The Big Idea: Chris Gerrib

Bank robbers have always made for exciting characters, and author Chris Gerrib got inspired by a real life robbery while working at a bank. Hop in your getaway car for a drive through the Big Idea for The Third Person in the Room. CHRIS GERRIB: “They were alive when I left them.” That’s the first line of my new book The Third Person in the Room, and figuring out what happened after the speaker left is the through-line of this book. Like many authors, and unlike Our Host, I have a day job. For many years, that job was as the head of IT for a community bank. Fairly early in my tenure at that job, one of our branches got robbed. It was a small building, about the size of a standalone fast-food joint, and on a wintry Friday night a masked man with a gun walked in. He marched the two employees into the back room and walked out five minutes later with around a quarter of a million dollars in cash. As I was pulling (useless) video from our new digital camera system that night, I thought that…