"Asking me about how to succeed on Instagram is like asking a toddler how to fly a jet!"

Author Art Bell on letting a short story take on a life of its own, moving from TV into publishing, and his dark new thriller, WHAT SHE'S HIDING

Check out the collection of past Words With (Author) Friends, wherein I g-chat with an author and you get to read over my shoulder, and order Art’s new thriller, out now.

Me: Art, hi! Huge congrats on WHAT SHE'S HIDING!

Art: Thanks! My first novel. Crazy, right? I never thought I'd write one, but here we are.

Oh that's so interesting, I feel like most authors are like, "This has been inside of me my whole life."

Definitely not inside of me my whole life. I had a career in TV before I even started writing.

We’ll definitely get into that, but to start, can you share a little about WHAT SHE’S HIDING?

Thanks for having me, Andrea. Okay, here's what the book's about. It's a noir thriller set in modern Manhattan and narrated by Henry, a 36-year-old lawyer at a white shoe law firm. One day, his femme fatale ex-wife who walked out on him two years earlier, Leslie, drops into his office and says she needs a quarter million dollars immediately or she'll be killed, and that Henry's in danger, too.

Henry assumes she's lying and, despite still being in love with her, tells Leslie to leave. But when he gets home that night and finds his apartment ransacked, he realizes she might be telling the truth. Now he has to find her to save himself, but she's disappeared. Henry must find Leslie, figure out who's after them, and somehow get himself and his ex-wife out of danger.

You said you never thought you'd be writing thrillers—did you have the idea for this book and decide you had to write it? Or did you decide to write a novel and then start brainstorming?

I published a memoir, Constant Comedy: How I Started Comedy Central and Lost My Sense Of Humor, a few years ago, and then began writing short stories. The novel started as a short story, but I was having so much fun writing it I just kept going, not knowing whether it would be a long short story or a novel. I'm glad it became a novel.

I love that. What was the original inspiration for the short story?