Father/son team collaborate on political thriller

Destin resident Dr. Steven Abernathy always said that someday he’d write a book, and now he has.

On Labor Day, Abernathy and his son and co-author, John Abernathy, will sign copies of their first novel, “A Question of Character,” at Books-A-Million in Destin Commons.

The novel’s protagonist is a Washington, D.C., detective who discovers a supposed suicide is a murder that involves the president, Washington history and a collection of valuable Civil War artifacts.

“I was very active in politics in the 1980s,” Steven Abernathy, a former Arkansas candidate for U.S. Congress, told The Log. “So it was only natural, given my interest, that my story revolve around a political theme.”

Readers may be reminded of 1990s allegations that Clinton aide Vince Foster’s suicide was actually murder, but Steven said the president in the book isn’t modeled on Bill Clinton, and that the plot leads in a different direction from anything the Clintons were accused of. However, he said, when he and John reached key points in the book, stories about the Clintons’ careers frequently fit into the plot.

“It wasn’t necessarily intent,” he said. “Rather, it was that the Clintons managed to create better reality than we could have written as fiction.”

Steven said he’d written health and science texts for a publisher years before, but he gives John, who has written scripts for several short films, credit for the “real writing talent.” John took his father’s political stories and tied them into an interesting plot and story, Steven said.

He said the best part of the project was collaborating with John, since they live far apart and don’t get to see each other as often as they’d like: “Writing together created a much closer contact than we would otherwise have had.”

John said that his father sells his own writing ability short: “He thinks, writes, and communicates with the over-50 crowd very well, and I do the same with a younger audience. There are elements of this novel that are aimed at both groups. The resulting story is quite different, and I hope more interesting and broad based, than either of us would have written alone.

“I have written everything from short stories to commercial advertising scripts to screenplays since college graduation in 2004. I never had the time or, quite frankly, the discipline to tackle a novel. When Dad approached me about co-writing this story I jumped at the chance.”

“We live on opposite sides of the country,” Steven said, “so the mechanics of ‘how we did it’ involved many, many phone calls and e-mailing the manuscript back and forth hundreds of times ... I would write a chapter, John would read and make changes, I would read and agree with some of the changes and disagree with others. Then we would meet in St. Louis and fight it out (just kidding). I think the end result is a collection of my stories that became John’s novel.”

John said he enjoyed writing “A Question of Character” but the toughest part was “when our personalities or generational differences clashed. That’s tough for a father/son team. It always worked out, though.”

Want to read it?
The Abernathys will be signing copies of “A Question of Character” at Books-A-Million in Destin Commons on Sept. 7, starting at 1 p.m. For more information, visit www.QuestionOfCharacter.com.

____

To read about other local authors, click here.