David Tindell lives in northwest Wisconsin, where he dabbles in radio, trains in the martial arts and studies the warrior ethos. His White Vixen and Quest series have earned stellar reviews. With his wife Sue he travels the world, seeking out new places to feature in his next thriller. He blogs at www.davidtindellauthor.com. Connect with him at X at www.x.com/davidtindell1 and Facebook at www.facebook.com/DavidTindellAuthor.
10 Things You Might Not Know About David Tindell
- I was born in Germany, while my father was serving there in the US Army. My parents married in Platteville, Wis., just a few months after my mother graduated from high school. A week later, Dad shipped out. Mom worked as a telephone operator for six months to earn passage to Europe. Then, still not yet 19 years old, she took a train—alone—to New York, then a ship across the North Atlantic. When she came ashore in Bremerhaven, she knew exactly one person on the entire continent: her husband. You want to talk about courage? There you are.
- I’m a small-town Wisconsin guy. My father finished college after his time in uniform and became a teacher, then an administrator. We lived in towns as small as 100 people up to the suburbs of Milwaukee. Finally, we settled in Potosi, a little town on the Mississippi in southwest Wisconsin. Both sets of grandparents, along with lots of aunts, uncles and cousins, lived in the county. It was a great time and place in which to grow up, although of course I didn’t really appreciate it at the time. But I sure do now.
- My original choice of profession was radio broadcasting. I wanted to be a sports announcer for a major-college or pro team, like my idol Eddie Doucette, the original radio “voice” of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks. I got a degree in the field from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville and embarked on a 20-year radio career that eventually led me to Rice Lake, up in northwest Wisconsin. I never did become the next voice of the Bucks or Badgers, but in Rice Lake I met the love of my life, and I wouldn’t trade that for a dozen Rose Bowls.
- I first started writing in middle school, or what we called “junior high” at the time. I was inspired by a great English teacher, Mrs. Millman, who introduced me to classic literature. Later on, in high school, I was taught how to write by another English teacher, Mrs. Leonard. Our geography teacher, Mr. Peake, opened my eyes to the world beyond southwest Wisconsin. In those days, the only people who went overseas were rich people, unless you were in the service. Little did I know that I would wind up traveling all over the world, but it all started in a little Wisconsin town on the Mississippi.
- Believe it or not, radio actually prepares you for a writing career. You have to be on time. You have to be organized. You have to push through the day even when you don’t feel up to it. These things can be applied to any profession, but especially writing, because you have the ability to make your own schedule, for the most part. One of the first things they taught us at UWP was that every time you open the microphone, you had better be “on.” Your listeners are depending on you that morning. They want to hear the latest news, who won last night’s game, what the weather will be like today. They want to hear a good song or a joke. It’s sort of the same in writing. Every time you sit down at the keyboard, you’d better be ready to give it everything you’ve got. Yes, you’ll get some do-overs that you don’t necessarily get in live radio, but the concept is the same. Your readers will want a good story, compelling characters, clean formatting, an attractive cover, and a bare minimum of typos or other mistakes. My radio career enabled me to cover three national championship small-college football games and more than a dozen state high school championship games in four sports. When you go on the air for one of those games, the chips are down, and you have to deliver. When you write that novel, you have to deliver, too.
- I mentioned the “love of my life.” That would be Sue, my wife. She’s from a small Wisconsin town, too: Chetek, not too far from where we live now, up here in the northwest. I met her on my first day on the air at WJMC/Rice Lake. One of the things I had to do on my show was call this gal at the travel agency and talk travel. Well, what the hell did I know about travel? I’d never been anywhere. My boss suggested that I go to her office and meet her in person. A few days later, I did. Four and a half years after that, we were married.
- We have two grown kids, Kimberly and James. When Jim was seven, we started him in martial arts training. I’d been bullied at that age and I didn’t want Jim to experience that. He became a junior black belt in taekwondo at 12 and a first-degree black belt at 15. He still trains in the art and this summer will be making his second trip to South Korea for advanced training. When he was 13, I decided to give it a try. I was in my early 40s at the time. It was very hard, but one of the Five Tenets of Taekwondo is “perseverance,” so I hung in there and got my black belt. Several years later, I had transitioned over to karate and my sensei invited me to join a new class he was starting in Okinawan weaponry. I did, and Sue signed on, too. Four years later, we both received our first-degree black belts in ryukudo kobojutsu, after a physically and mentally rigorous 4-hour-long test at our master instructor’s dojo near Detroit.
- My martial arts training has really informed a lot of my writing. When I’m sitting down to write a fight scene, I already have it blocked out in my head. Usually, I’ll have my sensei walk me through it on the mat. Then I can write it, but usually I’ll do it from the other guy’s perspective. Action writers are supposed to “show, not tell.” Rather than give a very technical move-by-move description of the fight (which would be the “tell”), I describe it from the antagonist’s point of view (the “show”). That’s something I picked up from one brief but very effective scene in my favorite Tom Clancy novel, Without Remorse.
- People often ask me, which of my novels is my favorite? Well, that’s like asking which of your children is your favorite, but in this case, I’d have to give a slight nod to The Heights of Valor. That’s a stand-alone novel, loosely grouped in my “Men of Honor” series, about a young Wisconsin college student in 1898 who quits school to join the Rough Riders and fight for Theodore Roosevelt in Cuba. To get his father’s blessing, he agrees to keep a diary of his experiences and pass it along to future generations in the family, so they’ll know what it means to make this kind of sacrifice. Over 100 years later, it comes into possession of his great-great-grandson, who is also quitting school early to join the Army. So it’s a parallel story, told in the first person both ways. I had a fun time writing it because TR is one of my favorite historical characters, and he figures prominently—and accurately, I’m pretty sure—in the 1898 section of the book. I’ll tell you what, we could use a guy like him today.
- I’ve now written four novels in the White Vixen series and three in the Quest series. My next novel will be one of the “Men of Honor” group. It’s called The Dance We Shared. It’s about a middle-aged guy who lost the love of his life 20 years earlier because of a stupid mistake he made. He’s never gotten over it, but he’s tried to build a good, if lonely, life for himself. One day, he finds an envelope sent to his office address that he’d misplaced. Opening it, he finds a card, on which is printed a phone number, and in his lost love’s distinctive handwriting, three words: “Please help me.” The problem: the card was sent five years ago, just before she vanished. No foul play was ever suspected, she just ended her marriage, quit her job and dropped off the grid. Now, he has a chance to right the wrong he did two decades ago, but is he too late?
Title: The Silver Falcon
Author: David Tindell
Publication Date: March 1, 2025
Pages: 292
Genre: Thriller
October 1990. A mysterious object is seen floating eastward over Alaska, resembling a silver falcon of Tlingit legend. Air Force radar can't see it. Fighter jets scramble to intercept the object, but all the pilots can do is watch it cruise across the border into Canada, where it comes down in a remote part of the Yukon Territory.
USAF special operator Jo Ann Geary, the White Vixen, is dispatched to Dawson City to assist Canadian Rangers in the search for the object in the Cloudy Range of Tombstone Territorial Park. They've barely started their hike when all radio comms with Ottawa and Washington go dead, but not before Jo is told about an unidentified aircraft dropping paratroopers north of the target's last known location. Who are they, and why do they want the Falcon?
As the weather deteriorates, Jo and the Canadian intelligence agent in command of the mission worry that the Rangers will be outnumbered and outgunned if they encounter the airborne troops, who are almost certainly Russians. At the White House, the president is told that the Falcon's technology, whether man-made or extra-terrestrial, could be so important that the invaders might possibly call in a nuclear strike from an offshore submarine if they're unable to keep the Falcon away from the allied force.
Thrust into the midst of indigenous Rangers who don't really trust her, unable to get help from Washington or Ottawa, and facing an enemy force that could be desperate enough to risk war, the Vixen must call on all her skills to survive and prevent the Falcon, whatever it is, from touching off a nuclear cataclysm.
The Silver Falcon is available at Amazon at https://bit.ly/TheSilverFalconEbook.
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