His fans love the mystery, suspense

Phil Bowie flies airplanes, drives boats and rides motorcycles. As a writer, he naturally does not put out cook books.

The New Bern area author has a new book out, "KLLRS," which is the third in a series of suspense novels with a common thread of airplanes and adventures.

Bowie, a Massachusetts native who has lived in the New Bern area for 30 years, has drawn on his own experiences and fascinations in producing "Guns" in 2006 and "Diamondback" last November.

When he completed "Guns" two years ago, he didn't foresee it becoming a three-book saga.

"No, I didn't really. But, I knew I wanted to do some more," he said. "It was a big effort to get the first one out. I spent about 18 months writing the first one."

With an established publisher, Medallion Press, he discovered that more work was ahead.

"First thing you find out is that you have to promote the books," he said. "As soon as you write one book, you're under pressure from your publisher to get the next one out within a year or so."

He has called "Guns" a "dressed up western suspense novel," in which his character loves old westerns, wears cowboy boots and is called Cowboy.

"KLLRS" is another suspense tale, and this time his hero is intertwined with an outlaw motorcycle gang.

"I've ridden a motorcycle on and off all my life and I have one now," he says. "I've always been interested in the fringes of society, and outlaw bikers are on the fringes, so it interests me."

He has had some friends who were in motorcycle gangs, although Bowie has never been a member.

"I have a friend right now who ran an outlaw motorcycle gang for 20 years," he said. "He's a good fellow and I play music with him."

He said the inspiration for the threatening character in this book goes back 40 years. As is the case with many of his book characters, there is a semblance to a real person Bowie has met.

"Many years ago, I did some sport parachuting and in the course of doing that I met a psychologist who was studying what he called the approach-avoidance conflict," he said. He used the illustration of someone who has had a lifelong dream of going to Hawaii, but they are scared of flying.

"The closer you get to the day you are going to leave, the more intense the conflict," he explained. "You are pulled between your lifelong desire and your deep-seated fear of flying."

The psychologist used four parachutists to study the conflict, hooked to a polygraph.

"He would ask questions like ‘Have you ever thought about how high you will bounce if your parachute doesn't open?'" Bowie recalled. "You try to be nonchalant and the (polygraph) needles are going crazy."

From that premise, a demented psychologist was created for "KLLRS."

Bowie's gang character studies people under severe stress and he puts them under severe stress because he plans to kill them.

"That is the basic conflict," he said.

As in the other two books, there is a hot-shot pilot.

Bowie, who has owned an airplane for years, does not label himself as a hot-shot. Other than pleasure flying, his aerial work includes work for the Neuse River Foundation, observing and documenting pollution.

"Really, I don't like hot-shot pilots," he said. "The best pilots are fairly laid-back, confident individuals, but they don't take chances, because flying light aircraft is very unforgiving."

He has lost four flying friends over the years.

He repeated an old saying about pilots.

"There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots," he said. "And that is quite true."

With that in mind, a natural question is how much of "KLLRS"‘ pilot John Hardin is Phil Bowie?

"Probably Hardin is who I would like to be, because he gets to kick butt," he laughed.

Hardin doesn't go looking for trouble. In "KLLRS," he is living happily with his girlfriend in the Smokey Mountains (Bowie grew up in the mountains of Massachusetts). A man comes out of Hardin's past.

"The man threatens to expose some darker deeds that John has done if he doesn't help the man rescue his younger son from the clutches of a motorcycle gang," Bowie explained.

Hardin has to infiltrate the gang to enact a rescue.

Bowie sees riding a motorcycle as an expression of freedom as well as a back-of-the-mind fascination of most readers - hop on a bike and take off over the horizon.

"I think it is a dream a lot of people of both genders have," he said. "For the same reasons, people are at least interested in outlaw bikers, because they do apparently live with a lot of freedom that we don't have day-to-day. We have to pay the bills and work 40 hours and make sure we have money in the savings account, and that takes up most of our lives."

Bowie, who does river water quality monitoring by boat for N.C. State University for a living, writes mostly in the predawn hours.

"Ideally I'd like to write eight hours a day, but that just never happens," he said. "I'm fresh in the morning. It's an easy time to write. When I write at night, generally I am revising, I'm not creating chapters."

He is often asked, especially at book-signings, if he develops an outline.

"I don't, probably because I am lazy," he laughed. "I also have access to the Internet, which is great for research. You can do instantaneous research. If there is a certain fact you want to check, you can stop writing for a few minutes, pull it up and plug it in and go on, which makes writing a whole lot easier."

The basic storyline, however, is in his head.

"Subconsciously, you carry the story with you," he said. "When I'm two or three chapters into a book, the characters come alive. I carry them around with me and plug in different things into the story."

Revisions are inevitable as the characters take on life in his mind.

"Something might happen in chapter 12 and I realize I have to go back to chapter two and build in some foreshadowing of that event," he said. "I revise as much as I write."

His fourth book is in the works, and he has set aside the characters of the first three books.

"It's not in the same series. There will be a new protagonist," he said. "It will be set in New Bern, and the protagonist will be a federal probation officer, who is also an amateur astronomer."

Not surprisingly, Bowie owns several telescopes.