Perfecting the Craft of Mystery | Jonathan Kellerman

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26:57I'm fascinated, though. I think suspense slash thriller is very hard because not only do you have to plot in this, like people expect extra suspense and they expect to be fooled. So given that they already go into this thinking it's like a puzzle to some extent, like, you know, you go into a novel, let's say any of your novels, or, you know, I could be talking about this one or I could be talking about any, you kind of lead us to believe there's some really annoying guy who's a bad guy. but we also sort of know that because it's the middle of the book only I and I'm being kind of led to believe it's probably not true and so it's very well put so how do you get around that how do you know that you're got the right twist I don't know I just once it feels right to me I sit up and write it I I don't introspect I to me I always would tell students who would ask about writing I I would say introspection is the worst enemy of creativity.

27:58Don't study your navel. It's like a job. I talked to Stephen King about this. Any of us who have been doing this for decades have the same approach. It's a job. You don't even see a career. It's a job. It's a great job. We sit down. We take it seriously. I don't write in my bathtub. I'm in my bathrobe. I get dressed. I shave. I go to the office like I used to when I was a doctor. And I do my job. and I just don't think about it. I just try to do it as well as possible. And I just, that's why I think those MFA things where you give other people your stuff and it's just a circle jerk. I mean, it's just not something that appeals to me.

28:38And I'm glad that I didn't come out of the English department. I came out of a different background. And I just don't even think about it. If it feels right to me, if the story is making sense, if it's not, I'll change it. So as I say, it takes a year for me to write a novel. Half of that time is spent planning and plotting and outline. Half is spent writing. So I put just as much time into it. Once I've done that, once I've prepped it, everything needs to be prepped. You know that. You want to invest in stock. You've got to do research. You don't do it blind. I paint a picture. I have to prime it.

29:13And I'll use different color primers. I have to layer it. You know, you play music. You have to limber up. everything requires prepping what do you mean by layer layer up when i paint i people say oh is it relaxing i'll say not the way i do it because i copy old masters i'm super realistic so i use layers and layers of paint a lot of painters know that the under layer will affect the next layer so if you put down color a and put down color b color b looks different than if it wasn't sitting on top of color A. So there's a lot of glazing. There's a lot of that kind of painting requires a lot of precision, a lot of layers.

29:55And same thing with writing. You have to just prepare it properly. Some people don't. I mean, Parker did some great books. Elmer Leonard was brilliant. He did an outline, but he did a different type of book. You know, the kind of book you're 100 % right, the kind of book that I write because I've been overcompensating for being a lousy plotter for 40 years already because it's expected of me, which is the other thing. When my son started writing, my wife told him, Faye said, Jesse, you better write what you want to write because you'll be required to do that the rest of your life. Okay. Yeah. Right.

30:29Because if you suddenly wrote, you know, Flowers of Algernon or whatever, part two, like people would be like, oh, this is like a pet project of his. It's not Alex Delaware. I don't want to read this. You know, I've done some non-Delaware suspense novels, some of which I think are at least as good as the Delawares, and they sell 90 % of the Delawares, no matter how good. I did a book called The Murderer's Daughter. My lover was really excited about it. Great female character. This is going to outsell Delawares. No, same thing. 80, 90 % of Delawares. And so people want that from me. It doesn't bother me.

31:06I'm not like Raymond Chandler sitting around getting drunk and bitching about it. I happen to like writing Delores. If I didn't, I'd stop. But I'll give you another good example. My son and I wrote a couple of golem books, Golem of Hollywood with a golem of parents. We think they're brilliant books. Stephen King freaked out over them. He said, this is, took my breath away. We saw, we did something great. Nobody wanted to read them. Nobody bought them. You know, it's just, that's the way it is. People expect a certain thing. But it's interesting because you, the first part of your life, you were a great, your career was you were a great child psychologist i like to think so and you know your alex delaware series is about this amazing child psychologist right who also loves you know solving crimes yeah most psychologists do well say psychologists there is an element of there's a person in front of me and there's a period of discovery that you have to kind of peel away to find out who this person really is and what's driving them.

32:06And so when you have a character based on that, it's like that there's a little bit of your autobiography in each book. I feel like you're living inside my head because that's exactly what I used to tell myself. I said, I'm doing detective work. Every time a new patient comes in with some problems, I need to figure out what's going on. It's detective work. So I'm doing detective work and I'm doing it in a certain way. But the other thing is that I did have experience with the criminal justice system. I've been an expert witness. I've gone to court. If you see enough patients and you're in enough clinical situations, especially in an inner city hospital, you're going to have, you're going to see all sorts of crazy stuff and even in private practice.

32:52And so I had experience with that darker side of life. So it didn't come out of nowhere. Right. And I think that is shown so much in these novels in this alex delaware series so just to set the context alex delaware is a child psychologist and he just lives for helping his partner you know milo solve these crimes and like i'll just say like in the ghost work at friends in the beginning he's kind of depressed because he hasn't gotten the call from the guy in a while like he just loves this exactly he's addicted to it and it's not where he makes money he doesn't make any money He has a well-paying job doing legal work.

33:33He makes a lot of money. He's done investments. He's a successful guy. But this is what he does to keep his brain going. And he is addicted to it. And it's been an issue with his girlfriend, Robin, because he puts himself in danger occasionally. And he's just drawn to it. And I think that a protagonist needs to be driven. I never was attracted to apathetic heroes, antiheroes, guys who didn't give a damn. I think for a book to have drive to it, the protagonist needs to be driven too. What's an example? Let me just ask you, Jack Reacher, he's clearly motivated by doing justice, but at the beginning of each novel, it seems like he's apathetic.

34:21I don't see him as apathetic. I see him as a drifter. I think Lee's a great writer. and created this amazing person with a great assumption of this guy traveling around rural America doing great stuff. He just is, he's like, to me, Reacher is like a cowboy hero. He's there when you need him. He's like a good gun that you're ready to shoot when it's necessary. But the other kind of book is like the cozy novels you used to have from England where there's a body and everyone stands in the drawing room and talks about it. I don't like that. To me, I've seen dead bodies. Dead bodies are upsetting. Violence in crime is upsetting.

35:07And policemen, cops, they get images in their heads. They can never get rid of those images. I'm very empathic. I'm a super empath. I don't want to look at this stuff because I know once the image is in my head, I'll never get it out of there. so that kind of book kind of annoys me when people are oh there's a body let's go have a martini that Dorothy Sayers and that which is not to detract um they have their audiences they have their audiences and I and look at some of them are really good uh Akita Christie most successful mystery writer in the world created these great puzzles very mathematical very little if any character developing Poirot was Poirot in the first book and he's Poirot in the 10th book.

35:51Of the British writers, I like Ruth Rendell. I mean, she was a genius. And she also dealt with the dark aspects of the human psyche. And crime is bad. Crime is bad stuff. I don't like an apathetic. For example, the movies are always showing cops and making jokes about it and being lighthearted. There was a certain amount of gallows humor that occurs to mediate their anxiety. But most of the homicide cops that I've met are really, really upset by this stuff. They really take it to heart. They're sensitive guys. I find when I talk to homicide cops, I'm a tougher guy than they are when it comes to bad guys.

36:29They're more, I don't know, tolerant. It's not tolerant. They're more soft-hearted even than I am. Wonder why that is. Because they're sensitive human beings. To become a homicide cop, you have to really care. And when they say, I want to help people, they really mean it. It's not like someone who works for a nonprofit. The guys who set out to, they become obsessed, the good ones. And so that whole thing of they're sitting around and they're making jokes about it, that's a lot of nonsense for the most part. They're very serious guys. I mean, and women too. When you were a psychologist, like you said, after seeing so many, like, let's say young people through the system, eventually you're going to see some horrible stuff, whether it's abuse or crime or, or kids who can't be helped or kids who are like, you've been involved in kids who are let go, who still need institutional treatment.

37:21And I mean, was that hard to deal with? And in many cases, you might not know the end of the story either. Like someone's in the hospital for a little while, then they're gone and you don't know the end of the story. Oh, that happened to me many times. Um, what happened to me is I, I've had stuff thrown at me. I'm not really good at planning my life. I'm kind of experiential. So I went to grad school to become a psychologist. I got married when I was 22 years old. I got my PhD when I was 24. I looked 18. I grew a mustache because people kept saying, doctor, how old are you? And I was sitting in my office.

37:58I was an intern at Children's Hospital. Chief psychologist comes. He goes, John, are you really going to finish your PhD this spring? I said, well, you know what it's like if they accept it. He says, okay, would you like a job here? Children's Hospitality is kind of like Yale, Harvard. You know, it's a very, one of the best hospitals in the world. I'm going, hell yeah, I'm 24 years old. I'm married. I'm broke. So yeah, you're offering me a job here. Awesome. Then he says, this is the job. I thought it's going to be a straight psych job. No, no, no, no, no. He says, well, you know, we have these kids with cancer, very serious solid tumors, And we can't give them enough chemotherapy because the chemotherapy kills their immune system and then they die of pneumocystis pneumonia.

38:42So we have a study from NCI or NIH, whatever. We use these germ-free modules called laminar airflow units that were developed by NASA to decontaminate astronauts. And we can use them, but the government is telling the oncologist who's doing the study, You can't put kids in isolation without studying psychological aspects. I'm listening to this. I'm 24 years old. I go, okay, and what's my job? Your job is to find out what's going on and to prevent problems. That was my first job. I had no interest in oncology. I had circulated through other parts of the hospital, but I really didn't want to deal with it.

39:22But it was fascinating, and I got paid to think. So I got to say, I got to do research and figure out what was going on. And when I met the guy who was doing the research, he looks at me, also a young guy, but older than me. He's like 33. He looks at me. He goes, I guess you'll need an office. So that was the welcome that I got, right? Because in those days, the doctors weren't too psychologically minded. Three years later, he's going around saying, most important data to come out of my study are the psychological data. Because he knew he could not do that study without us. So that was my first job.

39:55I didn't think it through. So then people say, oh, you work with kids with cancer. Isn't that depressing? And I said, no, because I know I'm helping them every day. And a lot of them, some of them are getting cured. That's the purpose. That's the point. And so three years later, the same guy became the head of oncology. And he said to me, John, can we do for all of our patients what we did for those kids in that unit, which is 3 ,000 or 4 ,000 patients? And so I said, I was 27 years old. I said, okay, let's try it. So we were the first people to do psychosocial care. So it's been thrown at me.

40:31I never had time to worry about it. I was so busy. And I really felt it was very uplifting, very rewarding. I would leave work every day knowing I'd done something important. And you can't always say that about every job. And the reason I left the hospital in 1981 wasn't because of the patients. It's because I got tired of the bullshit and the bureaucracy. I just got tired of dealing with it and not making any money. You know, the salaries are not good. I have kids. So I went into private practice and I told my wife. And also, I wanted to give writing one last shot, which I did many times. And I said, honey, can we tighten our belts?

41:08Because I'm not going to make any money for them. Let's go into practice. And people said to me, 1981, you're giving up a tender position to go into solo practice during a recession. And I had no knowledge. I said, oh, there's a recession. I didn't live in that world. I didn't have money to invest. I didn't know there was a recession. I went into practice, and I figured nothing would happen. Like Arthur Conan Doyle, who had a really bad medical practice, he wrote Sherlock Holmes. I said, I'll have time to at least take a year and give writing one last shot. And my practice booked up in two and a half weeks.

41:42Wow. So how did you find the time then to write? Back to the garage at 11 p.m., back to doing what I was doing. And finally, four years later, I got published. and uh but so i just i'm just not a guy who plans things out uh they say you make your own look i guess so if i didn't have a doctorate i couldn't be a psychologist if i didn't have a license you know but but they offered me jobs what can i say well i i think it's true about the you make your own like luck but you have to you have to eat what you make basically yeah yeah so like you You were offered the job, you took it. You have an opportunity to write a series of, you know, thrillers that have a child psychologist as the main character.

42:30So you took it and that becomes one of the best-selling series of all time.

42:49you know i'm always just fascinated again with with thrillers like there are two areas that seem like really difficult to write one is a chase scene because they it's hard not to imagine them in a cliched way. Like, oh, we're chasing them. They start firing at us. We fire back and something happens. Like there needs to be a twist to get them or else it's a cliche. And then again, building in the twist so that only you know what's happening and the readers don't know what's happening. And maybe you don't think about it when you're writing, but I'm just fascinated, like if you have any insight into how you do those two things.

43:27I try to evolve it in a logical way so there's not an, oh, all of a sudden, epiphany. It's pacing. That's the key is learning how to pace, which took me a long time to learn. How to pace it so it's, I hate to use the word, but organic or natural so it's sequential rather than all of a sudden, oh yeah, I looked at a red bird and it made sense to me. That's the skill in doing these stories and that's why I spent as much time planning it as actually doing it. and it always seems to come when it always seems to fall into place. It's almost a magical experience where you don't know whether you can do it, and then you do it.

44:09What's an example from like an, not necessarily this novel, but like an earlier novel where you feel comfortable saying what the twist is or how you thought about the twist? Like as you were outlining, like how did you think about the twist and you knew it was a good twist? I don't even think of my books as having twists I just think it's a more gradual, logical, similar psychology where you're meeting, as you very adroitly said, very acutely, you're getting to meet people and you have to figure them out. You know, if a child would come into my office with a symptom, that same symptom could be due to many different things.

44:44So you have to learn about this person. And it's just, it's not really a twist. I don't know how to explain it. I see. It's like as you're getting to know the different characters better, as their motivations come out, suddenly you could begin to connect dots. Dots that were very hazy at first, but now they get darker. Well, it's not just that. Like the book that I'm outlining now, I know this is really a why done it. It's all about motive. The whole mystery of this book is why do these things happen? Once we understand why they happen, then we can move on to solving the crimes. And that's true of most of my books, but especially in this particular book that I'm outlining now.

45:24And I was working on it right before we began talking. And I knew I wanted to get there. And, you know, I just kept thinking about it and writing it and trying different things until I got somewhere that made sense to me. It's the way it is in real life detective work. They keep accruing data until something makes sense. Sometimes it never happens. You have a cold case. So it's just a matter of collecting. It's like anything else, collecting the information, knowing how to get the information, and trying to hone it, trying to sculpt it. I don't know, like when I paint, I like to refine. You know, when I paint, I'm sure most painters do, I start off with, I frame it out.

46:09I'll do a rough out, you know, Let's say it's a bird on a branch, a hummingbird. So I sketch it and I write it and I block it in. And most paintings, you start off with dark colors first, then you lighten up. That's not always, but that's... And you're using progressively finer brushes. You're starting off with broad brushes, literally, and you're putting it in there and you're getting into the tail and I'll use brushes with three hairs on them. Again, it's a hummingbird's eyeball and that kind of thing. Same thing with a novel. You're just zeroing in on a target to some extent. But for me, it's all about planning.

46:45And how do you, like, you know, you have this very successful series revolving around Alex Delaware, the child psychologist who likes to find, you know, solve crimes. What's the, is there a pressure of, like, you know, having to do a series? like, you know, you're, you're, it's not that you're obligated to write 20 more Alex Delaware novels, but what's different about, you know, sticking to a series for as many novels as you have, um, as opposed to like writing one-offs. I like the one-offs. I don't do them anymore because I don't want to work that hard anymore. I was doing two, three books a year.

47:21Occasionally they were really inspired. I thought so. They were some of my best books and they just don't sell as well as the other. So if I'm going to spend energy, let me do what people want. But unlike other writers who got like, I think Conan Doyle got sick of Sherlock Holmes. He killed him off and bought him back. Chandler was always bitching because he was just that kind of a guy. I liked, I like writing Delaware novels because I see them as a vehicle for telling a certain type of story. And my story comes out of my work as a psychologist. It's basically you forget about the past at your own jeopardy.

47:56Okay. And, and so that's a very psychological approach. I, the past is going to come back to, you can't forget about the past. You have to look at the past to understand the present and hopefully the future. So I keep telling that kind of story using him as a vehicle. It's, it reminds me of the evolution, let's say of a standup comedian, like where at first they start, start early in their career. Let's take Louis CK as an example for better or worse. Early in their career, he was just, he was like an absurdist. He was just telling these like crazy jokes and they were great. He was funny. He had talent and skill, but then he really became huge when he started talking about his own failures and his own life and the crazy things that happened to him with his kids and marriage and stuff like that.

48:40So you, it's like you were able to, once you put yourself in the fiction, it took off. I mean, it was taking off before then with even right from your first book, but then this became a series, this Alex Delaware series. Well, it got published. I got published because I was finally stopped being a coward. I would write about everything but being a psychologist. There were two reasons. First of all, I hadn't been a psychologist that long. I mean, I got my doctorate in 74. The book was published 11 years later, but I wrote it in 1981. So you have to accrue a certain amount of experience. Even though I won a literary award when I was 21.

49:18I had nothing to say. I had nothing to say. No life experiences. Were girls impressed that you won a literary award when you were 21? Sure. How do you think I got married? I knew it. You know, I mean, girls were impressed by playing guitar, you know, whatever works. But it was just, I never thought this was going to be a series. I didn't, you never know, my wife says it, Faye says it, she goes, you never know your first novel is your first novel. So you throw everything in there. And then you've established these characters and you have to be consistent. But I don't feel hemmed in by him. Honestly, at this point, if I didn't want to do it, I wouldn't do it.

49:59Because life is too short. I'll be 75 this summer. I like to enjoy my life, you know? And I just like writing books. Well, first off, for anyone who's listening to this and not watching this, you look very young for 75. So I can tell the good genes. I can see why your mom lived to 103. Yeah, people think I look younger. You look young too, by the way. I'm 55, so I'm 20 years younger. You look 20 years younger. 20 years younger. I don't know if I want to live to 103. I mean, she was okay to 96. It wasn't bad. All right, that's a good run. She had a good life. No, I mean, you like to think, you have to have a somewhat young approach also to write.

50:41I don't want to, I'm not writing for Gen Xers. I'm not writing about TikTok. So yeah, my readership has aged to some extent. I'm just not that young, hip, new, fresh Phenom guy anymore, which I was in 1985. But two questions about that. Like one is, is the Phenom concept. So like in the late 80s, early 90s, there was the so-called Brat Pack of fiction with Jay McInerney, Brett Easton Ellis, and Tamma Janowitz. And they were all young. Like Brett Easton Ellis was like 21 when he first published. and it was just like with entrepreneurship, there's this myth that the young ones are more brilliant, but there's been a lot of research to show that writers actually get better.

51:23Like a historian, a mathematician, their peak age is 25, but a historian, according to Arthur Brooks, the peak age is 69 years old for a historian. Like they should try to live into their seventies because their best work's gonna happen around then. And for writers, I think it's the same. I mean, you can be a flash in a pan or you can be, I was about the same age as Jay Meckiner. We broke it around at the same time. But in typical fashion, all those guys, and I think they're talented, they were just part of that New York hipster thing. And I'm married and living in a suburb with my wife and kids, not living a glamorous life, going to work.

52:02And that's my style. And that's Faye style too. We like to keep a low profile. I'm not interested in going to parties, never hired a publicist. I'm really bad at self-promoting. I don't want to talk about the new book. I never like talking about a specific book. I like talking about the process, the way we're talking. That's much more interesting. I'm a terrible self-promoter. But publishers now only are interested in self-promotion. I don't know if that was always the case. They always were. But how did you, I guess, like you said, it was word of mouth on that first book. Your publisher, fortunately, in some respects, you were below the radar for your publisher, so they weren't pressuring you.

52:39and word of mouth got that first bestseller status. Yeah, I got, as I say, I got a lot of attention because shrink writes book. And I was like the only guy doing that out there. And I was a real shrink. You know, Michael Crichton was an MD, but he never practiced medicine. He was a great writer, but he never practiced medicine. And, but I did, I practiced psych. And so I was doing, I had another life. And so that was, I got a lot of attention. I got on Today's Show. and then I got really good reviews. And then I won an Edgar Award. So it was like, wow, this is cool. You know, I never took it seriously to the extent that I was willing to give up my day job until six years later.

53:26I'm just very conservative by nature and whether it comes to investing or anything else, and as a result, we're doing very well. So, you know, it's just personality. I don't use drugs. I'm not a heavy drinker. I don't have a lot of vices. I'm a pretty boring guy who's able to write books. That's just the way it is. And there are other people who are like that. I think when you start to live your... That happened to Norman Mailer. Here's Norman Mailer, who's a genius, right? When he became running for mayor of New York and becoming a persona, he never wrote another novel again. It's true. I mean, he did, but they weren't known really.

54:07But he wrote nonfiction fiction stuff. They weren't really serious novels like Naked and the Dead. That was a brilliant work. You can't do both. You can't do both. You know, I think it was his, you know, a lot of people, their second book after a great first book is not as good. So I think he had trouble with his second book. But his third book, which was, I'm trying to remember the name of it now. My memory's bad. The American Dream, I think it was called. Yeah, An American Dream. I loved that book. It's one of my all-time favorite books. He was brilliant. But later on, he became Norman Mailer instead of being a guy named Norman Mailer who wrote books very well.

54:46He wanted to be in the Post on page six. He wanted to be in the New York Times. He wanted to be a celebrity. He wanted to hang around with people. Doesn't appeal to me at all. Some of those people were my patients. I don't want to hang out with them. So, you know. So, Faye, your wife, she's also like an impressive novelist and sold tons of copies and has her own series. How much do you guys kind of grew up together in writing? Well, that's the thing. We didn't meet through the English department. I have a doctor in psych. She has a degree in dentistry. She's a dentist. She never practiced. She has a degree in theoretical math.

55:24She's a genius, okay? She's like math, physics, brilliant, you know, really, really smart. Was going to go to med school, but she said, I want to have kids. I'll go to dental school. hated it, never practiced. I had no idea that she could write because my concept was I'm the writing artistic guy in the family. You're the math science person, kind of a reversal in terms of sex roles. So I would go to the office and she decided to write a book. And I had just gotten, I just sold Wendabow, I was 85. And I was sitting with our third child, who was born in 85 on my shoulder. She was a baby. And Faye comes up to me and hands me this sheaf of paper and says, read this.

56:06It's lousy. You'll hate it. And I go, oh shit. This is a tough position to be in. We knew each other for 12 or 13 years. We'd been married for many years. I start reading it. This is like really good. I said, I can't believe she has any talent. You think you know somebody. You've been with them for years and you don't know them. And I'm going, honey, this is really good. So then she said, I was patronizing her. So we had a little tip about that. I said, no. So I called my agent and you need to understand I had no clout. My first book hadn't even come out. I just sold it for, for very little money.

56:41I said, I know what it sounds like. I wrote it, but he said, his eyes rolled back in his head. He said, I'll read it. He reads it. He goes, she's a writer and he sells it right away. Were you jealous? Cause you spent like a decade. I was so happy for her because she was miserable because she went to dental school. She graduated and then she had a kid. And she said, okay, when Jesse's a little older, I'll go back to work. Then she decided, I'll have another kid. And so she had a couple of little kids and she was like, how old was she? Like 31, 32? And she was bored. That's what she started. She was really bored and unhappy because here's this brilliant person who could have done anything, really.

57:18She's just a genius. And I was so happy that, but I struggled for 13 years, but every novel's been a bestseller. Okay? Every single book. Faye got published right away, but it took her many, many books like P.D. James to become a bestseller. So she had a different arc, so to speak. But it's a bizarre story because I think we're the only married couple to be on the New York Times list at the same time. Now, to be honest, Faye has just retired. She had enough of it. Doesn't want to do it anymore. She went out on top. I said, you don't miss it at all. He goes, nope, nope. So she works out. She picks up the grandkids from school.

58:05She cooks a little bit. She's learning Hebrew. She's boning up on her French. And she's just enjoying her life, you know? Let me ask you, like, when you're working a really high-intense job like you were and dealing with kids with cancer and all this stuff, and then you're writing in the garage at night, Like, how did you guys keep it together? Not necessarily the marriage, but, or maybe the marriage. Like, what sort of problems existed at that time? Well, the big problems were having kids and not sleeping like everyone else. I mean, I think the problem was that Faye was not so happy with her life because, you know, and I had done everything.

58:47I was, one thing I never was, was a sexist. I always said, God, you're really smart. You need to do something, you know, whatever you want, you know. and I supported her, whatever she wanted to do. I paid her tuition all through dental school, you know, and I was kind of sad that she wasn't happier with the way things were going. But overall, we were happy. We had a good marriage. We're best friends. We've been together for 53 years. You know, we love each other. And we had kids. And what I would do is I'd work at Children's Hospital, in that case, in private practice, come home. When I was in practice, my hours were not as long because I didn't want to work that hard.

59:24I wanted time to relax, and I was making a lot more money. So I would come home, be with the kids, be with Faye, hang out. She would go to bed, and then I'd go out to the garage, 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., and work on my writing. So it didn't intrude. And she was always very encouraging. Like when I told her I was quitting the hospital to, I actually asked her permission. I said, can I quit the hospital, and can we tighten our belt for you? Sure, honey, whatever you want. She didn't care about money. Faye doesn't care about stuff. She's from the Midwest. She's a very sensible person. And, you know, she grew up in California, but she's born in St.

1:00:00Louis, and she's from the Midwest. And I think that's the reason our kids turned out so well. She's like a really stable, unpretentious... Here's a woman who looked like a movie star, has a doctorate, has written bestsellers, and she's so unpretentious. How'd you get so lucky? You know, it really is luck. When I saw Faye, it was a sports night from a Jewish college group. And I had just finished with the requisite psychotic girlfriend. Right? I wasn't interested in another girlfriend. And a bunch of guys are standing around. And they go, who's that? I said, what are they looking at? Oh, there's a new girl.

1:00:39And there was Faye. It was gorgeous. Absolutely gorgeous. I said, she's really cute, but she looks 14 years old. I mean, I look young. You should see her. They said, no, she's 18. I said, okay. So I made my move. Game on. And that was it from the day we met. It was like, I won't say love at first sight, but certainly love at second sight. We just have a really good rapport. It's not to say we don't have our tiffs, we don't have our fights. We don't, you know, both of us are very strong personalities. There's no dominant submissive. There's two dominants in this family. We have to learn how to compromise.

1:01:12But she's just awesome. And as we've gotten older, it's a different depth of love. because you really start to appreciate that you've been with this person your entire life. I mean, I always say to the extent that I grew up, I grew up with Faye. And so I was 21 when I met her. We were 19 and 22. We decided we're getting married, which is pretty crazy in retrospect. And we look 14 and 17 and people try to sell us credit schemes. If you see our wedding picture, we look like children. And it was just one of those lucky deals. But in the traditional Jewish background we came from, all of our friends were getting married young.

1:01:52I have another friend. His wife was 18. Another was 17. Another one was 20. So we were not the only ones. That was our social norm in that community. And all those people are still married. They're still married. And they're happily married and have a bunch of kids. It's just what we grew up with. That's amazing. And you guys have two kids who also happen to be writers. Yeah, I have two writers and two psychologists. and two psychologists. The two middle daughters are PhDs in psychology. Oh, that's interesting. And we never, we were not helicopter parents. You know, I sent, I paid tuition at four Ivy League type schools.

1:02:28One kid went to Harvard, one kid went to Penn, one kid went to Barnett, one went to Claremont McKenna, all pretty exclusive. We never told them where to go. We never made the decision. We didn't care. Frankly, I think it's a lot of hooey. I think in recent events at Harvard, it's all emperor's clothing. You know, I mean, It's a college like anything else. And you can get a good education anywhere. But we just didn't. The kids turned out well because of Faye. I'll give you a good example. We had an assistant, a prior assistant before Tame. She was British. And her prior boss had been Bruce Springsteen, which is something she was never, ever going to let us forget.

1:03:08She was always talking about, oh, Bruce, oh, Bruce. But one thing she said to Faye, Dave, you're the only boss I've ever had who cooks. You know, Faye would get up in the morning and make sure the kids had breakfast and she would drive them to school. And I gotta be honest, I said, honey, it was up to me. I hire a driver and it's a delegate. No, no, it's there for the kids. As a result, we have a son of three daughters. They love her, especially these daughters. They call her every day. They love her and they're just really close to her and they appreciate her. and we have a dozen grandkids so far.

1:03:44And it's a huge clan of people. So where would you say her writing is better than yours? She's definitely started out with better dialogue. No question. I mean, she, Elmer Leonard and Fay were the best dialogue people. She has a good ear. She's very, like I'm a painter, so I'm very visual. She was very good at, like she could do impressions of people. She had a really good ear. and I did learn from her about that. She's also kind of a cut and dry type of person. There's no bullshit in her book. She just tells the story. But honestly, we had very little interplay. We've actually written a few novelas together and that was a pleasant experience, but not something we wanted to do again because we're busy.

1:04:30So it's not that we talk shop. I mean, we just did our own thing. I mean, the only privacy we ever had was writing our books. We used to say, because think about it, we shared everything else, but we go to our office, we'd write our books. Now, the process has changed. In the early days, we were insecure. Every Friday, we would show each other our week's work. So we had a little writer's group. That was like date night for you. Yeah, no, except sometimes, as Faye said, there were some cold nights. Because, you know, you have to be really ginger. As our confidence grew, it stretched out. And it got to the point fairly quickly where we just showed each other finished books, finished manuscripts.

1:05:11And for the most part, once in a while, we'd make a suggestion here and there. I always welcome her suggestion because she's a writer and she's a talented person. But for the most part, it's a mutual admiration club. And she's like, it's great, honey. And I'm saying, really? So for the most part, and people would say, do you compete? And Faye was, her answer was, it all goes in the same bank again.

1:05:48so it's funny how you have a very practical like obviously when you were first writing you did it i don't want to say you did it then for the love of it and you don't do it now but you repeated several times that you it's a job also yeah but back then it wasn't a job so you were 100 % doing it for the love right and I wonder if now that you're in part doing it and getting paid for it like and again you referred to Parker's quote about the contract and and so on I wonder if that's why do you think you paint more because that's like a more artistic outlet for you now that you're not paid for no I always paint it always play guitar those are two of the things that I've done my whole life I'm just you know I think I'm actually a better painter than I am a writer.

1:06:28I was kind of a child prodigy. I could paint upside down. I could paint with both hands. Just something that I can do. And I can't explain it. But no, and just the fact that it's a job, I love it even more because I don't have to worry about it now. It just became a job in 1990, a full-time job. And when I say it's a job, it's not to say that it's boring or it's pedestrian. And it's just that we like those of us who've been doing it for decades. I have found we approach it in a professional manner. It's not an inspiration. Yes, we're inspired all the time. We're creative. But it's not a, you know, all of a sudden an epiphany comes.

1:07:10It's a matter of thinking it through and taking it. Writing novels, as you know, you write a book. It's a long project. We were with a project several years ago. There was like a genius camp for these kids. and they asked us to be the writers in residence there. And Faye, being a math person, she was talking to these kids, and most of them were math geniuses, and she said, what's the longest problem you've ever worked on? She said, because, you know, if you're in math, some of these problems can take a long time. And she was trying to get across to them that some of these projects take a long time.

1:07:49And I think that's what it is, you know? particularly when you're talking about the scope of a career like yeah like it took you a decade to get stuff published then it took you you know probably you know i don't know when the when did the first alex delaware book come come out 85 okay oh oh okay right this is the first one so uh you know you you hit your stride with the series but it's a long process you can't in something sometimes you feel like giving up on things like let's say someone wants to be a professional athlete, it's so easy to give up in that first couple of rejections or, you know, professional anything really, particularly if it's more sensational or artistic, because everyone wants those to do that for their life.

1:08:33I think being a bestselling novelist, there's a lack of reality. It's like being a major league pitcher or being a movie star. I never had thought that was in my life. And you can't aspire to that. I mean, you can, but I don't know. It's just, it's, look, people tell me, oh, well, you deserve it because I don't believe in deservedness. Okay. Yeah. I think I'm a pretty talented guy and I work hard, but I can be just as talented and it didn't happen. There's plenty of great writers who don't sell a lot of books and plenty of lousy writers who sell a lot of books. There are some good writers who sell a lot of books.

1:09:11I would hope I'm in that antheon, you know? So it's just, there's no guarantees. You understand that you're a mature human being who's done a lot of stuff. Kids, they don't understand it. I'll get people come to me before they write a novel and say, how do I publicize? How do I promote? I've got to write the damn book shirts, you know? I mean. Right. I think people don't understand that because it's pretty easy in most respects in this country in particular. And so you expect everything to be easy. And to some extent, it's getting too easy. I mean, maybe that shows my age a little bit. But like, do you think people read as much?

1:09:50Because let's put it this way. Reading is harder than watching TikTok videos. And so people do not read as much. And men certainly don't. Since you have readers, it's mostly women, except if you're like a Tom Clancy guy. I think it's the internet. You know, the news cycle's gone from 24 hours to 24 seconds. And you do have people who are like influencers. I gave the keynote address at SE graduation a few years ago because I was on faculty and I'm an alumnus. And I said, get a real job. Don't be an influencer. And they all applauded. But the truth is some of these influencers, whatever they are, make a ton of money.

1:10:29Now, it's not going to last unless they invest properly. They're going to be like, you know, the rock star who's selling real estate. So it is a tough thing because we have conditioned people to have no attention span. at all. Right. So how do you, has your writing changed as a result of that? Like you get to the murder faster? No, my writing hasn't changed. What I've had to do is adapt to reality. If I, people will point out the older books, I'm old enough to have, to have anachronisms. So, you know, payphones, now you have cell phones, you have, and you can't deny things like DNA and all that.

1:11:05So you have to work it in. But if, but if you're skillful, you can work with that, You know, so you have to change reality to some extent, but the core is the same. And people don't really change. I used to be on the media line for SC Med School, which means when reporters had questions on certain topics, they could call me. And it was always a question like, how do you think video games are going to change children? You know, I said, they're not going to change at all. Their behavior might change, but human nature is human nature. It's the same way I feel about race. Clinically, I dealt with people from all backgrounds.

1:11:40Because when you work at a major hospital, no, we had gypsies, and they were called gypsies. They were self-labeled as gypsies. I know that's not a politically correct thing. They were gypsies. We had everything. I dealt with people from all backgrounds. And I got to learn that ethnicity is a hurdle, but you can get over it. And once you get over that hurdle and you open the communication, everyone's the same. People want the same things. Human beings don't really change nature. Everything around them changes. So kids are kids. I just think we're conditioning people to expecting so quickly. Yeah.

1:12:16But maybe kids were always that way. I don't know, you know. Maybe, like one thing you hear from each generation is that it'll never be as good for us as our parents. And that never is actually true. Like people are saying it now. People said it when I was younger. People probably said it when generation before was younger. like the baby boomers were younger. So there's always down periods. Well, I have to make sure I don't lapse into that grumpy old guy of this generation. You have to understand, you know, it's the same process over and over of the young wanting to eat the old. And it's just, you know, things, okay, I'm an optimist.

1:12:53And I'm an optimist because I was born that way. It's character logic, okay? I'm just lucky. I'm lucky I'm an optimist. I find optimism, pessimists think they're realistic. They're not. If you look at pessimists, their error rate is higher. And when you teach pessimists to act like optimists, they're happier. So if you look at the world, when people start bitching about the world, say, you really want to live in the medieval ages? You want to live in the days before antibiotics? I said, a working class guy has more creature comforts than the king of England had 200 years ago. The world has gotten better progressively.

1:13:30Well, and your wife will appreciate this. The biggest cause of suicide in the 1800s was dental pain. I'm not surprised. Exactly. I mean, people, my mother was lucky. She was born prior to penicillin. So that's why, you know, those were tough people because the weak ones were killed off. You got strap infection, you died. You died. So do you want that where the life expectancy was 30, 40? I mean, people always think that their experience is everything. And there's such an inability to look at the way things were. I don't know. So when you sit down to write, who do you read? Do you read beforehand to kind of get the juices flowing?

1:14:17I don't read any fiction because I don't want to steal. I don't want to steal. I don't want to crib. The only time I read fiction is if there's a long stretch in between books. And it's really interesting because people would send me books for blurbs, and they'd always try to send me a book like mine or they thought was like mine. I don't want to read that. That's boring. I want to read something different. I read a lot of nonfiction. One thing I bemoan is the death of magazines, good magazines. But there's still a few. I read history. I read science. I read art. Fiction-wise, I've been going back and rereading the books of two writers.

1:14:55Margaret Millar. I don't know if you're familiar with that. She was married to Ross. Yes, you never heard of her. She was married to Ross McDonald. Okay. His real name was Kenneth Millar. And she's nasty and dark. I mean, she's really worth reading. And Ruth Rendell, both of whom are dark, dark writers. Very, very skillful. Margaret Millar wrote in Santa Barbara, and Ruth is British. And so I've been going back and reading quality fiction. But for the most part, I read nonfiction. I read a lot of science. I'm very curious about the world. So almost anything I'm going to read about, it comes my way.

1:15:36I guess also nonfiction is more likely to fuel plots than fiction. I guess so. It's just like I don't read fiction because for two reasons. First of all, I read. To enjoy fiction, you have to immerse yourself in it and engage what you call the subjective state of consciousness. And I lapse into the objective state of consciousness where I'm reading it like an energy would. I'm going, I would write that differently. Oh, that makes no sense. So something has to be really good to get me to be immersed in it. And I find it difficult. But I just think nonfiction is more stimulating. I don't think in terms of getting plus.

1:16:18In terms of that, I have an idea file created years ago because I have no short-term memory name works. I'm old. And so I have 100 plot ideas in this file, 100 plus plot ideas. I'll never write all of those. So I don't need new ideas. They're in there. I've got them in there. Interestingly, the book I'm writing now is not in that file. It's something totally different that I came up independently. But getting an idea is not a problem. People always say, oh, I have an idea. I say, then you should write your book. You know? Yeah, that process of, like you said, just, you know, or someone said to me recently, again, my short-term memory is no good, but that so-and-so was asked about writer's block and he said, every day at 9 a.m.

1:17:05I don't have writer's block. He knows he has to write that and that's what he does. That's your job, exactly. No, it's like saying, I have an idea. The jump from idea to book is like, I've got guitar strings on my guitar, so now I'm going to write a song. No, I mean, that's your tool. You have an idea. That's the germ. But I'll give you a good example. Warren Zeevan, are you familiar with? So he was a very good friend of mine. And he was fascinated by this whole process of writing a novel. He said, I write a song in three minutes, and I'm finished. I have nothing to do all day. You take a whole year.

1:17:44So he was so happy when he got the gig to be the band leader on David Letterman because he got to put on a suit and have a real job. Unfortunately, he passed away shortly after. But we were always talking about the difference between writing songs and writing novels. It's very, very different. Yeah, because you have to, like you say, you have to immerse yourself in those characters. You have to live with those characters in your head for a year or more. Forever, forever. In my case, because it's a series. So I have to live with these guys forever. I mean, it's so strange, these imaginary people.

1:18:14have been a bigger part of my life than anyone except my family. Do you want a TV series? Do I want a TV series? Like, you know, there's Reacher, there's other... If it's done well, we've tried, you know, so many times we've had so many deals fall through. We've had people try to do the books. They're not concept-based, what Hollywood calls high concept, like a Michael Crichton book, you know, Dinosaurs in Amber. You can't sum my books up. They're even hard to write flap copy for because it's not based, as you say, upon a twist or anything. They're more complex. So people really find it difficult to do.

1:18:56I've had so many deals, so many deals that fell through, so many bad scripts writing. At this point, I don't pursue it. I don't really care if someone does a great job, but I'd rather not do it than someone do a crap job. And now with all the political critics, I don't want someone saying, I want Milo to be a black, artistic woman. No. You know, we have to stick to the book the way it is. And I'm not sure that would play today. We'll see. Well, you know, again, a great series of books. The Ghost Orchid, it's just, you say you don't have the classic twist, and that's true. but I was just riveted and fooled each time.

1:19:44And, um, I appreciate it. It's really great. I can fool anybody. I don't know. I don't know. I'm, I'm pretty open to just living in that world when I read the book and, and letting the writer guide me. I'm not, I'm not, maybe that's why I never really liked Agatha Christie. Cause I'm not really trying to figure it out, but I just enjoy it. And, and I really enjoy your stuff. I'm so glad you came on the podcast. And it's thrilling to talk to a thriller writer like yourself. It's such a great one. So thank you once again for coming on the show. And the book, as I mentioned earlier, is The Ghost Orchid, an Alex Delaware novel.

1:20:24And go out and buy it. What date does it actually come out? I think February 6th. I'm not sure. Early February. See, I don't even pay attention to that. Yeah, you're hard at work outlining the next one. Exactly. It's great meeting you and great talking to you. And I really appreciate the insights. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate your insights. Thank you. Okay. Thanks, James. Take care.