Joshua Hood says one look at his newborn son convinced him to quit his job, a decision that’s not mysterious when you consider that he was a SWAT team sniper at the time.
He had recently come off a harrowing night when he used two tourniquets and a newly invented iTClamp on a man who’d been shot through the leg with a high-caliber military rifle.
“I not only got an award for saving the guy’s life; I wrote an article about it for the Journal of Emergency Medical Services,” Hood says.
Then he jokingly understates another life-changing effect of exposure to violence on the job: “At my son’s birth I thought, ‘There might be safer ways to make a living.’”
Since then, Hood, 42, who lives in Collierville, has switched to writing military and espionage thrillers full-time.
In the past three years, he’s produced three titles in the world of Robert Ludlum’s Operation Treadstone, the latest of which — “The Treadstone Transgression” (Putnam) — comes out Tuesday, April 5. Hood will appear at Novel in Laurelwood to talk about his book at 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 6.
Ludlum, creator of the genetically enhanced fictional super-assassin Jason Bourne, died in 2001, and while other writers continued his Bourne series, Hood was chosen by the estate and publisher to expand the action in Ludlum’s covert CIA world of Operation Treadstone.
With his protagonist Adam Hayes, Hood says, he had to figure out, as he wrote for the website CrimeReads, “How to Create a New Character in the Long Shadow of Jason Bourne.”
“When I began writing, it was with the idea that whatever Bourne was, Hayes would be the opposite,” Hood wrote. “If Bourne couldn’t remember, then Hayes couldn’t forget. If Bourne was a loner, then Hayes would have a family, but perhaps most important of all, if Jason Bourne was a scalpel then my job was to make Adam Hayes a sledgehammer.”
He ended that essay by advising readers to “find out why neither James Bond or Jason Bourne want to meet Adam Hayes in a dark alley.”
Hood can claim hard-won familiarity with life on a battlefield and the tactical use of military weapons. After he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Memphis, he spent five years in the 82nd Airborne Division. His parachute infantry regiment fought in Iraq from 2005-2006, and as a regiment squad leader in Afghanistan, he was decorated for his part in Operation Furious Pursuit.
After leaving the service, Hood joined the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office’s SWAT (special weapons and tactics) team. He worked with them from 2011 to 2017, a period when he also wrote his “Search and Destroy” thrillers: “Clear by Fire” and “Warning Order.”
“In Memphis, you work a lot of overtime, see a lot of things. You’re working 60 hours a week, and you never know when you’re gonna be called,” he says. “My son changed my whole perspective on life. I had this feeling that you bring all this trash to the house.”
In “The Treadstone Transgression,” Hood’s protagonist Adam Hayes is recovering from the brutal assaults he endured in Africa during his previous venture, “The Treadstone Exile.” Hayes is hoping to slip into an anonymous life free of black ops with his wife and son on a remote New Mexico ranch, where his top priority at the outset is planning his son’s fourth birthday.
That dream of the simple life ends when a helicopter carrying the Treadstone director and an enforcer drops down on his property with the traditional call for just one last job. Hayes soon lands in Haiti — by blowing up the engine of the plane he’s on and jumping out a window — and faces a barrage of hostile forces reacting to a CIA agent’s assassinations of a Haitian intelligence commander and two cops. Hayes needs to extract that agent and a flash drive that her source tells her will provide “the intelligence coup of the century.”
A cover blurb by Mark Greaney calls Hood’s Treadstone work an “intense and electrifying espionage adventure” — words from a man who knows the business. Greaney, the Memphis-based writer whose “Gray Man” series of spy thrillers inspired a Netflix film to be released this year, wrote three novels with Tom Clancy in Clancy’s Jack Ryan series. After the author’s death in 2013, Greaney wrote four more Clancy-universe books.