The following interview was conducted with Michael Gruber in anticipation of the release of his new novel The Forgery of Venus. I have already published my thoughts on the book, but suffice it to say, I thoroughly enjoyed this literary thriller. You can read the full review here. I'd like to thank Michael for taking the time to answer a few questions from an ardent fan.

TKC) You had quite a body of published work prior to Tropic of Night. What did it feel like to finally see your name on the cover?

MG) It felt wonderful, of course.  Ghostwriting is a sad business at best, and even though I made a lot of money and got a lot of good writing experience with the Butch Karp and Marlene series, it was nothing compared to writing under my own name.

TKC) Has a review or profile of any of your works ever shaped or changed your perspective of that work?

MG) In fact, I don't read reviews at all.  I used to read stuff written about my work compulsively and then I realized that the pleasure I got from a good review didn't begin to balance the misery of a bad one, so I stopped.  Reviews in US papers (literary journals aside) are not in any case real reviews.  They're book reports, with opinions, and are thus not of much value to authors.  I already know the plot.

TKC) The Jimmy Paz thrillers are heavily influenced by various exotic strains of faith and religion. Have you always had a fascination with world cultures and religious tenets?

MG) Yes.  My main interest in that series was exploring the underlying nature of reality.  Other cultures have different takes on this, and it's always struck me that our own strict materialist view was seriously limited.  I wanted to throw a wrench into the mix, to make the reader question his ontological stance, without going into all the way into magical realism.  I suppose you could call these books realistic
magicalism.

TKC) What can you tell us about your upcoming novel The Forgery of Venus? It sounds like it continues your work in the literary thriller genre you so successfully explored in the The Book of Air and Shadows.

MG) Forgery of Venus is about painting and the forgery of painting. Suppose that there was at the present time an artist, eking out a living as a commercial hack,  who could paint like Velázquez, and wanted to paint like Velázquez, with the bravura technique and psychological penetration for which the Spanish artist is justly famous.  But although the art world loves Velázquez paintings, any effort to imitate his work by our guy, however, skilled, would likely be regarded as mere pastiche.

Art has moved on.  Or has it?   What if this artist produced a forgery of a nude woman, a companion piece to the Rokeby Venus, so skilled that it was hailed as one of the greatest masterpieces of Velázquez, and what if he did it while taking a powerful psychotropic drug, that allowed him to hallucinate that he was living the life of Velázquez?   Maybe he was living the life of Velázquez, maybe the Mazotecs were on to something, with their ideas about the permeability of time and space.

And what's the status of a painting that has all the aesthetic power of an old master but was in fact painted last week?   If we're told it's a fake, does that power vanish?  And what if it can't be told from a fake by any curatorial or technical means?   Art forgery is not a simple thing, because what we experience in the eye and in the heart when we look at a painting in a sense transcends its authenticity. Besides which, if you start creating, in effect, with the mind and hand of another person, from a different age, can you really maintain your modern self intact? What would it be like to have the work of you hands hailed as an old master when, if you had presented it as your own work, would have been despised?   Wouldn't that make you even crazier?

TKC) Aside from the standard "be persistent and keep writing", what advice would you give an aspiring author trying to get published in the suspense/thriller genre?

MG) Steal.  Pick a novel you love and really analyze what makes it work. Try to reproduce it with your own plot and characters.  Personal style is the hardest thing to develop and that's what attracts attention.  It's okay to borrow someone else's style until you develop your own.  Also, find some aspect of life and bone up on it and build your novel around it.   All mystery and thriller plots are essentially the same, so there's another way to distinguish your work from the pack.

TKC) The Forgery of Venus is set in the world of fine art and the people that covet it.  In your view, has technology diminished the popularity of and respect given to the painters of today?

MG) There are a lot more distractions today, primarily films and TV, and these tend to carry the visual culture in the way painting once had to do on its own.  Meanwhile, more people go to museums every year than go to NFL games, and the art market continues to boom.  Painting's still important, even if not as central to the way we see the world.

TKC) Chaz Wilmot, your main character, struggles to find his own creative identity.  He survives by essentially copying or deriving from the works of others.  Is someone like this really an artist?

MG) All artists derive material from the past and borrow from other cultures.  Picasso, in fact, once said, "Talent borrows, genius steals." The point of Forgery of Venus is that we place such a high value on originality in art that we cut ourselves off from the past.  But mere originality is hollow, and leads to the absurd belief that anything done by someone proclaiming himself an artist is art.

Again, thank you to Michael Gruber for taking the time to speak with us.