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It was a small but focused group who joined best-selling
author Robert “call me Bob” Crais at the Denver Press Club for lunch and
talk. Crais, whose latest book has just been listed #6 on the NY Times
bestseller fiction list, told us he’s in the midst of a heavy book tour,
which will wind down at the end of March.
“This is my favorite thing on a book tour, meeting
with other writers and getting a chance to really talk about writing,”
he told us.
With little prompting, Crais reminisced about his
childhood, his start as a professional writer, his leap of faith into
writing novels and his love of the genre. Here is what he said, barely
edited:
“No one in my family writes. I grew up in Louisiana
and I come from a line of chemical factory workers and police officers
– in fact, four generations of cops. The truth is, I’m the Martian in
my family, because from an early age I knew I was a storyteller.
“I grew up in the outskirts of Baton Rouge, on land
that had just been reclaimed from the marsh. My backyard butted up against
a drive-in theater. Every evening we heard the dialogue from the movies
over the car speakers that were hung in the back rows, and if I climbed
up a tree in my yard I could watch the films and follow them fine. There’s
nothing worse than the movies on the southern drive-in circuit, so I got
my training early when it comes to pulp plots.
“My family was suspicious of my writing. My folks
grew up in the Depression, and they had no tradition of the arts, to say
the least. Success was getting a steady job, with a steady paycheck. So
of course my writing was discouraged.
“I became a closet writer. I worked in secret. I
piled up hundreds of rejections in high school, sending stories off without
telling anyone I was doing it. I wrote everything, everything I could
think of – science fiction, historical fiction, everything. And all those
rejections were fine. They didn’t get me down. I was learning how to be
a writer, learning on my own.
“When I was 15, I discovered crime fiction in a second-hand
bookstore called Crime Exchange. I loved that place. As soon as I could
drive I started hanging out there. But even before then I would get there
by bus and by walking, and I would read everything I could get my hands
on.
“I discovered Raymond Chandler and he changed my
life. I admit I wasn’t looking for great writing when I bought my first
Chandler book. I bought Chandler’s Little Sister for 19 cents, and it
had a picture of a really hot girl on the cover. I was a 15-year-old boy,
remember. That hot girl is what sold me, that and the cheap price.
“Then I fell in love with what Chandler was doing
in his writing. Phillip Marlowe changed everything for me. I had been
raised with the American picture of Los Angeles that everyone got from
TV, that it was glamorous and beautiful. Chandler, of course, presented
another side to Los Angeles. The seamy side; the real side. Chandler could
make me feel the city and the story in a way that no one else ever had.
I’ve been in love with the genre ever since.
“Once I had Chandler in my head, that’s what I wanted
to write.
“I write mysteries and I’m proud of that. I understand
the writing industry: that it’s a business, and it’s not good to get locked
into a reputation as a single-genre writer. But at the same time I see
that mystery transcends genres, and it’s what America wants to read. I
don’t see it as limiting at all.
“Anyway, when I grew up I drove to Los Angeles and
I’ve lived there ever since.
“I sold a few short stories before I left home. My
first sale was a science fiction story. I got $50 for that story. I showed
the check to my dad, I was so excited. Mr. Supportive said, ‘that’s all
they paid?’ He just couldn’t see the career possibilities.
“So I packed up and drove to L.A. when I graduated
from high school. And then my career took a different trajectory from
what I’d originally pictured. In fact, today I’m a trivial pursuit question
for 80s TV. Because I wrote so much of it.
“I was a big Star Trek fan as a kid. I was a real
Trekkie. I wanted to write for Star Trek. So being as I was going to L.A.,
of course I tried my hand at teleplays. And I have to say, TV sales came
easy for me. I sold the second script I ever wrote – to Baretta, the Robert
Blake TV show. I wrote two teleplays and five stories for them. Then I
was hired by Quincy, the Jack Klugman show. I must say it sounds like
a better gig than it was, at least to start. Klugman had a horrendous
reputation in L.A. It’s because he came from a background of Broadway
and films and he didn’t think TV writing was good enough. Well, really
he mostly hated TV writers. So before I was brought on, he’d already hired
and fired nine writers for Quincy. And by that point, no one with a name
wanted to write for him. So here I was, a baby writer, with some Baretta
experience, just freelance. They hired me, a full-time job. What they
did was they virtually locked me in a room at the studio and said, ‘write
as fast as you can.’ And that’s how I produced 15 episodes.
“From there other jobs came. I wrote for Hill Street
Blues, Cagney & Lacey, The Equalizer – lots of good shows.
“My dad finally got some satisfaction out of my work,
when my name started coming on the credits. He could call up his friends
and say, ‘Eight o’clock, Thursday night. The boy’s on TV.’
“But of course my original goal was still to write
books. I admit that I’m not particularly comfortable with collaborative
writing. TV and film requires a team effort, and that’s just the way it
is. I wanted to write novels and say, ‘that’s mine, just my work.’
“So, I wrote two manuscripts which are among the
worst books ever written on the face of the earth.
“They were so bad, I would never submit them. Ever.
I’ve been threatening to burn them for 20 years, but I don’t because they
remind me of what I was doing. I was learning how to write a book.
“I’d had to learn how to write for TV. Everything
has to be structured. The plot has to be figured out and the characters,
everything has to be thought out before you write. My imagination had
pictured that books were written differently. That novelists would go
into some kind of trance and great art would just appear. Well, that didn’t
work for me!
“Here’s the way I finally wrote my first book. It
was 1985 and I was working for Johnny Carson, on a series he’d created
called Partners In Crime. Not a stellar moment in television drama. It
was really a pretty bad concept. But he had a producer called Leonard
Stern, who was fantastic and highly regarded in the industry, and I wanted
to work with him, so there I was, on this Lonnie Anderson vehicle.
“Then my dad passed away. My mom was alone in Louisiana
and I started going out there a lot. I learned a lot about my parents
and their relationship as I helped her. For instance, my mother had lived
a very, very traditional life as a housewife and had never handled money.
Suddenly our roles were reversed, and I was helping her and teaching her
to be self-sufficient. I was terrified of this responsibility, by the
way. I was flying back and forth to L.A. between the show I was working
on and Louisiana, and it was a real difficult time.
“So, I took the situation with my mother and I turned
it into The Monkey’s Raincoat, my first Elvis Cole novel. The main character
needed Elvis to find her husband. But in truth, she doesn’t want him back
because she really loved him and missed him, but because she needed him
to take care of her. Elvis helps her to become who she needs to be, to
go on.
“Now, this was fictional, of course. I took some
feelings, and went with them. Elvis and I are certainly not the same person,
although I was taking from my own experiences and feelings about working
with my mom. I mean, Elvis and I have many of the same strange tastes.
Our offices are decorated the same, that kind of thing.
“Parts of a writer are in all of our characters,
whether they’re good or bad. What makes them real to you and to the readers
are the little bits of reality that you pull from your own life and experiences
and feelings. It’s you that makes them come alive. Same with the character
of Joe Pike – he has little bits and pieces of me, definitely. Joe Pike
became who he is in order to protect the child he used to be, who was
hurt and lonely and angry. Elvis became who he is for the same reasons,
but he made different choices along the way. I always think it’s interesting
to look at the choices that we make and that our characters make. I like
to think about how people develop from similar backgrounds to be completely
different people.
“So I’m flying back and forth to Louisiana and I’m
putting together these characters and this story and I finally write my
first novel.
“The Monkey’s Raincoat reintroduced me to
rejection. It was rejected nine times before it was bought. Now it’s in
its 30th printing and it’s been very successful, which is nice. Not that
I took any of that rejection personally . . . really.
“I mean, this is a business and you are going to
get rejected. One of the editors who rejected it, for years she would
avoid me. I held no grudge, but she didn’t know it, because she wouldn’t
speak to me. It was funny for a long time. We would be at the same convention,
the same conference, and she would leave the room when I came in. Finally
one day we were caught in a doorway at the same time and there was no
avoiding me – we were stuck, looking at each other. She said, ‘Oh, Robert,
I just want to say how much I really love your latest book.’ And I said
thanks. Then she said, ‘um, I once rejected your first book. I hope you
don’t hold a grudge.’ And I said, no, of course I don’t. And I’m sure
your bosses don’t hold a grudge about it either. Really.
“The editor’s life is tough. They work for big corporations
and have to make judgments based on lists. You might be rejected or accepted
based on an impersonal list of what some corporate person is looking for,
or not looking for. So as the writer you really can’t take it to heart
when the rejection comes. Because it doesn’t have anything to do with
you, but with some list. And what I was writing wasn’t on anybody’s list
at the time.
“When I wrote Elvis, the timing was bad. I wrote
about a white cop in L.A. It’s been done. People kept telling me that.
It’s not original. No one was looking for another detective like that.
But then it was successful. Who knew?
“But then I went really bad and I wrote my first
stand-alone, Demolition Angel. I was under a three-book contract to write
more Elvis Cole books and here I was writing something that had nothing
to do with Elvis. My agent was concerned, to say the least.
“We kept putting off the publisher about the plot
of the next book. Put him off, put him off, until I had 100 pages done.
Finally we told him that it wasn’t an Elvis book, and after a long pause
he said, ‘it better be good.’ So the pressure was there. But after he
read it, he liked it so much he paid me an extra $100,000. And it was
successful for him, so I am very grateful.
“Demolition Angel grew out of research I did
for L.A. Requiem. I needed to research how Los Angeles cops actually
handled the process of a murder investigation. I wanted to blend genres
– detective, procedural and thriller. So I needed to do a lot of research.
I interviewed a criminalist with the LAPD. He invited me to come to his
lab. Well, by happenstance his lab was right next to the L.A. bomb squad
department. I was interested, and I went across the hall and talked to
the bomb techs. They are not like regular cops. It was fascinating. I
wanted to learn more and so they let me put on the bomb suit. It was 95
pounds heavy. I was really impressed, and wondering about these guys that
put on this suit and do this kind of thing for a living. I was just leaving,
and I met a woman bomb tech coming in to work. Here’s this woman, maybe
125 pounds. It wouldn’t have hit me so hard except that I had just had
on the suit that she wore at work. That suit was practically her body
weight. Whoa. What motivated her? I started wondering about her, and I
started making a character. That was Carol Starkey.
“I’m a big plotter. One of the things that my early
novel attempts made clear was that doing without a plot in the first place
just doesn’t work for me. So I outline, and I start with a character.
I don’t outline or even write sequentially. I write scenes and sometimes
chapters out of order. I work concentrically out from the base of the
character. I would say that a third of the time I spend on a book is the
plotting and the outline and the character development. Then when I have
that clear to about 75 percent, I go for it. I figure I have enough to
make the book work, and I start writing scenes. My books get sequential
later in the process.
“I write a type of book that I’ve loved since I was
15. I’ll keep writing this way because it works for me and I love my characters.
I’ll write Elvis Cole books forever. I’m writing the next Elvis Cole book
now.
“Well, and even though his type of character is not
original, so what? People love him. According to editors’ lists, they
shouldn’t. Los Angeles detectives are not trendy right now. And that leads
to the question, where is the private eye novel going? Fads come and fads
go. I don’t trust trends because as soon as you produce for a trend, it’s
over.
“I don’t believe the American private eye novel will
ever die, or will ever leave us. The form will be here and there will
always be room for a new voice. But you’ll have to be good, because there
is so much out there. You’ll have to break through and force your character
into the room.
“As to making movies of my books. Well, my book Hostage
was made into a movie in 2004. It’s not a very good movie. The book is
better.
“I learned a lot from Hostage. Bruce Willis
is a terrific actor and I was thrilled that he was the lead. But I wasn’t
so happy about the process. It was extremely frustrating. So now I’m being
difficult. It will be harder to make a movie of one of my books in the
future, because I’m more demanding, and I will only sell a stand-alone
for movie rights. Just so you know, I will never sell Elvis Cole and Joe
Pike. I’ve been approached to do so. But no.
“I feel strongly that the finished product of a book
is not the words on the page. The finished product is what’s in your head
when you finish. So it’s unique, it’s special to every reader. I love
that. I have a hand in collaborating with my readers. Elvis and Joe, well,
if there was a movie, even a good movie, would be ruined. Once the director’s
vision is up there, it’s going to mess up the collaboration we have, writer
to reader. Some actor would be Elvis, and not the person in your head.
“Of course, this stand is easier for me to take now.
The Monkey’s Raincoat was one of 10-12 paperbacks published that
year, and it got no promotion at all. Back in the day I might have been
more amenable to selling those film rights. But now I don’t need to.
“I did sell the movie rights to Demolition Angel,
with the deal that I would write the screenplay. This was my own fault.
I wanted to write the screenplay. Unfortunately, the producers who would
make the movie weren’t the same people who bought the movie rights, so
they didn’t like my screenplays. I went through four separate drafts of
screenplay for Demolition Angel, but it didn’t matter. The fact
was, they didn’t like Carol Starkey. She’s the main character. She’s hardcore
damaged goods, she’s a wreck, she drinks, she’s all but suicidal. She’s
hanging on to life by her fingernails. She’s the basis of a bestselling
book. But the producers wanted to make her more ‘likable’ They said, ‘um,
couldn’t we soften her a little? Where’s her femininity? Couldn’t we make
her nicer?’
“Finally I said, ‘I give up, I’m out.’ So they brought
in a team. The first couple of guys, they take a six-figure paycheck,
and they gave her a dog. This was to make her more likable. They got fired.
So another writer comes in. He gets a six-figure paycheck. He says it’s
her name. The name Carol is unlikable. So he changes it to Angie. He got
fired. Anyway, at this point, they’ve gone through seven different writers,
trying to make the story something else, something likable. Who knows
when it will finally be made into a movie.
“OK, so with this experience under my belt, I sell
Hostage. MGM wanted me to write the screenplay. I said I didn’t
want to, after going through what I had with Demolition Angel,
but they insisted. So, I wrote two scripts. Everyone loved them. Bruce
Willis came on as the star. Everything looked great. Then, they hired
a director. He was French, and his experience was directing video games.
Then he brought in some European producers, and they said they needed
to work on the screenplay. New writers started appearing. ‘They’re just
going to make some small adjustments,’ I was told. Right. By the end,
if you watch the movie, I have no screen credits at all. I was written
right out of it.
“So you can see I don’t have any interest in working
on movies of my books, not anymore.
“And that’s OK, because I really do just want to
concentrate on my books. Like I said before, I like writing books. And
I like writing mysteries.
“I use the term mystery as an umbrella term, really,
because there are so many different kinds of mysteries. Within the genre
there are detective novels, cozies, legal thrillers, suspense – it goes
on. To me, if there’s a crime and there’s some questions, it’s a mystery.
If you take this definition, then you’ll see that the mystery is the most
popular kind of fiction. Take any New York Times bestseller list,
any week of the year, and half the titles will be mysteries by my definition.
America can’t stop reading mysteries. And of course that’s fine by me.
Because I’ll be writing mysteries for the rest of my life.
“So thanks for buying them. I appreciate it.
- submitted by Lee Ann Fleming
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