So, the guy comes out of the closet, and he’s got both passports and a gun with a silencer…”
Matthew Quirk pauses his muttering into his phone to wave at a family passing by him on Bessemer Path in Point Loma. Docked boats float on one side, while palatial homes overlook the trail on the other. Check Quirk’s voice notes, and you’ll find dozens of recordings like this, detailing nefarious plots and high-stakes encounters—concerning, until you realize the San Diego local is the author of nine thrillers, including The Night Agent, a mega bestseller and multi-season Netflix adaptation about an FBI agent’s mission to stop a disastrous conspiracy. He calls strolls like these his “crazy brainstorm walks.”
“I seem completely deranged,” he admits, laughing.
Quirk, in reality, is charming and witty. He’s got coastal dad vibes: baseball cap, striped t-shirt, fuzzy fleece. He’s busy, too. He has a three-year-old daughter; is drafting a new thriller; and is going on tour for his latest book, The Method, all while the third season of The Night Agent drops.
But it wasn’t always like this. Back in the late aughts, he was a journalist with a secret dream to write books. A cliché, he says—“the reporter with a novel in his desk drawer.”
He planned to pen a Christopher Buckley–type DC satire, but when he gave it to his family to read, he got a lackluster response. “‘These, like, Evelyn Waugh wannabe parts are excruciating,’” he recounts of his family’s loving but brutal honesty.
What they liked: the thriller elements.
When he decided to go full genre, “it was like turning an aircraft carrier,” he says.
At the same time, Quirk was working in Washington DC at The Atlantic. He found himself attending salons at the former Cuban embassy, populated by figures high up in the CIA. “I was so out of my element,” he says, “and there was so much intrigue.” The people he encountered there would plant the kernels of his early work.
Then the 2008 financial crisis hit. Quirk was laid off. He made a go of writing, but it was getting engaged that lit a fire under his pen. He gave himself until his wedding day to see if he could pull off the novelist life. He didn’t want to be at the reception assuring family and friends with a dubious, “Don’t worry; the book is going to work out!”
A month before the vows, he got word that his novel, The 500, was going to be published in a major deal and go directly into film development (progress on a screen adaptation has been slow since the book’s 2012 release, but a TV show is finally in the works from Amazon MGM studios). “I thought I was in a psychotic break and dreaming up the whole thing,” he says.
Meanwhile, Quirk’s wife, Heather Burke, had fallen in love with San Diego while serving on a political campaign here in 2004, so when they both found themselves working remotely after the wedding 14 years ago, they decided to move cross-country to give the finest city a shot.
Ever since, they’ve been SD residents, and writing books has been Quirk’s full-time career. There is a lot to contend with, including the pressure of coming up with his next big idea and the difficulty of staying focused when there are so many ways to procrastinate—like surfing. He tries to get on his board at least three times a week. There are also the sprawling backyards that abut Bessemer Path. “How much of these yards do you think are a land grab?” he asks me as we pass by.
Sometimes, he explains, he’ll do anything to avoid writing. “You might find me later down at city hall looking up public easements,” he quips.
Joking aside—which is a lot to put aside with Quirk—he works pretty much constantly, often deep-diving into research. If you don’t dig, he believes, you’ll end up recycling action scenes readers have already seen umpteen times. “Like crawling through air ducts,” he says. “People don’t do that; it’s an air duct!”
He’s learned to pick locks and break out of handcuffs. You might spot him loitering in corners, faux-casing a joint. He once hired an urban escape team to mock-kidnap him in Los Angeles so he could understand the psyche of the abducted. “When you’re writing a thriller from your chair, it can get a little cartoony,” he says. “It helped remind me of the stakes, the fear in a visceral way.” He smiles. “I’ve been dining out on that experience ever since.”
Sometimes, the process works in reverse: His life and interests become infused in his works. For example, as he was writing Cold Barrel Zero, a military thriller, he was also learning to surf. “So, there’s a lot of near-drowning kind of stuff because I was, like, constantly near-drowning,” he deadpans. “I really channeled that.”
Of course, securing the Netflix deal was one of the highlights of his career, but even as it was happening, he refused to get excited. “I was like, ‘Don’t get your hopes up; don’t move to Hollywood, because you’re just going to waste your time,’” he recalls.
Even after the show was greenlit, he tempered his emotions. “I was like, ‘Okay, so maybe it’s happening but no one will ever hear of it,’” he adds.
But then The Night Agent became an overnight sensation. Today, it ranks as the tenth most popular Netflix show globally. “I feel so fortunate,” he says. “I know this kind of thing never really happens.”
Though the show has been a great success, he’s sticking to writing books and just dabbles in Hollywood’s affairs. “I do the touristy stuff,” he says. “I go on set and eat the catering and take photos with the celebrities.”
PARTNER CONTENT
His acting career is limited to a brief cameo in episode three of season two (he’s a patron in a hotel bar scene), but hanging out around all those actors partly inspired his brand new book, The Method. It’s about an actress who, despite playing bad asses on film, considers herself a homebody. When her friend goes missing, she has to become as lethal as the characters she typically portrays. “I think this is my favorite book so far,” he says. True to form for a Quirk novel, the edge-of-your-seat yarn is also in development as a television series.
Before we say goodbye, Quirk lists off the things he still has to get done today: He needs to schedule a ride-along with the fire department in the next couple weeks for research on his newest draft (a plot involving stolen identity), pick up his daughter from preschool, and prepare for his book tour. He’s also busy pinching himself—and will be for a long time. “I still think sometimes that maybe I’m just living under a bridge in DC somewhere,” he says, “dreaming that everything is working out.”
