The Lineup Page 15

  Ultimately, I hit upon another creature of tremendous will and attainment, who was nevertheless thorny, difficult, even repulsive. I hit upon Tyrus Raymond Cobb. It’s part of my attraction to difficult men that I like Ty Cobb. Yes, I know: racist, sexist, violent, outsider to the end, vicious, vengeful, tough as brass bushings, relentless, unpleasant, ultimately spurned by everyone. But his backstory is very interesting. When he was nineteen years old and had just signed his first professional-baseball contract, his mother murdered his father in her bedroom with a shotgun. Her lover was in bed with her. Ty Cobb loved his father, a prominent Georgia lawyer, seen by all as a fair, kind, brilliant, just man. He felt immensely cheated by the fact that his father never saw him play ball professionally, and he was shattered at the squalid circumstances of his father’s death, so small in comparison to the attainments of the man himself. Nevertheless, he paid for his mother’s defense and saw her get off as not guilty, pleading that she thought it was an intruder at the window.

  I decided to give Bob a similar dynamic—a brilliant father, snatched from him early in squalid circumstances that were no match for the accomplishments of the man, so that the haunted son would miss his father greatly and spend his life trying to live up to the man’s brilliance. He would be a man who idealized his father, never having learned that his father was just a man, with his own foibles and flaws.

  I remember one night, sitting in the Columbia house, just typing out a paragraph without a lot of thought. I have no idea where it came from. I wrote of—hmm, what’s a good Southern-sounding name?—oh yeah, Earl, yeah, that’s it, Earl. Let’s make Earl a Marine too, and, oh, I know, this’ll be cool, let’s have him win the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima; in fact, let’s have him fight his way across the Pacific, island to bloody island, killer, hero, Marine, a man of legend. Oh, then he comes back and becomes a state policeman. Now let’s have him killed ten years later in a squalid cornfield by two white-trash skanks with those dog-of-the-South names, I know, we’ll call them Jimmy and Bub Pye; there you go. Achilles slain by two Yocums, or Snopeses. Yeah.

  I typed it up and forgot all about it.

  And yet, when I was finished—years later, it seemed—that’s what stayed with me. Achilles felled in the corn, two worthless punks crowing. It was so sad; I just had to know more, and the only way to learn it was to write it. And that’s what I did. As for Bob Lee and Point of Impact, there’s not much more to tell. Once I had him, I had the book. Everything else more or less happened in the time it should have happened. There was a last, desperate rewrite, where I solved another narrative problem by breaking a single villain into two, one Colonel Ray Shreck, ex–Green Beret, and the other Hugh Meachum, CIA executive and espionage entrepreneur extraordinaire. (Somehow they became Danny Glover and Ned Beatty in the movie. Go figure!)

  Yet, when it was done, published to good reviews but disappointing sales, I found that Bob and his father, Earl, would not go away. I tried to banish them, for until then I had taken craftsman’s pride in not repeating myself. But they wouldn’t go away, and I had to write another book. And then another. And then… My life’s work had arrived, and I was the last to know it.

  FAYE KELLERMAN

  Born in 1952 in Saint Louis, Missouri, Faye Kellerman graduated from UCLA with a bachelor of arts degree in theoretical mathematics in 1974. Four years later, she received her doctorate of dental surgery, although she has never practiced dentistry. She is an Orthodox Jew, as is her husband, bestselling mystery novelist Jonathan Kellerman. The Kellermans are the only husband and wife writers ever to appear on the bestseller list of the New York Times simultaneously for two separate books. Jewish themes and characters are frequent and important elements of most of her novels.

  In addition to the much-loved novels about Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus, she has written two nonseries mysteries—The Quality of Mercy (1989), a historical thriller, and Moon Music (1998), a serial-killer novel set in Las Vegas—the short-story collection The Garden of Eden and Other Criminal Delights, and two books with her husband, Double Homicide (2004) and Capital Crimes (2006). Stalker (2000) and Street Dreams (2003) feature police officer Cindy Decker.

  The Kellermans live in Beverly Hills and have four children, one of whom, Jesse, is also a successful mystery writer.

  PETER DECKER AND RINA LAZARUS

  BY FAYE KELLERMAN

  One of the most frequently asked questions that I have fielded over my twenty-two years as a published crime fiction writer is: how much of me is in my characters? More specifically, how much am I like the female protagonist of my series, Rina Lazarus? I’ve answered this question hundreds of times, and usually I respond with the following: I am not Rina Lazarus. Rina Lazarus is a fictional entity that I’ve created. She is not based on a single representation but a composite of my experiences and my imagination. Then I add: all of my characters have Faye Kellerman in them. How it could be otherwise? They all come from my unique and sometimes subconscious process of blending fact and fiction, real and imaginary.

  But the response does beg the question: how much of me is Rina Lazarus? I find it amusing and not unpredictable that people rarely ask: how much am I like my male series character, Peter Decker? More often than not, Peter takes the starring role in my novels, so if there is any character who is a manifestation of me, why wouldn’t it be Decker?

  To answer the question honestly and completely, I’d like to go back to the origins of Peter and Rina. Where did they come from? Who were they before they appeared in fiction and how have they evolved?

  To best respond, I need to reconsider my first published novel, The Ritual Bath, where Peter and Rina made their debuts. I’ve italicized the word published because at the time, I didn’t know that The Ritual Bath was going to be my first novel. I had made a few attempts at writing and was now trying to pen a story that would be interesting, entertaining, and, most important, would capture the eye of some farsighted editor. But the characters didn’t come from thin air. To help you understand the biographies of Peter and Rina, I’m going to give you a little background about the author.

  As a young child, I had a vivid imagination. Most kids do, but mine seemed to last a little longer and to be just a tad more florid than those of most children. I not only had imaginary friends, I had them in many different locales and diverse centuries. My friends were Greek goddesses of mythology, dames from medieval Europe, turn-of-the-century Boston blueblood girls in boarding schools, barefoot Okies from the dustbowl, and prisoners in concentration camps. Anything I heard or saw was re-created, enhanced, and then acted out in private. My “friends” and I went through a slew of adventures, and all before I reached school age.

  School.

  Nothing quite kills a fertile imagination like rote learning. No one is saying that times tables aren’t important, but how could such humdrum triviality compete with all my terrific escapades? Nonetheless, school is a necessary evil, and at the age of six I started first grade. And that’s when I discovered that although I had an elaborate imagination, I was saddled with a brain that had a hard time integrating letters with phonetics. Reading was difficult because I couldn’t sound out words. I learned how to read English the same way I learned how to read music—by sight-reading. In actuality, I learned how to read music before I learned how to read words. And, as I did with the notes on a scale, I had to memorize words in order to get my brain to properly translate what my eye saw. To do this, I resorted to a number of memorization and mnemonic tricks. I recall that I could easily identify the word look because of the two O’s that in my six-year-old mind resembled two wide eyes. My dyslexia stalled my reading for a while, but luckily I was compensated with a facility with numbers. I always say in my talks that I could work with X, Y, and Z as long as the letters weren’t strung together to make words. I did not like English. I did not like writing papers and essays. I did like creative writing, but so little of that is done in school that my preference didn’t matter much. As far as learning, I took th
e path of least resistance and was a math major in high school and college, graduating from UCLA with a BA in theoretical mathematics in 1974.

  My next incarnation was in dental medicine. I attended UCLA Dental School and graduated in 1978 fully intending to practice dentistry, but fate had other plans. Jesse Oren Kellerman was delivered about two and a half months after I graduated. I don’t know what I was thinking when I thought I’d be up on my feet a week after birth. I must have been on another planet when I thought I could easily integrate career and children. I had to learn on my own that babies are a lot of work. This was a revelation to me. For the first six months of my son’s life, I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get anything done other than to take care of the little rascal. It helped to know people in the same situation, but as I had always been a competent person and prided myself on being organized to the point of compulsive, I felt I should be doing better.

  By the time I finally reached some kind of equilibrium, Jess was around six months old. I was able to brush my teeth, shower, and get dressed all before noon. I was learning how to become a functional person at the same time my son was becoming a person. He was a lot of work, but with that work was the joy of seeing a human being develop. He was a happy little guy—amusing and engaging—and we had a really good time together. As he grew older, he was very responsive and made my life easier by being an early talker. I decided to put off my illustrious career in dentistry in favor of motherhood and I kept telling myself that I’d soldier on with dentistry just as soon as Jesse was in school.

  But then I got pregnant again. By the time Rachel came around, I had come to grips with the fact that I was not just postponing dentistry, I was shelving it. It was an easy decision in some ways, but a very hard one in others. I felt I was wasting years of education and letting my profession down. But at the time, dentistry wasn’t calling my name, and honestly, no one from the ADA has ever phoned me and asked, “Where the heck are you?” It seems that dentistry has gotten along just fine without me.

  So I went about the business of raising a family. Now, anyone who has ever spent long periods with a child knows that there’s a lot of down time—pushing a swing, taking a walk, watching your child play at the park.

  The mind abhors a vacuum.

  Presented with blocks of time without speaking, my brain began to spark and fill in the blanks. In my head, I listed chores that needed to be done. I planned dinner menus. I considered baby gyms and music classes. I was expected to be thinking about all those things. What I didn’t expect was to be making up stories again.

  My imaginary friends awoke from the dormancy caused by twenty years of education. They began to make their big-screen comebacks in my head, only this time they materialized in adult form. I began to invent new adventures, more daring quests, more racy and passionate love stories, darker fables, and elusive murder mysteries. Once again, the chief protagonist in all my stories was some kind of Faye Kellerman facsimile, but at twenty-six, I knew better than to act out the stories aloud as I had done as a kid. They put adults away for those kinds of things. I kept all my buddies inside because I felt that there was something a little off with me: making up stories when you’re a wife, a mother, and supposedly a sane person. I firmly believe that I would have left my tales deep inside my gray matter if I had been married to anyone other than Jonathan Kellerman.

  Unlike me, Jonathan was a natural-born writer. I think he emerged from his mother’s womb with pen in hand. When I met Jon, I was eighteen. We married a year and a half later, both of us still wet-behind-the-ears kids and very much unformed. Jonathan not only saw me through college and dental school, but elected to go to graduate school in Los Angeles because I didn’t want to move from there. Jonathan graduated with a PhD in clinical psychology from USC at the tender age of twenty-four. My husband was a true Renaissance man, with many interests and hobbies, and one of his extracurricular passions was writing. If he saw me through college, I saw him through nine novels, all of them eventually relegated to boxes in storage. His attempts taught him a lot. They taught me what it meant to persevere and how much fun it was to write. Yes, he cared that his novels weren’t getting published, but it didn’t deter him a whit from writing. It was almost as if writing were an addiction.

  Then one day it suddenly dawned on me what he was doing. He was taking his imaginary friends and putting them down on paper and calling himself a writer. If he was brave enough to do that and strong enough to suffer through one rejection after another, what in the world did I have to lose by putting my imaginary friends on paper too? And the timing was perfect. He was on the brink of breaking through into the publishing business. Had he been the monster bestseller that he is today, I would have been much too intimidated to try to write.

  Another husband might have been outright discouraging. Another husband might have been encouraging in a discouraging way. Jonathan, bless him, was only encouraging. As the premier author in the family, he was helpful and straightforward, straddling the difficult lines between tutor, critic, and husband. The nights weren’t always easy, but the conversation was always honest.

  As with a lot of neophyte writers, my first attempts were competently written but went nowhere. The stories dragged, the characters didn’t develop, the sense of place was wanting. It was good that my initial forays into fiction never saw the light of day, but all those hours of writing bad stories weren’t for nothing. I considered the four-to-five-year experience a protracted course in writing fiction. I had Jonathan’s input, but I still had to act as my own student, teacher, editor, and critic.

  The main thing was that I discovered my love for writing. It was cathartic, it was an outlet for my zany imagination, and it gave me something to do. I wrote notebooks full of novels, stories, and plays, but deep inside, I knew I was spinning my wheels. It’s certainly okay to indulge in creative outbursts, but if I had any hopes of getting published—of having my works out there to be read and critiqued—I had to be a little more thoughtful about what I put down on paper.

  I began to think about what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong. Equally significant, I began to wonder what I wanted to write about. That meant structure.

  I needed a plot.

  In the ’70s and ’80s, to have a strong story line was somewhat anathema and was eschewed in modern literature. Plot was for chumps, a crutch used in genre writing. But since I wasn’t an English major in college and since I didn’t follow the vagaries of the literary world, I didn’t know that. Plot just appealed to my sensibilities as a mathematician. Well-crafted stories had beginnings, middles, and ends, and propelled the reader forward from the first page to the last. I considered plot to be a good thing. This revelation dovetailed nicely with the kinds of books I liked to read—mystery and suspense novels.

  Jonathan had introduced me to Ross Macdonald. He had found The Zebra-Striped Hearse in a used-book store near work, and we began to systematically devour many of the best “hard-boiled” writers—Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler, John D. MacDonald, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett… the list was long and impressive.

  My choice was clear. I decided to write crime novels, and my timing couldn’t have been better. There was a growing renaissance of mystery writing in the ’70s and ’80s. Joseph Wambaugh and Evan Hunter writing as Ed McBain were pumping out some of the best police procedurals in the business. Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake had switched over from Westerns to capers and mysteries. There were others: Arthur Lyons, Lawrence Block, Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, Linda Grant, Stephen Greenleaf, all of them giving the murder mystery their unique spin.

  To me that was the key: to make the murder mystery genre my own, I needed to give my book a voice. I needed a narration that told the reader that this was a different kind of suspense novel from a new author named Faye Kellerman. I felt that I could put my imprimatur on my story only if I wrote from a point of expertise, i.e., if I wrote what I knew. The problem was, at thirty-two, I didn’t know all that much.
I had gotten married at nineteen and had spent most of my adult life being a wife, a mother, a daughter, and a student. I could probably figure out a good plot, but who would my characters be? What could I take from myself that would give my novel an exclusive punch? Who was I and what could I do to set myself apart?

  Knowing that I wanted to write a mystery novel was a good first step, but I still had to figure out who would people my deliciously intricate plot. I had to start thinking about who I was so I could develop a flesh-and-blood protagonist.

  First, I considered the fact that I was female. That was more relevant than you might think, because in the early ’80s, women PIs were coming into their own. I thought about writing from the perspective of a woman PI—I certainly admired Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky—but I had been married for a very long time. As a wife and mother, I didn’t see myself as chasing down bad guys and wielding a gun, so the idea of writing a character like that really didn’t strike a chord.

  Second, I was a dentist. Now, there had been lots of dentists in film and literature, but I struggled to remember the name of any dentist portrayed as a hero. My recollection was that the characterization of fictional dentists usually revolved around their being sadists, louts, or geeks. Although I was sure I could imbue my dentist with sterling qualities, I thought the profession lacked the sexy image that might be needed to interest an editor.