By Amanda Estes
Staff Writer
If you’ve ever tuned your car radio to 100.9 in search of a Bob Dylan song or a disco era hit for your morning commute, chances are good you’ve heard Chuck Igo’s voice.
The morning show host and South Portland resident is a broadcast veteran with nearly 28 years in the industry since he started out as an overnight weekend disc jockey while serving in the navy.
In 1996, Igo was working as a production director writing and rewriting close to 500 pages of radio commercial copy – which translates to “60 seconds of magic” on the air – when he realized he had essentially written a book. It was the inspiration he needed to try his hand at writing the kind of book he wanted to read.
“I was looking for a good old fashioned spy yarn when I said, ‘Let me try my hand at this,’” Igo said.
Nearly three years later, the result was Taken Identity, a “geo-political thriller [with] international politics, spies, local good guys and Maine settings.”
On Monday, the novel was listed a top ten book with his publisher, AuthorHouse.
Igo asks his readers to “imagine a president embroiled in scandal, an opposition party frothing at the mouth with his impending resignation or conviction and the only thing standing between the other guys and the White House is the vice-president.”
With the president wrapped up in a scandal, the office is vulnerable to those who wish to take the government down. Igo asks his readers to imagine what would happen if agents of the former KGB, sent to the United States in the 1970s, received orders to stay in the country and work their way further into the government with the intent of controlling it.
Igo found plenty of inspiration for his fictional White House in the real scandal that was unfolding during President Bill Clinton’s administration. Igo said, at the time, something about Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, didn’t sit well with him. When it came out that Gingrich had been having an affair while Clinton was facing impeachment for lying about his affair, Igo said his suspicions were confirmed.
Because of Igo’s suspicions, his speaker of the house character is not what he seems.
Igo grew up in North Cambridge, Massachusetts, the district represented by future Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. He recalled his nana sending him outside to shovel O’Neill’s driveway after a snowstorm because you could never tell when you might need a politician’s help down the road.
“I was taught early on, it’s OK to like everybody, but it’s also OK when you like other people better,” he said.
Igo started writing the first draft of his novel on his lunch hours and any quiet time he could find at the time with a 4, 9 and 13-year-old at home. He faced a minor setback when part of the book was lost in a computer crash, but he kept writing.
In 1997, he started a job in Boston and bought himself a laptop computer. The two-hour commute both ways gave him time to work through plot ideas in his head.
While developing the story, Igo took the advice of a college English professor, who said, “write what you know.”
Igo spent three of his four years in the Navy stationed at Bruswick Naval Air Station and he said it “just happened to have been a good location as any for international transport.”
One of Igo’s characters is also in broadcasting and named after a broadcast acquaintance.
Donald Hough wakes up at 2:45 a.m. (an hour later than Igo’s usual wake up call) on an April morning in Kennebunkport. As Hough makes his way through a snowstorm to the station in South Portland, he notes, “The South Portland snowplows had done a good job of getting the roads cleared.”
When Hough arrives at the station, what was “another mundane, snowy day” becomes a great deal more complicated after he receives a telephone message from a caller, who “says he’s got the goods on the Speaker of the House. The U.S. Speaker of the House.”
“The nice thing about fiction is we ask you to suspend belief as you go along,” Igo said.
He said he thought about what the people in his life might be capable of if put up against a major challenge.
“If I could put a cape and a big red ‘S’ on this guy, what would he do?” Igo said.
While Igo knows radio and the Navy, he said his view of government may be idealistic.
“I don’t know any of us have been privy to what goes on in the Oval Office,” he said. “Do you address everyone as sir – no, come on.”
While his novel was in the copyright office, Igo said he couldn’t help but see some of his White House coming to life on the screen in Aaron Sorkin’s drama, The West Wing.  
A reader apparently also sees some correlation between the current administration and Igo’s fictional government. He said he received an email in which the reader referenced today’s players and events and asked, “What do we really know about this person?” and “What if it’s really just like your book?”
Igo said he has already written a sequel to Taken Identity and has plans for a third novel. With work, family and a slew of volunteer duties calling for his time, Igo said his schedule is often “A, B, C, D, E and then writing.”
“I have to make time if I’m going to keep it up,” he said. Chances are Igo will continue to write, even if it is only to see how his characters find their way out of another adventure.
Chuck Igo’s Taken Identity is available at Nonesuch Books in South Portland, Once & Again Books in Scarborough, Borders stores, Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and through www.chuckigo.com.
From 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Dec. 8, Igo will be at Nonesuch Books for a pre-holiday book signing.