Jonathan Maberry: Jonesing for more Joe Ledger
Jonathan Maberry: Jonesing for more Joe Ledger
By Angelique Fawns
Jonathan Maberry has created a character so iconic, he may exist in an alternate universe. Joe Ledger is an asskicking phenom who has starred in 14 of his own novels: starting with Patient Zero in 2009. A character who never tires, Joe has also been the lead in three full short story collections, multiple comic books, and has guest starred in The Rot & Ruin Series, and V-WARS. Maberry has just completed Joe Ledger’s next upcoming novel, “Burn to Shine” which will debut on March 4, 2025. I thought it might be fun to chat with Jonathan about his leading man.
AF: What was your inspiration for Joe Ledger?
JM: Joe Ledger was born in a diner. I was sitting at the great Red Lion Diner in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania, eating eggs, drinking diner coffee and making notes for a nonfiction book I was writing, ZOMBIE CSU: The Forensics of the Living Dead. As often happens with novelists, characters suddenly started having a conversation in my head. At first I didn’t know who they were or what they were talking about, but it sounded interesting so I wrote it down. That conversation was a kind of job interview between a smartass Baltimore police detective and a mysterious guy who ran a science-based special ops team. I liked the characters and their potential so much, that when I got home I typed up that conversation, and then let the story flow from there to see where it was going to take me.
Joe Ledger is a functional basket case. As a teen he experienced some truly horrific personal trauma, and as a result his mind his fractured into three distinct personalities: the Modern Man (his idealistic and optimistic self), the Cop (his clinical, analytical, central personality), and the Warrior (the personification of his rage). Joe has managed to make peace with all three and they more or less work like an internal team.
Joe is hired because he is a unique individual. He is an expert in jujutsu, a former Army Ranger, and he has the rare quality of zero hesitation in a crisis situation. He is hired to lead a SpecOps team against terrorists who have a prion-based bioweapon that approximates a zombie plague. That story, PATIENT ZERO, was the novel that broke me away from straight horror and into the thriller genre.
AF: How is he like you?
JM: Joe and I have a lot in common. We both like coffee, the music of Tom Waits, Hawaiian shirts, smart women, and we’re both experts in jujutsu. We are both humanists –leaning away from party politics and in the direction of what’s actually best for people. We despise bullies and both of us have taken jobs where we put ourselves between the innocent and harm. I was a bodyguard for years, working in the entertainment industry; I was a bouncer in a club where women were frequently in danger of harassment or assault; and I taught self-defense to specialty groups for decades –women, girls, the elderly, the vision-impaired, LGBQT+, and the physically-challenged. Joe and I are also fans of snark, and we both have useful pop culture sensibilities. On the other hand, he is thinner and better looking.
AF: Are you ever going to retire Joe? Tell us how you would/will do it!
JM: I have no plans on retiring Joe. He appears, at different ages, in three series. The main Joe Ledger thrillers are the ‘main timeline’. He shows up in books 3 and 4 of the Dead of Night series, at around age 50, and deals with the zombie apocalypse; and in the YA series, Rot & Ruins, in books 3–7, as a mid-sixties fighter. Those two series are directly linked, and form an ‘alternate’ Ledger timeline. My version of the Multiverse.
For his main series, though, I will be writing #15 soon (The Alchemist), and have just pitched the next couple of books to my editor. So, no…I have no plans on ever stopping.
AF: How has his character evolved over the years?
JM: Joe has become wiser and more experienced. He has also received greater damage in physical and emotional ways, and that has caused him to occasionally lose himself in a fourth personality, The Darkness, which is a very dangerous place for him. But, Joe has also found love with Junie Flynn, made terrific friends among his colleagues, and has saved the world a number of times.
AF: Who is the ideal actor to play Joe and why?
JM: Given that Joe Ledger has just been optioned for a possible TV series, it would actually be impolitic for me to speculate on casting. However, I can tell you who I had in mind when I created him. Joe’s story was set in Baltimore because I admire the actor Thomas Jane (who is from that city). Tom played The Punisher, and I’ve also written Punisher comics. There’s also some of Ryan Reynolds snark from Blade: Trinity and Deadpool, and a bit of Matt Damon’s take on Jason Bourne.
AF: What can fans look forward to in the meantime?
JM: Apart from the 14 Ledger novels (counting March’s Burn to Shine), there are several collections of Ledger short stories (Secret Missions, The Missing Files, Special Ops, etc) and two anthologies co-edited with Bryan Thomas Schmidt where we asked some of our ‘friends in the industry’ to write Ledger shorts. Those friends include Heather Graham, Kevin J. Anderson, Scott Sigler, Peter Clines, Wayne Brady, Steve Alten, and many others.
Apart from that, I have been chunking out novels at the rate of about 3–4 per year. My latest series is NecroTek, which is deep-space futuristic cosmic horror; The Sleepers War, futuristic battle against alien invaders; Kagen the Damned –an epic fantasy trilogy that wraps in August with The Dragon in Winter; and others. I also have several short story collections out, or coming out soon, and they include Mystic: The Monk Addison Case Files, Midnight Lullabies: Unquiet Stories and Poems; and Empty Graves. I edit Weird Tales Magazine, and we’re putting out three issues per year; and I edit anthologies. The next anthology will be Shadows & Verse, in which I asked 90 of my creative friends to select public domain poems that deal with some aspect of ‘darkness’, and then to write commentary. That book will be published in October and 100% of all proceeds benefit scholarships for emerging creators.
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