Publisher Pens a 'Notable' Thriller

It's not unusual these days for a thriller to include an acknowledgments page, where the author thanks various friends and sources. But the page at the back of first-novelist Juris Jurjevics' The Trudeau Vector (Viking), a September Book Sense Notable, has a most out-of-the-ordinary first sentence: "My thanks to my daughter, Rosa Audrey Colwin Jurjevics, without whom this book would not have been necessary."

Asked to explain that line, Jurjevics replied, with a laugh: "Mostly it was the insistence of my daughter's [school] bursar, I think, that brought me to write the book. The bursar hit me with a bill; the stock market tanked and knocked out about two years of tuition, which I had to make up ... so I thought, What will I do now?"

The answer is The Trudeau Vector, a gripping tale of infectious disease and a marooned Russian submarine set largely at an internationally staffed research station in the Canadian Arctic.

The whole of Jurjevics' inventive book -- which touches on such matters as global warming, nuclear proliferation, and biological warfare -- surely stands apart from the run-of-the-mill. The same can be said of its 62-year-old author, who described himself, in a phone call from New York, as "the oldest first-novelist in captivity."

Jurjevics has been gathering research and taking notes for The Trudeau Vector for the past 20 years -- all of which time he has served as publisher of Soho Press, a firm he co-founded in 1986, after 18 years in publishing, that has made its mark specializing in cutting-edge mystery-suspense fiction.

When the house began, Jurjevics recalled, "I made up a list of all the biases in the industry: the books you weren't supposed to do. I figured nobody [else] would go there, so we proceeded to publish them, and checked each off the list as we went: the African-set novels, and so on down the line.... We took what we called 'offshore mysteries': mysteries with foreign characters, no Americans.... We had a lot of success with unagented authors. And with the agents, I made a plea to them not to show me the most expensive things, but [instead] the manuscripts they couldn't bring themselves to turn back [to their authors]. And some really tough agents pulled out these threadbare manuscripts that had been circulating for four years, that they just wouldn't quit on; and, of course, they were wonderful! So we had a good time, publishing those.... It really worked. The material was there, the writers were panting, and there just weren't enough outlets for the more serious writers."

Finally, some three years ago, Jurjevics began working in earnest on his own book. The Trudeau Vector, he said, draws on his lifelong fascinations with themes and issues that play into his own unique background: "It has a bunch of elements or areas I've always been interested in."

Born in Latvia, Jurjevics came to America with his family at age seven and was raised in New York, where he quickly learned English. "I've always been interested in Canada; I've always been interested in the Inuit.... Issues that the Inuit face are not that different from what the Latvians face: You have a huge neighbor, whether it's Canada or Russia or the U.S., which very much affects everyone's lives in the most intimate ways.

"And then I was always fascinated in underwater things. My generation really grew up on [Jacques] Cousteau and that whole idea of being able to 'breathe' underwater. I was very aware of the developments in the '60s of submersibles and remote-observation vehicles. There was lots going on under the seas, and nobody seemed to notice.... There were always mysteries, like: What the heck was going on in the fjords? ... And then I heard stories from the emigre communities of things going on in Kamchatka and in the Arctic. This is one of the advantages of coming from a small country: You get to talk to alcoholic Russians who work for the NSA [National Security Agency] and Estonians who were submarine captains for the Russians. And so the information sort of dribbles out, but it's nowhere officially recorded."

Jurjevics supplemented such informally gathered information with more traditional research and interviews. "I talked to a lot of people. I actually set foot in the Arctic -- about one foot in the Arctic, anyway; I went up to the line. Over the years, I just read and read, and went to really obscure sources. I think I've consumed several hundred books on the Arctic. And the Soviet stuff mostly I got through interviews."

The would-be author had to keep updating his research: "Everything kept changing. The Soviet Union went under, the Arctic started melting; it wouldn't stand still. And, of course, the medical developments [having to do with infectious-diseases] were very rapid, and just accelerated in the last few years."

At last, he completed The Trudeau Vector -- a work author Neil Gordon has described in advance-praise as "a singular novel ... thrilling and believable, erudite and absorbing -- a wholly captivating universe created by a writer of huge talent."

"I'm drawn to anomalies," Jurjevics reflected, "scientific and historical ... I like the historical cracks that the history books don't cover and the press doesn't pay much attention to ... things that just zip by and that people don't notice, usually because there's a bigger story in the way."

Juris Jurjevics is scheduled for a tour of nearly a dozen bookstores and events throughout September, from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco.

Is this newly hatched first-novelist by any chance already at work on another book?

"About six of them, actually," a happy-sounding Jurjevics said. "In fact, I thought of a seventh, today!" --Tom Nolan