On Our Best Behavior for Barry Eisler

We at LustBites are all dressed up to meet our latest guest author: Barry Eisler. It would be enough for us that Eisler is the author of The Rain books, featuring half-Japanese, half-American assassin John Rain. These titles have won the Gumshoe Awards; have been included in numerous "Best Of" lists; have been translated into twenty languages; and have been optioned for film by Barrie Osborne, Oscar-winning producer of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Say it with me: Oh, my god.

But Eisler is cooler than that. Before becoming a best-selling thriller writer, he worked in the CIA's Directorate of Operations.

Yes, the CIA.

And if that’s not enough, he then lived in Japan, where he earned his black belt at the Kodokan International Judo Center.

So what all this means is that you’d better behave yourselves and read the following sexy excerpt from his latest book, Requiem for an Assassin, out tomorrow. Then stick around for a little Q & A. We’ll choose a commenter from today’s post to win a signed copy of Requiem!

The back of her thighs bumped against the side of the bed. She was barely thinking now, she just wanted him naked, his skin against her, his weight on her, all of him inside her. He broke the kiss to lift her sweater over her head and was back before he had even tossed it aside, his tongue, his teeth, the taste of whisky and his own taste, too. She managed to get his belt open, then his pants. She reached inside, and when she felt how hard he was, it excited her even more. She squeezed and felt his breath catch.

She pushed the jacket off his shoulders and tugged it down over his arms, then got his shirt off and threw it aside, never once letting him stop kissing her. He pushed her back on the bed and stepped out of his pants. She realized her bra was gone, she hadn’t even been aware of his doing it. Her groin ached and she was panting. Without thinking, she put her hand on herself, over her jeans, and rubbed. “Hurry,” she said.

Then he was naked, leaning over her, unbuttoning her jeans. He hooked his fingers inside the waistband and peeled the jeans and her panties down over her legs and flung them away. She scrambled back on the bed, spreading her legs and raising her knees, and Rain moved on top of her. She took hold to guide him and she was so wet that he didn’t stop nor even slow but buried himself inside her with one violent stroke.

She gasped with the mixed pleasure and pain of it and he moved back and thrust again and this time she cried out because she was coming, her back arching, her body shuddering, her hands moving involuntarily to his ass to pull him deeper, deeper. She felt his arms go under hers and he took her face hard in both hands and spread her legs wider with his thighs, his weight on her now, holding her, pinning her to the bed, kissing her hard again, fucking her like some primitive natural force she’d conjured but could now no longer control. He was moaning in her mouth, she could hear it and feel it both, and his movements grew faster, more brutal, and she felt another orgasm welling up from the depths of her. He groaned and squeezed his eyes shut and hammered at her harder than ever, as though enraged, or enraptured, or punishing an enemy he didn’t know how else to kill.

Then the groan grew wilder and his body tensed and she felt him coming and she came, too, a shock wave of pleasure reverberating from her groin to her toes, her breasts, her fingertips, her mouth where he was kissing her still.

Questions:

Lustbites: How do you decide whether to include an explicit sex scene or fade-to-black?

Barry Eisler: Mostly I prefer more of the full monty approach, driven as I am by my enduring inner 14-year-old. But here's the right rule of thumb, I think, at least when your inner 14-year-old isn't calling the shots: does it only matter *that* the characters had sex? Or does it matter *how* they had sex? If the only thing that matters is the fact of the sex itself, showing it is unnecessary and will add nothing to the story. But if the way the characters make love is what matters in the story, then not only should you show it, you actually have to show it, or the story will suffer.

One thing an explicit sex scene automatically has going for it in this regard is the way it can reveal character. Few things reveal character as immediately and profoundly as the way someone makes love. Another, by the way, is the way someone reacts to violence, whether as victim or perpetrator. To me, the best stories, really the only worthwhile stories, are always about realistic, memorable, affecting characters. If you're writing genre and don't have all the time in the world to allow your characters to develop over the course of a thousand mundane behaviors, subjecting them to the extreme stress of violence, and seeing how they make love, are two good shortcuts.

LB: Do the sex scenes always have to drive the thriller plot?
BE: They do if the thriller is any good. In a good book, there shouldn't be a single scene that can be removed without the whole story unraveling. If you can pull out that single thread without unraveling the story, you didn't need the thread in the first place -- and there's no exception to this rule for sex scenes.

I suppose it comes down to a question of emphasis. In romance, readers expect good sex scenes, so romance writers have more of a tendency to make the scene the objective and work backwards to plot and character. In a thriller, where action might be the objective, it's more the action that will drive plot and character (actually, I tend to think of sex as just another kind of action scene... see my thoughts in response to question #1...). But regardless of how you arrive at any scene, sex, action, you name it, that scene has to be both the result of and the catalyst for other forces in the story. In other words, it ought to be some kind of turning point: emotionally, thematically, or logistically. If it's not, it'll by definition be gratuitous, and will have far less power than it otherwise would have.

LB: You are a male writer and (seem) to have a male POV character. Have you ever written a sexy or romantic scene from a female POV? If not, why not? If yes, how was it for you?

EB: Up until Requiem, which is the sixth Rain book, all my sex scenes were from the male POV -- naturally enough, because the books were primarily told from John Rain's first person perspective. But in the fourth book, Killing Rain, I started adding segments told from the POVs of other characters -- most particularly Delilah, the seductive Israeli agent who becomes Rain's lover. As the lives and actions of these characters became more intertwined, not just their behavior, but their impressions and interpretations of each other's behavior became increasingly integral to the plots. In Requiem, I realized the reader could best understand the changes in Rain's character, and the chemistry that bound him to Delilah, if those changes were told from Delilah's POV. Naturally enough, that led to a sex scene from Delilah's perspective.

How was it? Awesome. The research was a blast: a lot of imagination, a lot of interesting Q&A sessions with my wife, a lot of "I get paid to do this?!" moments. And the result, for me, was one of the hottest scenes in all the Rain books.

LB: Do CIA agents wear uniforms?
EB: Only the security guards at Headquarters in Langley. For the undercover people it would be a dead giveaway...

LB: What are you wearing?
EB: LOL! You wouldn't believe me if I told you...

LB: Oh, try us, Barry. We'll believe anything...

For more about Barry Eisler, visit his web site or be his friend!