‘NCIS’ Star Mark Harmon on the Bold New Direction in His Career

The ‘NCIS’ star hopes this major change becomes a different kind of series.

When Mark Harmon wrapped up his role as Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIS, he didn’t have a clue that he was going to return to narrate the voiceover on a prequel series, NCIS: Origins, that tells Gibbs’ story and that of Mike Franks.

What he did know was that his connection with the real-life NCIS was going to continue through books. Harmon and NCIS technical advisor and former NCIS agent Leon Carroll Jr. had already started researching their first book, Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, a Japanese Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor, the story of Douglas Wada, the first Japanese American NIS agent.

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“Initially when [Harper Select] came to me and said, ‘Would you write a book about the show?’, I said, ‘No,’” Harmon tells Parade. “I said I would be interested in possibly doing what I was told this was originally, which was every show was going to be based on a real case and part of that was my introduction to coming on board in the first place.”

But when the time came to write NCIS, the powers that be realized that having a medical examiner—David McCallum as Ducky—and a forensics expert—Pauley Perrette as Abby—as part of the regular cast meant that if you didn’t have a body each week, there wasn’t much for those characters to do. So, the show became a murder of the week even though that’s not really what NCIS does.

“But I did say to them, ‘If you’re interested in telling the real stories of NCIS, I would be interested in that and I wouldn’t touch that without Leon Carroll, who not only has been a technical advisor on this show for 20 years, but he was my guy,’” Mark continued. “I talked to him every day about the right way and the wrong way to do something, trying to research the character and just get inside his headspace sometimes for different parts of the role.”

The publisher went for the idea and Harmon and Carroll released the first book on Nov. 14, 2023. Now, they’re back with the second in what they’re hoping will be a series of books, Ghosts of Panama: A Strongman Out of Control, A Murdered Marine, and the Special Agents Caught in the Middle of an Invasion, which goes inside the work done by NIS Special Agent Rick Yell in the powder keg that was Panama in the late 1980s ruled by Gen.