Since he has an important new book out that debuted at #15 on the New York Times bestseller list, I'm updating the Literary Mystery Novelists post featuring John Lescroart. Lescroart's new book in hardcover is The Hunter, the third in his books about San Francisco PI, Wyatt Hunt. Lescroart is one of the finest writers on the scene today, and The Hunter is another gem for his fans. (Damage is now out in paperback.)
Publishers Weekly gave The Hunter a starred review, saying, "This book succeeds on every level--as a mystery, as a thriller, and as an exploration of its appealing hero." Protagonist Hunt always knew he was adopted and never cared to find his adopted parents, happy and secure with those who raised him. A disturbing text message --"How did your mother die?"-- changes all that and sends him on a quest into his birth family's dark secrets.As Hunt investigates his parents' past, he puts himself in danger because someone will kill to keep these secrets hidden.
In
The Hunter, Lescroart's signature abilities to bring his characters
to life and to weave complicated plots reward the reader again. Here is
the
link to buy
The Hunter.
Original Post
Lescroart has been called a national treasure for his writing skills, and his latest novel,
Damage, offers evidence for that claim. As he does in many of his novels, Lescroart examines serious societal issues in this book. In
Damage, those include
the
power and wealth that allows a segment of the population to flout laws
and escape punishment for their crimes and the legal system that caters
to this powerful elite at the expense of ordinary citizens.This
stand-alone novel offers the sharp humor, rich characterization, and
complex storyline that fans have come to expect from Lescroart. His
novels are beautifully crafted, and he's reaped the rewards of his
artistic labors with multiple stays on the New York Times bestseller
list.
Damage will be out in paperback at the end of December, and Lescroart's newest book,
The Hunter, will launch in January. Here is the
link to buy
Damage.
John Lescroart Bio
John Lescroart
is the NY Times Bestselling author of twenty-two novels, including most
recently DAMAGE (January, 2011), the latest in the San Francisco based
Dismas Hardy/Abe Glitsky series. Libraries Unlimited has included him
in its publication “The 100 Most Popular Thriller and Suspense Authors,”
his books have been translated into twenty languages in more than
seventy-five countries, and his short stories appear in many
anthologies.
John’s first novel, SUNBURN, won the San
Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Award for best as yet
unpublished novel by a California author, and DEAD IRISH and THE 13TH JUROR were nominees for the Shamus and Anthony Best Mystery Novel, respectively; additionally THE 13TH
JUROR is included in the International Thriller Writers publication
“100 Must-Read Thrillers Of All Time.” HARD EVIDENCE is named in “The
Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Ultimate Reading List.” GUILT was a
Readers Digest Select Edition choice. THE MERCY RULE, NOTHING BUT THE
TRUTH, and THE SUSPECT have been major market Book Club selections. THE
SUSPECT was also the 2007 One Book Sacramento choice of the Sacramento
Library Foundation, and was chosen by the American Author’s Association
as its 2007 Book of the Year. Each of the last several of John’s books
have been Main Selections of one or more of the Literary Guild, Mystery
Guild, and Book of the Month Club, and DAMAGE made Entertainment
Weekly’s “Must List.”
Outside of the book world, John loves to
cook. His original recipes have appeared in Gourmet Magazine and in the
cookbook “A Taste of Murder.” (He also wrote the forward to Francine
Brevetti’s paean to the famous San Francisco eatery Fior d’Italia
entitled The Fabulous Fior: 100 Years in an Italian Kitchen.)
John and his wife, Lisa Sawyer, live in Northern California.
For
those new to your series, can you describe the Dismas Hardy mysteries?
Since you hadn’t originally intended this to be a series, how did you
develop the series once you knew you wanted to do more Dismas Hardy
books?
Dismas
Hardy was a character who would not leave me alone. I first used the
name in my very first (still deservedly unpublished) novel, which I
wrote in college – I loved the combination of the name of the Good Thief
on the cross next to Jesus somehow connected to The Hardy Boys. As I
began my career, such as it was, I came out first with a literary novel,
SUNBURN, and followed that with two Sherlock Holmes pastiches. When I
finally decided to write about a modern hero, a largely still
undeveloped, but well-named Dismas Hardy was there waiting for me. In
the first of the Hardy books, DEAD IRISH, I thought I had a good
character arc for a stand-alone novel, but never dreamed that Dismas
would still be in my life twenty-some years later.
The
initial impetus to continue the character as a series came from my
publisher, Donald Fine, who liked DEAD IRISH and Hardy a lot, and who
wanted a sequel. For a young writer hoping to keep getting published,
this was a godsend moment. I knew Hardy and liked him, and I figured he
could have another adventure, so I wrote THE VIG.
Then
life intervened. I got spinal meningitis and spent eleven days in a
coma. In the wake of that, and my survival, my day job as a legal word
processor became unbearable for many reasons. I wound up moving to
Northern California from LA and didn’t write a word for perhaps sixteen
months – a very long dry spell for me. But by the time I started
writing again, I knew what I wanted to do, which was move Dismas Hardy
into the professional law business with a big, perhaps important book.
This was, of course, a huge challenge since I wasn’t a lawyer, but I did
a lot of research and wrote HARD EVIDENCE, the first of the Hardy
“legal thrillers.” That book did poorly in the US, but sold for six
figures in Germany and Japan and gave me the impetus to start another
Hardy book in the same vein, and that book, THE 13TH JUROR, turned out to be my first bestseller.
Ironically, because of the lag time in publishing, I didn’t know that THE 13TH
JUROR was going to be a hit, so I abandoned Hardy for the next two
books and concentrated instead on Hardy’s cop pal Abe Glitsky. So by
the time the next true Dismas Hardy book, THE MERCY RULE, appeared, I
had a much larger San Francisco cast of characters and was beginning to
see the possibilities of the universe that all of my characters
inhabited together, and I’ve been expanding those possibilities ever
since.
How would you describe Damage to someone who has not read any of your previous stand-alone novels?
Damage has
some legal elements, but they are decidedly in the background of the
story. I purposely created it as a more or less stand-alone novel.
Every now and then, when I’ve got a franchise character such as Dismas
Hardy, I find it refreshing to let him rest somewhere off the page while
life goes on in his greater universe. So Damage features
some of Hardy’s colleagues, notably Abe Glitsky and Wes Farrell, who
get caught up in the release of convicted murderer Ro Curtlee through a
technicality. Ro is a very bad person. His parents are rich and
manipulative, and horrible stuff starts happening again within a day or
two of Ro’s release from prison. Glitsky and Farrell are constrained by
their jobs and their consciences, while Ro just begins to run amuck.
And because of these elements, and also the creation of the character
Sheila “Heinous” Marrenas, the novel has a tremendous propulsive force,
or narrative drive, which was a blast to work with. And as a
stand-alone, it’s a great way to introduce new readers to the general
neighborhood.
What's your writing process? What is a typical writing day like for you? What are your writing habits?
I’ve
been extremely fortunate to have been writing under multi-book
contracts now for at least fifteen years, so my life is about as
“organized” as those of people who work steady jobs. I get up at around
7:30 (when my two children still lived at home, it was 6:00), then read
the paper and have my coffee. Next I’m off to my workout club where I
sweat for about an hour and a half. I’m usually at work at my office – I
don’t write at home – and answer emails and real mail and generally put
off writing as long as I can – I call it “sorting my socks” -- until
around 1:00, when I start writing pages. I don’t have a daily limit
until I get to January or so (my books are always due to the publishers
by June 1), but after January I write usually about seven to ten pages a
day, finishing my first draft by about mid-April. Then I do my own
personal revisions and rewrites, work with my own personal editors, and
hand in the finished book, after which I do another set of revisions
based on the comments of my agent, the genius Barney Karpfinger and my
real editor Ben Sevier, one of the very best. Then I incorporate Ben’s
suggestions, edit the galleys and start the process for the next book,
the outline for which I hand in on September 1.
You
turned to full-time writing after a near-death experience, and that led
to your great success. Do you regret not having made that transition
earlier?
Well,
it wasn’t as though I was sitting there before the spinal meningitis
hit me thinking that I was just passing the time writing mid-list
books. All the while, I was trying to write the kind of books that
would give me a living in literature, but somehow had not discovered the
“voice,” or the formula, or the techniques, to reach a big audience.
I’ve thought a lot about the question you’ve asked, above, and I’ve come
to believe that though it seemed to take a very long time before I had
any real success (I was forty-six when THE 13TH JUROR hit the
bestseller list), it’s been for the best. I learned a lot in the early
days, gained real confidence in my abilities, and was able to handle
the “trappings” of success without becoming too weird – although of
course my friends would tell you that I’ve always been weird. So while
it might have been nice to have had a breakout book in my twenties or
thirties, I don’t spend any time worrying about that.
Who were your literary influences growing up? Are there any authors (living or dead) that you would name as influences?
My
main influence – the person who just knocked me out from the very first
– was Hemingway. This is not, of course, to say that my work reflects
his in any meaningful way, but I was deeply affected by his style and
basic approach to life and literature right from the git-go. From
there, the list of influences goes on, since I was by any standard a
reading geek. I adored Albert Camus and Mark Twain in high school. In
college, I essentially majored in Lawrence Durrell and the Alexandrian
Quartet -- still highly recommended! After college, I drifted into
what I’d call pleasurable, as opposed to “English major” reading – Rex
Stout, Arthur Conan Doyle, John D. MacDonald – and found that I loved
it! Finally, in my thirties, I became enamored of the Aubrey-Maturin
series by Patrick O’Brian, phenomenal stuff. And all along the way, I
tried to remain sensitive to “new” voices, no matter if they were
already well-established or even dead, as they presented themselves to
me – Agatha Christie, PD James, Elmore Leonard, Nelson DeMille, T.
Jefferson Parker.
You wrote your first novel in college. What inspired you to write that first book? Had you always wanted to be a writer?
I guess the short answer to this question is “Yes.” I was a voracious reader from an early age, and just could never quite envision doing anything else for a living that would be meaningful. This is really funny considering the dozens of jobs I wound up doing until I could get my writing to support me, but that’s the way I always felt. As for that first college book, which I presciently entitled “No Promise,” I had already started telling friends and family that I was going to be a novelist, and I figured that meant I had to actually write a novel, or maybe even more. (Although in my youth, my fantasy was that I would just write a few novels, maybe three or four, and then after that I would just be a “famous novelist.”) So I sat down and started writing and pretty soon had a pretty bad novel. But you know, a pretty bad novel is still a novel, and it was someplace to start.
Do you (or have you) belong(ed) to a critique group of other authors. Do you find it helpful? In what ways?
The only critique group I’ve ever been a part of was a creative writing
class at UC Berkeley back in 1969. Jackson Burgess was our teacher and
he told our class of about twenty students that only one of us was
going to make a living as a professional novelist. Then he told us who
that student was and it wasn’t me. So after that, I decided I would let
the market, and neither my peers nor my instructors, decide who was
good enough to be published. I knew that I was going to be published
because I wasn’t going to quit until that happened, and I didn’t stop
learning and trying until it did. (And I like to think I’m still
learning.)
What
is your advice to aspiring writers? How important is it for a young
writer to be a reader? What would you recommend they read?
My advice to young writers is simple: read all you can and write all
you can. There is something to be learned in almost everything you read
– whether it’s a fluency or felicity of language or something you know
that you’ve got to avoid at all costs. Read, read, read, every day, and
write, write, write, every day. There is no substitute – okay, you can
take a few days off sometimes, but make reading and writing part of
your everyday life. It’s okay to read what you like, of course, but
it’s also a good idea to push yourself to read something that doesn’t
appeal at first encounter. Only then will you be able to define what
you like and don’t like, what you want to emulate, what you want to
avoid. And eventually your own personal voice will begin showing up and
you’ll recognize it and then, eventually, hopefully, be able to control
it.
What is the most surprising thing you’ve learned in your writing career? What has been the hardest part about being a writer?
The most surprising thing to me is that writing is a full-time lifelong
commitment as well as a career. When I was young, I really thought
that I’d write one book that everyone would read (think STONE MOUNTAIN
or THE DA VINCI CODE), and then I’d be a famous writer and that would be
really cool. In reality, of course, most working writers write books,
and then we write other books. It’s a continuing process, and we’re
always learning, trying to get better, recommitting, because sometimes
it’s very, very difficult – not just the writing itself, but the search
for the next great idea, the frustrations of the business side, the
obstinacy of your characters, the search for the mot juste.
It doesn’t really get much easier in a day-to-day sense, though to real
writers this very difficulty makes it an enthralling, challenging
adventure.
The
hardest part about it all? In the face of criticism, cynicism,
jealousy, ignorance, and apathy, it is incredibly hard to remain brave
enough to create your own worlds and characters, and to believe in them
absolutely. And the way to conquer this hardest part? Make your worlds
and characters so real that they cannot be denied by the critics, the
cynics, the jealous and the ignorant and the apathetic. Or by
yourself.
