The Camel Club

David Baldacci’s Inside Story: “The Camel Club came about long before I was writing novels. I had moved to Washington, DC to practice law and remember walking past Lafayette Park for the first time. The park was filled with what I called permanent White House protestors: people that set up shop in the park. There was one banner between two trees which said, ‘Have a nice doomsday’ and I thought maybe I should leave DC and head back to Richmond. But there was one woman who caught my attention.

“She was a protestor against nuclear weapons, with a little tent full of pamphlets. She ended up in that park for probably 30 years and died just a couple of years ago. The authorities never felt she presented a threat, but she was out there in her little tent every day. I thought back to this lady when I was thinking about a new series, which became The Camel Club. I thought about those protestors and what if one of these people was actually a guy who used to work for the government in a really secret capacity—maybe as an assassin—before something bad happened. He was set-up, had to go on the run and spent a few years underground before coming back to protest a government he knows to be corrupt.

“That was the genesis for Oliver Stone, John Carr and The Camel Club. I put this ensemble cast together about people fighting against corruption, only really because I’d walked past the park one day and saw some interesting people. That’s what I tell people who ask me all the time, ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ I tell them, ‘I get my ideas from waking up every day and walking out the door.’ You never know what you’re going to see and all of a sudden, it can spark something.’

“I also caught a lot of criticism from certain people for how I portrayed Muslims in the book. My emails and letters for next 10 years were…quite something. Let’s just say other people did not see the world as I saw it. We were right in the middle of the wars in the Middle East and part of me felt that the world had gone mad, so I thought, ‘I’m going to go down a different path.’ Every thriller that I had been reading at the time presented Muslims as these stock caricature villains hellbent on destroying everything. I wanted to put a different spin on it. Which, being honest, got me hate mail and death threats that we had to pass on to the FBI.

“But The Camel Club turned out to be one of my most popular ever series. I think people just really took to the characters and to the stories that I was trying to tell—which were intended to be more even-handed and a little more sophisticated and nuanced than some other books might have been. It’s very easy to label people villains and just forget about who they might be.”