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VOL.19, NO.9
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More than 125,000 readers throughout Greater Baltimore
From war coverage to thrillers
SEPTEMBER 2022
I N S I D E …
PHOTO COURTESY OF DAN FESPERMAN
By Robert Friedman Baltimore-area spy novelist, Dan Fesperman, worked for 21 years at the Baltimore Sun as a reporter. During those years, he mostly covered Europe and the Middle East, traveling to 30 countries and covering three wars. He retired in 2005, after “I did all I wanted to do” in journalism, he told the Beacon, and turned his full-time attention to writing novels of intrigue and suspense. And not just any novels. Fesperman’s 2018 book, Safe Houses, is “the best suspense/spy novel I’ve read since (John) Le Carré,” said Stephen King, who knows suspense thrillers when he reads, and writes, them. No doubt Fesperman’s years in journalism gave him many experiences with which to illuminate his novels. He reported on the Persian Gulf War, including Operation Desert Storm; the Bosnian and Serbian War, “maybe a dozen trips, some to besieged Sarajevo,” and the Afghanistan conflict in 2001. “What you learn mostly in covering war,” he said, “is the way human beings act when placed under the stresses and dangers of war — an experience that tends to bring out either the best or the worst in people.” He added: “It’s all wasteful and often pointless, and it’s usually the people who have the least to do with the war — women, children, front-line cannon fodder — who suffer the most.” But his works do more than incorporate elements of real life. Fesperman said journalism “allows the reporter to tell the truth with a small ‘t,’ [while] novel-writing offers the writer the opportunity to get to the truth with a capital ‘T.’” “In journalistic reporting, you can’t al-
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L E I S U R E & T R AV E L
Yoga with goats? That, plus hiking, biking and dining in northern Colorado; plus, visiting country inns in Vermont, and fun factory tours page 15
Dan Fesperman, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who covered the Cold War among other wars, recently published his lucky 13th novel, Winter Work. The thriller tells a tale of espionage at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. “I try to write the kind of book I would like to read,” he told the Beacon.
ways give your impression, even if you have a pretty good idea of what is going on,” Fesperman said. “In fiction writing, I can at least make a stab at telling a few larger truths.”
New book just published Fesperman’s latest spy novel, Winter Work, is a “well-paced thriller,” according to The New York Times. Of the same book, Kirkus Reviews said “Fesperman builds his story around the
inner lives of his characters, an approach that transforms typical espionage tropes into universal human drama.” The novel is based on experiences Fesperman had in the early 1990s, just after the Berlin Wall came down, when he lived and worked in the German capital. He had an inkling then of what everyone knows now — this was a crucial time in 20th century world history.
ARTS & STYLE
A Vietnamese American playwright debuts her new play at the Everyman Theatre page 19
See FESPERMAN, page 20
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