Mystery, Mystery & Suspense, Suspense, Thriller

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An 81-year-old woman versus a little boy: It sounds wholesome, but just wait till the bodies start to pile up

Plus, a wicked holiday delight and a ripped-from-the-headlines espionage thriller in this month’s Whodunit column.

Mystery & Suspense, Thriller

Mystery & Suspense Thriller

The Close-Up

World-weary and distinctively jaded, The Close-Up is a fantastic, Los Angeles-set neo-noir.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

The Rivals

Amateur sleuth Claudia Lin delves into a dating app conspiracy in Jane Pek’s entertaining, thought-provoking The Rivals.

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Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Alan Bradley

Interview by Trisha Ping

by Trisha Ping

How many 70-year-olds can also claim the title of best-selling debut novelist? We know of at least one: Canadian author Alan Bradley, whose first novel (after two nonfiction projects), The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, became a word-of-mouth hit in early 2009. Set in Britain just after World War II and starring Flavia de Luce, a fiercely intelligent 11-year-old with a talent for chemistry and a nose for mystery, the book was nominated for a handful of awards—and won the hearts of more than a handful of readers. Now Bradley has released the second Flavia de Luce mystery, The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag. This time, Flavia is investigating the murder of a traveling puppeteer whose death might drag a skeleton from the closet of her small English community.

We contacted Bradley, who now lives in Malta with his family, to find out more about the series, his inspiration for Flavia and the many reasons women make better detectives than men.

You’ve said that Flavia just showed up while you were writing a different novel and “hijacked the book.” What was it about her that fired up your imagination? Do children like Flavia still exist today?
I loved Flavia’s undimmed enthusiasm: that powerful sense of self that 11-year-olds can sometimes have. That and the intense focus. I believe that children of that caliber haven’t changed at all over the years, because they tend to be not much influenced by outside demands upon their attention.

At 71 years old, did you ever worry about finding the voice of an 11-year-old girl?
No. There must be a lot of the 11-year-old Alan Bradley left inside me!

Growing up in Canada in the 1950s, was your childhood in any way similar to Flavia’s?
I suppose it was, in the sense that, as a child, I was left alone a lot. And I like to think that I had that kind of burning enthusiasm. My passion was lenses and mirrors—I loved to play with light.

You had never been to England before writing the first Flavia de Luce book—how did you create such an evocative setting?
I grew up in a family of English expatriates who never stopped talking about “back home.” Books about England have always been a favorite read—I have a wonderful collection of them!

Flavia knows a good deal more about science than your average tween—it’s how she makes sense of the world. Was this an interest of yours already, or did you have to study to write the book? Why did you choose chemistry as Flavia’s obsession?
I chose chemistry because it is a subject about which I know absolutely nothing. As I’ve said before, Flavia knows everything there is to be known about chemistry, while what I know about it could be put in a thimble with room left over for a finger. I’m learning, though! I’ve actually come to love poring over ancient chemistry books.

Rights to the first Flavia de Luce novel have been sold in several countries. Which cover is your favorite? How does it feel to be an international success? And do you have any overseas publicity tours planned for book #2?
Rights to the first book in the series, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie have been sold in 31 countries, and to The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, in 19, so far. I love all of the covers—but for different reasons. The U.S. edition, from Delacorte Press, set an incredibly high standard to which every other country has aspired. I’ve just seen the Turkish cover today, and it’s breathtaking.

It’s lovely to know that so many readers love Flavia so fiercely. I’ve even heard from a couple of ladies in Washington who have formed The Flavia de Luce Adoration Society!

I often find when I meet Flavia’s fans that we have a lot in common, so it’s extremely gratifying to know that she’s being welcomed into such compatible company.
Besides the upcoming tour of Canada and the U.S., I’ll be visiting London in April, with two trips to Germany planned for later in the year.

You are also the co-author of Ms. Holmes of Baker Street, a book that presents the hypothesis that Sherlock Holmes was a woman. Do you think women are better suited to detection than men?

Yes. I’m surprised that no one’s ever spotted that before. Women are equipped by nature for the task: for example they have a better sense of smell, hearing, touch and taste than men. What is remarkable in a man is commonplace in a woman: it’s sometimes called “intuition,” but it’s really a kind of secret brain power. If more detectives were women there’d be fewer unsolved crimes.

You’ve planned six Flavia novels—without giving away too much, how do you see the character changing over the course of the series? How has she changed between books 1 and 2?
Since book two takes place barely a month after the first, there’s not a lot of change in Flavia. But she’s definitely growing up as she learns more and more about her place in the world. And it’s not all pleasant.

What books did you enjoy as a child?
I was an early reader. My two older sisters taught me to read before I went to Kindergarten, and once I’d worked my way through Huckleberry Finn and the set of Mark Twain books my mother owned, I read anything I could lay my hands on. One of my sisters had a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I didn’t understand it, but I loved the words. After Ulysses, Dick & Jane were crashing bores.

What mystery writers influenced you?
Dorothy L. Sayers, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie—also, many of the mystery novelists who were writing during the 1960’s and ‘70’s, such as Laurence Meynell, Peter Lovesey, Catherine Aird—the list goes on and on.

What’s next for Flavia?
I’m currently working on book three, which is called A Red Herring Without Mustard. I can’t say much about it except that a Gypsy caravan is involved and that Flavia stumbles upon a particularly gruesome murder. I love that word, “gruesome”—don’t you?

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Alan Bradley’s website

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Jonathan and Faye Kellerman

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

The Kellerman household seems to be in a state of controlled uproar on this particular afternoon. Faye Kellerman is leaving in the morning for a nine-day book tour in Germany. There is a hum of activity in the background during our phone conversation. Last minute preparations and pressing household matters occasionally take Faye away from the call.

"She's never been to Germany," Jonathan Kellerman tells me during one of his wife's absences. "They've wanted her to come for many years." He says her tour will focus not only on Stalker, Faye's current thriller, but on many of the other novels in her popular Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus detective series. "She's a big personage in Germany," he adds with obvious pleasure.

Of course Jonathan Kellerman is no slouch himself. He has written more than a dozen bestsellers in his Alex Delaware series since the mid-1980s. Commenting on the first, When the Bough Breaks, Stephen King announced that Jonathan Kellerman had reinvented the detective novel. Ardent fans continue to agree.

His latest effort, Dr. Death, centers on the brutal murder of a Kevorkian-like figure. Suspicions fall on the husband of one of Dr. Death's most recent "patients." As always, Los Angeles, vividly described, is also a character in the novel. Many advance readers (including this interviewer) think it may well be his best book yet. Jonathan, who gave up a career as a noted child psychologist to write full-time, believes the book is his most successful attempt to interweave a family psychopathology theme and "a really creepy killer."

Together, the Kellermans have an extraordinary publishing record. Each produces a novel almost every year, an astonishing pace to sustain for the better part of two decades. Stalker, which focuses on the experiences of Peter Decker's daughter, Cindy, as a rookie in the LAPD, is Faye's most successful book to date, the first to crack the top five in the New York Times bestseller list. Jonathan's last book, Monster, was a bestseller in both hardcover and paperback.

As we continue the interview, Jonathan mentions that one of their four children is also working on a novel, "a brilliant historical novel, a rather ambitious and wonderful book," he calls it in one of those warm, big-hearted comments that typify his conversational style.

Jonathan is illustrating a point about the importance of plot. He says his son has come to realize that at some level or another all literature is mystery. It's an excellent point. It's a point that puts Jonathan at odds with much fashionable contemporary writing. And it's a point on which Faye and Jonathan emphatically agree. Unfortunately, I am too distracted to quite take this in. I am thinking: What? Four children? Two prodigious, very successful writing careers under one roof? And now, possibly, a third? How is this possible? How do they ever manage it?

"Doing well in marriage is a good preface to doing well in a household like this," Faye says. "I think the key to managing this is the art of compromise."

"Right," Jonathan says. "Faye and I were married 12 or 13 years before either of us got published. It wasn't as if the two of us met at a writer's conference and brought these egos in. Faye was 18 when I met her; I was 21. To the extent that we've grown up at all, we've grown up together. The fact that our relationship was solid before we got published really helped."

It seems to be true. Throughout the hour we spend talking, the Kellermans graciously take turns answering questions; they trade jokes and witticisms; they encourage one another with praise and endearments and thanks. They say they really don't compete, that they are honestly happy for each other's successes. They seem genuinely to respect one another's work.

Asked to comment on each other's strengths as writers, they are quick to answer. "From the very outset, Faye had a golden ear for dialogue," Jonathan says. "It took me a while to learn to write dialogue. But Faye could do it right away because she's always been a gifted mimic. She also has an innate sense of pacing. Her books are lean, never padded. The story moves along at a rapid pace, because Faye is that kind of person. She's a busy person. She doesn't have a lot of patience for wasting time."

Faye responds, "Jonathan's strength is his consistency in always writing a fantastic story, his ability to keep the story moving and his wonderful prose. He uses the perfect metaphor — not five perfect metaphors. He's able to inject much more into his thrillers than the average thriller-writer because of his training as a psychologist and his keen insight into people."

In fact, the only thing resembling a dispute comes up during a rambunctious discussion of the movies. The two spar playfully over which is the greater movie, Jaws or The Poseidon Adventure. They come to a sort of agreement on Titanic. "That movie finally picked up once they hit the iceberg," Faye exclaims gleefully. "I mean once the water started pouring in, I turned to Jonathan and said, 'All right! Now we've got a movie!'" Jonathan agrees, and adds, "But for me, it wasn't worth waiting through two hours of sloppy romance for 20 minutes of iceberg."

To be honest, all this warmth and tenderness is a little disconcerting. And the Kellermans know how I feel. "I'm always wary of interviews like this," Jonathan says, partly in jest. "What happens is that we come across as disgustingly smug and goody two-shoes. Honestly, we don't have any big skeletons in our closets. But we're both extremely intense people, with very artistic temperaments. There's no doubt about it."

Of the two, Jonathan is probably the most intense. "Everything, everything seems destined to impede my writing," he says. "I'm so paranoid about this. I see life as a series of obstacles. I've got to get into my office and not be distracted. I'm just a fanatic about achieving focus, just trying to shut the door and shut off the phone. My secretary knows not to come in for anything short of an emergency."

Then, during one of Faye's absences, Jonathan says, "Faye has been so wonderful in taking care of me that she basically leaves me free to do this. She manages to do everything, so she's a lot more impressive as a human being."

"Anything that's great takes a lot, a lot, a lot of work," Faye says, later. "We like to write our books and we're grateful that they're successful, but we do work. This is a job. I mean this is a working household."

"Faye and I are very much enmeshed," Jonathan says. "We have four kids, we hang out a lot together, we both work at home, we generally have lunch or breakfast together three, four, five times a week. So we're like a retired couple. Our writing is the only private time we have. We each go into our little offices and close the doors. We're each pretty protective of that. We talk about the financial part of the business but we don't talk much about creative aspects. We don't talk shop."

So the success of this immensely productive marriage isn't just about compromise and work and family? It is also about allowing, even encouraging, private, creative spaces?

The Kellermans definitely agree. In fact, Faye might be speaking for them both when she says, "We love each other, but this is a very personal thing. Jonathan and I collaborate on almost everything that pertains to life. But we want our stories to be our own. For better or for worse, our books are our own personal little slices of life."

Alden Mudge writes from his home in Oakland, California.

Author photo by Jesse Kellerman.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

George Pelecanos

Interview by Stephanie Swilley

by Stephanie Swilley

Author George P. Pelecanos has created his own niche as the "best kept secret in crime fiction." The critics love him, but after eight gritty urban novels, the Washington, D.C.-based writer has yet to crack the U.S. bestseller lists or achieve instant name recognition. And that's just fine with him.

"I don't think my books are for everybody," the soft-spoken author said when BookPage caught up with him at a recent ClubMed mystery writers conference. "I totally cooperate with everything [my publisher] asks me to do, and I want the book to succeed, but I've stopped having unreal expectations for any of my books. All I want to be able to do is write another book."

Just the kind of answer you might expect from the easygoing author. But with his growing cult following in the U.S., a thriving fan base overseas and plenty of cheerleaders inside the industry, his name might not stay a mystery for long. "He's the best," raves former touring partner Dennis Lehane. Along with Lehane, authors like Elmore Leonard and Michael Connelly are heaping praise on Pelecanos' latest book, Right as Rain.

Like all of his previous novels, Rain is set in the working class suburbs of Washington, D.C., a side of the federal city that has nothing to do with politics. The story involves former cop Derek Strange, a Samuel L. Jackson-like character with cool confidence, who now heads his own P.I. firm, Strange Investigations. He's hired to investigate the death of an off-duty black D.C. cop who was gunned down by Terry Quinn, a white cop with the unpleasant combination of a quick temper and a chip on his shoulder. Although Quinn was cleared of any wrongdoing, he's tormented by the thought that race made him pull the trigger. He volunteers to help with Strange's case and the unlikely duo of killer and investigator create a unique partnership.

Pelecanos, a Greek-American, has created plenty of multi-ethnic characters in the past, but here he tackles the race issue head on. The racial tension is always just below the surface in his honest look at prejudice on both sides.

Describing his novel as an "urban western," Pelecanos says the story is based on actual events that were happening in Washington during the time he wrote the book. Several black officers had been shot by other policemen and the majority of those shootings were by white cops. Pelecanos researched the book by riding along on several midnight to dawn shifts to get a sense of their job.

"It's a real interesting shift," he says. "You really see what's going on. All the straights are in bed, and the people who shouldn't be are [the only ones] out there."

He also did what he has always loved — just "get out there and listen to people talk." Which might explain why dialogue comes so easy to him.

"I've been listening all my life," he says. Every summer as a kid in Washington, D.C., he would travel across town on the bus to work for his dad's lunch counter downtown. The various conversations he overheard on the bus fascinated him. "I was always interested in not just what they were saying, but the rhythms of their speech, the slang. Just a love of the language."

There are a few other things that Pelecanos is obsessed with, like basketball, cars, music, movies and ladies shoes. Each obsession has a history, and each of those elements finds its way into Pelecanos' books. He put himself through college selling shoes on straight commission ("the best job I ever had"), describes himself as a movie freak who, as a boy, dreamed of becoming a movie director, and admits he used to own a jacked-up Camaro. To him, the kind of car you drive and the music you listen to say a lot about your character. So can he explain the guy/car phenomenon?

"It's something about having a beer between your legs, the music up loud, a girl beside you," he struggles to explain. "Yeah, my books are for guys, I would say. It's another thing keeping me down," he laughs.

Even if you don't get the car thing, maybe you'll understand the vast and varied music references that punctuate his descriptions. It's been suggested that his books should come with a soundtrack, and it's not a bad idea.

"I do understand that I'm alienating a certain part of the audience that doesn't listen to that music. I don't expect people over the age of 60 — just to pick a random age — to know what I'm talking about," he says. "It's sort of like I can't help myself or something. The things that I write about, the settings I write about, people are listening to music. If you've got a book set in the kitchen of a restaurant, the radio is the most fought over appliance in the restaurant all day long. I know because I worked in plenty of kitchens. When people start talking about what they're listening to or why the other guy's music sucks, you start finding out about their characters."

Pelecanos knows all about blue collar jobs because he has amassed quite a resume over the past 30 years: bartender, truck driver, line cook, valet and don't forget shoe salesman. He was general manager of a $30 million company when he had what he calls an "early mid-life crisis."

"That's when it all fell apart for me," he says. "Because what I thought was going to happen was that I'd buy a company or own my own business, and I didn't want to do that. I just didn't want to get in my car every day and be like everyone else. In a way, you can say it's a personality flaw of a lot of writers — they can't really conform. They question everything, from authority to driving the same route everyday."

Despite the fact that he'd never tried to write anything before, he quit his job and started his first book. He finished the largely autobiographical A Firing Offense a year later.

"You've got to remember, I was just a guy saying, 'I want to write a book.' I didn't have any formal training. I never took a writing class, so I'm sure the people around me that loved me were thinking, 'He's gonna fail.' And how would they know, and how would I know, that I could write a book? I just thought that I could. I just had the idea that I could," he says.

And whether or not Right as Rain is a huge hit, Pelecanos will be content as long as he can keep writing seven days a week and churning out one book a year.

"I'm always one book ahead," he explains. "I can write another book before the next one comes out, and I don't have to worry about what people said about that one. I just put something else in the hopper and keep the cycle going."

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Donald Westlake

Interview by Stephanie Swilley

by Stephanie Swilley

Donald Westlake was recently treated to a special big-screen viewing of The Hot Rock, a 1972 film based on his novel of the same name. The credits rolled and when the screen flashed Based on the novel by Donald E. Westlake, a loud cheer erupted from the assorted mix of best-selling mystery authors and journalists in the audience. Twenty-five years since his last viewing, Westlake flashed a grin as a young Robert Redford filled the screen with his jaunty gait, bringing to life Westlake’s ever-challenged burglar Dortmunder.

No stranger to the big screen, Westlake has seen several of his novels make their way to the multiplexes, including the classic Point Blank!, the Mel Gibson remake Payback and his Oscar-winning screen adaptation of The Grifters.

In June, an adaptation of the 1996 Dortmunder caper What’s the Worst That Could Happen? debuts at the box office, and this time Martin Lawrence takes over for Robert Redford as the bad luck burglar.

Popular and prolific, Westlake is widely credited with creating two of the most memorable characters in crime fiction — the cold-hearted, professional crook Parker and the bumbling burglar Dortmunder. This month Dortmunder makes his 10th appearance in print in the new mystery novel, Bad News.

Westlake, 67, has been making readers laugh at the foibles of his professional criminals since his smashing debut, The Mercenaries, in 1960. His career took off, and he was soon publishing three to four books a year. So prolific was his output that his publisher warned him not to publish so many books under his own name. Rather than slow down, he developed a myriad of pen names (Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt and Curt Clark to name a few) to keep up with the overflow. After 40 years, even Westlake himself has lost track of how many books he has written. "I don’t know. I believe we might be in the 90s — not 100 yet though," he says.

You get the sense when talking with Westlake that he doesn’t have time for trivial matters like tracking his workflow. His conversation frequently veers off track, sentences tripping off his tongue unfinished. With all those books and characters in his head, who can blame him?

The Parker character made his first appearance in 1961. "I hadn’t even bothered to give him a first name because I thought that [book] would be the only one," he says. With a new ending that let the bad guy get away, the series was born. Written under the name Richard Stark, Westlake’s Parker novels don’t waste words or spend much time dealing with emotions; Parker is a true tough guy.

A plot idea originally intended for the hard-hearted anti-hero led Westlake to create Dortmunder, another life-long crook and the polar opposite of Parker. Westlake thought it would be fun to have Parker grapple with the challenge of stealing the same thing over and over. But he realized that "as soon a tough guy becomes inadvertently funny, he isn’t tough anymore; he’s just ridiculous. I liked the idea, so I said, well, let’s switch it around and give it to somebody else."

The Hot Rock was the first novel featuring the comic efforts of Dortmunder (named after a German beer) and his merry band of thieves. With plenty of puns and gags, this guy can’t quite get his act together to pull off the perfect crime. Whether it’s a scheme to nab a priceless bone or steal a bank (yes, the whole thing), the endless plot twists are a natural antidepressant.

In Bad News, Dortmunder’s problems start right off the bat when he and his friend Andy Kelp are hired by shady businessman Fitzroy Guilderpost to do a little graverobbing. Soon they’re caught up in a DNA switcheroo meant to prove that ex-Vegas showgirl Little Feather Redcorn is a long lost member of the Pottaknobbee Indian tribe. If they can pull off their scam, Little Feather will become one-third owner of the largest casino in the East. As with all Dortmunder novels, things never go according to plan, and plenty of hilarity ensues.

Westlake is famous for his comic touch, but in 1997, he had something of a career breakthrough with the publication of The Ax, a savage tale of a man caught in the era of corporate downsizing. He began getting a lot more attention, and suddenly the guy who could crank out three books a year was struggling with writer’s block.

"I realized that for 35 years I’d been flying under the radar and always able to do whatever I wanted to do — just successful enough so that I didn’t have to have a day job and not successful enough so that they were watching me. So all of a sudden, after 35 years, I was having second novel problems," he says.

Not wanting to follow the critical and commercial success of The Ax with a light Dortmunder novel, Westlake spent over a year trying to figure out what to write next. "I was spending several hours playing solitaire in my office, which can really get to you. I think I’d rather be a drunk," he laughs.

He had given up and moved on to a different project when a snippet of conversation with a friend got the wheels turning. Soon The Hook, a tale that ironically involves a best-selling author suffering from writer’s block, was under way. His editor took one look at the manuscript and announced, "That’s the book that follows The Ax."

Which brings up another dilemma. "Now I have to think about what book will come after The Ax, after The Hook, after Bad News. Has enough time gone by? Can I go back under the radar now?" he laughs.

But Hollywood isn’t about to let that happen. When the film adaptation of What’s the Worst That Could Happen? debuts at the box office in June, Westlake will have to venture out for one more trip to the theater.

Author photo by Lisa Berg.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Walter Mosley

Interview by Alden Mudge

by Alden Mudge

For the past several years, writer Walter Mosley has been exploring and experimenting. Widely known and widely praised for his best-selling Easy Rawlins series of crime novels, Mosley restlessly delved into speculative fiction with Blue Light (1998), wrote two books featuring his urban philosopher, Socrates Fortlow, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1998) and Walkin' the Dog (1999), and produced an edgy nonfiction critique of American capitalism called Workin' on the Chain Gang: Shaking Off the Dead Hand of History (2000).

"In a funny kind of negative way, I'm representative of a new breed of crime writers and fiction writers — because I write so many different kinds of books," Mosley says during a call to his home in New York, where he has lived for nearly 20 years after growing up in Los Angeles.

During our conversation, I've been pressing Mosley on whether or not, as an African-American, he feels he's expanded the boundaries for black writers. He has been thoughtful and polite, but he obviously does not want to make large statements about his contribution. More to the point, he doesn't want to be neatly and narrowly categorized. So Mosley talks about the impact of Chester Himes and Donald Goins and notes that there are about 40 black mystery writers publishing in America today. "I kind of took on the job of doing the type of hardboiled fiction that originated with Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald," he finally allows. "I may have been, if not the first one, maybe the most defined person to do that."

In his new novel, Fearless Jones, Mosley moves beyond the Easy Rawlins series and creates a new cast of characters in the same hardboiled genre — with a twist. "I consider Fearless Jones to be in the genre of comic noir," Mosley says. "Even though these terrible things happen, very often you end up laughing."

Mosley is right. You do laugh, and the reason you laugh is because you see events through the eyes of Paris Minton. Paris is a slight, intelligent, inveterate reader who opens a used bookstore in the Watts section of Los Angeles in the 1950s. When Elana Love walks through his door, very bad things start happening to Paris Minton. How Paris responds to these events is quite different from how Easy Rawlins would respond.

"Paris is at once more practical and more cowardly than Easy," Mosley says. "In most hardboiled and noir fiction, the voice of the narrator is a very tough voice. I wanted to do something different. I wanted there to be the same tough, hardboiled character, but he's not the one telling the story. So Fearless Jones is the guy who does the rough stuff, and Paris is the guy who hides from it."

After Paris has been beaten up and robbed and his bookstore has been torched, he finally agrees to bail his friend Fearless Jones out of jail, having refused to do so before. "Friends are people who overlook your flaws and whose flaws you overlook," Mosley says. "Paris tells Fearless he's getting him out of jail just to save his ass, and Fearless says, 'I understand that. You're not perfect and neither am I.' I think that's a very satisfying moment, and it's a kind of moment that's often lacking in America."

Mosley has a reputation for weaving this sort of social and political commentary into the background of his novels. "I've always been pretty political," he says. "But I don't think there's any book that I've written — except possibly my book of nonfiction — to convince somebody else of my point of view. Very often I say 'this is the way things happen.' So if I talk about a black man named Paris Minton who lives in California in 1954 and has the entrepreneurial wherewithal to start himself a little business out of nothing, I'm going to have to mention that this doesn't necessarily go down easy with the guardians of the community. When Paris is rousted by the police it's just natural. He's not particularly angry. He's actually smart enough to have gone off and gotten a letter of explanation, because he knows what they are going to blame him for. If I didn't write about this, I wouldn't be writing really about our time."

Mosley, who didn't start writing until he was in his 30s, is also known for the economy and expressiveness of the language he uses. "When I decided to become a writer," he says, "I went to the writing program at City College. The one class I took every semester while I was there was a poetry workshop with a poet named Bill Matthews. I'm not a good poet, believe me — and that's stating it mildly. But studying poetry taught me the major things I needed to know about fiction. I already had a narrative voice, and I already loved characters and character development. But the other stuff I had to think about was condensation, the music in language, how simile works, how metaphor works, how to make a sentence say one thing and mean two other things also."

Discovering the other things his sentences and books are about is the challenge he always faces, Mosley says. "A mystery that is just a mystery will work. I read books like that all the time: a man gets killed and the whole book is finding out who that man is and how he got killed. That's OK, but for me it's not good enough to have written a book like that. There have to be other things going on.

"Fearless Jones is a mystery but it's also about black entrepreneurs in Los Angeles in the 1950s," Mosley adds. "That's a class of people who are almost never talked about or thought about or wondered about. But this story is full of them. . . . I also talk about a lot of other things, about people falling in love and how different people approach falling in love. I talk about friendship. And I talk about what intelligence is and the different kinds of intelligence that exist. Paris and Fearless really need each other. And part of that has to do with intelligence. Fearless is one of those old kind of heroes like Achilles, and Paris is more like Ulysses. One has a smart heart and the other a smart head. If it weren't for their friendship, Fearless would still be in jail and Paris would be dead," says Mosley, who plans to feature the characters in an ongoing series.

Mosley thinks of novels as documents of the history of the time and believes that people are more likely to read a novel for an understanding of a historical period than a history book. So he strives for a kind of fundamental accuracy.

"But the real job of the novel is character and character development," he says. "I try my best to bring my characters off the page." In Fearless Jones Mosley does exactly that.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

Author photo by Anthony Barbosa.

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Sue Grafton

Interview by Stephanie Swilley

by Stephanie Swilley

It’s 16 down and 10 to go. Sue Grafton is working her way through the alphabet with the mystery series featuring private investigator Kinsey Millhone, and this month she follows O is for Outlaw with her latest release, P is for Peril. Coming up with plenty of title possibilities for the letter "P" was not a problem for this prolific author.

" ‘O’ was tricky," Grafton explains, "but when you come to ‘P,’ you’ve got poison, pistol, peril, persecute, prosecute, prison, police, whatever — you can go on and on."

Just don’t ask her what the book is about, because she candidly admits in a phone interview from her home in Louisville, Kentucky (where she was born and raised) that she’s "already forgotten it."

"I’m on to the next one," she says, "and my only survival skill is to delete from my brain anything that doesn’t exactly pertain to the book I’m working on."

More on Q is for . . . to come, but right now we’ll give the rough cut for Peril. At the center of the mystery are Dow and Crystal Purcell, a quintessential California couple: he, elderly and wealthy; she, cute, tanned and curvaceous, not to mention 40-odd years his junior. When Dow goes missing under mysterious and sinister circumstances, Kinsey Millhone is called in to investigate . . . by Dow’s ex-wife, no less.

Grafton’s latest possesses all the humor, charm and attitude that have compelled readers to show their devotion to the feisty P.I. by naming their daughters in her honor. "Originally they were naming their dogs and cats Kinsey, so I think I’m moving up the food chain," she laughs.

Grafton admits she based her character on herself. "Kinsey Millhone is my alter ego," Grafton says. "She is the person I might have been had I not married young and had children, so it is fun that I get to live her life and mine."

For several years, Grafton was living a life neither she nor Kinsey would have wanted. Grafton had moved to Hollywood after college and for 12 years she made her career in TV writing. The only problem was, she hated it.

"I knew I had to get myself out of Hollywood because it just did not fit me at all," she says. So she took the advice of her father, an attorney who wrote mysteries on the side, and started plugging away at A is for Alibi. Five years later, she finished it and four months before it was published, her father died.

"I never got to sit down and ask him about plotting and how to come up with good premises. He was a whiz at it, but we never got to talk shop," Grafton says. And since Grafton is determined not to repeat herself in any of her storylines it would have been nice to have some help on the road to Z is for Zero.

"I thought they’d get easier; I thought after eight or 10 letters I’d get the hang of it. But I am convinced there are 26 things to say about homicide," she says determinedly.

We promised to get back to "Q," and while Grafton won’t give away any plot secrets ("never talk about a work in progress"), she will say that she has chosen Q is for Quarry as the title, "both the sense of rock quarry and in the sense of hunted," she explains.

It's 16 down and 10 to go. Sue Grafton is working her way through the alphabet with the mystery series featuring private investigator Kinsey Millhone, and this month she follows O is for Outlaw with her latest release, P is for Peril. Coming up…

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Harlan Coben

Interview by Stephanie Swilley

by Stephanie Swilley

Harlan Coben, the wise-cracking mystery writer who’s every bit as funny as his characters, would rather not hear that you don’t have time to read.

"Please don’t say that!" the author joked in a recent phone interview. "I have a fourth child coming in July; I need to feed them all!"

Sure enough, just as his new thriller Tell No One is released, Coben and his wife Anne will add baby number four to their family that already includes three kids ranging in age from 2 to 7 years old. "To answer your next question: Yes, I am insane," he deadpans.

The stay-at-home dad might need to be a bit off his rocker to come up with the twists and turns that make Tell No One such a wild whodunit. The story follows pediatrician David Beck’s search for the real story behind his wife’s murder. Eight years after her death, the inner city doctor receives an anonymous e-mail sending him to an Internet street cam. As he watches people stream by on a busy street, he suddenly finds himself staring at the woman he lost all those years ago. It’s almost impossible to distill the plot into short summary, as Coben has enough surprises up his sleeve to keep you racing to the end.

"I love to lead [the reader] down one path and then rip you in the other. I want every book, especially this one, to really twist and turn," he says. "I love a book that sneaks up behind you at the end and slaps you in the back of the head, and that’s what I hope this book does."

After seven books featuring Myron Bolitar, his sports agent mystery sleuth who reigns as the king of zippy one liners, this is Coben’s first release without the alter ego. "At the end of [my] last book [Myron] kinda looked at me and I kinda looked at him, and he said, ‘You know, give me a break here pal.’ So I gave him some down time," Coben says.

It wouldn’t be a Coben book without his trademark wit, but Tell No One relies less on snappy comebacks, keeping the humor more controlled. And what ranks as his most suspenseful book yet had an unlikely origin.

"I was watching one of those typical romance movies — I won’t mention the name — where the man loses his wife, years pass, he can’t go on, but he learns to go on. I said to myself, What about the guy who can’t go on? How can I find a story where he can find redemption and solace?" Coben explains.

Learning to go on is something Coben knows a lot about. He talks candidly about the death of his parents while he was in his 20s, saying his close relationship with them has affected his writing "more than I ever anticipated."

"There are parts of Tell No One where I describe what lessons [Beck] learned from the death of his lover, and really a lot of those lessons I derived from the death of my parents," he says.

That family theme seems to find its way into all of Coben’s novels. Unlike most mystery protagonists, Myron Bolitar still loves his aging parents, and his visits with them are often a source of great comedy.

"I’m always shocked at how much people relate to the stuff that deals with family and parents," he says. "I love writing about the suburbs of America; it’s sort of a last battleground of the American dream. It’s where everyone, you and I and everyone else, fights to find some sort of happiness." He stops himself before getting too profound. "Wow, that was deep, give me a moment. (short pause) OK, I’m OK."

Coben hasn’t left the suburbs in Tell No One, but he admits he had a few anxious moments about leaving his favorite character.

"With Myron there was a comfort zone, in the sense that it was an ‘I know I can do it’ zone. Not that it was easier or harder, but I knew I could do it and that the public would accept it," he admits. "So to try something new took a bit of a nudge, but once I was there, I really found it quite freeing."

Coben felt even better after Hollywood snapped up the book in a four studio auction. In fact, he calls the whole bidding war "just four or five days of sheer bliss." With orthodontia and college to come, it’s a family man’s dream come true.

Harlan Coben, the wise-cracking mystery writer who's every bit as funny as his characters, would rather not hear that you don't have time to read.

"Please don't say that!" the author joked in a recent phone interview. "I have a fourth child coming…

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

James Lee Burke

Interview by Martin Brady

by Martin Brady

Two-time Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke’s latest novel, Rain Gods, finds the crime master at the top of his game. Burke, best known as the author of numerous books starring his Southern sleuths Dave Robicheaux and Billy Bob Holland, has also crafted other works of fiction that transcend the mystery genre, including the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Lost Get-Back Boogie. Burke is that rare thriller writer who can combine gritty plotting with colorful characters and poetic descriptions of physical settings, while also managing to neatly circumscribe the action with a noirish sense of the sociopolitical American landscape.

Rain Gods is set into motion when the dead bodies of nine young Thai women—human “mules” in a heroin smuggling scheme—are discovered in a remote South Texas churchyard. Sheriff Hackberry Holland—Korean War vet, former ACLU lawyer, and reformed drinker and contrite ex-womanizer—takes on the investigation, which reaches into many sleazy worlds but mainly pits him against a formidable yet strangely compelling madman named Preacher Collins. The strong narrative offers a starkly realized Texas backdrop with occasional echoes of his beloved Louisiana, a healthy amount of violence and suspense, and a continuously intriguing whodunit feel that will satisfy his many fans. Burke took the time to answer a few questions about the new novel from his home in Montana.

Your protagonist, Sheriff Hackberry Holland, is 74, has chronic back pain, night terrors about his Korean War POW experience, has sworn off drink, and now doggedly chases bad guys in a wide-open—some might say godforsaken—Texas landscape. What inspired you to develop this character, and can we expect to see him as the star of future novels?
Hack first appears in my work in three short stories contained in the collection titled The Convict. He is also the narrator of my third published novel, Lay Down my Sword and Shield. I think he's one of most intriguing characters I have written about, and I suspect I will be writing more about him as well as the rest of the Holland family.

In the course of Rain Gods, it is suggested that Holland and his nemesis, Preacher Collins, are “two sides of the same coin.” Does either one bear any resemblance to the coin that is James Lee Burke?
My own life is an enormous yawn. I think that's the reason I'm often invited to speak before groups of insomniacs.

Two current events are referenced in Rain Gods that seem crucial to the narrative and character development: Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War. How do you think these events have affected American society?
The antagonist in the novel is a man known as Preacher Jack Collins. He's narcissistic, messianic, and convinced that he is the left hand of god. Needless to say, he's an extremely dangerous man. The novel has many symbolic overtones. We live in a time when men who in my view are absolutely ruthless have hijacked Christianity and used it for their own agenda.

With its South Texas setting, Rain Gods automatically conjures a strong sense of border politics and the issue of Hispanic immigration. Holland’s investigation directly—and often uneasily—involves the FBI and ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Do you have a personal view on the immigration issue or any cynicism regarding the related work of federal agencies?
I think the people who serve in federal law enforcement do the best they can with what they have. I used to work for the United States Forest Service and the Job Corps, and I was always impressed with the quality of men and women who serve our government. I think the immigration difficulties we are experiencing today are directly related to our policies in Latin America, and also the wish on the part of many business interests to see an end to labor unions.

Your treatment of women in Rain Gods might be viewed as extreme. Juxtaposed with the dead Thai drug mules and strippers and escorts are tremendously strong figures like Holland’s devoted deputy Pam Tibbs, the defiantly combative strip-club owner’s wife Esther Dolan and the feisty country singer Vicki Gaddis.
The three women you mention are among the strongest characters in my work. The victims of the sex trade are not dealt with individually because they are not central players in the story. However, my experience has been, as Orwell once said, that people are always much better than we think they are, no matter what roles they occupy.

Deputy Tibbs, though young enough to be Holland’s daughter, has romantic designs on him. The age difference bothers him, yet we’re tantalizingly left hanging about exactly what happens between the two of them. Any hints about what happens between the two of them?
I never know what lies next in the story. I believe the story is written in the unconscious and the artist is its incremental discoverer rather than its creator. At least, that is the way it has always been for me.

Three of your previous books—In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead, Two for Texas and Heaven's Prisoners—have been adapted for the screen, and Rain Gods would also seem to be a logical candidate for a film. Have you been satisfied with Hollywood’s treatment of your work?
My experience with the film industry has always been a good one. In each instance, the creative people involved in the project treated the work with respect and did the best job they could. A writer shouldn't ask for more.

You’ve been referred to as “a Faulkner of crime writing.” How do you feel about that designation? And, since you began your career as a writer of “serious” fiction, has your work in the crime genre fulfilled your literary ambitions?
The comparison with William Faulker is very complimentary, but Faulkner's work is on a level with the work of Shakespeare and Chaucer and Homer and Keats. The only change that has taken place in my work is the fact that with the writing of The Neon Rain, some of my novels were narrated by a police officer, namely Dave Robicheaux. The themes, the settings, the type of people I write about are the same as the ones we encounter in my first novel, Half of Paradise.

Rain Gods is chock-full of details on myriad topics—the Korean War, the drug trade, seedy night clubs, firearms, federal law enforcement, all manner of Texas geography and flora and fauna, etc. How much research do you do, or is it all second nature by now?
I do little if any research. Most of the people I write about are composites of people I have known. Hemingway once said that once the author knows his characters, he can place them in any setting or era he wishes.

Holland’s antagonists in Rain Gods are a motley bunch of lowlifes, all fit for a Tarantino film. Have you known many people like this in the course of your life?
I was a social worker in California and handled the cases of many parolees and mental patients, some of whom were among the most interesting people I have ever known. I also made recordings of the inmates in the work camps and what was called "the block" at Angola Penitentiary in 1961. I was occasionally a police reporter and worked a bit in the oil patch, and lived in an urban slum and the poorest part of the southern mountains. I may have had few other talents, but I was always a good listener. The great stories are in the air, all around us, everyday, no matter where we're located. All we have to do is listen.

What the heck is creosote?
It's a viscous oil produced by the creosote bush. It's often used to treat wood, particularly railroad ties.

You were born in Houston but have a home in Louisiana, which one would assume is your spiritual literary base given your many Robicheaux novels. Still, you’ve written about Texas in the Holland stories. Which locale do you prefer to bring to life in fiction, and is there another Robicheaux tale on the horizon?
To me, the South and the American West represent the entirety of our experience as a nation, for good or bad. The challenge for the artist is to see the larger story in its smallest component, like coming to know a beach through a grain of sand. I'm writing another novel narrated by Dave Robicheaux now. I hope to write many more stories before I catch the train. In fact, when the latter event occurs, I'm taking my notebook and pen with me.

RELATED CONTENT

Read all our reviews featuring the novels of James Lee Burke.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Sketching a stylish debut thriller

Review by bookpagedev

Former policewoman Kate McKinnon is the central character in Jonathan Santlofer’s debut thriller, The Death Artist. Ten years ago, she traded her badge, homicide cases and ill-fitting uniform for a sexy husband, a New York penthouse and a career in art history. It was a good trade. Successfully making the transition from cop to cashmere-clad socialite, Kate fills her days hosting a television art series, planning fund-raisers and sponsoring budding artists. Then the murders begin.

When one of her proteges is murdered, Kate discovers that her past and present are about to collide. A serial killer is on the loose, and before each crime, the killer sends Kate a cryptic clue. Constantly smoking, frequently cursing and occasionally wise-cracking, Kate is an independent and intelligent protagonist. Santlofer also conjures a large ensemble of supporting characters that are sharply drawn and distinctive. The author hits his stride, however, in creating escalating suspense as Kate mentally spars with the crafty killer. An internationally recognized painter, Santlofer turned to writing after a fire in an art gallery destroyed five years of his work. He skillfully uses his considerable knowledge to give readers an intriguing tour of museums, performance art, galleries and artists’ studios in New York. In The Death Artist, Santlofer has produced an engrossing debut filled with plenty of simmering secrets and a multitude of motives for murder.

Former policewoman Kate McKinnon is the central character in Jonathan Santlofer's debut thriller, The Death Artist. Ten years ago, she traded her badge, homicide cases and ill-fitting uniform for a sexy husband, a New York penthouse and a career in art history. It was…

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Robin Cook

Interview by Jay MacDonald

by Jay MacDonald

Robin Cook’s latest medical thriller may seem like yet another example of the author’s uncanny ability to anticipate national controversy, in this case the uproar over federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. After all, the Harvard-trained medical doctor-turned-novelist has been writing well ahead of the public-debate curve since his breakout novel, Coma, nearly 25 years ago.

But in fact, Shock, Cook’s expose of the private infertility industry, was actually delayed nearly a year by an arrival of a different sort — Cameron Cook, the author’s first child.

Did fatherhood turn life upside-down for the 61-year-old dad?

"Oh wow, absolutely!" he chuckles by phone from his home on Martha’s Vineyard. "Especially since the boy took over my writing room. I wrote the last two books on a card table in the living room."

Impending fatherhood may have played a role in turning the doctor’s mind toward the dramatic possibilities behind the closed doors of America’s infertility clinics. It is largely within these privately funded clinics that controversial stem cell research is being conducted because the federal government, beset by anti-abortion groups, has refused to grant it funding.

Shock, named for the technique of fusing two cells, is a return to form for Cook, whose last outing, the Atlantis-themed Abduction (2000), was considered pretty farfetched even by science fiction standards. This time out, he’s back to what he does best: spinning a suspenseful tale, one that places curious female Harvard grads in mortal danger as they seek to uncover the truth about a mysterious clinic that’s harvesting more than HMO dollars.

When the two grad students — prim-and-proper Texas debutante Deborah Cochrane and her street-smart New York girlfriend Joanna Meissner — answer an ad in a campus newspaper to earn $45,000 by donating eggs to the Wingate Clinic on Boston’s North Shore, their goal is to raise enough money to write their master’s theses in Venice. But when Deborah wants to know more about the fate of her eggs, the clinic stonewalls her. Undaunted, the pair concocts aliases to obtain employment at the creaky former psychiatric hospital. Suffice it to say that going on for their doctorates might have been the better choice.

Cook admits the timing of Shock was fortuitous. "I suppose you could say that it’s the most like Coma in that it deals with an issue that everybody seems to be concerned about," he says. "I wrote this book to address the stem cell issue, which the public really doesn’t know anything about. Besides entertaining readers, my main goal is to get people interested in some of these issues, because it’s the public that ultimately really should decide which way we ought to go in something as ethically questioning as stem cell research."

As a doctor, Cook marvels at the enormous potential of this evolving medical field. "This is the most promising aspect of medical research that has ever come along. It’s going to make even the discovery of antibiotics pale in comparison," he predicts.

"Up until now, all of the medicine that we’ve done has not been curative; it’s been a way of helping the body’s own defenses in some form or fashion. This stem cell research has the potential for creating true cures for many human illnesses. If you’re a doctor, the idea of actually having the ability to cure people rather than just kind of putting your finger in the dike and keeping it there is the most exciting aspect of it."

Pro-life groups, however, have condemned stem cell research for tampering with human life, albeit at the microscopic level.

"That is the main problem, that it does brush up against the whole abortion issue, which has been a real conundrum in this country," he says. "Because the government up until now has decided not to fund this research, it pushes this research, which is going to be done, into the private labs, just as I do in the book. And once it’s in the private labs and nobody knows what they’re doing, they’re doing whatever they like."

Which brings up everybody’s favorite question: Couldn’t that make human cloning a reality?

"Yes, absolutely," Cook insists. "With the pressure on the infertility clinics, that alone is enough to encourage people to ask for it and various and sundry researchers to go ahead and do it. There is no question in my mind that it’s going to happen. Again, part of the reason is that all this can be done behind closed doors, and they use private money, so it will happen."

The author admits he never thought he would have so much compelling material to work with when he began writing fiction in 1970 after completing medical school at Columbia University and post-graduate training at Harvard.

"If I tried to be the writer I am today a number of years ago, I wouldn’t have very much to write about. But today, with the pace of change in biomedical research, there are any number of different issues, and new ones to come," he says.

No longer in private practice, Cook remains on the staff of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston. Keeping his lab coat handy helps him turn our fear of doctors into bestsellers.

"I joke that if my books stop selling, I can always fall back on brain surgery," he says. "But I am still very interested in it. If I had to do it over again, I would still study medicine. I think of myself more as a doctor who writes, rather than a writer who happens to be a doctor."

And after 23 books, he has come up with a diagnosis to explain why his medical thrillers remain so popular.

"The main reason is, we all realize we’re at risk. We’re all going to be patients at some time," he says. "You can write about great white sharks or haunted houses, and you can say I’m not going in the ocean or I’m not going in haunted houses, but you can’t say you’re not going to go in a hospital."

Jay MacDonald is a writer in Naples, Florida.

Author photo by John Earle.

Robin Cook's latest medical thriller may seem like yet another example of the author's uncanny ability to anticipate national controversy, in this case the uproar over federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. After all, the Harvard-trained medical doctor-turned-novelist has been writing well ahead…

Mystery & Suspense, Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Suspense

Brad Meltzer

Interview by Stephanie Swilley

by Stephanie Swilley

When he was just out of law school, Brad Meltzer quickly joined the ranks of John Grisham and Scott Turow with his nail-biting debut thriller, The Tenth Justice. Four bestsellers later, he’s still reveling in a job that gives him inside access to the Supreme Court and the White House.

"I love digging around for the details. They are the most fun," Meltzer says from his home in Washington, D.C. "Hollywood lies so much to us that when you take the time to get it right, it becomes amazing." He researched his latest thriller, The Millionaires, for more than two years, but the topics he explores couldn’t be timelier. Crafting a story of two brothers on the run for stealing way more than they intended, Meltzer dove into subjects now on everyone’s mind: how people can change their identity and just disappear, and how the super-rich keep their millions hidden.

"It is so pathetically easy to change your identity in this country that it’s not funny," he says. "I thought it was going to be hard, [requiring] masterful, evil villain thinking, and it’s not. It’s simple. And that’s what’s truly scary." The Millionaires centers on Oliver, a rising young associate at a swank private bank in New York, who discovers that his boss is sabotaging his plans to get into a top MBA school. In a fit of anger, he agrees to his brother Charlie’s plan to steal $3 million from an inactive account about to be turned over to the government. To Charlie and Oliver’s thinking, no one will ever miss the money since the owner is dead. But it turns out quite a few people want the money, and the two boys are soon on the run as they try to figure out who’s chasing them, and how $3 million turned into $313 million.

Meltzer threw himself into his research and in no time learned how to get a fake Social Security number and passport. He discovered the art of garbage reading and the wonders of Nice N Easy hair color to create a new appearance. "Sometimes the dumb things and the easy things are the most effective" when trying to disappear, he says.

Meltzer even hired a private eye to put him under investigation. With just his name, he told the detective to find out everything she could on him. For an author who admits he’s paranoid, the results were scary.

"Within two minutes, she had everything," he says. "She had my Social Security number, my address, my former addresses. She had all of my relatives and my neighbors. She had my phone number, and once she gets your bank info, she can get your credit cards. In no time at all, she had my entire life laid out in front of her." But to Meltzer, The Millionaires is about more than stealing money and finding privacy in a world where everyone can see you.

"It’s about what we dream of as dreamers," he says. "It’s about what you think you want from life and realizing that sometimes it’s OK not to get it."

The journey for Meltzer’s characters inevitably hits close to home. "Every book that I write, I finish it and say, That’s the most personal character I’ve written." Meltzer sees part of himself in the serious, hardworking Oliver who struggles with money and class issues in a world of wealthy entitlement. "Our backgrounds are very similar," he says. "It’s always been the thorn I step on."

At 13, Meltzer was suddenly uprooted from Brooklyn when his father lost his job and did a "do-over of life" by moving the family to Florida with just $1,200. His parents lied about their address so Meltzer could attend the rich kid’s public school, and suddenly he was surrounded by families with more than one car and kids planning to go to college.

"In terms of feeling like you’re the outsider looking in on the rich person’s life, I felt like that was my entire life when we moved to Florida," Meltzer says, adding "That’s what Oliver was based on the kid who wants more."

Now 31, Meltzer still populates his thrillers with young protagonists with grand plans and plenty of idealism. Usually in their 20s, the wannabe lawyers and bankers have their lives all planned out, until, invariably, everything goes wrong.

"It’s just a magic time. I think it’s the best time to write about. And maybe this is just my belief in how power really works," Meltzer says. Meaning that without the "little people" to drive the cars, send the faxes and work the computers, the big shots would be up a creek. "I feel like in some ways I’m forever trapped there in the low part of the totem pole," he admits, "but thankfully so."

Meltzer, like one of his young, eager characters, thought he had his future mapped out. With one year to go before starting law school at Columbia University, he took a job in Boston at Games magazine. And like one of his twisting, turning thrillers, nothing went as planned. The job turned out to be awful, and Meltzer remembers thinking, I have one year and I can either watch a lot of television, or I can try and write a novel. "I know it sounds insane," he says now, "but it just seemed like the most logical thing to me."

Maybe his plan was crazy, because Meltzer eventually received 24 rejection letters for his literary novel Fraternity. But he fell in love with the process of writing and early into his first year of law school, the idea came to him for The Tenth Justice. Being a paranoid person, Meltzer says, writing thrillers came naturally; he had found his niche. The Tenth Justice was so successful that after finishing law school, he devoted himself to writing full-time and never practiced law.

Although he made his mark by writing about lawyers, Meltzer wanted to take a new direction with The Millionaires. "I did not want to forever rely on the big Washington power structure to scare the reader," he says. So he moved the action to New York, left out the lawyers and tinkered with the thriller structure.

"Usually you always know who the villain is and why the character is in danger. And in this book, I said, Let’s know neither of these things. Let’s see what happens when the character doesn’t even know why he’s in trouble, if he can figure his way out of it," Meltzer explains.

He charged into unknown territory, but didn’t lose an ounce of the Meltzer magic. The 482 pages fly by with pulse-pounding suspense, and the unraveling secrets chase you to the end. Joey, the female insurance agent in The Millionaires who’s smarter than both the bad guys and the good guys, sums Meltzer’s style up best: "The best games always keep moving."

When he was just out of law school, Brad Meltzer quickly joined the ranks of John Grisham and Scott Turow with his nail-biting debut thriller, The Tenth Justice. Four bestsellers later, he's still reveling in a job that gives him inside access to the…

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

Michael Connelly

Interview by Bruce Tierney

by Bruce Tierney

Michael Connelly’s new book, The Scarecrow, hits bookstores this month, having garnered pre-release acclaim from every quarter. It is Connelly’s first novel to feature reporter Jack McEvoy since the runaway bestseller The Poet in 1996. Of all of the characters in Connelly books over the years, McEvoy has the trajectory that most closely resembles Connelly’s own: reporter for a small-town newspaper, a move to the Los Angeles Times, a successful book deal, fame and fortune; analogous events, albeit in a slightly different order.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Connelly via a crackly Tokyo-to-Florida cell phone connection. In addition to having read most of his books over the years, I did some research and learned that Connelly once lived in Raymond Chandler’s old apartment, a factoid I thought worth pursuing.

“Ah, you must have visited Wikipedia,” Connelly begins, with a knowing chuckle. “As so often happens with the Internet, they got the germ of the story right, but they missed out on the details.” Connelly says he was inspired to start writing mysteries after seeing Robert Altman’s film The Long Goodbye, in which Elliott Gould stars as the Chandler detective Philip Marlowe. “When I moved to L.A., I thought it would be cool to live in the apartment where Marlowe/Gould had lived in the movie,” he says. The apartment wasn’t available at the time, but years later it became vacant and Connelly moved in. “On the plus side, it had a great view overlooking L.A., and I could walk to the Hollywood Bowl to see the Rolling Stones. On, the minus side, it wasn’t air-conditioned, and it always smelled a bit like a gas leak,” Connelly recalls.

Connelly’s character, Jack McEvoy, lives in a Craftsman home south of Sunset, and does his writing from the pressroom of the Los Angeles Times. This is a room with which Connelly is intimately familiar from his years as a crime reporter, and one of his aims in writing The Scarecrow was to focus on the sad decline of newspapers like the Times. The real-life closing in February of the Rocky Mountain News, the site of McEvoy’s previous posting, forced the recall of The Scarecrow manuscript so Connelly could make last-minute changes to the book. As more newspapers around the country shut down, Connelly says, “I think what is lost is a community center, a place of news and ideas and debate. It will be splintered among websites and blogs. Perhaps more important is the loss of a watchdog. Who will keep an eye on the small stuff? Who will uncover the small corruptions that lead to the big ones? Will the bloggers do it? Will websites do it? I’m not sure.”

As The Scarecrow opens, McEvoy’s career is in flux: thanks to the double whammy of his large paycheck and the L.A. Times’ plummeting fortunes, he is about to be given the heave-ho. Asked to stay on for a brief period to train his replacement, Mc-Evoy faces a conundrum: on the one hand, he would love to leave his boss twisting in the wind, but he is working on an article that might well garner him the Pulitzer Prize, and he’d really like to stick around long enough to see it in print. His story focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old journeyman felon charged with rape and murder. It takes McEvoy next to no time to deduce that Winslow’s so-called confession is bogus, which begs the bigger question: if this fledgling thug isn’t the killer, then who is the Scarecrow? And how can one write about this stuff without giving real-life villains usable ideas?

“I think you always have to have some responsibility when you write up the bad guys,” Connelly says. “For example, I never give every step in a crime because I don’t want the books to be a primer for anybody. Most of the time, unfortunately, I am not plowing new ground. The bad guy in The Scarecrow may be unique, but the use of the Internet for nefarious deeds is nothing new. This so-called Craigslist Killer would be a case in point. The real thing is always much worse in reality than anything I put into fiction.”

A longtime cinema fan, Connelly has had only one of his books made into a movie thus far, the 2002 Clint Eastwood adaptation of Blood Work. It makes one wonder how Hollywood can pass over such intelligent and action-packed novels in favor of, say, a remake of Bewitched. “Hey, I liked Bewitched,” Connelly says with a laugh. “Seriously, though, I don’t think my books lend themselves to being made into movies, because so much of what happens in the book is in the head of the protagonist. You could do it with voice-overs, but Hollywood doesn’t like voice-overs.”

Asked if he has ever considered doing a Hitchcockian cameo role in a film of his work, Connelly says, “I visited the set of Blood Work a couple of times, but Clint Eastwood never offered me a role as an extra, and I never really thought much about it. Then Eastwood directed Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River, and toward the end of the movie, Dennis was in a great cameo in the parade scene, alongside the mayor, no less! Dennis is a friend of mine, and I have given him a good deal of grief about that.”

Speaking of cameo appearances, the McEvoy character has made several, in books featuring longtime Connelly stalwarts Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller. “The idea was that all my books would be part of one big mosaic of time and place. So I consciously look for places to cross-pollinate,” Connelly says. “I needed to have a reporter in The Brass Verdict so I made him Jack McEvoy because I knew I would be writing about him next and it sort of set the table for the next book. I wish there was a device for tracking all of this. I could use one.”

Connelly is not one to rest on his laurels. Indeed, it seems he is not one to rest at all; his next book, 9 Dragons, featuring L.A. cop Harry Bosch, is due out in the fall.

Mystery, Mystery & Suspense

Mystery & Suspense Mystery

C.J. Box

Interview by Bruce Tierney

by Bruce Tierney

Tony Hillerman wrote of C.J. Box's first novel: "Buy two copies of Open Season, and save one in mint condition to sell to first-edition collectors." In his well-crafted debut, Box decisively set himself apart from the crowd of freshman mystery writers. Deftly sidestepping the dreaded sophomore slump, he is back with a vengeance in Savage Run, the second book featuring Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett.

Box, a Wyoming native who has worked as a ranch hand, a surveyor and a fishing guide, focuses his latest book on the battle between conservationists and ranchers for control of the West's open range. The scales tip one way, then the other, in this ongoing struggle, with neither side seeming to gain lasting advantage. In Savage Run the stakes have been raised, as an organization of zealous environmentalists locks horns with the Stockman's Trust, a well-heeled clandestine association of ranchers who will stop at nothing in pursuit of their objectives. When several "tree huggers" meet with foul play in rapid succession, the investigation falls to Joe Pickett. It will prove to be the toughest assignment of his career.

"People seem to see environmental issues as black and white," says Box ("Chuck" to his friends) via telephone from his Wyoming office. "I hoped to present a fair look at both sides of the issue." The environment is certainly a running theme in both Open Season and Savage Run, but more compelling are the characters on either side of the fence: the ranchers who depend upon the use of government lands for grazing their cattle; the newcomers from out of state who hanker after a taste of the Old West; the environmentalists bent on conserving the dwindling natural resources of the region; and finally, the game wardens, who stir the simmering pot in an attempt to keep it from boiling over.

So, are the protagonist and the supporting characters drawn from people in Box's daily life? "Well, there are any number of game wardens who are absolutely sure that Joe Pickett is based on them, and their wives think so as well!" Box says, laughing. "But the truth is that he is a composite of several different people. A game warden has a unique and autonomous job, and that lifestyle attracts a certain type of individual, someone like Joe Pickett."

On a more personal note, Box reveals that his 15-year-old twin daughters are convinced that they are the models for Pickett's older daughter, Sheridan: "I guess there's more than a little resemblance between my youngest daughter and Lucy Pickett, as well," he says with a chuckle. "The girls take a bit of ribbing from their friends at school, because all their friends read the books to see if there is anything potentially embarrassing."

How does it feel to be an overnight success? "It's weird. Open Season sat on my shelf for three and a half years before anyone showed any interest in it. I went to a conference hosted by the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Association, and they had agents on hand to critique new writers' work. The deal was, you could sign up to meet with two agents, so I signed up with two as C.J. Box, two more as Chuck Box. I think I signed up for eight in all. That was in November of 1999, and by the following May I had a publishing deal." Now, two years down the road, Open Season has been optioned for a movie, and Savage Run has received rave advance reviews. "Originally, I was signed to do three books in the Joe Pickett series; we have just signed for an additional three, plus another book that is not part of the series."

Things are nothing if not hectic for Box these days. He has not given up his day job (organizing tours of the western U.S. for European travelers), but writing demands more and more of his time: "I try to devote two entire days a week to writing. The rest of the time, I go in to the office and work just like before." And has he at done something wonderful to celebrate his new success-a round-the-world cruise, a Mercedes? "No time," he says ruefully. "I did take my wife out to dinner, though. Does that count?"

Tops on his wish list: "I hope that someday I have the opportunity to meet Tony Hillerman and thank him personally for his great review!"

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