Lights, Camera, White House: Matt Quirk on the Enduring Power of the West Wing in Fiction, Nonfiction, and Film

Novelist Matt Quirk joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss what makes the White House such a popular place to set stories—including scenes in his newest thriller, Inside Threat, as well as a previous book, The Night Agent, which is now a hit Netflix series. Quirk suggests that the White House is a unique space where the domestic sphere intersects with the seat of world power. He examines the idea that readers desire a “classic president” character, particularly in times when the real commander in chief falls short. He also reads from Inside Threat and reflects on shifting settings from the White House to Raven Rock, a real-life government doomsday bunker. Finally, he talks about what it’s been like to see The Night Agent adapted for the screen.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf, and edited Hannah Karau.

Whitney Terrell: Could you talk about why the White House is such a popular place to set stories? Why don’t we have all these films and novels set at the Supreme Court or the Capitol building?

Matt Quirk: Well, it’s just proximity to power. The president is the most powerful person in the U.S. and arguably, the world. So when you’re writing—especially thrillers—and you want really high stakes, it’s kind of a no-brainer that you would go there.

It’s funny when you’re writing and reading about the White House a lot, and it starts to become tropes and genre standards and things like that. It’s always funny to go back—and maybe I’m still the nerdy-school-trip-to-D.C. kind of kid. The first times I went into the White House complex, I was in absolute awe, and I still get those vibes. That’s the thrill for people. And the thrill in these books is to pull back the curtain and give people the sense that they’re seeing into this forbidden world where the powerful decisions that affect nations and everyone’s lives are made.

WT: Not only that, there’s also the weird contrast with it being just a house, right? It’s not this massive—it’s not the Empire State Building or something. And it also has all these cool–speaking as a writer–all the things that you mentioned in that opening paragraph: the sensors in the grass, the thing on the roof that shoots down planes, the pressure difference between the interior and exterior to expel chemical agents. All this weird, crazy stuff that’s stuck onto a normal person’s house that a real person could imagine.

MQ: Yeah, it’s James Bond stuff. And it’s fun having worked in D.C. for a while because it’s cool to get all that neat, Q from James Bond stuff. But what I try to do—which is always a balancing act in the books—is give people what they expect from a thriller like this and then also take the mundaneness of what I know from people who actually work at the White House. I splice that in without taking away from that frisson you get of it being this larger than life place.

I think when you show the characters, they’re not as, I don’t know… West Wing. Well, West Wing did an amazing job on that, I shouldn’t make that my example. But sometimes when there are wooden stock types, it doesn’t feel real at all. But if you have characters who feel like real people in there, I think it heightens the sense that you’re really getting close to the power and can make it more powerful as a book.

V.V. Ganeshananthan: It seems to me the thing that the White House has that the other buildings don’t have—which connects to what you’re saying—is that it’s easier to bring in that element of the personal than it might be if it were the Supreme Court or the Capitol building, because you have the intimacy of the domestic sphere not being that far away. Physically, it’s around the corner, the first lady could walk in anytime. She has a professional role and also she’s part of the domestic sphere, she’s part of the family. And so there’s this porousness and this danger to the intimacy which heightens the stakes, which you wouldn’t maybe get in the same way. Like at the Supreme Court, the secrecy is, I don’t know, sealed documents. It’s not the actual private life in the same way. I don’t know, what do you think?

MQ: And with the Supreme Court, we don’t have a matrix to build off of what happens there. I know people work there, and I’m sure they’re getting interesting work drama, but it’s what you’re saying. It’s a house, so you can do Downton Abbey stuff, and it’s a workplace, so you can have real life workplace stuff. And it’s also where you figure out which war you’re going to start next, and things like that. So you can run the gamut of all the different levels of stakes and drama you want to get into. And it has secret tunnels.

WT: You can have affairs there. And scandal.

MQ: And they do have affairs!

WT: In Bill Clinton’s administration.

MQ: And the Kennedy administration, my God. So, you know, it’s got it all. And that’s what I mean—the secret tunnels, those were for helping the president escape or helping the president get out to have, you know… presidential affairs.

WT: I can’t think of any other building that actually has its own genre, kind of. I mean, there are White House books, right? And those go through biographies and films and novels. The Empire State Building appears in the King Kong movies, but that’s it. It keeps getting returned to generationally. I can even think of a Faulkner story that said, “in the White House.” Given that there have been so many things written and said at the White House, what did you have to do to think about, “Okay, what do I want to do differently? How do I make this story new?”

MQ: The short answer is I set it someplace else. The White House is just a warm-up. What’s fun about this book is the whole thing is set in Raven Rock, which is this cool, real life place. It’s a continuity of the government; it’s a doomsday bunker, and it’s built under a mountain. So if you want to talk about cool, James Bond-style, naturally fascinating places, this is it. And you add to that the power and stakes of having the president there. The presidential bunker and other bunker scenes have been in a lot of fiction and film. What was novel about this one was to actually deal with Raven Rock as it is.

Sugi and I were talking about this before we started recording, but our friend, Garrett Graff—who just was a Pulitzer finalist for his incredible Watergate book—wrote a whole book on Raven Rock and the government’s doomsday plans in general. So it was amazing to get this peek behind the bunker doors. I had had this in my idea file forever—it was basically like Die Hard or Agatha Christie in a presidential bunker. You lock them in, a body turns up, and then you get into it. And then suddenly Garrett says, “Oh hey, I published a 600-page book on this,” and I said, “Well, that’ll be helpful.” And so what made it new was having it be the real place. It’s a fascinating place.

Actually, it ended up being the big challenge of this book. No one—no civilian reader or even military reader, because very few people have been inside Raven Rock—has any intuitive understanding of how this place is set up. They burrow tunnels through the mountain and then they build office buildings inside the tunnels that look like Quonset huts, and they’re on springs in case it all gets hit with a nuclear bomb, so they can absorb it.

It was fascinating to work all that stuff in, but the challenge of this book was orienting the reader in a totally new place. I spent a lot of time and put these maps in that I had to render myself, just to make sure it was all legible to them. As a movie, I think it would have been easier because you can say, “Oh, that’s what it looks like.” There’s just a lot of work in making it very easy to orient and understand for the reader.

VVG: So, for those of our listeners who might remember, Garrett has actually been on the show; you can listen to that episode—he and Susan Choi talked to us about henchmen. You can also look up the nonfiction version of this Raven Rock story.

I appreciated the maps, I will say, for the reason that you were describing. I was thinking about how you’re taking a very small portion of the White House and moving it to another place. So it’s also a very classic… Some of the tension is watching these people who know each other and are supposed to follow a protocol, right? There’s a protocol, there’s a plan. And I think I learned this from one of my students who had studied screenwriting, but when there’s a plan, it’s dramatically interesting when it goes wrong.

Matthew Quirk

• Inside Threat • Red Warning  • Hour of the Assassin • The 500 • The Directive • Cold Barrel Zero • Dead Man Switch • The Night Agent

Others:

 • How Shawn Ryan Adapted ‘The Night Agent’ from the Page to the Screen By Jean Bentley • The West Wing • White House Down • Olympus Has Fallen •  Murder at 1600 • Scandal • Seven Days in May • Commander in Chief • The American President  • Max 2: White House Hero • William Faulkner • King Kong • James Bond • Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 3 Episode 9: “All the President’s Henchmen: Susan Choi and Garrett Graff on the Citizens of the Swamp” • Raven Rock by Garrett Graff • Agatha Christie • Die Hard • The Pelican Brief by John Grisham • Law & Order • “More secret service agents expected to lose jobs over Colombia scandal” • “Secret Service agents sent home after one found passed out in Amsterdam” by Evan Perez • “Reports: Secret Service agent on Pence detail consorted with prostitute” By Melanie Eversley • Clint Eastwood • Air Force One • First Daughter • Chasing Liberty • Curtis Sittenfeld • Ellen Emerson White