I was never any good at it, though in time I became close to adequate. However, the excitement of learning somehow alchemized my writing into something truer. I was aware that the process had never been accurately portrayed in a book, and I thought if I could get that right, I’d have something different, at least.
Finally, there was courage. Bob, I knew, would be brave. He would be one of those rare men (wholly, wildly unlike me, I hasten to add) who could face enemy fire stoically, figure it out as a problem in higher calculus, and work swiftly and efficiently to counter it. It wasn’t that he wasn’t afraid; it was that he had learned to deal with his fear, or that he had a motive so overpowering that it vanquished his fear. And what would that motive be?
I studied the biographies of war heroes to determine what made them so brave. In the case of officers (that is, leaders), it was a belief in cause and system, a fear of not letting others down, a sense of responsibility. But that’s not what would drive a sniper. He’s alone, on his own, out there in Indian country. No one knows if he’s brave or not; he really answers only to himself. What drives him? I had to find out, because I was determined to create the whole man, and I didn’t want to just declare him brave and let it go at that, as happens routinely in B movies and novels.
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.