BIO
Brent Ghelfi is the author of Volk's Game—nominated by the International Thriller Writers for Best First Novel of 2007 and by Mystery News and Deadly Pleasures magazines for a Barry Award for Best Thriller—and the critically acclaimed Shadow Of The Wolf. His novels have been translated into seven languages and optioned for film. He is currently working on the fourth novel in the Volk series.
Q&A WITH BRENT
A: I was in a fourth floor room at Moscow's National Hotel, looking down on Red Square between the Kremlin walls and the History Museum, when I saw a man wearing a black overcoat striding toward Lenin's tomb. This was on a misty morning near four A.M., and floodlights cast an atmospheric glow over the Square, so he stood out, walking fast, with a barely perceptible limp. Then he cut through the barricades and past the soldiers guarding Lenin's Tomb without showing any identification. He disappeared so suddenly he seemed to have been swallowed whole by the red-bricked walls. I wondered who he was to be able to transition so effortlessly between Russia's civilian population and its military elite, like a phantom haunting both worlds. That man became Alexei Volkovoy.
A: Russia first hit my radar screen in high school, in the late-seventies, when I read War and Peace. I started reading the other great Russian writers including Solzhenitsyn's classic One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich—The name Volkovoy comes from a character in that book. I visited Russia in the mid-eighties while still a student, and my overwhelming impression of the country then was the color gray. In the mid-nineties, I went back to Russia on business and my impressions of the country and its people were altered substantially. It reminded me of a strange combination of America's Wild West and the Industrial Revolution rolled into one. In 2002, I was back in Russia traveling for pleasure, and it was then that I saw Da Vinci's Benois Madonna at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and had the idea for Volk's Game.
A: Valya's appearance in an early scene in which she comes to Volk's aid bearing a pump-shotgun, and especially a line from that scene ("her white hair sprays backlight like a halo") set her character firmly in my mind as Volk's guardian angel. From then on I knew who she was, although the details of her background were, and to some extent still remain, something of a mystery to me. She's self-assured, intellectually curious, bold, and immature in some ways. She is also, to use Volk's word, the one that sums her up the best, I think, "ethereal" in the sense of having an otherworldly air about her.
A: Whenever I pick up a new book I look for a fresh perspective, a slightly different way of seeing the world. Volk's Game offers an aggressive, gun-in-your-face immediacy that mixes the wild unpredictability of the new Russia with a volatile cast of characters—including Volk, who belongs in a category all his own. I hope this novel surprises and thrills everyone who reads it.
