Author’s stories resonate with prisoners

Growing up, author Charles Martin “always had a ball in his hand,” said his mother, Ray Martin. But in 1984, at age 15, he sat down and wrote a short story.

“Somehow, that exercise of thinking through a feeling and communicating it out my fingers was like opening a vent on a pressure cooker,” Martin said. He has published 14 novels and 1 nonfiction book, with a second set for release next year. His books have made the bestseller lists of The New York Times and USA Today. The 2017 adaptation of his book The Mountain Between Us, starring Kate Winslet and Idris Elba, grossed more than $60 million. His most recent novel, The Water Keeper, came out in May.

Martin weaves the humor and pain of day-to-day life into his characters, which strikes a chord with the many prison inmates who read his novels. In 2018, he visited the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Florida, where he faced about 100 hardened inmates.

“I’m looking out into the crowd of guys there, they look like right out of the movies that you see,” said Jason Watson, a friend who went with him. “Guys that just look scary.”

The chaplain at the high-security men’s prison had invited Martin at the prisoners’ request. Martin agreed on his usual two conditions: He would talk about Jesus, not his books, and he would bring some friends. He shared the gospel and then invited the inmates to receive prayer. Nearly all of the men lined up, Watson said.

While Martin’s books populate the shelves of Christian bookstores, his characters aren’t necessarily religious. “I’m focused on, ‘What is the story I’m trying to tell?’ and how to tell it in a way that is authentic and true and not cliché and doesn’t use a lot of Christian-ese,” Martin said. His ability to relate to hurting people has helped him achieve success in the secular publishing world, too.

“His hope is the authenticity and experience of the character might awaken something that has been dormant in some person’s life,” said his wife, Christy Martin. She encouraged him to publish his writing years ago when he had a successful career in the insurance business. A company offered him a vice president position with a six-figure salary, but he felt called to try publishing his manuscript. Some lean months and 86 rejection letters later, he finally sold the book, The Dead Don’t Dance, to publisher Thomas Nelson. It came out in 2004.

He said he wants his stories to show that love endures. “You can crush it, you can try and stab it, you can run over it with a truck,” he said. “But in the end love wins, and hope feeds us.”