https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CBD36FBD
Can you tell us a little about The Dead Chip
Syndicate?
One of the first times I flew into Manila, I remembered
thinking the airport we were landing at had a dark claim to fame – it was the
only airport in the world named after someone who’d been murdered on its
tarmac. In the 80s, during Ferdinand Marcos’s reign, Senator Ninoy Aquino had
been in exile, but he decided to return home because he sensed a revolution was
brewing. Marcos warned him not to return because he couldn’t guarantee Ninoy’s
safety. Ninoy ignored the warning and was assassinated on the tarmac once he
arrived. His death sparked the People’s Revolution, which toppled the Marcos
regime and ushered democracy into the Philippines. As my flight descended
towards that runway, the opening line of The Dead Chip Syndicate came to
me. The book would start with the main character landing in Manila, reflecting
on Ninoy Aquino’s death while getting news that several hitmen hired to kill
him had just been arrested in Macau. It seemed like a great jumping-off point
for a thriller, so I spent the next several years mapping out and writing the
rest of the story.
The synopsis is as follows: Offered the chance to run his
twin brother's A.I. company, Anthony Wilson ditches his failing screenwriting
career to start anew in Macau. The job turns highly lucrative when Anthony's
new client, Cash Cheang, a pompadour-topped and Johnny Cash-loving casino
operator, hands him a bag full of cold hard Yuan to implement a facial
recognition system in his casino. Hearing about Anthony's past life as a
screenwriter, Cash offers him another job - ghostwriting a biography about the
casino mogul's life rising from the mean streets of Macau to becoming one of
the city's most notorious and successful businessmen. However, as Anthony
learns more about Cash's life, he realizes the biography is filled with
dangerous secrets about the Chinese elite, secrets these powerful people would
rather see buried for good. “You always cheat the ones closest to you”, warns
an old Chinese proverb. Words that ring true as Anthony enters a playground
more surreal and depraved than decadent Hollywood. More deadly too as Anthony
soon discovers he's the dupe in a huge Chinese money-laundering scheme that
might be orchestrated by his treacherous twin.
Any plans to turn it into a series?
Yes, that’s on the horizon. I’m writing the sequel; Quid Pro Crypto is the working title. It’ll be the second in my Exotics series, which is not just set in the exotics, places such as the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Macau, and China, but also centered around exotics betting, i.e., high-risk/high-reward gambling, like trifectas, triple trios, multi-leg parlays, and accumulators. This type of betting can result in life-changing payoffs but can be extremely risky and hard to hit. The characters in my novels love to play these high-stakes games and murder is sometimes the result. Quid Pro Crypto also kicks off where Dead Chip ended, on the film set of Anthony’s movie, Cash is King, which is based on the book he wrote in Dead Chip. Very incestuous, I know, but it’s a milieu I know well and have a lot to say about. The first line of the novel is, “Nothing is more chaotic than a movie set devolving into a crime scene.” That’s at least the first line for now if I don’t come up with something better.
What motivated you to write the book?
It was either write this book or go into therapy. I didn’t
have enough money for therapy, so I took option number one. Sun Tzu has a great
quote, “In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity,” and I took it that
heart while writing this book. When I moved to Macau, a few years before that
fateful flight over Manila, I got involved in a highly chaotic situation. I
moved to Macau because I was offered the managing director position at a
software consulting company. However, once I arrived and started working, I
discovered the company was the most dysfunctional company I’d ever worked at. I
was soon replacing useless consultants and pulling my hair out at the sheer
insanity of the decision-making at the company. Many scenes in the book could
have been modeled off of the those trying experiences. It was bad enough moving
to a completely foreign company, but I was also working in a new industry, and
partnered with people who were incredibly difficult to deal with.
Before moving to Macau, I knew about the city’s reputation as
the biggest gambling hub in the world, but once I arrived, I also saw how incredibly
unique and crazy the place was. I gave a dedication to Macau in the book; So
extraordinary, wondrous, and bizarre was the place, “it was impossible not to
write a book about you,” I said. I also called it, “A third-world country
living a first-world life because it sat upon a never-ending pot of Chinese
gambling gold,” which is very true. It’s a wonderful place to set a thriller
because there is so much money sloshing about, so many odd characters doing
sketchy and even downright illegal things, and so many junket room operators
courting the rich and famous while also pushing the boundaries of legality.
It was the perfect place to set a unique thriller that buttressed
two cultures, Western and Chinese. Macau became a central character in the book
the way L.A. became a character in Raymond Chandler’s Sam Spade books, or the
way Florida provides a whacky locale for so many Florida mystery writers. While
Chandler’s L.A. centers around oil and water, my Macau is about gambling and
the greed that follows the billions of dollars flowing through Macau’s massive
casino resorts. These monolithic structures are some of the biggest buildings
in the world, massive monuments dedicated to the destruction of the Chinese
baccarat player’s wallet. A compulsion driven by what Cash describes as the
Chinese people’s gambling ironic conundrum, “How do you tell if you’re lucky if
you don’t gamble?”
A dead chip is a real thing; it’s a casino chip that only has
value in one specific casino high-roller room. Gamblers play with these chips
and ‘roll’ them over, i.e., gamble with them; when they win a hand, they get
their dead chip back along with a normal casino chip that can be deposited at the
casino cage, then wired to any bank in the world. It’s a great way to get money
out of China, to circumvent some of the financial barriers the Chinese
government has erected to slow the flow of money out of China. It sounds
complex, but when greed gets involved, complexity is simplified and this aspect
of the story is secondary to the motivations of Anthony Wilson, who has come to
Macau to try to make his fortune because, as his twin brother trenchantly warns
him, “The starving artist persona loses its appeal to the opposite sex once a
person turns forty.” Anthony quickly realizes that fortunes can be made, but
souls are often extracted in return, if not lives.
A few decades ago, there was a gangster living in Macau who
made a movie about his life. He supposedly tried to blow up Macau’s
undersecretary of security at the time. It didn’t work and he got arrested, but
witnesses refused to testify. This was during the final days of Portuguese
control, before the handover to China, and a panel of Portuguese judges went
behind closed doors, watched the gangster’s movie, which was called Casino
and can still be found on YouTube, and came back with a guilty verdict. They
said the film accurately portrayed the gangster’s life. As I have Anthony say
in the book, “It was the first and only time a fictional movie put someone away
for a real crime.” The gangster was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
When I read that story, I thought Macau was the perfect setting
for my book because it was such a strange, irreverent, and quirky place. I kept
my eyes and ears open for other interesting stories. Even though there’s a
great disinformation wall between China and the West, every now and then a fascinating
story or an interesting tidbit of criminality pops through. I tried to catch as
many of those stories as I could and then fit them into a tale about an ex-pat
working with a junket operator seduced into a deadly criminal enterprise that
he feared he might survive.
After living in Macau for a few years, I had a plot about an
expat moving to Asia and getting caught up in a money-laundering scheme that
tested his loyalty, his morals, and his ethics. Then COVID hit, and the last
piece of the plot fell into place. I came up with the idea of giving the doctor
who blames Cash for the death of her son (a problem gambler who got beaten to
dead by some loan sharks working out of Cash’s VIP room). She has the power of
life and death over Cash when he gets afflicted with COVID and is wheeled into
her hospital emergency room in China. Will she choose to murder Cash during the
height of COVID, a time when a murder would so easily go unnoticed, or would
the Hippocratic Oath she took win out? It was a great moral dilemma. I had read
about the life-saving value of ventilators – if you got one, your chances of
surviving the latter stages of COVID weren’t great, but your chances of surviving
without one were basically zero. I thought, why not give a character that moral
choice? In a way, ask the reader what they would do in such a similar
situation.
So, in the end, it’s a story about a writer who comes to
Macau and gets involved with a Macau junket operator who is trying to escape
his life because the authorities won’t leave him alone. The writer breaks
through his creative block, trusts himself to write a novel, and learns to be
less trusting of those he loves while more trusting of himself and his talent.
How did you decide on your book’s title and cover
design?
The Dead Chip Syndicate was the
first title I came up with. I like alliteration in titles, I like the words to
roll off the tongue, and titles should add an air of mystery that intrigues a
potential reader enough to have them reach for the book, I think. This title did
just that, it intrigued enough to make someone want to learn more about the
story. Another title I thought about was ‘What Happens in Macau, Never
Happened’ but, even though I liked it, I thought it was too cutesy for the book,
not malevolent enough for this thriller.
As for the cover design, first off, I want to say, I loved
the work the book cover designer, Alexios Saskalidis, did. I worked closely
with him, giving him ideas that captured the essence of Macau, if that’s
possible to do in one picture. For the cover, I thought a casino chip with the
outline of a dead body would capture the spirit of the novel and make the book really
stand out on a bookshelf. The color red worked in so many ways – it’s symbolically
the color of China, it’s a head-turning color, and the color of danger in
nature (you see a red-and-black striped snake in the bush, you best run). I
found the image of Macau that I wanted. The tallest building on the cover is
Grand Lisboa, the biggest casino in main Macau. I thought a symbol of the
casino business should be the most prominent building on the cover as that
would reflect the importance of the casino business to both Macau and the story.
I went back and forth with the quote as I liked “What happens in Macau never
happened” as it had a nice Goodfellas ring to it, but the Chinese
proverb, “You always cheat the ones closest to you”, worked better. It captures
the essence of the novel because the protagonist is stabbed in the back by his
twin brother.
What trends do you see in your genre and where do
you think the industry is heading?
Recently, there has been a flood of books set in Asia or focused
on Asian characters, to say nothing of the explosion of Asian stories at the
box office and on streaming channels. I think that’s great. Although I have
Western parents, I was born in Pakistan and spent the majority of my youth in Singapore,
so I have a soft spot for Asian places and Asian stories. When I first got
Netflix, in the early streaming days, I watched mostly Hong Kong, Korean, and
Japanese action and drama flicks. Now, it’s nice to see the rest of the world
embracing these interesting stories and exotic settings. These stories can be
quite sophisticated so it’s great to see. It’s also refreshing to read novels about
normally underrepresented people. Bloomberg said the 21st century
might be the Asian century so it’s time to focus on it more.
I think the book publishing industry is as healthy as it’s
ever been. However, writers might be in a precarious position going forward. I
work in the AI field and write a lot about generative AI, text-to-image AI,
text-to-video AI, and how AI is being used in digital marketing. It’s a
fascinating field. Yes, AI can replace writers in certain circumstances, i.e.,
writing stock reports or providing blurbs on sporting events, but I still think
humans will always be needed to write stories that readers connect with on
deeply emotional levels. If you want to move a human heart, you still need a
human writer. I still think it’ll be a long time before AI can write a novel
good enough to move that most fickle and mysterious thing in the universe, the
human heart.
Were their experiences in your personal life or
career that came in handy when writing this book?
In my book, Anthony runs an AI/software consulting company working
with the Macau casinos, which is a similar job to the one I had. It’s a
fascinating world and, although I don’t betray any client confidences, I detail
some things that go on behind the scenes at a casino that few people know
about. I think I skillfully captured that world. The Booklife reviewer seemed
to agree, saying, “Pearson’s knowledge of the milieu and the over-the-top
characters who run it gives the material a bustling verisimilitude.”
I also spent about 15 years working in Hollywood, optioning
and adapting books, working on productions, and attending the film festivals
and film markets, which was a great experience for this book because the main
character lives a similar life and shares a lot of similar frustrations I
experienced. Anthony becomes a proxy for me and there is a lot of reflection
about the situations in Macau, Hong Kong, China, the Philippines, and even the
US that echo my own beliefs. The last five years have been a pretty tumultuous
time in this region, starting with the Hong Kong protests, Duterte’s
extra-judicial killings in the Philippines, and the COVID outbreak in China.
And it’s not getting any better with the political turmoil now simmering between
China, Taiwan, and the US. Even as a Westerner, one sees – and can’t help but
be affected – by it and I explored it in my writing.
The secondary character, Cash Cheang, asks Anthony if he’ll
ghostwrite his biography. Anthony quips the irreverent line, “Everyone has a
book in them, but for most people that’s where it should stay,” but Cash is one
step ahead of him, tricking him into taking the job because he fixes a bet.
Cash plays a similar trick on Anthony as Bob Hope plays on several couples at a
racetrack in the movie The Lemondrop Kid. I think my knowledge of movies
and gambling helped add some clever twists and turns to the novel, which should
keep the readers on their toes.
How would you describe your writing style? Which
writers or books are you similar to?
A Booklife reviewer called my prose, “savvy and brisk but
with sharp edges,” and it was “alive with memorable talk,” which, I think, is a
compliment on the dialogue. The reviewer also compared my book to Lawrence
Osborne’s The Ballad of a Small Player. Osborne is an Edgar Award-nominated
writer and I respect his work so that was a nice compliment. When I workshopped
the book, one reviewer said, “I detected something of David Foster Wallace in
the complexity in your writing, and in your intent, maybe?” It was a great
compliment and I think readers will recognize I have honed my craft to prose
that is tight, clean, and invigorating. Also, my dialogue is witty, memorable,
and highly entertaining.
My favorite writers are an eclectic mix of authors,
playwrights, and screenwriters, including Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Mikhail
Bulgakov, Elmore Leonard, Steve Lopez, Laurence Shames, Nicholas Rinaldi, Henry
Miller, Ron Faust, Billy Wilders, David Mamet, William Goldman, Edgar Wright,
Mel Brooks, and Aaron Sorkin.
What challenges did you overcome in writing this
book?
Although many of the subplots are events that really happened
– a gambler getting beaten to death by loan sharks, fundraising for a
cryptocoin that was going to fund a floating casino in Macau, a hitman trying
to outsource his hit, a junket operator going to jail for running an illegal
casino operation in China – the book centers on the failing relationship
between a pair of twins. Although everything that happens in the book is purely
fictional, the story sprang from problems I had with my business partner, a
person who happened to be my twin. Needless to say, it was one of the most
challenging things I had to do, especially since the company I was overseeing
at the time seemed to be falling apart at the seams. I had to spend a lot of
time learning about the technology that is being utilized in the book. I ended
up writing several books on the subject of analytics and AI and even ended up
speaking on the Forbes Middle East stage about this technology, so I think I
did okay.
If people can buy or read one book this week or
month, why should it be yours?
There’s nothing like it. It’s highly original, filled with
wonderfully irreverent yet empathetic characters who are facing life-changing
decisions, which, in some cases, are life-and-death ones. The dialogue is
memorable and laugh-out-loud funny, I believe. It’s a great madcap story
The Booklife reviewer also said, “The novel will both delight
and disgust readers fascinated with wealth and power run amok.” This is the kind
of subject matter that seems to be resonating with audiences right now, with TV
shows like Succession and The Squid Game pulling the curtain back
on how the 1% live. It’s also a wonderful look into how the 1% live in China.
Readers should also know they’re in good hands. This might be
my first novel, but I’ve adapted seven other novels into screenplays that were
good enough to attach respectable talent, including a three-time Oscar-nominated
actress.
There are some twists and turns most readers will not guess.
Hopefully, anyone who does pick up and read my book will feel the same way
several of the other writers who have read this story. Their only complaint, it
ended too soon. “I wanted to spend another hundred pages with these characters,”
they said because they found the characters so compelling.
Where can readers find out more about your work?
My website is andrewwpearson.com. I have a Medium blog as
well -- https://medium.com/@andrewwpearson. I’m on
Instagram @andrewwpearsonauthor and at Twitter or X now, I guess –
@intelligenciaAI
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-dead-chip-syndicate-andrew-w-pearson/1143756448