Best-selling author Steve Berry seeks 'ooh factor' at Chamblin Bookmine bookstore

Steve Berry sells a lot of books. Like 20 million and counting.

Where does he get the ideas behind best-sellers such as "The Warsaw Protocol," "The 14th Colony," "The Malta Exchange" and "The Lost Order"?

At Jacksonville's Chamblin Bookmine, the labyrinthine bookstore off Roosevelt Boulevard, of course. Berry, whose new thriller "The Kaiser's Web" comes out Tuesday, said he can spend hours poring through the history section at the bookstore, trolling for that "ooh factor" he can build a book around.

"I'm looking for that thing from history that’s real, that makes you go 'ooh.' It would be easy to make them up but it has to be real and it has to still have relevance today," Berry said. 

He'll take home 300 to 400 books to be used in research for the next book he's working on. He won't read all of them, but he'll pull out ideas that can later be distilled into an adventure for his globe-trotting hero, Cotton Malone. He's been haunting the aisles at the Bookmine for 30 years.

"He’ll get a big boxful," said Ron Chamblin, owner of the store. "It will come back three or four months later.” 

The Bookmine is ideally suited for the purpose. Chamblin said he stocks "a few hundred thousand, I would think" history books, covering just about any topic. You'll find books on ancient Egypt, the Vietnam War, warships, Black history, Jacksonville history, steamboats, the Crusades, art history, political science, automobiles, national parks and nuclear weapons — and that doesn't even include the biography or historical fiction sections. 

The "ooh factor" Berry is looking for might concern papal succession or lost Confederate treasure or the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. or states' rights. He does all of his own research — "No one could do my research for me because I don’t know what I’m looking for" — and typically is working on three books at a time, one that he's actually writing, one that he's researching and one that he's just starting to think about. Start to finish, it takes him about 18 months to complete a novel, six months of research and 12 months of writing.

For "The Kaiser's Web," Berry stumbled across a tidbit at the Bookmine concerning high-ranking Nazi officials who may have survived in South America long after the world thought them dead. 

"This is not a book about Hitler surviving," Berry said. "It is about someone else who may have survived the war. We never really found out what happened to Martin Bormann. This guy was far, far more dangerous than Hitler."

Berry said Bormann, who was Adolf Hitler's private secretary and head of the Nazi Party, was clever, ruthless and amoral. "Hitler was a fanatic, but he had his faults," Berry said. "Narcisism, refusal to listen to others, those are what brought him down. Bormann didn’t have those faults."  

Bormann was reportedly killed in an explosion in the waning days of World War II, but "The Kaiser's Web" posits otherwise. It's Berry's 16th Cotton Malone adventure and his 20th novel.

Berry spent decades living in South Georgia, serving as an attorney in St. Marys. He later moved to St. Augustine but now calls Orlando home.

"The Bishop's Pawn," Berry's 2018 novel, was almost entirely set in Florida and dealt with a cache of secret files dealing with the death of King. Berry said his hero Malone might come back to Florida some day, but not soon. "You never know. 'The Bishop's Pawn' was kind of my ode to Florida. The whole book basically took place all over the state. That’s not to say we wouldn’t do it again. There could be another story in the future."

Berry typically travels all around the world to get first-person observations to put into his books, but the pandemic has kept him grounded. Parts of "The Kaiser's Web" are set in South America and South Africa, places he didn't get to visit for this novel. "You don’t really have to go to a place to write about it, but it does certainly does help," he said. "I talked to people who have been there and they told me about it."

He had a trip to Romania set to research the next novel, but that trip was canceled. "It will be well into 2022 before I get on an airplane again," he said. 

The pandemic has also put the brakes on his promotional tours. In normal times, he spends months on the road, visiting bookstores, greeting fans and signing books. There was very little of that in 2020 and he doesn't plan to do any in-person appearances in '21.

More:Four decades later, Ron Chamblin keeps selling, buying books

Instead, he's doing virtual appearances, going online to meet with fans and sending signed book plates to stores so fans can get an autographed book. He has one planned for March 8 with the BookMark in Neptune Beach. 

History is at the core of all of Berry's novels, but that doesn't mean he doesn't pay attention to current events. He said he's tempted to write a book about 2020 and call it "The Virus Loves Stupid."

"If you’re smart and you protect yourself, you can stay safe," he said. "When you’re stupid, it’s got you. Unfortunately, over the last year there have been a lot of stupid moves. I think it’s going to be the first time in human history that we decided to politicize a pandemic. We thought we could apply our politics to it and outsmart an organism that has been around for billions of years."