EXETER — Brendan DuBois said he always knew he wanted to be a writer. He can’t explain why, he said, he just knew.

“From 12 through college, I wrote very bad short stories on an old manual typewriter – I was a big science fiction fan back then – and mailed them,” he recalled. “I got lots of rejections.”

Decades later, DuBois is a New York Times bestselling author and writer of 26 novels, including “The First Lady” and “Cornwalls Are Gone.” His works have appeared in Playboy, The Strand Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. 

He has also partnered with his mentor and “the most published author in the world,” James Patterson, on several books, including “The Summer House,” “Blowback” and the recently released “Cross Down.”

DuBois is best known for his 11 – soon to be 12 – Lewis Cole mystery book series, which is finding a new audience as of late. 

DuBois recently signed with a new publisher, Severn River Publishing, to publish his latest Lewis Cole novel. As part of the deal, the publisher secured the rights to the previous ones.

“They’ve been reissuing every single one of the novels,” he said.

This February, DuBois will celebrate the re-release of his 9th Lewis Cole novel “Blood Foam,” which was originally published in 2015.

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DuBois on writing the Lewis Cole mysteries

The Lewis Cole series features protagonist Lewis Cole, a retired Department of Defense research analyst and a magazine columnist, who finds himself in the middle of some of the most dangerous cases. 

The first of the Lewis Cole novels, “Dead Sand,” was released in 1994, and is DuBois’ favorite.

“The first one is always (special),” he said.

DuBois said writing fiction, especially mystery and thriller novels, is his calling.

“The first thing I do is (ask) where it’s going to take place,” he said, referring to the creation of the character Lewis Cole in 1994. “LA, Chicago, Boston, New York, they all got detectives, do they need another one? So, I thought, ‘Oh, the New Hampshire Seacoast. No one’s ever written about the New Hampshire Seacoast. It’s all mine.’”

When it comes to inspiration, DuBois said the possibilities are endless.

 All good fiction novels have conflicts, he said, and there’s a lot of areas of conflict on the Seacoast.

“You got a nuclear power plant in one area or shipyard and nuclear submarines in the other,” he explained. “There’s great wealth along here, there’s so many beach houses. Going deeper there’s great poverty, there’s hundreds of thousands of tourists that come in the summertime.”

DuBois said a lot of his ideas came from real-life events. From missing uranium inside a German boat after World War II (reported by the Boston Globe) to a Viking coin found in Maine (reported by the New York Times), “sometimes stories just trickled,” he said.

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DuBois hopes Lewis Cole novels find new audience 

DuBois hopes the re-release of the series, including “Blood Foam” in February, will attract new readers and new fans. 

In “Blood Foam,” Lewis Cole returns to his fire-damaged home on Tyler Beach, only to be drawn into a desperate search for the missing fiancé of a close friend, a former lover, and journalist Paula Quinn. 

While published shy of a decade ago, he hopes the novel will still get “the readers going.”

DuBois said most of the earlier novels were written pre-Internet era, which was critical to the storyline. 

He said he never intended to re-write any of the earlier novels as part of the re-release because he would have had to rewrite the entire plot.

“Why rewrite?” he said. “It just adds complications. Back in the day if a private investigator was going somewhere, he had to find a payphone… it’s part of the plot.”

DuBois said the books still hold up because of the characters. 

“People still read the old fiction from the ’40s, ’50s and last century, it all comes down to the character story,” he said. “People still read ‘The Maltese Falcon’ and ’40s PI novels or old science fiction novels… it’s the characters and the plot (that gets them going).”

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Latest Lewis Cole novel to be released next year 

DuBois said so far books one through five of the Lewis Cole series have been reissued.

He said all 11 books will be out by next year, before the release of the 12th book “Terminal Surf.”

In “Terminal Surf,” Lewis Cole stumbles upon a harrowing scene – a drowned migrant woman and her child – and he is thrust into the middle of a human smuggling operation on the coasts of New Hampshire and Maine. Appalled by the discovery, Lewis “navigates the choppy waters of local politics, high emotions, and escalating violence.”

DuBois said he wrote the 12th novel during the COVID-19 pandemic when “publishers were cutting back.”  

He said he was a “literary orphan” (a writer without a publisher) during that time and could not publish his work.

Now, his latest Lewis Cole novel is hitting the shelves next year, and his previous ones are enjoying new life.

“I just hope I get a new generation of readers,” said DuBois.