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Ronald Drabkin is the author of Beverly Hills Spy and peer-reviewed articles on Japanese espionage. His obsession with espionage history started when he was as a child in Los Angeles, where he vaguely understood that his father had been working for the US military in counterintelligence. Later he discovered that his grandfather had also been in "the business," and it drove a voyage of discovery into previously classified documents on three continents. His career prior to writing was at early stage startups in the US, where he was an early adopter of Google and Facebook advertising. He currently lives in Tokyo.
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Give me a thirty-second summary of Beverly Hills Spy.
The book is about a British World War I hero, a fighter pilot—who was one of the most famous World War I aviators, the first guy who flew an airplane off a ship in a battle—and how he turned into a Japanese spy in the golden age of Hollywood, helping the Japanese Navy with their upcoming attack on Pearl Harbor.
Your professional background isn't in writing or research. Did you always want to write a book, or… ?
I'm like your standard Silicon Valley tech nerd. I worked at Intel, started a couple of companies, some of them did OK. You haven't heard of any of them. I kind of dropped into historical research by coincidence about five or six years ago when my dad passed away.
The book was originally going to be about your father and your grandfather and their history with espionage.
Yeah. Usually, with someone who's looking into their family background, they don't end up writing about something completely different. But I found just such a really interesting story that hadn't seen the light of day.
Was it only five or six years ago that you began to learn what your dad and grandfather did for a living?
I kind of knew about it. My dad, especially when he was getting ...
Abbott Kahler, formerly writing as Karen Abbott, is the New York Times bestselling author of Sin in the Second City; American Rose; Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy; and The Ghosts of Eden Park, which was an Edgar Award finalist... (more)
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Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times of London and the bestselling author of A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books. Macintyre has also written ... (more)
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Beverly Hills Spy
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