WRITER2WRITER A CONVERSATION WITH HARLAN COBEN Harlan Coben is one of the top-selling suspense authors in the world. Winner of the Edgar Award, Shamus Award, and Anthony Awards—the first author to win all three—his novels have been called: "ingenious" (New York Times), "poignant and insightful" (Los Angeles Times), "consistently entertaining" (Houston Chronicle), and "superb" (Chicago Tribune). His latest, Just One Look, recently debuted at #1 in the UK and at #7 on the New York Times bestseller list. Visit Harlan's official site here. Jeff: Tell us about Just One Look. Where'd you get the idea? How is it similar or different than your previous suspense novels? Harlan: My ideas come from something that happens to me in my daily life. In this case, I went to pick up photographs at the Photomat and I'm going through it and for a second, I didn't recognize one of the pictures. And then I started thinking, "What would I do if there was a picture in here that I didn't take? What would I do if it was a picture that could change my life?" And that was the seed that became Just One Look. The big difference from my previous novels is that the two lead characters are female. I wanted to do it to fight those awful women-in-jeopardy novels, where the heroine is naive to the point of it being a learning disability. So I wanted to write a heroine who would be realistic. In fact, one of the characters in the book thinks about stupid things heroines in bad women-in-jeopardy movies do, and does the exact opposite. Jeff: In suspense fiction, you were a pioneer in using mixed first- and third-person voices—it gave a real immediacy to the action. The reader could jump from the tortured thoughts on the hero right to the action of the villains to torture said hero further. What sort of challenges or advantages has this approach given you? Why did you move away from it in Just One Look? Tell No One Harlan: I wrote the Myron books in what I call "cheating third person"—in third person, but with a first-person style voice. I broke the rule in Tell No One, started in first person, felt the need to go into third person to go into another character's head about forty pages in, so I did it and it worked. This time I wanted to do something totally different, because Grace is the best lead character I've ever done. I think it's a distraction to for a male to write first-person female, so I went to third for this book. Jeff: Why is Grace your best lead ever? Harlan: Probably because I always think the most recent book is the best and thus she is the lead in the most recent book. Ask me again next year. I may give a different answer. Jeff: Your suspense novels both celebrate the everyday joys and headaches of suburbia, but I don't want to live in your neighborhood—it's Freak City. It's like Quentin Tarantino meets Mr. Rogers. What about American suburbia speaks to you? Will you ever move away from it or are you going to be the John Cheever of suspense? Harlan: I used to make fun of the notion that you should write what you know, because what do I know about criminal activity, mobsters, etc. But the suburbs is where I grew up, where I live. First, I have a romantic, skewed view of the American suburbs as the battleground for the American dream. It's where people like you and me go and get married and have the two-point-four kids and now we're happy, right? Except where dreams dim is a ripe arena for devastation. Second, in that placid pool, I can make a great big splash. I can write about characters, like Grace, who has no special skills to survive the terrors she faces, and she's someone we all can relate to. Third, I write about everyday evil. Often my criminals started with mild motives that spin out of control and bring greater evil into their lives. Jeff: A recurrent theme in your work is family members who are lost or missing returning to the fold. Is there some wish fulfillment going on there? Do you think that's part of the broad appeal of your books? Harlan: I'm all about family. When I wrote the Myron books, for example, I was dealing with my own parental issues. My mom and dad died young, and I missed them—still do—terribly. Most detectives and the like seemed to have horrible relationships with their parents, and I wanted to go against that stream because surprise, most people have great relationships with their parents. Family is always a theme in the books because the emotions are so great. Like you'll instantly kill for your kid. You would never kill under normal circumstances, but to protect your kid, sure you would. That line you'll cross, it only happens with family, so the tension for characters raises dramatically when family's involved. Jeff: You have taken complicated plotting to a new art form. How do you work all the threads so the story resolves so seamlessly? Harlan: I confess—there are very few twists that I've met that I haven't liked. I love twists. Jeff: You're a twist whore. Harlan: I prefer twist slut. And in Just One Look, I pulled a hip with this twist. I love those hands-out-of-the-graves moments where everything changes at the end, I love reading those. This is just the way my mind works—I can usually tell with about 90% of other crime novels, not to offend anyone, by page 30 I know which way it's going to go and what's going to happen, and I'm terrified a reader will have that reaction to my book. So there's just no way I want that to happen—I'm going to try and fool you. Whatever gifts we're given, I can keep all these plot threads going in my head. I love the E. L. Doctorow quote: "Writing is like driving at night in the fog with your headlights on—you can only see a little bit ahead of you but you can make the whole journey that way." I never want to take the expected route. I love to take readers down the road they think they're going to go, and then take them someplace else. Jeff: Let me jerk you around a little on that answer. You and I are both at the point where our publisher—Dutton, by the way—asks us for detailed proposals on books. If you don't know the middle, what are you doing in the proposal—lying? Because I'm gonna try that next time. Harlan: I'm supposed to do a proposal and three chapters, but I always rather would do more book—say a hundred pages—and less proposal. And the proposals are total book-jacket copy, it's just a stab. I probably know a couple of events that have to happen in the middle. But I just don't go into that kind of detail. If I can start, they know I can end. Jeff: When you were writing Gone for Good, you called me and said you'd had a big "spurt" that day. (Your word, not mine.) You have tended to write in periods of intense activity and high productivity—like forty to fifty pages in a day. Do you have long fallow periods, then write the book in a short amount of time—these spurts? And please come up with a different term for it. Harlan: Each book takes about nine months; I compare it to childbirth. The best part is the idea. I'll pause for the laughter. Okay, and some days I feel great and glowing, and other days I feel bloated and like there's a dump truck on my bladder, and I just want the damn thing out. At the eighth-month mark, I'm at the 200-page mark, then the last half is done very quickly. . .24/7, no food, no sleeping, I'm writing in a streak. . . Jeff: Streak? That's your new term instead of spurt? It's getting uglier. Harlan: It's not a pretty picture. Jeff: Despite your rise to the top, you've had some bad luck in your career—I speak of the Bleeding Ball covers of the early Myrons, often cited as the ugliest covers of all time. So ugly that they won you notoriety. Haven't you always made the best of bad situations as a writer? Harlan: That's a classic case of break an egg, make an omelette. I've always tried to do that. But even with Tell No One, my publisher took a risk by not putting my name on the cover, but it paid off—or, wait, maybe leaving my name off was a good thing, who knows? Jeff: I pretended they were good. I couldn't be mean, you were too fragile back then. It would have been confrontational—like on a special episode of "Blossom": "You've got a drug problem and ugly covers. Get some help." Harlan: Wasn't every episode of "Blossom" special? I thought so. Jeff: With the success of your standalone suspense novels, the pressure must be intense NOT to write another Myron Bolitar novel. I mean, that backlist is controlled by Bantam; Dutton basically has no reason to ask you to do another one, true? Harlan: Well, true. Jeff: What would make you write Myron again? And are you tired about being asked if another Myron is coming? Because, for God's sakes, I get asked if you're doing another one, just because you blurbed Cut and Run and readers and booksellers have figured out we know each other. It got to the point I was ready to either give out your home phone number or say "He'll write another Myron when I say so." Harlan: I do plan on writing Myron again. It's my intention to write him again. I only left him because the idea for Tell No One wasn't right for him. That was an idea where a guy has lost his wife and has the chance to find her again—combined with an idea where we get to see a missing loved one on a webcam and we suddenly know they're alive. I thought of the idea first, not the character of David Beck, first. Myron had never been married, so I couldn't have used him for this idea. Secondly, in any series, the characters age and change. It's not the days of Poirot or Holmes where the characters are always the same. Myron had already dealt with some heavy personal stuff in the series, so after Darkest Fear, I looked at Myron and he looked at me and he said, "Could you give me a little space?" Thirdly, I wanted to prove I could do something else. When will Myron be back? When I have the right idea. I don't want to force it, just stick Myron and Win in some silly plot. I don't think that would make Myron fans—or heck, Myron's creator—happy. Jeff: You wrote movingly about both your father's passing, fictionally, in The Key to my Father and the aftermath of losing neighbors in the 9/11 attacks. It was powerful stuff. Would you ever consider writing a non-suspense novel? Harlan: I hope everything I would write would be suspenseful. I think suspense is a form, like haiku or sonata, and I've gotten to explore love, redemption, family, loss, tragedy, whatever within that form. In my neighborhood, 9/11 is still too fresh—two of my kids are in classes where fathers were lost on 9/11. But to ignore it totally, pretend it didn't happen, well, that would be like writing in the early 70s and pretending that there had been no Vietnam War. It's now part of our makeup. I dealt with it a bit in No Second Chance, because of something that I always think about when I drive near where the Towers were. I used to know exactly where they were located. Now I'm starting to forget. And that just bothers me so much. Jeff: You've had a lot of TV and film interest in your work. The French actor Guillaume Canet, who's married to Diane Kruger (Helen in the upcoming Troy), has wanted to option Tell No One. Can you update us on what's going on with that? Are you worried that a filmed adaptation would stray too far from the style of your work? Harlan: Yeah, Canet's going to make it into a French film. I'm excited. But Hollywood is a strange and evil place for novelists. The books are so different from movies; but you can't complain. When you sell it, you've sold it, so don't criticize. I am very protective of Myron, though, and haven't optioned those books in a while. (Note: That may be changing—situation fluid) Jeff: You have this ongoing fascination with pop culture: 60s TV shows, trivia, and so on. We've even played Batman trivia on the road—I lost, badly. Why did that become an element in your books? Do you think pop culture has become a lingua franca for the world—does it help your appeal overseas? Harlan: I have less of it as I write more books. But Myron thinks in pop culture. In Just One Look, Grace doesn't. . . Jeff: But she's part of a pop culture moment, a terrible stampede at a rock concert that's become part of the American fabric. Harlan: True. It's not something I'm conscious of, like throwing in pop culture every fifty pages. I don't think about it. Today an interviewer today asked me about symbolism in the books, and I'm like, "Whoa? Symbolism? If it's in there, it's an accident and I apologize." Jeff: Last question. Where do you think the contemporary suspense novel is going? Any trends that you see? Harlan: Trends. . .mostly just one of excellence. I think we're living in a new Golden Age of crime fiction. I just did an interview with George Pelecanos and Michael Connelly for a magazine in the UK, and we all seemed to think that crime fiction is becoming more relevant than ever because some of the so-called mainstream writers forget to tell a story. If people just talk about angst, it's not interesting. Even with the greats, there's often a crime angle, look at Dostoevsky or Oscar Wilde. Look at Orion in the UK, you and I are both with them, it's an amazing list, including Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Robert Crais, James Lee Burke, Ian Rankin, Lawrence Block, Ed McBain, Laura Lippman, Steve Hamilton. . .has there ever been a publisher with such a list, with so many people working at the top of their game? It's lucky for those of us who love to read.