Author Bio
While his novel may not exactly be a high-tech thriller, David Carnoy does hail from a high-tech background. He currently serves as Executive Editor at CBS Interactive, where he oversees reviews of home and entertainment products at CNET.com and writes the column Fully Equipped. Before joining CNET in 2000, he was an editorial director at a dotcom start-up and kicked off his career working at sports and business publications.
Knife Music is the story of a doctor who is accused of sleeping with his patient, a 16-year-old girl who has committed suicide. In researching the novel, Carnoy spent a lot of time talking with doctors and trailed a surgeon at a hospital in Northern California. He also put in some time at trauma centers in Santa Clara and New York City.
One of the things he discovered while wearing scrubs is that some doctors don’t really like being doctors—or at least, they have major misgivings about the profession. Many doctors expressed problems with how today’s medical system is run and how poorly they feel they’re treated by administrators and patients. Of course, leaving a profession that requires so many years of training isn’t an easy decision, particularly if you’re good at what you do.
In his visits to hospitals, Carnoy also noticed the sometimes tenuous relationship between doctors and patients--especially between male doctors and female patients. The seemingly omnipotent physician can feel vulnerable to a complaint or lawsuit that will lead to his dismissal, and potentially end his career.
All this is part of the backdrop of Knife Music, which takes place in and around the idyllic suburb of Palo Alto, where Carnoy grew up as a Stanford fac brat. His father, Martin, still teaches in the School of Education and he and David co-authored Fathers of a Certain Age (Faber&Faber, 1995), a book about, "The joys and problems of middle-aged fatherhood.”
David gives some of the credit for his interest in mystery/thriller writing to a year he spent in France his freshman year in high school. “I was in a French public school and didn’t speak French,” he says. “The only class I really enjoyed was English because it was so remedial I didn’t have to participate. There was this cupboard in the back of the room that had English-language books in it. I was supposed to pick out a book and sit in the back of the class and read. Many of the books weren’t all that good but for some reason they had the entire works of Agatha Christie. So, that’s what I started reading. All of them.”
The question he gets asked most often is what does “knife music” mean and where did it come from? The short answer is from a magazine article that he read one day while he was home on a visit. It was from a Stanford medical publication and the article was about how surgeons listened to music while they operated. The headline for the article had the phrase “knife music” in it. He thought it would make a good title for a novel.
Today, Carnoy resides in New York City with his wife and children. He went to college at Wesleyan University and has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. He’s interviewed regularly on TV as a tech expert, appearing on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Good Day New York, NY1, BusinessWeek TV, Reuters TV, and other media outlets.
