Brad Meltzer relies on three principles to guide his writing:
• History is cool.
• Ordinary people can do amazing things.
• The American presidency is a wondrous office.
Meltzer usually includes a couple of those elements in his material, even when the characters range from Mother Teresa to the Three Stooges.
He often weaves all three principles into his series of best-selling political thrillers, including the recently released “House of Secrets.”
And he does it in several genres, notching best-sellers in at least five different categories. (Which, by the way, doesn’t include his television work.)
While he obviously is proud of that output, to have two titles on best-seller lists at the same time “was surreal,” Meltzer said.
If You Go
• What: Fort Vancouver Regional Library Foundation’s Authors & Illustrators Dinner with best-selling author Brad Meltzer.
• When: 5 to 9:30 p.m. Monday.
• Where: Hilton Vancouver Washington, 301 W. Sixth St., Vancouver.
• Cost: $85 per person; tickets for a private one-hour reception are $50.
• Contact: 360-906-4700; foundation@fvrl.org; www.fvrlfoundation.org; www.facebook.com/FVRLFoundation
They included “the No. 1 book on the fiction list and the No. 1 comic book in the country, as absurd as it sounds.”
Meltzer will explain how he puts all those pieces together Monday as featured speaker at the Fort Vancouver Regional Library Foundation’s fundraising event. The Authors & Illustrators Dinner will be at the Hilton Vancouver Washington.
In a telephone interview last week, Meltzer went over some of the themes he might discuss Monday.
“I believe the only story you can tell authentically is your own,” he said. “My core belief is that ordinary people can change the world. That’s my own story. I was the first in my family to go to a four-year college. My dad told me, ‘If you get D’s in school, it’s better than anything I got.’ ”
Meltzer was able to find success, he said, because “English teachers and history teachers showed me what I loved: Here is this thing called history; here is this thing called writing. You love them and you’re good at them.”
The first movie his 11th-grade history teacher showed was about the John F. Kennedy assassination.
“Not a kookie one — it asked realistic questions that still need to be answered,” Meltzer said. “How could Jack Ruby sneak into a police station? Lee Harvey Oswald was in Russia, and nobody has any information on that?
“Regular people: A guy who owned a night club, and some schlub, and they changed the course of history.”
The JFK assassination also featured another frequent topic in his thrillers.
“I have a fascination with the presidency: A regular human person is considered the most powerful person on the planet,” he said, right up the final day in office. “And the next day, you have to stop at traffic lights with the rest of us.”
Meltzer also writes nonfiction. And he started writing children’s books because he wanted his kids to have real-life heroes. New releases in that series are “I am Jane Goodall” and “I am George Washington.”
Meltzer’s stories of history’s notables goes beyond their widely recognized achievements. The Wright Brothers didn’t just give America wings. They showed the world what it takes to succeed. Figuring that something was going to fail, they brought extra materials to every test flight.
But the Three Stooges? Really?
“Oh yes,” Meltzer wrote in a website Q&A. “My wife hates them. But what people don’t know is they were the very first ones to take on Adolf Hitler in film.”
Despite the range of his writing, Meltzer still sees some new areas to explore.
“I would still love to write young adult — I’m a huge ‘Harry Potter’ and ‘Hunger Games’ fan — if I had free time.”
