Here at Casa Mysterioso, instead of recycled site-owner publicity, we offer interviews with other people in the arts--writers, musicians, actors, entertainers, and sometimes just plain characters. We add new ones all the time, and site visitors are invited to contribute. If we use your interview, we'll pay $35. Query by e-mail.

Interview with Jan Burke
Interview with Jeremiah Healy
Ben and Diane (An Interview with Stephen Booth)
Cold Days and Deadly Nights (An Interview with Steve Hamilton)
Mysteries (An Interview with Irene Marcuse)
The Stone Monkey (An Interview with Jeff Deaver)
The Salaryman's Wife (An Interview with Sujata Massey)
A Kiss Gone Bad (An Interview with Jeff Abbott)
Charlotte Justice (An Interview with Paula Woods)
Blood Money (An Interview with Rochelle Krich)
Letter From New Orleans: (An interview With Andy J. Forest)
The Lady From Charm City (An Interview with Laura Lippman)
Crescent City Views (An Interview with Anne Rice)

 

The Stone Monkey
(Interview with Jeff Deaver)
by Andi Shechter

A talk with Jeff Deaver - the hardest working writer in mystery.... When last Jeff and I talked, months ago, I hosted a chat with him on-line.  The chat had to be postponed at east once - only days before he'd learned  he'd won an award, voted on by readers in England, and had to fly over there  to accept the award.  Keeping up with this peripatetic guy isn't easy; every  time I tried to reach him, he was in Europe, or flying out to California where he was an advisor on a television show...you know, like that.  Happily,  the internet means we can talk while he's running all over the place.

AS is interviewer Andi Shechter; JD is Jeff Deaver.

AS: Jeff, why do you write so many different books and styles and series?  You've done legal thrillers, stand-alones of varying types, series with young  female protagonists.   Have you ever thought "I'll just write one series and  see where it goes?  Whatsa matter, restless?

JD: My job is to give my readers as much fun as I possibly can. Hey, this is the  entertainment business, right? Some of the stories that I think will please  them are conducive to series (like Lincoln Rhyme and Rune) while some are  one-off ideas that have rather esoteric themes (handwriting analysis in The  Devil's Teardrop or cyberspace in The Blue Nowhere). I'll write any type of  suspense, provided it's entertaining to my audience and fits my essential criteria--takes place over a short period of time, features regular deadlines  and has the opportunity for plot twists and surprise endings.

AS: This is probably an impossible question, but I'd like to try asking;  who's your favorite creation? 

JD:  I think I would have to say Michael Hrubek, the paranoid schizophrenic who  escapes from a mental hospital in Praying for Sleep. He is certainly my most  interesting--and ominous--character and I thoroughly enjoyed creating him.

AS: You write books that involve lots of intense research - Lincoln Rhyme's  disability issues, the net and privacy in The Blue Nowhere...do you  have a  secret clone who does all that while you're writing?

JD: Research is one of the best parts about being a writing. I love learning  about things and puzzling how to integrate the facts I find into my novel.  Readers too (speaking from personal experience), enjoy learning facts that  they haven't been exposed to in novels--provided, however, that they move the  story along. You can't let the research pull your story down through  digression. I'll end up using in the final book perhaps only twenty percent  or so of the material I've gathered.

AS: Talk about where Lincoln Rhyme came from, please.  After years, you were  an overnight success and this character pretty much put you on the map, yes?   And if you would, what it was like seeing him on screen.

JD: Lincoln came about essentially from a desire to create an "everyman"  detective, a hero who was pure mind -- meaning that he solved crimes as did  Sherlock Holmes, not by driving faster or shooting straighter or hanging out  in bars being a wise-ass PI.  I felt that readers might come to identify with  him and his thought processes more easily than if he was a more traditional  suspense fiction hero.

  Like Sherlock Holmes, Lincoln Rhyme has an intense desire to solve the problem posed by a complicated crime. This is what keeps him sane. He is  essentially a hunter and is driven to find his prey. I was not, by the way,  inspired by anyone in particular; I created Lincoln from my imagination.

  I thought it was a fine movie; Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie did a  fine job in the main roles of Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs. There were a  few things I would have done differently, of course, but I'm not a filmmaker  (just as there're probably things about my book that the director of The Bone Collector might've done differently if he were going to write it). Making a  movie's a tough thing to do. I don't have a lot of patience for authors who  whine that Hollywood destroying their "vision." If you don't want to risk a bad adaptation, don't sell your book. If you think you can do it better,  produce it yourself. Nobody puts a gun to your head and says, "Your story or  your life."

AS: Your newest book is yet another departure for you. Talk about The Blue Nowhere.

JD:  We writers of suspense fiction are always looking for new ways to thrill our  readers -- that is, we try to avoid the cliches that are so tempting to fall  back on. I wanted to create a unique villain, yet one who would have an  immediate impact on my readers and -- being as sick and twisted as I am -- I  wanted to scare the socks off them. Since my bad guy--his screen name is  "Phate"--sits at his computer and can get into his victim's machines with a  few keystrokes, I wanted readers to think, "Oh-oh, my keyboard feels funny or  my hard drive sounds weird; maybe Phate's inside my system right now!" I took  this idea and built the book around it, again using recurring deadlines, plot  twists and -- in this case -- a triple surprise ending.

AS: What haven't you written that you'd like to try; are we going to see Deaver's Big Book of Haiku?  A play?  A non-fiction book?  History?

JD:  Well, I just wrote an introduction to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for Oxford  University Press. That was serious work -- I used footnotes and everything. I  enjoyed it, though it was a lot of work (it's so much easier to make up stuff  than to be factual).

   But aside from little projects like that, no, I'm perfectly content to write  suspense fiction. I love it and my audience seems to enjoy it, as well.

AS: Do you get out much? What I really mean is what is your life like now? 

Are you constantly in demand, now that you're writing BIG books?  Do you get to conventions any more?

JD:  I have to do a lot of balancing. My books have become increasingly popular in  Europe, where I actually sell, proportionately speaking, more copies than in  the United States.  A word to those aspiring to be professional  novelists:  only half the job is writing the book; the other half is selling  it. I do a great deal of traveling here and overseas to promote my work. Then  too I have to spend time in the location where my books are set to get the  details right (or else I'll hear about it from the locals!)

AS: What drives you? 

JD:  Telling stories.

AS: What's your favorite part of writing?

JD:  Two parts: I spend eight months outlining, organizing and researching each of  my books. Putting together the outline, finding out how the story and  subplots are going to fit together is great fun. The second joy is meeting  fans and hearing how much they've enjoyed reading a particular book.

AS: And of course, what's the thing about writing you like the least, or hate, or would like  to avoid?

JD:  Getting things wrong in the book: factual errors, typos I've missed or  continuity errors from one scene to another. Not only are they embarrassing  but they disrupt the readers' experience and can disturb that delicate web of  illusion that's so important in fiction of the sort that I write.

AS: What are you working on now?

JD:  My new book is another Lincoln Rhyme/Amelia Sachs novel. It will be out in 2003. I generally intend to alternate -- one Lincoln Rhyme every other year,  interspersed with a stand-alone. But this idea was just too much fun to let  go. I can't say anything about it except that the villain is somebody who's  mastered some unique means to kill and destroy. After you read it you may  never talk to a stranger again. The Stone Monkey pits Lincoln and Amelia against the Ghost, the nickname for a Chinese "snakehead." These are criminals who smuggle illegal aliens out of China. The book takes place over two days--much of it in New York's Chinatown--and follows Lincoln as he tries to find the Ghost before he, in turn, finds and kills two illegal immigrant families who have escaped from him and pose a threat to his criminal operation. There's, of course, more to  it than that and I get into a lot of other issues--such as Lincoln's  impending spinal cord operation and Amelia's relationship with a handsome  illegal immigrant whose life she saves.

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