New York Times bestselling author, Academy Award winning screenwriter of The Imitation Game and filmmaker, Graham Moore, will be in Sylvania Thursday, May 30 at Lourdes’ Franciscan Center for a special author event.
Moore will be talking about his latest book, The Wealth of Shadows. A masterful storyteller, his latest novel is an impeccably written and researched historical thriller based on a true story about an ordinary man who joins a secret mission to bring down the Nazi war machine by crashing their economy.
Born in Chicago, Moore received a BA in religious history from Columbia University. After college he started his writing career with his friend, Ben Epstein, who was attending Tisch School of the Arts in New York City. His first novel, The Sherlockian, is an award-winning book and New York Times best seller.
Moore recently spoke with Toledo City Paper about his new book, his creative process and what he loves about going on the road.
Moore explains that his love of history came from his grandfather, “When I was seven my parents split up and my mother’s father became a huge part of my life. He was a doctor who had a small family practice in New Jersey and he used to take my brother and I on these trips to meet scientists. I remember very vividly him taking us on a trip to Bell Labs where we met scientists doing a project on acoustics and computing. I was 11 years old, but my grandfather always treated and talked to me like an adult. He was a voracious reader and a lover of science and history and he got me into it as well. It was a shame that he didn’t get to see my first book come out (The Sherlockian) because I know he would’ve been so excited by the kind of material I’d chosen to write about.”
His New Novel, The Wealth of Shadows
Where did the inspiration for The Wealth of Shadows come from? Moore goes back to the summer of 2020.
“In those first very scary, destabilizing months of the pandemic, I had gone to a house in Michigan with my family,” Moore said. “My wife was pregnant with our first son. We were piled into this house in the woods for a few months and I felt sort of useless, so I started digging into the list of topics I always wanted to know more about. One of those topics was the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944 which is where the book ends. It was very fascinating and strange to me that at the end of the Second World War, when allied troops were storming the beaches of Normandy, the global economic system was in tatters — it essentially didn’t exist anymore.”
Moore explains that delegates from every country in the world were sent to a hotel in New Hampshire to hash out what the future of the world economy should look like. While reading about that, Moore started reading about the “economic warfare of World War II.”
“As I started reading on what seemed to be this ‘secret history’ of the war — a war of currencies and finance between the United States and Nazi Germany — there was a name that kept popping up in all the records I was looking at — Ansel Luxford,” Moore said. “I didn’t think anyone had heard of him. No obituaries were published after he died, but he kept turning up at all these fascinating events during the war on behalf of the National Treasury Department.”
Who was Ansel Luxford?
Moore discovered that Luxford was a tax attorney from St. Paul Minnesota who joined a top-secret treasury program in 1939, which was given a mission to crash the Nazi economy. After months of work, Moore was able to track down Luxford’s three children.
“I called them and told them who I was, and that I wanted to write a novel about their father,” Moore said. “I remember his daughter asking why I’d want to write a book about someone no one has ever heard of, and I said that’s exactly why I wanted to write a book about him.”
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The hardest to track down was his youngest son, Ansel Jr. Moore found him living off the grid as a sheep herder in rural Montana.
When they finally spoke on the phone, Ansel Jr. said, “I’ve been waiting my entire life for this phone call. Is this about how my father was secretly a spy?” To which Moore replied, “Well, it is now.” The story of Luxford was more fascinating than he could have ever imagined, assures Moore.
On The Road — An Evening with Graham Moore
Moore says his favorite thing about doing book events is getting to have conversations with people who’ve read and thought about the work he’s done (Moore also wrote and directed The Outfit which was well received by critics in 2022).
“As someone who’s been lucky enough to bounce back and forth between film and novels, I can sit in the back of a movie theater and hear when people laugh, cry or get nervous,” Moore said. “I can be an active part of an audience’s experience consuming the material. One of the lonely things about writing a novel is that I don’t get to do that. When I do book events, people ask questions and find connections in the books I’ve never thought of. That’s what I get excited about. I try not to have an event be me just giving a talk. I’m much more excited about getting to talk with an audience and getting to interact with them.”
A VIP reception is planned for 6 pm and Moore will speak at 7 pm followed by a Q&A and book signing.
Lourdes University, Finch & Fern Book Co. and Starlite Theater Group are partnering to bring this first of many more author events to Sylvania. Tickets include a signed copy of The Wealth of Shadows and are available online at starlitetheatergroup.org or at Finch & Fern.
