1. How did you go from a career in architecture and real estate development to writing?
The short answer is: purely by accident.
When I came to Europe in the mid-80s, architects were going through exceptionally hard times. I tried it for a few months and quickly realized I'd have to do something else if I wanted to live here. I was in my early 20s and investment bankers were having a ball, and it seemed like a cool thing to do, so I did a quick MBA before joining a French investment bank that was headquartered in London.
The money was great, but the work wasn't. I did it for three years before deciding I had to get out before the bonuses got too big to turn down.
I eventually ended up trying to combine my architecture background with my newly acquired financial skills and working in real estate development - which, bizarrely, led to writing - on a beach in the Bahamas. A real estate developer friend of mine from Manhattan had asked me to be part of a project he was putting together there, along with two Wall Street bankers who he'd also invited there as backers. Over dinner one night, one of the bankers mentioned how he was investing in developing screenplays for Hollywood, using a couple of writers he knew there - more as a hobby than a serious investment. I jokingly told him of an idea of mine which I'd always thought would make a fun movie. He loved the idea and suggested we develop it together by hiring one of his writers.
We had several conference calls with a screenwriter in L.A., but when the first outline was faxed to me, it was very different to what I had in mind. I told them both I'd put my thoughts on paper, in the hope of making things clearer. When I faxed the pages through, my partner in New York called me and said the screenwriter wasn't going to write the screenplay anymore: I was. "You're a writer," he said. "Just sit down and write the damn thing. You can do it." Which I did. And that screenplay got me nominated for a Fulbright Fellowship in Screenwriting, which gave me the confidence to try writing another one: "The Last Templar." In 1996, helpful friends and fortuitous events soon led to my finding myself sitting in the office of one of the biggest publishers in New York who thought my story would make a bestselling novel. Things didn't quite work out at that time. However, an agent I'd signed up with a few years later read the screenplay and loved it, insisting I should still write it as a novel. She would call me up every few months, asking if I'd started. And in the autumn of 2002, I finished a long commitment to a screenwriting project and decided I was ready to do it. For myself. For the readership I had in mind. And tell the story I wanted to tell.
2. In The Last Templar several characters have strong feelings about organized religion. What are you trying to get across about religion?
I've always found it shocking that, in this day and age, a massively significant amount of people all over the planet can behave in the most amoral and savage way towards others, all because they hang on every word of religious documents that were written thousands of years ago, at a time when the world was a very, very different place.
It seems to me that the world is, sadly, reverting to a more primitive state where religion is being perverted and turned into a great divider of people, which, ironically, one could say was the original intent of the founders of these movements: to create a unifying force in order to overturn a pre-existing belief system that's been abused and turned into an oppressive force.
In "The Last Templar", I've tried to explore the history of one of the planet's big religions, in an effort to lay out the often overlooked origin of the Catholic Church and perhaps inspire a broader curiosity about other religions and how they came to be.
3. What attracted you to the Knights Templar?
I was introduced to the Templars by a friend who knew a lot about their history and thought I should use them as the basis of my next work. As I began researching them, I was fascinated by the wealth of material about them, and by the myths and legends they inspired. The Templars' missing treasure was one of the great hooks of history, and as I got deeper into my story, it became clear that this premise presented the opportunity to do much more than just write a conventional thriller: it allowed me to present some widely overlooked, but historically accurate and possibly unsettling information relating to the early days of the Church, and in particular, how the Bible was actually put together; and by opening that door, it allowed the characters in the story, and by extension, its readers, to explore their own faith - or lack of it - and, consequently, the effects - good or bad - of organized religion on the world today, which may not be a bad thing at a time when spirituality is being polarized across the planet.
4. Is there anything in the Templars' real history that corresponds to the object or 'treasure' desperately sought by the characters in your book?
What is widely accepted is this: that the Templars did spend many years cloistered in the huge quarters they were given, which stood on the remains of King Solomon's temple, when they were supposed to be escorting the pilgrims from the ports of the holy land to Jerusalem; and that their great wealth, their treasure, was never recovered.
5. Why do you think ancient secret societies are such a hot topic?
I think there's a general yearning for something more fulfilling spiritually, and part of that search is manifested through exploring the hidden secrets of our past.
6. It sounds like you've lived all over the world. Where are you from, and how has exposure to various locations influenced your writing?
I was born and grew up in Beirut, Lebanon until my early teens, when the civil war there erupted and my parents and I moved to Rye, New York, where I went to high school. By the time I graduated from Rye, the fighting in Beirut was calming down and although my brother and sister preferred to stay in the US, my parents needed to go back for my father's work and I chose to go back with them. I studied architecture at the American University of Beirut, living through six years of intermittent civil war which were amazingly intense, emotionally taxing, and, oddly, utterly riveting. The situation there deteriorated again very badly towards the end of 1983 after the Marines compound at the airport, and it was time leave again, this time for good. We spent a week huddled in the underground parking of our building before being evacuated from the beach on a Chinook.
Living in New York in the mid-70s was a phenomenally enriching time for me which continues to influence my writing. At school, I had some wonderful English lit and creative writing teachers who introduced to the work of Ayn Rand, Dashiell Hammett and SJ Perelman. New York City was very different from European cities I knew, it had an amazing energy and range, its own pace, its own sounds and smells. I try and spend as much time as I can there, and when I'm not there, have to make do with using it as a setting for my writing.
