After writing numerous thrillers, American author Joseph Finder decided to learn how to shoot a gun. He occasionally goes to a firing range near his home in Boston and shoots. He has a wife and a 12-year-old daughter, is a graduate of Harvard and Yale, and he grew up in an intellectual home. One might even call him a man of letters. But Finder had to know how it feels to shoot the gun. His motive is, of course, literary: As a crime writer, he wanted to lend his work the weight of authenticity. "Writing a thriller without knowing how to shoot a gun is like a virgin writing a sex scene," he says, in a telephone interview.

Isn't there a terrible contradiction between literature and guns?

Finder: "I don't know. That's not what Hemingway thought," he laughs. "I don't think there is. But in my part of the U.S., in Boston, it's very unusual to find someone who knows how to use a gun, or who owns a gun, like I do. I got some criticism, but I'm writing books in which guns make an appearance and I've never fired one. It's sort of like a virgin writing a sex scene. It just seemed wrong. It seemed like I really should learn. And that was true. Once I learned, I described guns in a different way. I have a different feeling about them. It's more realistic, less 'cartoony.' I am more scared of guns now. Having fired them is having seen what they can do. It really helped make my fiction feel more real."

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Despite that, Finder notes that it is possible to write thrillers without guns, "Yes - absolutely. In fact, in my novel 'Paranoia' there is no blood whatsoever. I wrote that one to see whether I could not have anyone killed - not have any bloodshed. It worked just fine. The fear and the tension do not depend on anyone being killed. It's not necessary."

Too boring

Finder, age 47, was born to a New York, Jewish family. In 1975, while he was in high school, he visited Israel and spent a few months at Kibbutz Tel Yosef. He even spoke a bit of Hebrew. (He studied in a Jewish high school and is still connected to the Boston Jewish community.)

As a child, he traveled with his family in conjunction with his father's work for the American government. They lived in Afghanistan and the Philippines for extended periods. Finder completed his bachelor's degree in Russian Studies at Yale and later completed a master's degree at the Harvard Russian Research Center. He could have easily joined the world of American surveillance and intelligence, but he decided it was too boring. He set aside three years to see if he could earn a living from writing. Mission accomplished.

When he was 24, he published the non-fictional book, "Red Carpet: The Connection between the Kremlin and America's Most Powerful Businessmen." He quickly realized he could reveal more in fictional literature than in non-fictional commentary or analysis, because of legal issues. His first thriller, "The Moscow Club," was published in 1991. After that, he published "Extraordinary Powers," which was adapted for screen in the movie starring Morgan Freeman. Two of his books, "Paranoia," and "Company Man," were published in Hebrew, by Yedioth Ahronoth, and the same publisher will soon release, "Killer Instinct."

Finder is a talented and experienced thriller writer. "I'm writing entertainment, but I like it to reflect the world we live in. I like to write about issues that are of concern. It makes the entertainment feel more relevant. When I read a book, I like to get something out of it - even when it's pure entertainment, I want to learn something, to visit a world I've never visited, to think about things. I like it to have some substance to it. That's why I try, in my thrillers, to touch upon things that people care about."

As a result, the real star of his books is reality - at least, American reality. CEOs and major corporations, the war in Iraq, terror attacks - everything that contributes to the current American spirit. "Killer Instinct" is also a distillation of that reality. The plot follows the rooky employee of a fictional corporation - Entronics - which manufactures plasma screens. New employee, Kurt Semko, was dishonorably discharged from U.S. Special Forces in Iraq. The book's main character, Jason Steadman, a leading sales executive with big ambitions, coincidentally befriends Semko and brings him to work for the electronics giant. The story that begins in friendship is gradually transformed into treacherous rivalry.

Those who look for them will find no lack of barbs aimed at contemporary American society: insatiable, giant corporations acquired by Japanese companies; aggressive, manipulative marketing ploys; corrupt bosses; capitalist rules of the game that trample workers, flanked by the war in Iraq and the moral proportions of one discharged, American soldier.

The book's character hangs posters that portray power, control and survival in his large, new office as an emblem of "the business world, the duel, and all that."

The idea for the book was born as a result of Finder's frequent visits to the offices of CEOs of major corporations, mainly for the sake of gathering information for his books. "I always interview a lot of corporate leaders and go to offices of CEOs and things like that. You always see a bookshelf behind the CEO, and there are titles like 'Business is War.' It always seemed so stupid to me. What do these guys really know about war? And what would happen if, in a sense, this came to life - if someone just took it literally? So I thought of a situation in which someone who had really been a soldier and is also very ruthless, goes into a corporation and finds that all of these tough guys are not so tough."

Finder always conducts indepth research before writing a book. Before writing "Killer Instinct," he interviewed a number of Special Forces soldiers. "That was difficult because people in the Special Forces tend to be very secretive, and they're actually not allowed to reveal very much about their training or their operation. It took me a few months until I found a group of recently retired Special Forces people in Boston. I contacted them and they were a little worried, but one of them agreed to have lunch with me and see if I seem legit. We had lunch and we talked, then he turned me on to a friend of his and I began to talk to other people that way."

Never-ending war

What are your readers supposed to make of a character like Kurt Semko, who considers life to be a never-ending, cruel war?

"I'm making an ironic point about the pseudo-machoism of the corporate world. It's obviously entertainment. But the part of it that appeals to me intellectually is making the point that there is so much macho posing in the corporate world, and it's false. Semko's character seems to be very effective but ultimately self-destructive. He is the hollowness of the corporate macho's ethos. I don't think good businessmen have to be like that at all - even though so many self-help books seem to encourage you to be ruthless. I don't think ruthlessness is necessary, required, or even effective in the business world."

Kurt Semko appears to represent the violent, militant aspect of the U.S, a point Finder confirms. "Yes. It's something that you see periodically after September 11. There was this real blood lust. We're so different culturally from Israel. We're not constantly surrounded by violence, the necessity to live. We live in a very sheltered, comfortable way. And that encourages some people who don't know the first thing about war to act in a very martial way, a kind of posing, of swagger - very George W. Bush."

Finder believes the war in Iraq is a terrible mistake. "For the record, I actually wrote about that very early on," he says. "I have good sources in the American intelligence community, especially in the CIA, and, before we went to war in Iraq, my sources were telling me that there was no intelligence that supported the war. There was no link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaida, and that Iraq doesn't have weapons of mass destruction. I also was quite certain that it would just cause us more trouble than it was worth. It would not accomplish anything near what people in the White House thought it would. And I am really ashamed of the way the American public and American politicians caved in so easily to the war.

"I'm not a pacifist. I was very hard-line during the cold war. I'm not opposed to war. But a war like this is a really damaging thing to a country like ours."

Out of control

Finder's book is also critical of the runaway capitalism that America spawns. In one scene, he writes of the human victims the Aztecs sacrificed to the gods, an apparent metaphor for the American economy.

"In a sense, it's out of control. That's why I create these metaphors. The corporate world has really taken over our culture around the world. It's not just the U.S., Germany, and France. It really influences the way people talk, the way they think and what they buy. It is where most people spend most of their waking hours - companies or corporations. It's amazing how few novels are set in this world. I think most writers don't perceive themselves as qualified to write about it. They don't know anything about this world. Writers don't work in corporations. They don't have jobs like that."

So you decided to write about that world, but from a critical perspective?

"I don't have an ideological slant. But I do, at the same time, like to make social observations. I'm not anti-business or anti-corporate. But I do think that corporations create conformity and they can do bad things to the human psyche. I am at heart a business person - so I have nothing against capitalism. And I have plenty of friends who work in corporations - very interesting and creative corporations that I visited and thought to myself I'd like to work in a place like that. But, at the same time, I wonder if I could. The Gordy character is like every bad boss you ever had, and I had bosses like that in Harvard. And the politics and the colleagues - it's all there. If you do it with a light touch you can be entertaining but also make a point."

Finder doesn't stop at writing. He also founded the International Association of Crime Writers. "I think the crime writing genre developed to a great extent after the Cold War," he says. "During the '50s, '60s and '70s, crime writing was very focused on the tension between the United States and the Soviet bloc. Fortunately, it has grown beyond that and now there are many literary novels that adopt the technique of thrillers. It may be connected with the popularity of mass entertainment like television and movies. So many of us are influenced by the movies and drama that we see that we want our literature to also not be so slow. I think 19th century literature would not be published today. It is just so slow."

In your view, is there a connection between the flourishing of thriller literature in the West and the clash of world civilizations, often portrayed as a struggle between good and evil?

"Literature is certainly a good way to test two different civilizations, two different moral perceptions. We are still waiting for intelligent writers to pick up the gauntlet. Thrillers will ultimately deal with that as well. But we are not there yet. I know a few writers who, after September 11, wrote novels that dealt with Islamic terror and their books were rejected by publishers, because the sense was that it was still too soon. There was even an argument regarding the poster for Oliver Stone's movie, "World Trade Center," because many people did not want to see the images of the World Trade Center again. Basically, we have not yet distanced ourselves enough from those events to that people would want to experience them again."