Michael Palmer Transcript

February 9, 2008

Announcer: You’ve been listening to Sound Authors, where authors sound off. If you’d like more information about Sound Authors and Dr. Kent’s guests, visit soundauthors.com. Now back to Dr. Kent and friends.

Dr. Kent Gustavson: Welcome back to Sound Authors. It’s February 8th, and this time of winter, we tend to really enjoy those afternoon or evening or weekend times when we can curl up with a book. The next book is called The First Patient. It’s written by Michael Palmer, an award-winning author and New York Times bestseller, and it’s a fantastic, gripping novel. Welcome to the show.

Michael Palmer: Hey, it’s nice to be here, Dr. Kent.

Kent: Tell me a little bit about… you’ve written a whole bunch of books. Give me a little history.

Michael: Well, this is my 13th or 14th book, depending on what you count. They’ve all been on the New York Times list, which is wonderful. I am a physician. I have boards in internal medicine and ER, and I’ve practiced both of them for a long time. Now I work taking care of sick doctors for a program in Massachusetts, but most of my time is spent writing, and all of my books are medical suspense dealing with some kind of current issue, ethically, in medicine.

Kent: Those are my favorite kind. My father is a physician as well. I grew up in medicine and I love the medical thrillers.

“Bill Clinton says, ‘This is an exciting thriller full of surprises. Captures the intense atmosphere of the White House.’” How did you get that quote, and have you been to the White House?

Michael: [laughing] Everyone wants to know, “How did you do that?” The truth is, I did it through a lot of hard work. When I decided that I wanted to write a book about the President’s physician, a thriller, I began doing research - an incredible amount - because I really hadn’t been to the White House at that point since I was a child, and didn’t know very much about presidential politics. I started reading books about presidential morbidity and mortality, and learned a tremendous amount about the number of presidents we’ve had who have been quite ill while they were in office.

Then I began to just look on the Internet for any other information that would help me to write, and that was when I discovered a physician by the name of Connie Mariano, who nobody had heard of, but for 10 years, she was the most powerful physician in the world. She was the doctor in the White House for George H.W. Bush for a little while, and then for the Clintons for eight years, and then for George W. for part of a year before she retired as an admiral in the Navy.

So I emailed her and asked her to check out my website, and would she act as a consultant for me for this book? And next thing I knew, I was getting a phone call from Arizona, and we became quite good friends, and we still are.

So that was my connection to the Clintons, and also to the information that I was able to include in The First Patient, which will be in stores February 19th.

Kent: Well, that sounds really fun for you, as well as fascinating for all of the listeners. I can’t imagine how excited you were to make that connection.

How about your other books? Do you hear certain things and then the spark lights a fire… how does it start?

Michael: I think that’s a very good way to put it. I’m not one of those authors that have a hundred different book ideas swirling about in his head. I feel lucky when I latch onto one that I actually think is going to become a book, and I’m looking all the time in the newspapers and in my own clinical experience for issues that would be of interest to readers. I don’t just want to write a thriller, I want to write a thriller that’s kind of informative and fun to read.

For instance, my last book, which was called The Fifth Vial, I got the idea for the book from an article I read in the New York Times about international organ theft. I decided to invent a story around that, including the possibility that when you go in to have your blood drawn at a lab, that they draw an extra tube on you without telling you. The technicians think it’s for quality control, but in truth, that tube of blood is sent off and you are tissue-typed and put in a massive database against the time when someone who is maybe more important than you are needs an organ, and you’re the perfect match.

Kent: Wow.

Michael: That’s how my ideas generate.

Kent: That’s fascinating. Let’s talk a little bit about White House doctors. I’m very curious - for everything from Presidents that conceal their illness from the public, to, you know, we’ve all heard of the bloodletting of George Washington way back then… what did you find out digging through all of this history?

Michael: Well, the interesting thing is that the White House medical office, which is located in the White House itself, right across from the elevator that goes up to the First Family’s residence, is manned by the White House military office, and generally speaking, all of the doctors involved in taking care of the President and Vice President and their families are military doctors. They’re very highly qualified; they’re excellent doctors.

However, the president is allowed to bring his or her own physicians into the White House and essentially it’s a little bit like the doctor on a ship. That particular person has a tremendous amount of power and can decide, for instance, whether the president can travel or not travel.

There’s virtually nobody that has power over the physician, when the physician is working on behalf of the president. And of course there is room for conflict, because if it is a civilian doctor under the supposed control of the White House military office, there can be room for a lot of conflict in that area.

Kent: I’m certainly on the edge of my seat here with “The First Patient” comes out in about in about, what two weeks?

Michael: Yes.

Kent: What’s your schedule going to look like? Are you going to be going around the country or what…

Michael: I don’t tour very much. I’m going to go out for about ten days. Mostly I don’t tour because I’m already hard at work on my next book. It’s important for me to sell “The First Patient” for sure, but it’s even more important for me to get a book written and unfortunately it’s not easy. I have a little sign over my desk that reminds me. It says, “This is hard.”

Kent: Have you had any books that weren’t successful? What is this 13, 14 books now? Have you had any that were flops?

Michael: No, I’ve been pretty lucky, I mean, some of them obviously have sold more than others. What I did discover was that the whole book business has changed to the point where it’s expected that a best selling author will write at least a book a year.

Kent: My goodness.

Michael: And the publishers won’t put up with anything less than that. Some authors like James Patterson and Nora Roberts, for instance, seem like they are writing a book every three of four months. I don’t know how they do it. Obviously, Patterson has co-writers, because he puts their name on the cover of the book.

But Nora Roberts is writing under a couple of different names and there is always a book out on the New York Times list with her name on it, it seems, in one form or another. I haven’t really had a huge flop. I’ve had books that were only on the Times list for say one week, in hard cover, and I would like to do better than that.

Kent: Well, I think this one will stick up there for a while. It’s very timely right now. I notice you said that his or her, when you talked about the president. What do you think about this primary season?

Michael: Well, it’s pretty exciting. Obviously, I have reason to be a little biased towards the Clintons, because her husband has read my book and very kindly given me an endorsement for it. Politically, you know, I am kind of a liberal, but I can’t find a lot to choose between the two democratic candidates.

Kent: It’s a fascinating time, there’s no question.

Michael: It’s very exciting. I’m thrilled to be part of it and I don’t even know if I thought about the timing of the book when I decided to write it. Because I started writing it well over a year ago.

Kent: Who would have thought that it would have been this exciting, this whole race? It’s extraordinary. So, speaking of writing itself, you’re a physician. Why writing? How did you get into this?

Michael: Well, I just, believe it or not, I went to college with Robin Cook who wrote “Coma.” And decided to try writing just because he did it. We trained in the same hospital in Massachusetts. I wrote a book called “The Sisterhood” about nurses and mercy killing, a secret society of nurses and the book make the New York Times list for eight weeks.

I was off to a running start essentially and I discovered that I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the power over my world when I started writing and was able to just do it.

There are a lot of kind of famous authors who were doctors that people may not even know about like, Author Conan Doyle, who wrote Sherlock Holmes. And Summerset Mougham and the Russian playwright, Anton Chekov, they were all physicians. There’s a good reason. Physicians care about people and that’s what writing is about and physicians have discipline. Anyone who has every tried to make it through organic chemistry knows that.

Kent: It’s true. Yes. And they also have to go through that brutality of the cadaver and all of that.

Michael: Oh, yea, the amount of material that we have to learn to make it through med school is quite enormous. So those are two reasons: we care about people and we have a lot of discipline and if we have a love of words, which a number of doctors do, then that’s a set up for becoming an author. And there’s the American Medical Literary Association, there’s a lot of…

I give a course every year with another physician named Tess Garretson [sp] for doctors who want to be writers. Several hundred doctors attend our course every year. There’s a great interest in writing.

Kent: And there’s always it’s the grass is greener on the other side, too. There’s a little bit of that.

Michael: Well, there’s a lot of pressure from managed care right now, in terms of the amount of work that physicians are being forced to do, to just keep up. So there definitely is they look at a successful writer like Tess or like myself and they think, God I’d like to do that.

Kent: Exactly. Well, this has been a real pleasure. I’ve been speaking with Michael Palmer. His new book is coming out on Feb. 19. We can pre-order “The First Patient” at Barnes and Noble online, Amazon, Borders, anywhere you can find it. And this has been a great pleasure and I can’t wait to read the book.