Tom Grace '84, '86 M Arch
Architect makes Quantum leap into fiction

By Kurt Anthony Krug

Thriller-author Tom Grace finds it easy to make the transition between architect and novelist. "Both disciplines work very well together," says Grace, 38, author of Spyder Web and Quantum. First of all, he does both for fun. Second, architects are project oriented, and the habit of making well-defined and orderly progress over a given time span helps him schedule and construct his novels.

Grace got the idea for industrial-spy thrillers while working on architectural projects like the Human Applications Lab in U-M Hospitals' Clinical Research Center. Photo by Martin Vloet, U-M Photo Services

A native of Detroit, Grace received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture from Michigan in 1984 and 1986. During his career as an architect, he worked for the U-M Medical Center, designing the world's first gene therapy lab there. He also wrote computer-assisted drafting (CAD) software, acted as the master planner for the renewal of London's wharves and consulted on the National Corvette Museum in Louisville.

"My training as an architect is a problem-solving process and in order to design something—a gene therapy lab—you have to understand what the scientists are going to do in the lab. You have to be able to choreograph movement," Grace explains. "I do storyboards for my scenes, design the rooms my characters are in to make sure I can move them around because there's a lot of physical action. My books are very visual, so you have to understand the movement of people. Designing buildings is like designing scenes and I work the process out."

In fact, designing high-tech research facilities is where Grace learned from his clients that intellectual property must be guarded from industrial spies. While designing CAD software for a computer company in Chicago, Grace learned the building directly across the street was his client's chief competitor. Taking protective measures, a special black room was designed with special cards to grant the authorized personnel access, and all the windows were painted black so nobody could take photographs any of the CAD software or the computers. It was this knowledge that inspired his first novel, Spyder Web, which takes place on the U-M campus. He self-published it in 1997, but Warner Books picked it up in 1999. Reviewers praised him for being "a storyteller along the lines of Tom Clancy, Ken Follett and Clive Cussler."

Heroic alter-ego
As a "great nexus for technology and development of new technology," Grace says, the University makes a great setting for his specialty of high-tech thrillers. He created a hero, Nolan Kilkenny, ex-Navy SEAL turned computer specialist, and placed him in a "commercial and economic landscape because that's where I have experience." Kilkenny's love interest, Kelsey, is modeled after Kathy Grace, his wife of 15 years. (They live in Dexter, Michigan, with their three children, Marcia, 10; Kathleen, 8; and Keely, 2, with a fourth expected this summer.)

It took Grace six years and eight drafts to finish Spyder Web. He self-published 25,000 copies; within five weeks he'd sold 12,500 copies, and in June 1997, while attending the Book Expo America in Chicago, he caught the attention of a Warner Books agent. In the week that followed, he signed a $1 million dollar contract with Warner Books for a three-book cyber-thriller series, which includes a revised Spyder Web and last year's Quantum. He was in Greenland this spring researching the last of the trilogy.

Grace was inspired by two actual events while writing Quantum. In 1992, he worked on a connector between two physics buildings. The construction site was located on the Diag, and during excavation, workers dug up human remains. Tests established that the body parts were those of medical cadavers buried during the late 19th century in the cellar of a medical school building demolished in 1902.

Mystery loves coincidence
"I found this situation so intriguing that I knew I could wrap a story around it," the author explains. "There's always a certain level of coincidence inside a mystery novel because you have to find ways to pull things together."

Photo courtesy Tom Grace

Rosowski

The second event that inspired the author was very personal. Grace dedicated Quantum and based a character on his friend and fellow U-M alumnus, John Rosowski, who died in 1984. Grace met Rosowski in the fall of 1977 at Catholic Central High School in Detroit. "He's one of the brightest guys I ever knew," Grace says. "This is the kind of guy I expected to be running IBM."

After graduating from U-M in 1984 with an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, Rosowski moved to New York and, fittingly enough, started working for IBM, while Grace went on to U-M's College of Architecture and Urban Planning. On the night of Sept. 28, 1984, Grace recalls dreaming about Rosowski. In it, his friend told him his life was going very well and no one should worry about him. Grace soon learned, however, that on that very night John Rosowski died, the victim of a drunk driving accident.

A dream; a funeral
"I could not figure out for the life of me—I hadn't seen him in several months—as to why I'd suddenly have a dream about him," Grace says. "A week later I get a call that John had been buried the day before. I missed his funeral; I didn't know he had died. That always bothered me. It was a tragic waste that someone with that kind of potential was just wiped out by a 19-year old drunk. I always wondered what the world has lost."

When plotting Quantum, Grace came up with the idea of a lost genius. He wondered what would have happened to Albert Einstein had he died before making his great discoveries. Would it take 100 years before humankind learned that out E = mc² if Einstein hadn't worked it out when he did? Working with that concept, Grace created Dr. Johann Wolff, a German émigré whose work was a step beyond Einstein's.

Wolff's character and his link with Nazi scientists resonate throughout the novel, and as Grace wrote it, he looked forward to the day he would send a copy to Rosowski's parents, Bob and Kathy.

In January 2000, Grace was asked to help organize his 20th high school reunion, which was slated for that August, around the time of Quantum's release. As part of the festivities, Grace planned to sell copies of the novel at the reunion and donate the proceeds to the John Rosowski Memorial Scholarship fund created by John's parents. The alumni association took this idea one step further and offered the novel to all its alumni and to the families of current Catholic Central students.

Grace called Bob Rosowski and asked if he and his wife would meet him for dinner to discuss his plans for their son's memorial. When he presented them with a copy of Quantum, "Kathy Rosowski started shaking," Grace recalls. "They opened it, saw the dedication, and just lost it. They were floored."

Kathy Rosowski read the release date of Quantum and told the author how John had forgot her birthday a month before he died. Seeing the release date brought everything full circle for her: Quantum was to be released on her birthday, Aug. 15.

Grace gave the coincidence a novelist's reading: "It turns out, as fate would have it, 16 years later, she's receiving a birthday gift from her lost son."

Kurt Anthony Krug is a free-lancer who lives in Dearborn, Michigan.