I interviewed Boston Globe bestselling author David S. Brody. David’s latest book, Cabal of the Westford Knight was recently released by Martin and Lawrence Press.
CM: Can you start off by telling us a bit more about yourself?
DSB: I’m a real estate lawyer by trade, one of those lawyers who always wanted to be a writer. My wife, Kimberly Scott, is also a novelist. We have two daughters, age twelve and fourteen, and live in Westford, Massachusetts.
CM: When did you decide that you wanted to become a writer?
DSB: I first got the writing bug in college, at Tufts University. After law school, while working in a law firm, I started to write a couple of novels but never finished. Later I met Kim, who had also always wanted to be a writer. After we got married, we pushed each other to finally finish our abandoned manuscripts.
CM: How many books have you written so far?
DSB: Cabal of the Westford Knight is my fourth.
CM: All of your books are set in Massachusetts. Is this a case of writing what you know or is there some wonderful history in the state that you develop your stories from?
DSB: A little of both. Every author will tell you it is best to write from experience. And the history of Massachusetts is fertile ground for fiction. There’s also a third reason: Readers like to read about places they’ve been and sites they’ve seen, and it seems like half the country went to college in Boston or visited Fenway Park or vacationed on Cape Cod. So I think readers enjoy reading books set in Massachusetts.
CM: What can you tell us about Cabal of the Westford Knight?
DSB: I guess I’ll start by saying that researching and writing this book has been a wild, fantastic ride. I had no idea when I started that I’d end up uncovering this whole hidden history of North America, involving medieval artifacts and the Knights Templar and all the Da Vinci Code stuff and even paganism within established religion. The protagonists in the story learn about all this in much the same way I did—by traveling around New England and connecting the dots and figuring out the clues. Of course, nobody was trying to kill me!
CM: This book has received several excellent reviews. Richard Lynch, past President of the New England Antiquities Research Association, said it is, “A wonderful mixture of The Da Vinci Code and National Treasure.” What was your goal with this book? What do you want readers to take away from it?
DSB: I didn’t expect my research would take me back to Scotland and run smack into the Sinclair family—who built Roslyn Chapel, were leaders of the Knights Templar order, and were made famous in The Da Vinci Code as the carriers of the Jesus bloodline. Nor did I expect to find so many connections to Freemasonry, which is where the National Treasure comparisons come from. But that’s where my research took me. Since I think many readers are interested in these subjects, it’s not a bad place to be.
CM: There seems to be a lot going on in this story: secret societies, treasure hunters, keepers of the secrets of the Jesus bloodline, a beautiful British researcher full of secrets, and unraveling 600-year-old mysteries encoded in ancient Templar artifacts. It sounds like this book required an extensive amount of research. How did you get from here to there without getting lost in all the research?
DSB: The most amazing thing about this entire project is how the pieces of the puzzle all seem to fit together so seamlessly. Once I completed the research, all the seemingly unrelated threads of the story—the artifacts, the Templars, paganism, the Jesus bloodline, buried treasure, the Sinclair family—wove together into a single coherent story. I would ask myself questions like, “Wouldn’t it be neat if the Sinclair clan was connected to Freemasonry?”, then I’d discover that not only were they connected but that, generation after generation, the head of the Sinclair clan held the position of Masonic Grand Master. Almost every time I looked for a connection, I found one. It was eerie. But it also told me I was on the right track.
