How do you get inspired to write?
Radiation.
Highly not recommended.
I started writing during recovery. I needed something to occupy my time that wasn’t self-pity or binge-watching the idiot box. I’m a mellow person, but I’m not passive.
Before that medical misadventure, I’d dabbled in short stories—testing whether I had the stamina or the ideas. Most of it was trial and error: a lot of slop, a lot of stopping and starting.
Up to that point, my writing life was mostly poetry. I did have a poem published at university. But I’d spent a lifetime reading across genres, so apparently my brain was hoarding material like a survivalist. Once I started in earnest, it didn’t stop.
How do you deal with writer’s block?
I don’t suffer from writer’s block. My real enemy is perfectionism. You can polish a sentence until it is lifeless.
I have to remind myself that language is inherently imperfect—it will never be exactly “right.” You can keep plucking the beautiful bird until there are no feathers left, no beauty at all. At some point, you have to let it go and release it into the wild.
What mystery in your own life could be a plot for a book?
I’ve survived more than my share of unpleasant things. I sometimes wonder how I didn’t turn into a violent psychopath.
Then again, truly crazy people don’t know they’re crazy.
What are you currently working on?
I recently turned in the manuscript for Company Files 5: The Quiet Eagle. Here’s the back cover copy:
Cairo, 1956. The Suez Crisis has thrown the world into chaos. Britain and France plan a covert operation to seize the canal, Israel calculates its next move, and Washington watches—ready to act when silence is no longer enough.
Reluctant operative Walker arrives to observe events spiraling beyond anyone’s control. In the city’s heat and dust, he crosses paths with two women who refuse to be controlled: Tania, brilliant and ruthless, shaped by danger; and Leslie, precise and self-possessed, a presence that unsettles every intelligence service circling her. At the center of it all looms Allen W. Dulles, pulling strings from the shadows.
THE QUIET EAGLE, the fifth novel in The Company Files, is a taut, atmospheric espionage story of tested loyalties, indirect power, and the human cost when empires realize they no longer command the room.
For readers of le Carré, Furst, Kanon, and Vidich, this is literary espionage at its most personal—and most perilous.
The novel is slated for release in October 2026 from Level Best Books.
Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?
My most recent published book is Company Files 4: Eyes to Deceit, centered on Operation Ajax—the joint MI6/CIA effort to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953 after he nationalized the country’s oil. The Shah was restored to power until he was overthrown in 1979.
I was a kid during the Iranian Hostage Crisis and remember it vividly. Writing the book became an exercise in connecting the geopolitical dots.
I realize that makes me sound like a history obsessive, but I’m always writing toward the human cost—real events refracted through the people caught inside them. Research for the Company Files leans heavily on books, supplemented by documentaries and the occasional piece of popular culture.
With my other series, the Shane Cleary mysteries, I draw more directly from personal experience to recreate the 1970s on the page. Those books are also grounded in real events.
The sixth Shane novel, FOUR ON THE FLOOR, will be released this July by Level Best Books. It’s inspired by the still-unsolved Blackfriars Massacre in Boston: Boston, 1978. Oppressive heat. Four dead. One PI. Zero clean exits.
Shane Cleary, Vietnam vet and ex-cop turned PI, is no stranger to carnage. But when one victim is a journalist with dangerous connections, the line between crime and politics begins to blur. The mayor, governor, and a former police commissioner deliver a message via a mafia don: investigate the bodies before the city explodes.
As Shane navigates corrupt cops and a killer who may be his mirror image, he’s pulled back into a war he thought he’d left behind—only now, the jungle is concrete, steel, and stained glass.
In a city where everyone has something to hide, Shane is about to find out who will kill to keep it that way.
For readers who like their fiction lean and lethal—think the moral ambiguity of Gone Baby Gone with the velocity of Drive.
What kind of research did you do for this novel?
With the Company Files series, I usually include an afterword detailing what’s real, what’s fictionalized, and how I approached the research.
For the Shane books, I cross-check events and references carefully. My memory is decent—but not that good.
In general, what emotions do you hope to elicit with your writing?
Ideally, engagement.
I’m aware that most people are easily distracted, so I try not to waste the reader’s time.
My writing is lean and compressed—plot and character move through dialogue and detail. Nothing is decorative; everything earns its place. There’s always subtext.
I want readers to think and feel at the same time. Ideally, something lingers—a line, a choice, a moment—long after the book is closed.
Best advice on writing you’ve ever received?
Write for yourself. Seriously. Nobody knows what will sell.
Publishing is part art, part business, and part guessing what people will like six months from now. Yes, there are tried-and-true formulas, and some are executed brilliantly. But most bestsellers fade. Agents are in the business of what will make money; a few may chase greatness, but most are Ahab chasing the rent with one leg.
That’s not cynicism—the market is reactive and cyclical; it rewards patterns that are already in decline. Writing, at its best, resists that impulse.
What is the weirdest or most surprising thing you’ve uncovered in your research?
How many major historical decisions boil down to: “This seems like a good idea at the time.”
It often isn’t.
Can you tell us a two-sentence horror story?
Trump. Twice.
What else would you want readers to know about you?
I believe readers are intelligent—and that they care.
We live in a world engineered for distraction, where everything competes for your attention and tells you what to buy and how to think. Picking up a book is a deliberate act, almost a defiant one.
A screen can convey in seconds what might take a writer hours to shape. But prose does something else—it asks you to participate, to imagine, to engage.
At the end of the day, we’re all alone with our thoughts. You might as well own them. No one will ever fully know you; we all carry private fears and contradictions. Whether they intend it or not, writers traffic in those hidden spaces.
That’s where the danger is—and the point.
Where can they find you online?
IG: @gabrielvaljan and Bluesky: @gvaljan.bsky.social
Gabriel Valjan is the author of The Company Files, and the Shane Cleary Mysteries with Level Best Books. He has been nominated for the Agatha, Anthony, Derringer, and Silver Falchion awards. He received the 2021 Macavity Award for Best Short Story, and the Shamus Award for Best PI in 2023. Gabriel is a member of the Historical Novel Society, ITW, MWA, and Sisters in Crime. He lives in Boston and answers to a tuxedo cat named Munchkin.
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