When You Write About A Spy...

...USA Today finds your opinion far more important than usual:

Burn Notice is fueled by Westen's frustrated efforts to come in from the cold — or in this case, the Miami heat. Blacklisted, he uses his spy skills inRobin Hood style, helping average Joes oppressed by evildoers ranging from drug dealers to white-collar thieves. Think A-Team meets MacGyver, mixed with a little I Spy and Rockford Files. Westen's crime-fighting partners are Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar), the centerfold-sexy weapons expert more comfortable shouldering rocket launchers than designer handbags, and rumpled wingman Sam Axe (Bruce Campbell), a sarcastic former Navy SEAL and government operative as interested in babes and beer as bringing down bad guys. For more comic relief, there's Sharon Gless as Madeline, the boozy, chain-smoking Mom who can pierce her son's James Bond veneer by guilt-tripping him into fixing household appliances.

Burn Notice's burgeoning audience — spring's season finale drew a record 7.6 million viewers — has been a pleasant surprise for the cast, crew and network. How does Burn Notice ignite such interest? "It looks pretty, the writing's strong, the heroes have frailty, and there's a humanistic quality about people overcoming obstacles to make the world a little better," says Tod Goldberg, who has written three companion Burn Notice novels.

You can read the rest of the article here. And if that's not enough, Lev Raphael recently interviewd me about all things Burn Notice, too:

In The Fix you call Miami a city that was always home to ruffians and rogues, and is now overwhelmed by ostentatious wealth and envy. Does it share those qualities with Los Angeles? And Michael Westen seems completely removed from envy, but is he a rogue or a ruffian in your view?

I think Michael Westen is an anti-hero, which is part rogue and ruffian and, in his case, a guy who goes and fixes his mother’s sink. He’s done bad things. He’s killed people. And yet we feel empathy for him because there is someone worse than him, someone without conscience who has burned him. Plus he’s got an ex-girlfriend he still sleeps with, a dumb brother, dad issues . . . he’s a guy who has a job that has made him into something unusual, but he’s still just a guy with problems, which is why I think people are drawn to the character. 

I think most places are overwhelmed by envy—or at least the people who live in those places are. Los Angeles is a strange place in that you meet an accountant or a rabbi and they both want to get into the entertainment industry . . . or at least want to be famous. I’ve written about this before, in other books and stories, but I find that LA is unique in the sense that it’s the only place in the world where people who are file clerks at a studio say they work in the entertainment industry. 

 You can read Lev Raphael's interview with me here.

Comments

[Bill Peschel]

Congratulations on the notices. Lev's a dam fine writer as well, with a number of mysteries about a professor set at a Michigan university not unlike the one he worked at. Then there's "The German Money," a mystery dealing with the aftermath of the Holocaust, and his short story collection "Secret Anniversaries of the Heart" that was excellent.

[Brenna]

You're everywhere! FREAKY... :)

[Danny Barer]

I saw the USA Today article in a copy of the paper lying around the Stone's Throw Cafe in Walla Walla -- which was interesting considering I'd read THE END GAME on the flight up. And there's a Milton-Freewater reference in the book. Synergy.