppose I like to take risks. During the summer of my junior year at Berkeley, I met a professor there from Columbia University a guest lecturer.

I guess he liked my questions and invited me to go for a walk. After an hour he said, and I really only remember this the last line of our talk:

“What makes more sense, is 4 years of rioting in Berkeley or 3 years of rioting and one year in Jerusalem. I’m leaving in two weeks to teach there for the year at the Hebrew University. They owe me a favor for doing so.

(He was not particularly modest though I discovered later he was one of the great minds of his generation.) You will be that favor. I’ll get you in the junior year abroad program. You have until breakfast tomorrow to decide. After that, I withdraw the offer.” I am not particularly good at math, but that didn’t seem like a very hard problem. In my new historical novel, THE SYRIAN SUNSET, I note that in 2007, Nancy Pelosi had lunch in the Talisman Hotel courtyard in Damascus with President Bashar al-Assad and his British born wife, Asma.

Asma is a looker, spreads in VOGUE, think Princess Diana; in fact, she wanted to be the Princess Di of the Middle East.

Asma met the ophthalmologist Bashar in London and soon chose to marry him and forego her admission to Harvard Business School, in order to modernize Syria. Once there though it seems shocked, she sat silent, had kids, and watched Bashar crush the country. She did though host Nancy Pelosi and her entourage; politicians far and near regularly were charmed by the wiles of Bashar and Asma and their British lilts. President Bashar al-Assad has a kinship with Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

They were both second sons of far more talented older brothers, each preferred by their fathers. Both elder brothers were killed at an early age. A poet-soldier, Yonatan Netanyahu commanded the successful 1976 Operation Entebbe in Uganda that rescued the 248 passengers of the Air France Airbus hijacked on its way from Tel-Aviv to Paris. Yoni, as he was known, the first on the ground was the sole Israeli casualty. Early on a shy, squeamish Bashar who never served in the Syrian military had decamped to London. His older brother, Bassel–colonel, equestrian, politician–racing in 1994 to Damascus Airport in the fog, late for a flight to skiing in the Alps, and declining to buckle his seatbelt, plowed fatally into a barrier.

In fact, both second sons are insecure, bent on living up to papa’s preference for their elder siblings, and have left havoc in their wakes. In one of Asma’s Vogue interviews, Bashar confided to the interviewer that he had chosen ophthalmology because there was little blood in eye surgery. My challenge is to tell an exciting story with rich characters about some subject that carries moral weight. For example, THE SYRIAN SUNSET is about how the West failed to aid the Syrian people and allowed Putin to control the country and how that inaction emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine.

He felt after the West’s turning their back on the 500,000 Syrians murdered by the regime that the West was feckless. In that regard, Putin mostly turned out wrong. The challenge in this particular work and elsewhere is humanity and humor. The first is not hard and the latter a bit more so. I didn’t intend to make THE SYRIAN SUNSET funny, but in the tradition of CATCH-22, it evolved that way.

So unintentionally I have that balance between barbarity and humanity/humor. Two love stories in that one too, one of young love, and the other a longer more difficult love story that spans decades. So I don’t produce a lot of books and am a bit envious, on occasion, of very fine writers who can turn one out yearly. But I’m passionate about the ones I do create.

Website: https://howardkaplanbooks.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HowardKaplanauthor/Amazon link to

SYRIAN SUNSET https://www.amazon.com/Syrian-Sunset-Howard-Kaplan/dp/B0BN21JDZV/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1694713564&sr=1-1