Mystery novelist Jack Erickson’s winding career as a writer makes for an excellent story arc.

ONE THING TENDS TO LEAD TO ANOTHER – in fiction and in real life. And this is more or less the process by which Jack Erickson the defense intelligence officer (and then, and this is not a completely comprehensive list: Capitol Hill speechwriter, freelance book reviewer, trade association editor, substitute teacher and financial adviser) became a mystery novel writer. One thing led to another (and another, and another) and now Erickson is here – living in Monterey, four books into his Milan Thriller series. Much like the backstory for any good fictional character, it has been a journey. And similar to a compelling main character, Erickson has some qualities that have served him well through this journey: He’s curious, willing to put himself out there, and knows a good idea when he sees one.

Erickson’s most recent book, The Lonely Assassin (the aforementioned fourth book in the Milan Thriller series) is the story of a Russian assassin sent to northern Italy with the mission to poison a rogue banker. The Italian General Investigations and Special Operations Division (the country’s anti-terrorism police who are, in many ways, the Milan series’ throughline characters) must find the assassin. The story winds from Russia to Switzerland to Italy with vivid ease, drawing on Erickson’s knowledge of Russian culture (he did a language exchange at Leningrad State University in 1972) and his love of all things Italian (we’ll get there).

But Erickson did not begin his writing career as a mystery/thriller writer. After grad school, Erickson got a job at the Defense Intelligence Agency is Washington, D.C. “It was kind of boring,” he says.

Searching for things to enrich his life, Erickson found a book about the KGB, the Soviet security agency, at the DIA library. He read it, and was blown away. “So, I wrote a book review and sent it to the [now-defunct] Washington Star,” he recounts. “The week after it was published I got a check for $25. And it was like – ‘you get paid to write!?’ That’s how naive I was.”

NEXT, IN THE LATE 1980S AND EARLY ’90S Erickson wrote, and self-published, several books on the then-burgeoning American craft beer scene. It came about in a similarly happenstance fashion.

One day in the mid-’80s, Erickson noticed an ad in the Washington Post: fly roundtrip to London for $386. A deal. He and his then-girlfriend spent weeks driving around England, visiting pubs and learning about the “free houses” that brew their own beer. Erickson learned that a similar craft beer brewing revival was happening in the U.S., and on return he wrote a story about it that appeared (he still recalls proudly) on the front page of the Sunday Post food section.

Realizing he had enough information for a book, Erickson went to the library and found a guide to self publishing. “I read it three times over the course of a year. Highlighted it, noted it, sketched out this, sketched out that,” he says. “And at the end of the year I thought ‘I could do this, I could become a publisher.’” He founded Red Brick Press, and its first book, Star Spangled Beer: A Guide to America’s New Microbreweries and Brewpubs, was published in 1987.

In general, Erickson has maintained other jobs while writing books and short stories on the side. Red Brick Press is more or less a break-even business, he says – making enough in book sales to pay an editor, a cover designer, someone to format the text as an e-book. Later in his career (he was already 55 years old) Erickson made a pivot and became a financial adviser at Smith Barney (now Morgan Stanley Wealth Management) in Burlingame, California. It was on retirement from this job that Erickson’s career as a mystery novelist really began.

ERICKSON IS WHAT HE CALLS A “PANTSER” – a writer who flies by the seat of his or her pants rather than by following a detailed outline. He rarely knows at the beginning, or even along the way, exactly how his book will end.

That said, Erickson also possesses a great attention to detail, journalist-like in his pursuit of understanding how things really work. When he came up with an idea for a book while in the Milan train station in 2011 during a year-long, post-retirement sabbatical (there’s a WordPress blog all about it), he quickly put an ad in a local paper: American author seeks Italian research assistant.

Elena Ciampella, who he hired simply because he liked her emailed reply, learned the book was about a woman taken hostage by terrorists and was able to set up a meeting with the Italian counterterrorism police at DIGOS (a meeting Erickson can still describe in great detail).

Erickson was off to the races – DIGOS officers play a major role in Thirteen Days In Milan (the first book in the Milan Thriller series, published in 2014) and the books that have followed. Since 2012, Erickson has made annual trips to Italy to research elements of and locations in his books, and held annual meetings with DIGOS – garnering high-level access to the potential daily realities and inner workings of his characters that he does not take for granted.

“So that’s why I go back to Italy every year,” Erickson says. “I’ve got a lot of friends there now.”

It’s a good fit because Erickson is – to put it lightly – an Italophile. If he’s not writing (or traveling), you can probably find him in his Monterey kitchen cooking ragu, marinara and pesto, or tending his backyard tomatoes and basil, or reading cookbooks – “they’re just so much fun to read.”

Might these be the ingredients of a next focus? “I’m just really curious, I hate to be bored,” Erickson says.

MEET THE MAN BEHIND THE STORIES and hear about his writing journey firsthand: Jack Erickson holds an author talk at River House Books in the Carmel Crossroads at 1pm on Sunday, Nov. 6.