Writing

Fresh off the release of his stellar THE SHERLOCK SOCIETY, James Ponti is back with the highly anticipated next thriller in the CITY SPIES series: LONDON CALLING. As always, the book is filled with action, adventure, humor, and heart. James was kind enough to speak with From the Mixed Up Files of Middle Grade Authors about his new novel, his approach to writing distinct characters, and a favorite book (with an ironic twist!).

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

London Calling takes a storyline that’s been building in the background of the first five books – with Mother and Clementine and Cairo and Annie – and brings it to the forefront. What was it like to tackle that storyline head-on?

There’s a couple things going into play with that. I know there are going to be at least eight books in the series, and there might be more. I thought – I have these ongoing stories, and I thought about readers – maybe some who’ve been with me the whole time, and they’re aging into different books. Perhaps I need to give them some resolution. But I don’t want to make the series feel like it’s over either. So what was interesting was trying to figure out how to wrap up some things and answer some big questions and at the same time create some new questions. So we have kind of a fresh start in the next book.

Everywhere I went where people were into the books, they would always ask me – is Clementine good or bad? And I told them, you know…I haven’t really fully decided – because what I didn’t want was for it to be an obvious one way or the other kind of thing. But I thought they deserved to have an answer to that question.

So in the last year, when I went out for either MISSSION MANHATTAN or if I was out for THE SHERLOCK SOCIETY, when kids would ask that I’d say, you’re going to find out in February!

I was drawn into the book from the get-go. The first chapter has such a great action sequence with Annie her best friend, but you also did such an incredible job revealing her character. How do you make sure you’re doing both of those things?

That was for me a really big challenge. I knew I wanted the book to start with [Annie] because we haven’t met her, and we don’t know what we think about her – although we have no reason to think she’s bad. Unlike Clementine, she’s never done anything to make you question her goodness or badness or which side she’s on – she’s just a character we don’t know about. And I wanted to get to know her, but also – I like to start the books with a big…I want them to suck you in. Hopefully!

One time I went on Goodreads, which is a mistake [laughs]. And this kid wrote – and I thank this kid a lot – because this kid wrote about the first book: I really like this book, but boy did it take forever to get started. And that gnawed at me for years. So the next book starts with like, hijackers landing on the ship about to take it hostage. I wrote that and I’m like, is that soon enough for you? Like talking to this kid out loud at my computer [laughs]. So you know, I like the book to really start with like something that’s going to grab you, hopefully.

The challenge is: how do we have that and not have it be empty action? How do we get to know this character during the action? …[T]he only way I’m going to get to know her character is if she has a friend to talk to. That became key.

…[T]hose [story] necessities led to me try to think: what’s her personality like? What kind of relationship does she have with her mother? And then – where I can break up the action with dialogue or with her thinking of an internal monologue to try to show her personality?

This is Book Six, and all the main characters have established traits about each of them, but you’re still revealing new things. How do you find that balance?

The first thing about the characters is – I started with five of them, and now there’s six – and what I did is: I took my five biggest problems as a middle schooler, and I gave each kid one of those problems. So that in a way, they would be five variations of me in middle school. And why I wanted to do that was because I wanted to never favor one over the other. I never wanted to be more vested or identify more with one of the other, and so I started with that. Then there’s other thing that is really backward… So I’m going to give you longer answer you want but hopefully it all makes sense. [laughs]

I went to see the DEAD POET’S SOCIETY with my mom back when that movie came out. I don’t know you’re familiar with it, but halfway through the movie, those kids – even though a lot of them now become actors we recognize – were all unknowns. All the kids have basically the same haircut, and they all wore matching uniforms. And halfway through the movie, my mom turned to me and she says: I can’t tell them apart. I don’t know who’s who. And that’s stuck with me forever as a writer thinking – how frustrating for a reader. To get confused with characters.

And I knew – here, I’m going throw five kids at you. And how am I going to make it work so you’re going to be able to keep track of them well? And that’s why I came with the idea, if I named them after the cities from – that gives you a little more tangible hold. It’s not Tom and Bob and Larry. It’s Paris. Oh, he’s the one for France – so I know his backstory instantly every time I see Paris, if I remember [he’s] the one that came from France.

So I made a list of 150 cities that I thought would be good character names. And I just scanned that list, and I said, I want one from each continent. So I had the names of the characters first.

You also have the profiles in the back of the book, so if you’re reading you can always flip back-and-forth. I think that is fantastic. How did those come about?

I’m not smart enough to come up with that. [laughs]. Actually, I got a call from my editor for the first book who said – someone in the sales meeting asked, wouldn’t it be neat if we had [character profiles]? I said, that would be great. You could go back and you could check.

And it was great – we got the artist to do solo shots of them all so they felt a little more real. Because it wasn’t just the ones on the cover. It’s like they each have their own yearbook picture. So I had to spend a lot of time trying come up with those. That’s actually the hardest part of the book to me is writing the dust in the back. Then they wanted to run the same one [for the second book]. I said no, we have to change it.

It forces us to really flesh them out – and also, I want to change how we do it. So one is them by themselves. In one of them they write about each other.

One of my favorite sections of the book is where the villain, Le Fantôme, quotes from The Little Prince that, “all grown-ups were once children, but only a few of them remember it.” He then says that he reads that book every year. To close, do you have a book that you find yourself re-reading like Le Fantôme?

…I was the worst reader growing up. I was terrible at it and was a really slow reader. Very frustrated by it, which is why I first started in television writing. I never thought I could write a book because it was such a struggle for me to get through. Ironically, the one book that got through to me is FROM THE MIXED-UP FILES OF MRS. BASIL E. FRANKWEILER.

It is my North Star, and I love it. There’s a funny story about it – so it’s the book that for whatever reason I got hooked on.

I grew up in a beach town in Florida outside of Jacksonville. We’re talking 30,000 people in four communities side by side. And when my first book came out, I said – I want to send a copy to Elaine Konigsburg and say to her: thank you for writing your book because without your book I know I would not have written this book. And so I tried to track down where she lived, and it turned out my whole life, she lived in my hometown. I had no idea.

I wish I knew that as a kid because I think [writing] would’ve seemed more attainable if I thought someone who lived here did it as opposed to – oh, you have to be in New York in Chicago or Los Angeles you have to have it you know XY&Z kind of things to check off the boxes…so the closest thing would be From the Mixed-Up Files!

James Ponti is the New York Times bestselling author of four middle grade book series: The Sherlock Society following a group of young detectives; City Spies, about an unlikely squad of five kids from around the world who form an elite MI6 Spy Team; the Edgar Award–winning Framed! series, about a pair of tweens who solve mysteries in Washington, DC; and the Dead City trilogy, about a secret society that polices the undead living beneath Manhattan. His books have appeared on more than fifteen different state award lists, and he is the founder of a writers group known as the Renegades of Middle Grade. James is also an Emmy–nominated television writer and producer who has worked for many networks including Nickelodeon, Disney Channel, PBS, History, and Spike TV, as well as NBC Sports. He lives with his family in Orlando, Florida. Find out more at JamesPonti.com.

CITY SPIES: LONDON CALLING releases February 4 and is available at bookstores everywhere.

You can see more purchase options at: Simon & Schuster.