During my sophomore year of high school, I sat in the back of Dan Lyons’ English class, scribbling down my first thriller with my favorite Flair marker. It was this James Bond-like mini-tome about spies and world domination. Since I was acing the class, Lyons tolerated my casual disregard for his lectures. Better than that, he even coached me on the side.

His critique was gentle. A good novel doesn’t have to be complicated to be gripping, he said. “After all, Ernest Hemingway wrote an entire book about a man and a fish.”

That was my first big lesson in writing. I’ll always cherish it because good advice doesn’t come along very often. As time went on, I realized that novelists need a little seasoning in that thing called life. And as the realities of earning a living settled in, I made the leap to nonfiction. Besides, journalism has its perks. You get to duck around police lines and watch history unfold from the front row. Pretty cool.

In the mid-1970s, President Nixon was on the ropes. Woodward and Bernstein were proving just how good journalism could be in ferreting out the truth. I was eager and ready. With a newly minted bachelor’s degree, it took only a hundred or so résumés to land a reporting job with a small suburban Chicago daily. My first assignment: write about a turkey.

Dan Lyons’ counsel came back to me. There was a story here. About a family pet and a grisly, beady-eyed turkey who’d evaded the Thanksgiving table for a dozen years. It gave me an appreciation for the drama of ordinary life.

I went on to cover Pope John Paul II and Henry Kissinger. Bob Vila and Frank Abagnale Jr.—a couple of decades before Catch Me if You Can hit the silver screen. I did my bit as an editor for many years, too, but I never lost my hankering to tell a story.

I kicked around some ideas for a first novel and settled on an aviation thriller. Flying was my greatest love next to writing. I might have become a pilot, except for poor eyesight and a lack of money to learn privately. Living vicariously seemed like the next best choice.

Most aviation books dwell on the pilots and planes, so I decided to write about air traffic control. About people who juggle thousands of lives at any given moment and make split-second decisions with zero tolerance for error. I wanted to paint a vivid picture of the colorful characters I met and lift the veil on this fascinating, mysterious world that few of us get to see. The only problem was the plot. After some research, though, I found a smoking gun.

TRACON kindled a remarkable following in the aviation industry for its accuracy and spotlight on a hot-button issue. I’m taken aback when industry insiders say they’re surprised that I was never a controller. Like Tom Clancy, I guess I’m just a good listener. And I owe a debt of gratitude to the generous, patient help of many controllers who trusted me to tell their story.

     In 2001, TRACON won two national book honors: the IPPY Award from Independent Publisher in the category of mystery/suspense and ForeWord Magazine’s bronze Book of the Year Award for fiction/mystery. The novel was also named one of two finalists for the Benjamin Franklin Award sponsored by the Publishers Marketing Association.

TRACON also caught the attention of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, which commissioned me to write a nonfiction book about the union’s history. NATCA published Against the Wind in 2002.

I’ve got a sequel in mind for TRACON, but I want to explore some other subjects first. The intrigue in my next novel, The Fractured Lens, lurks much closer to home. Like TRACON, the novel explores the double-edged sword of technology, delving into issues of personal privacy, identity theft and video voyeurism. My agent’s trying to find a home for it, and I’ll post information about publication as the details firm up.

—P.M.