Greg Iles is known to readers everywhere. His first novel. Spandau Phoenix, was published in 1993 and became a bestseller. He has since had many chart-toppers. In his fourth novel, The Quiet Game, he created Penn Cage and placed him in Natchez, the oldest city on the M

ississippi River.

He has written the Natchez Burning Trilogy featuring Penn Cage. The first two novels are Natchez Burning and The Bone Tree.

Mississippi Blood is the last volume in the trilogy. In it, we find mayor and former prosecutor, Penn Cage who is shattered by grief at the loss of his fiancée Caitlin Masters. In addition, his father, Dr. Tom Cage, is about to be tried for murder. Dr. Cage’s trial sets an ominous clock in motion, and unless Penn can lift the veil of the past and help exonerate his father, his family will be destroyed.

Mississippi Blood features a mesmerizing murder trial at the heart of the novel. How did you learn so much about courtroom procedures and tactics?

I’m not an attorney and don’t have any formal knowledge of courtroom procedures. I’ve attended a few murder trials but most of what I learned about trial tactics and routines can be attributed to my attorney-buddy who read the first draft and made many corrections. My guides for writing convincing trial scenes came from my having read Robert Traver’s Anatomy of a Murder and Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent. Those books gave me plenty of information.

As you know, an actual trial is a drama acted out in real life.

For a novelist writing a trial scene, the trick is to eliminate all the tedious elements found in an actual trial, while retaining  the very essence of “conflict” which is at the crux of every trial.  That conflict of competing narratives between prosecution and defense is the dramatic force, whether in an actual courtroom trial or one within the pages of a book.

If your narrative is convincing, your trial tactics will work, whether to a jury or to the readers of your novel.

Penn Cage is a fascinating character. How has he evolved over the course of the trilogy?

It was never my intention for Penn to be a series’ character. I thought his story would be explored in a standalone novel, but as I returned to Mississippi more and more in my fiction, Penn evolved from being an observer to an actor in the drama of the novels. His evolution involved his becoming more and more morally challenged with each book, which forced him to compromise with his own values as he went forward. As with us all, the more we see of life and surmount challenges, we must make certain compromises.

When writing the Natchez Burning Trilogy, how did you handle giving enough backstory in each successive novel without repeating too much of the contents of the earlier books?

It’s a temptation to make the worst mistake possible by providing exposition for the reader who came late to the trilogy. I had to trust that a new reader could be dropped into this story in medias res, and I felt the power of the story would clutch the reader through to the end. I avoided giving too much backstory beyond just using a few compressing devices early in the book—a newspaper summary—which I felt would suffice. I had to trust the story would carry itself.

I understand in 2011, you sustained life-threatening injuries in an automobile accident, and found new motivation by re-entering the world of Penn Cage, the realm of Natchez, and the secrets of the town. Will you tell us a bit about that?

I was driving when a car going seventy miles an hour, hit my driver’s side door. I sustained a torn aorta, many broken bones, and lost half my right leg. I was in a medically-induced coma for a week. When I came out of that situation missing a leg, my entire attitude toward writing changed. I realized I’d been compromising with myself.

What I mean is this: I originally conceived of the Natchez Burning story as one book, which I was on the verge of completing when the accident occurred. But I had been shortchanging myself because I couldn’t properly address important issues such as race, family, and the South in a single novel.

When I came out of that coma, I realized I didn’t care how long the story had to be. I no longer cared who would get angry at me; and I told myself if I was going to be a Southern writer, I had to be unflinching in my commitment to the truth. It didn’t matter what the consequences might be.

The accident altered my life. I undertook a quest to write what I felt I needed to write. I decided to write a trilogy instead of writing this story in one book. I lost my publisher and changed agents. I had no idea how it would turn out. There are very few trilogies in mainstream trade publishing. Generally, it’s considered commercial suicide. The accident took me from being perceived as a thriller writer to being seen as a fiction writer dealing with very serious issues. And I’m gratified to have made that transition.

Speaking of Southern writers, your writing has been compared to that of Pat Conroy, Thomas Wolfe, and William Faulkner. How would you describe your style?

I would not compare myself with those writers. Like so many of us, I was inspired by them. I was fortunate enough to meet Pat Conroy a year before he died. I also got to meet William Styron and James Dickey.

I recall something Faulkner said: We look at our heroes and on the deepest level, we’re trying to be them. I would never presume to compare myself with those writers. But, I look at the place and time when they were writing and the subjects they chose, and I jumped into the water in my time. I feel I’ve got to do the best I can. What separates me from them is I’m a commercial novelist. I have to make a living. Even though I write what I want to, I still have to sell enough books so the publishing industry will pay me. That’s a difficult compromise to make. Throughout my career, I have had to make that compromise to a greater or lesser degree. With this trilogy, I’ve compromised to the least degree possible. The writers you mentioned were commercial novelists, but while writing, they threw commercial interests to the wind, much more than I can.

We both know this as writers: when writing a novel, we’re looking for resonance. I feel resonance is achieved by providing the reader with emotional insight that’s only gained through suffering. In a good commercial novel, we find two or three such insights in the book. What separates a good commercial novelist from a Faulkner or Tolstoy is this: those great novels have profound insights on almost every page or chapter. They distill the human condition in ways most commercial novels never can.

I understand Sony Pictures is developing a cable television series based on the Natchez Burning Trilogy. Tell us about that.

It’s in development right now, but these things take a very long time. So, I’m just waiting to see what happens.

What do you love about the writing life?

I’ll tell you something I learned as a musician and it applies to being a writer, as well: no matter how much you love something, when you begin doing it for a living, it changes things. In a way, the thing you love doing the most is inevitably compromised.

What do I love about the writing life? I love the freedom of it. If you’re fortunate enough to make a living from writing, you probably have more freedom than in almost any other career. When you get over that initial hump of attaining success, you have a great deal of freedom. You’re on your own. That’s what I love.

You’re having a dinner party and can invite any five guests, living or dead, from any walk of life. Who would they be?

That’s a great question. I really have to think about it. [Reflection for a while] I’d love to invite Carl Jung along with Robert Oppenheimer to hear them discuss science and psychology. It would be fascinating to have Friedrich Nietzsche there, along with the great Greek playwright, Euripides. They could add a great deal of insight about what it means to be human. And I think Marie Curie would add to the mix. Can you imagine the conversation these five people would have?

Congratulations on penning Mississippi Blood. It’s an atmospheric, beautifully crafted conclusion to a trilogy exploring racism, abuse of power, and the meaning of justice. It blends imagination, suspense, history and lyrical writing in a novel that I could not put down until I’d read the very last page.

 

The media are brimming with reports about Esteban Santiago, the 26-year-old man who opened fire at the Fort Lauderdale airport, killing five people and wounding eight. Federal officials are investigating whether the gunman was mentally disturbed and heard voices in his head telling him to commit violent acts.

Mr. Santiago was reported to have walked into an Anchorage F.B.I. office in November 2016, and made disturbing remarks prompting officials to urge him to seek mental health care. He was reported to have appeared “agitated and incoherent,” saying “his mind was being controlled by a U.S. intelligence agency.” When he visited the F.B.I. office, his statements were described as “disjointed.” Interviewing agents contacted local authorities who took him to a medical facility for evaluation.

Since the shootings, reports have surfaced saying Mr. Santiago was discharged in August from the Alaska Army National Guard for “unsatisfactory performance.” He was noted to have been deployed to Iraq in 2007, where he spent a year clearing roads of improvised explosives and maintaining bridges. He did not see combat and was awarded a Meritorious Unit Commendation.

As described by the New York Times, his brother noted “that Esteban had recently been hallucinating and was receiving psychological treatment.”

This horrific case highlights matters which have recently received a good deal of focus: gun laws, air travel safety, mental health issues, terrorism, and the role of wartime combat in precipitating debilitating symptoms of mental disorders, foremost among them being PTSD.

Alternately, officials are considering the possibility that Mr. Esteban may have been inspired by terrorist groups, including the Islamic State.

As a psychiatrist, I contend Mr. Esteban is not suffering from PTSD, nor was he radicalized by ISIS. Instead, Mr. Esteban developed a serious psychiatric disorder: Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type. What is known thus far is that the onset of his symptoms—delusions and hallucinations—occurred in his 20s, which is the usual age schizophrenic symptoms make their appearance. It’s also clear that he was hearing voices—experiencing auditory hallucinations—and they were command hallucinations, ordering him to commit acts of violence.

It’s also clear from reports as early as November 2016 that he was “agitated and incoherent” when he appeared at the F.B.I. office. Such disjointed speech is typical of many schizophrenic patients in the process of decompensating.

Lastly, most revealing is the New York Times’ report describing Mr. Santiago as believing “that his mind was being controlled by a U.S. intelligence agency.”

A belief that one’s mind is being controlled by some outside force, or evil thoughts are being inserted into one’s head, is a classic symptom of severe schizophrenia.

Understandably, law enforcement officials are trying to determine if Mr. Santiago was inspired by terrorism, just as some might conclude his service in Iraq brought on mental illness and his violent actions.

But such thinking is misguided.

Schizophrenia, in any of its forms, is a severe mental disorder in which people abnormally interpret reality. Schizophrenia often involves a combination of hallucinations, delusions, disordered thinking and bizarre behavior that impairs daily functioning.

While it’s not known precisely what causes schizophrenia, researchers believe a combination of genetics, brain chemistry and environment contributes to the development of the disorder.

Problems with certain naturally occurring brain chemicals, including the neurotransmitters dopamine and glutamate, may feed into schizophrenia. Neuroimaging studies show differences in the brain structure of people with schizophrenia compared to normal brains. While the significance of these anomalies isn’t yet fully understood, it indicates schizophrenia is a brain disease.

It’s incorrect to point to Mr. Santiago’s army service and to terrorism as “causes” of his illness. Nor did they precipitate his condition. He was a compromised individual who was in the process of a slow and inexorable downward drift into madness. In his decompensated state, he may have recruited the Islamic State or recent news items about the U.S. intelligence community into his thinking; but these external issues did not cause, bring about, worsen, or precipitate a psychiatric illness already beginning to express itself within Mr. Santiago’s disturbed mind. Though his brother maintains that Mr. Santiago was in “psychological treatment,” it’s common for such patients to be non-compliant with their medication regimens. Without proper treatment, Mr. Santiago’s malignant illness culminated in the horror of the Fort Lauderdale airport massacre.

 

I hope you’ll enjoy the baker’s dozen tidbits from famous and not-so-famous authors I’ve stuffed into this book-lover’s stocking.

Happy Holidays!

Linda Fairstein: When I began writing Into the Lion’s Den, the idea of assuming the voice of a twelve-year old was daunting. In my extended family and among my friends, I know a lot of kids that age. When at a Thanksgiving dinner, I found myself with a notebook writing down certain phrases. For instance, the word “fiblet” meaning a little lie, is one of the words with which I became familiar. Hanging around with today’s kids is almost like referring to an urban dictionary.

Louis Begley: In correcting the German translation of my book, it struck me my dialogue is quite funny. How a writing style comes about—I really can’t tell you. I will tell you though, I’m a very good listener. I try to get into the longest line at the supermarket so I can hear what people in front of me are saying. I love listening to conversations. I pay attention to how people talk.

Mary Kubica: When I think about what I’d be doing if I weren’t a writer, I’d return to being a high school history teacher. Now, I volunteer at an animal shelter, my bucket list includes owning my own shelter.

Dave Barry: I got into LIV, Miami’s hottest nightclub. I was blown away by the concept of a celebrity DJ. The same skill set required to operate a microwave oven renders the DJ an internationally valued talent. If you want to stand around and listen to incredibly loud music played by a guy pushing a button, and if you want to purchase dinks for twenty dollars a pop, it’s a fun place to go.

Laura Lippman: The most important lesson I’ve learned about writing is to just do it. To get up and write, and do it regularly. I think people make a mistake in talking about developing discipline. Discipline is a scary word. It doesn’t sound like fun, and it’s difficult to maintain. I think what really works is habit. It’s crucial to develop the habit of writing. That’s what I’ve learned—to build writing into becoming a habit.

John Sandford: When I was a newspaper reporter, I heard the funniest stories from cops. Many cops have a good sense of humor. You almost have to have that to do the job. Some very weird and funny things happen on the street. I try working them into my books. Many things in the books are more stupid than just plain funny. Working with cops you realize that a lot of the people they meet are really dumb. And they do really dumb stuff. It can lead to tragedy, and many of these stories are really a complex mixture of comedy and tragedy.

Liz Kay: In my fiction, writing dialogue is the most fun for me. In my poetry, I don’t use dialogue. The language of poetry is so far removed from the way we actually speak. Moving into a world where I could create snippets of conversation like the language used in daily life, was my way of making art out of conversational language.

Joseph Finder: When I re-read my own book after it’s been published, I usually find something I would have done differently. With each book, I’m more demanding of myself. If a writer isn’t getting better at the craft, something’s wrong. That can make writing new novels harder. Because our critical faculties are more highly developed, we become less tolerant of mistakes.

Nathan Hill: In some ways, I think writing a novel should be like planting and tending a garden.  A garden isn’t a failure if thousands of people don’t look at it. A gardener loves gardening because it brings a measure of joy. The writing itself brings me joy. I think having a novel published should be viewed as a side-effect of the writing.

Lynn Rosen: As an eighty-four-year old debut author, I’ve come to realize my writing style is simply the voice in my head. I write down what that voice tells me. For me, the creative and performing arts involve transcendence beyond the moment. I’m engrossed by the question of how we access art and process our feelings about it, and that informs my writing. I don’t write the way I do in a purposeful way. It’s simply a result of how I think.

Daniel Silva: I always thought the dumbest piece of advice I ever heard was ‘Write what you know.’ I disagree. Write what you’re passionate about. Choose your material and then bury your face in it.

Camille Perri: Getting my first novel published was a long, long road. As a kid, I wrote stories. I spent a lot of time in the library. Books and writing have always been a huge part of my life, and it was always my dream to become a writer. I was relentless in this pursuit. I have loads of unpublished books. But I kept going. Even if my novel hadn’t been published, I would still be writing tomorrow morning.

Ace Atkins: I think dialogue is the engine driving a novel. It propels the story and bespeaks character. A novel’s characters are made real by their dialogue more than by anything else. I’ve always felt dialogue is not just what people say to each other; it’s what they do to each other with words.

Mark Rubinstein’s latest book is Bedlam’s Door: True Tales of Madness and Hope, a medical/psychiatric memoir.

‘Into the Lion’s Den,’ A Conversation with Linda Fairstein

Linda Fairstein, internationally bestselling author of the Alexandra Cooper novels and former Manhattan assistant district attorney for more than two decades, has combined her considerable talent, knowledge, and imagination to write Into the Lion’s Den, the first novel in a series for kids between the ages of 8 and 12.

Into the Lion’s Den introduces us to 12-year-old Devlin Quick, the daughter of New York City’s first woman police commissioner. Someone has stolen a page from a rare book in the New York Public Library, an act witnessed by Devlin’s friend, Liza. Devlin knows she must bring the perpetrator to justice, so the two girls begin piecing the clues together and uncover a mystery far bigger than they could ever have anticipated.

What made you decide to begin writing a series for young readers?

The Nancy Drew series hooked me as a kid and made me love reading. I distinctly recall finding Nancy Drew books had an aspirational quality. I always had the idea of writing a series of books about a smart young girl, and have a file going back fifteen or twenty years about writing what would be a tribute to Nancy Drew.

In 2014, I had an ill friend who underwent twelve hours of surgery. I sat at the bedside in the hospital, and began writing the first chapter on my iPad.

Your Alex Cooper novels are in the voice of a sophisticated adult. How difficult was it to assume the voice of a twelve-year old girl?

One of the fears both my agent and publisher had was that capturing a twelve-year-old’s voice would be difficult. If I couldn’t nail the voice—get inside the head of a contemporary twelve-year-old, it wouldn’t work.

I’ve never had so much fun writing a novel as I did with Into the Lion’s Den. Kids today are very smart, and because a good part of this novel takes place in the New York Public Library, it has many literary references, and was great fun to write. It was also less intense than writing an adult novel.

I must admit, contemplating assuming the voice of a twelve-year-old was daunting at first. I had to go back in time and remember certain forms of language. In my extended family and among my friends, I know a lot of kids in that age range. If I was at a Thanksgiving dinner, I found myself with a notebook writing down certain phrases. For instance, the word “fiblet” meaning a little lie, is one of the words with which I became familiar. Hanging around today’s kids is almost like referring to an urban dictionary.

Also, my editor was incredibly skilled. Every twenty-three pages or so in the manuscript, she would write, ‘Not a twelve-year-old word.’ So, it was a reminder to adjust my thinking.

If you strip away the differences in the eras of Nancy Drew and Devlin Quick, what qualities of Devlin’s are similar to those of Nancy Drew’s?

I think the main similarity between Nancy and Devlin is that both of them want justice to prevail. Devlin wants to set things right. Another parallel is that in Into the Lion’s Den, no adult takes Devlin and Liza seriously when they report a crime. It’s the same quality as when Nancy would get her friends together and they would take it upon themselves to solve a crime or mystery. Both Nancy and Devlin are young people with a keen sense of justice. Nancy was the child of a single parent; her father was a district attorney. Devlin is the daughter of a single mother who’s the police commissioner.

Kids have their own subculture. How do you plan on keeping up with the trends?

I’ve been so conscious over the last three years of the subculture in which kids live. If one of my friends with children invites me to a school event, I definitely attend. My two grandsons are now in college, but throughout their adolescence, they spent time with me each summer. For years, I’ve focused on the language and activities of kids. I was a high school swimmer, so I know first-hand, the atmosphere of team sports. I also read what kids that age are reading. I stay current with the subculture. It’s a very different kind of research as compared to what I do for the Alex Cooper books. In a sense, it’s a constant surround, or perhaps, an immersion in the world of kids.

Will Devlin grow up and mature in real time?

She will not. [Laughter]. It’s a matter of the dictates of the publishing world. There’s a clean break between middle grade books and YA (Young Adult). YA today would get me into the same issues I write about in my adult books: sexual abuse, date rape, and sex trafficking. Devlin Quick has just turned twelve; the minute she becomes thirteen, she gets shelved in a different place in the library—with the YA books. The second book in the series is set about three weeks after the first one. So, she’ll age very slowly and stay on the same library shelf. [Laughter].

As you do in the Alex Cooper books, do you plan on using a New York City landmark as a focal point in each Devlin Quick novel?

Into the Lion’s Den has many scenes in the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. The beauty of the Devlin Quick books is that she’s not tethered to Manhattan the way Alex is because of her work as a district attorney. People have been so responsive to my using New York city landmarks in the Alex Cooper novels, I would love to find a way to do that in the Devlin Quick books. I’m sure Devlin will find her way to the New York City DNA lab, the Museum of Natural History, and other locations, but she’ll also get to locations outside of Manhattan.

Do you plan on alternating Devlin Quick and Alex Cooper novels?

Alex Cooper will come out once a year on a summer schedule. Devlin will come out, most likely, each November. I’m planning on writing two books a year.

What’s coming next from Linda Fairstein?

Next July, an Alex Cooper book is coming. It’s called Deadfall.

Congratulations on writing Into the Lion’s Den, the first in a mystery series about a smart, edgy, young sleuth who drew me into her world and will undoubtedly win the hearts of young readers everywhere.

David Morrell is known to millions of readers worldwide as the “Father of Rambo,” the protagonist in his debut novel, First Blood. The recipient of many awards, David has authored 29 works of fiction that have been translated into 30 languages. A former literature professor at the University of Iowa, he now presents us with the last in his Victorian trilogy, Ruler of the Night.

Set in 1855 London, Ruler of the Night once again features the brilliant Thomas De Quincey and his daughter Emily who this time must solve a murder which occurred aboard an English train. Set against the background of the Crimean War, the story details the tormented De Quincey’s confrontation with his most ruthless adversary.

Central to the novel is the building of the British railway system. How did this impact England?

The impact occurred over a brief interval of time. In 1830, the first railroad in England ran from Liverpool to Manchester and was only thirty-five miles long. By 1855, the railroad tracks covered six-thousand miles. It sped-up Victorian life from moving at ten miles an hour during the mail-coach era to fifty and sixty miles an hour. A newspaper at the time predicted the railway would “annihilate time and space.”

Before the railway existed, individual villages had their own times, based on sundials. The trains needed a uniformly reliable way to keep the schedules accurate, so each morning, the time (which was measured by the Greenwich Royal Observatory) was telegraphed to each train station. Thus, Britain had unified time. This was pivotally important in organizing and promulgating the Industrial Revolution.

The real-life Thomas De Quincey said “there was no such thing as forgetting, that the mind was like a page upon which words were constantly inscribed and then erased and then inscribed again.” Tell us about that.

 De Quincey invented the term “subconscious.” As an opium addict, he suffered intense nightmares. Awakening from them, he would try reasoning where they came from in a way comparable to what Freud would do years later. De Quincey felt the human mind was filled with ‘chasms and sunless abysses and layer upon layer in which there were secret chambers where alien natures could hide undetected.’ His idea was that once an emotion or thought had been registered in the mind, it drifted downward into the subconscious where it remained, and we cannot forget anything. Another quote of his was ‘Memories are like the stars. They disappear during the day, but come out at night.’

Thomas De Quincey’s drug use parallels Sherlock Holmes. Drugs seem to be a classic element in mysteries of the era. Will you tell us about that?

There’s a direct link from De Quincey through Edgar Allan Poe to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Poe admired De Quincey’s work. In short stories like “The Fall of the House of Usher” you see that drug-like impression, where Poe imitates that aspect of De Quincey’s work. Of course, Poe invented the detective story in “The Murders of the Rue Morgue” where we have an eccentric private detective who has a sidekick recording his adventures. Conan Doyle acknowledged having taken that format from Poe and used it in the Sherlock Holmes stories. So, we can trace back Sherlock Holmes’ drug use through Poe and back to De Quincey.

Throughout the trilogy, and more so in Ruler of the Night, De Quincey is haunted by his past. How inescapable is our past?

De Quincey’s past is constantly bubbling up, and in a sense, controlling him. De Quincey sort of invented our notion of the autobiography. His best work is his writing about his own life and his attempts to understand himself, especially in Confessions of an English Opium Eater. In a sense, he was performing psychoanalysis on himself, and his thoughts about memories and one’s past are one of his major contributions to literature.

You’ve described the Victorian De Quincey trilogy as your “version of a nineteenth-century novel.” How did this differ from your other novels?

I was trained to think of a novel as consisting of form matching content. If you’re writing about something, you need to find a way for the form and content to match each other. With this trilogy, I did intense research about London in the 1850s. I wanted to convince readers they were truly on those fog-bound streets. I felt it would add to the atmosphere if I wrote the books as if they were Victorian novels. For years, I read extensively about 1850s London, and nearly hypnotized myself into that period.

I wrote the three books using techniques associated with the Victorian era—such as using the omniscient narrator and mixing the various viewpoints—I felt it would add authenticity to the way I was presenting the Victorian world. It would thrust the reader into the milieu I was creating on the page.

The De Quincey trilogy was a departure for you. What was your goal in writing these novels?

I wanted to escape the modern world. I started the research on Murder as a Fine Art in 2009, shortly after my granddaughter Natalie died at the age of fourteen from a rare bone cancer, Ewing’s sarcoma. Many years earlier, that same disease had killed my son at age fifteen. Unstrung by this double grief, I was seized by the notion to escape into 1850s London and try to hypnotize and protect myself from the reality of what had occurred. It was my attempt to escape from grief by disappearing into that world. A friend of mine said to me, “It struck me that Emily, De Quincey’s daughter is a version of Natalie. Whether you knew it or not, you were reincarnating your granddaughter in these novels.”

After having immersed yourself in Victorian England and the De Quincey saga, what feelings do you have about moving on to something else?

It’s been difficult. For years, I’ve been immersed in Victorian London. I feel as though I’ve come out of the depths of the ocean back into the modern world. Looking around at the vitriol of our current election cycle, it reinforced for me how much more pleasant it was to be in 1850s London. I must admit, I feel somewhat adrift right now.

What’s coming next from David Morrell?

I don’t know. I’m suffering from Victorian withdrawal. I’m catching up on my contemporary reading, and we’ll see where that leads me.

Congratulations on having written Ruler of the Night, the last of an exquisitely rendered and atmospheric trilogy reminiscent of Poe, which the Associated Press called “A literary thriller that pushes the envelope of fear…”

Michael Connelly, the author of twenty-eight previous novels, including his internationally bestselling Harry Bosch and the

Lincoln Lawyer series, started his writing career as a newspaper reporter. His award-winning books have sold more than sixty million copies worldwide.

In The Wrong Side of Goodbye, Bosch, retired from the LAPD, is now a private investigator who does some part-time work for the San Fernando Police Department. He’s contacted by Whitney Vance, a reclusive billionaire, who’s near the end of his life. The old man has one regret: as a young man, he had a love affair with a Mexican girl who after becoming pregnant by Vance, disappeared. Vance wants to know whether he has an heir, and this dying magnate hires Bosch to find out. An enormous fortune is at stake and the mission could be perilous. At the same time, Bosch is involved in tracking a serial rapist who may be the most dangerous foe he’s ever faced.

The Wrong Side of Goodbye is an intriguing title. It reminds me of the noir novels of the 1940s. Tell us about the title.

You’re right.  I set out writing this book with a couple of goals in mind.

The first was to open the story without there having been a murder committed for Harry to solve.

And as for the title, I wanted to pay homage to my literary elders. I wrote the novel as a bit of a throwback to the private eye novels from the forties and fifties. These were the stories that made me want to become a writer when I read them years ago.

The title could just as easily been affixed to a Raymond Chandler novel.

The Wrong Side of Goodbye tells two stories simultaneously, and as you mentioned, neither involves a murder. What made you decide to write the novel this way?

This time, I wanted to do something different.

When Harry was an LAPD homicide detective, the story had to begin with a murder. Now that he’s retired, I wanted to give myself a writing challenge and see if I could tell a compelling story with somewhat of a more mundane opening premise. Could I still create a narrative with momentum and high stakes, but without a corpse; and would it give the readers the kind of satisfaction they derived from my previous books?

All of us writers must stretch ourselves to be better storytellers; that’s what I challenged myself to do with this book

I know there was a real-life serendipitous event that brought Harry to the San Fernando P.D. as a part-time volunteer. Tell us about that.

This book was already in progress and it was a throwback to the kind of private eye novel I’ve always loved. As I was writing it, I realized this would be a somewhat shorter book than my usual target of about one-hundred thousand words. While I was struggling with the prospect of writing a shorter novel, I met a guy who was a police officer with the San Fernando Police Department. It’s a tiny two-square mile enclave encircled by Los Angeles. He’d read my last book and knew Harry Bosch was retired. He told me ‘We have a great volunteer department in the San Fernando P.D., so if Harry wants to keep his hand in something like cold cases, he can work part time for San Fernando.’ So, out of the blue, this materialized as a way to blend this new development in Harry’s life with what I was writing, and keep the book at the usual word-count I have for my books.

I found Harry’s search for a potential heir to the Vance fortune intriguing. Did you do much research to get that aspect of the novel down so perfectly?

I’ve always had real-life LAPD Homicide detectives helping me. One of them is much like Harry Bosch: he’s retired and now has a PI license. He was the backbone of the research. I could call him up and get accurate information about the next step in this kind of investigation. The word ‘research’ always sounds like heavy lifting, but for me, I shoot a text or send an email or make a quick phone call and have someone look into whatever I need to nail down while I keep writing. So for me, research is not really a chore. I pass that chore onto other people. [Laughter].

One of the great things about The Wrong Side of Goodbye is that Harry and Mickey Haller are working together. Will that continue into the future?

I think so. With Harry now doing a lot of private work, the field is wide open for him. I’m not complaining, but for the first eighteen books he was a homicide detective. Now, I can start a story anywhere. I think pretty often he’ll have to reach out for help, and one of the first guys he’ll call upon will be Mickey. So, you’ll see these guys working together—even if a book is Bosch-centric, Mickey will show up, and vice versa.

It seems Harry’s and Mickey’s relationship has been changing. Is that true?

Yes. They’ve been showing up in each other’s books for about ten years. I think some of the earlier tension between them was a result of Bosch being in law enforcement and Haller being a defense attorney. They now have a measure of each other and know each other’s strengths and where each can help the other.

Harry’s relationship with his daughter Maddie is evolving. Tell us more.

You’re a writer, so you know…you throw out a net for all kinds of things but you also mine your own life and experiences.

Harry, Micky and I all have daughters the same age. [Laughter] Obviously, it’s by design. I take a lot of my own experiences as a father, and the relationship with my daughter, and they become part of these characters’ relationships with their daughters. Lots of it narrows down to a texting relationship. There’s a lot of love between the lines of the texts, as well as some discomfort. To me, the moments between Bosch and his daughter are not only the fun part of the book, but those moments and the feelings they engender are what stabilizes Harry. Maddie keeps him grounded, just as in my own life, my relationship with my daughter does the same thing.

These are universal experiences. And that’s where I connect with readers. After all, most of us have never ventured into a homicide investigation, but when a reader finds a character has a basic human emotion similar to the reader’s, the protagonist and reader form a deeper connection. The reader ends up subconsciously nodding, and once that happens, you’ve succeeded in what you’re trying to do as a storyteller.

Since Bosch has been on Amazon TV, do fans tell you that when reading a Harry Bosch novel, they envision Titus Welliver as Harry?

It’s interesting because Titus Welliver in real life and on the show, is about twelve or fifteen years younger than the Harry Bosch about whom I’m currently writing. So, for me, there’s still a distinct separation. As I’m writing, I don’t see Titus. Then, when I watch the show, I totally see Titus as Harry.

When I write about Mickey Haller, I see Matthew McConaughey. It has nothing to do with the acting. It’s a function of the fact that when McConaughey appeared in The Lincoln Lawyer, he was the same age as Mickey was in the book. So, perhaps by osmosis, the image filtered into my creative thinking. I assume it will happen with Titus, but it just hasn’t happened yet. Also, I’ve been writing about Harry Bosh for more than twenty years before Titus was ever in the role, so my image of Bosch has been deeply cemented in my head. Titus has a hammer and chisel and is knocking down that image.

Speaking of Bosch on TV, I understand there’s a third season coming, and even a fourth season in the works.

We’ve almost completed filming the third season which will be out in February or March. Amazon is very confident about the show and gave us the fourth season about a month ago. That’s an important development because before this, after each season, we had to close the studio, then when the show was renewed, we’d hire actors and in a sense, would have to re-tool. Now, we can just proceed.

What’s coming next from Michael Connelly?

When we’ve talked in the past, I always knew what I would do next. I usually start writing a new book on December first of each year, so I have nearly a month to decide what to do. I have an idea for a Bosch book and another for a Mickey Haller book, but I have this growing notion tugging at me and telling me to do something new. I don’t want to keep writing only about Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller and would like to come up with something new before my storytelling days are over. So, I might be putting a new character on the page.

Congratulations on writing The Wrong Side of Goodbye, another intriguing Harry Bosch novel opening new doors and pathways for this enduringly fascinating character.

 

Okay, I admit to not having read many of the classics when I was a kid, and regret even more so bypassing these masterworks for all the decades I’ve been an adult. But there were a number I did read…you remember, all those assigned books we were forced to tackle in school. Among that number was The Old Man and the Sea. 

This book, basically a novella, had rested on my bookshelf for years.

One day, it caught my eye and I decided to give it another read. My sole motivation was to see what had made it worthy of winning Hemingway the Nobel Prize.

The beauty and power of Hemingway’s prose, which was lost to me as a teen, now engulfed me with its  spot-on magnificence, as Santiago’s character emerged in great depth, all within relatively few pages at the hand of this master.

As a man, I could appreciate the depth of the aged Santiago; and now understood his feelings about the sea, the marlin he caught, the sharks with whom he shared the waters, and I found a personal connection to his life and the lives of others as depicted in the novella.

As a novelist, I was struck to my core by the power and grace of Hemingway’s beautiful and economical use of language.

I knew the book had been wasted on me as a youth.

Since that day, I’ve re-read other classics. A few have left me as indifferent to them now as when they were assigned to me in high school; but many more have revealed themselves to the ” adult” me in ways I could never have imagined back in the day.

Why not pick up one such book yourself, and explore your own growth within its pages?

Let me suggest you begin with re-reading The Old Man and the Sea.

 

 

 

 John Hinckley, the man who shot President Reagan, was recently granted a provisional release from Washington’s St. Elizabeth Hospital, where he’d been committed since 1982. He was hospitalized after having been found Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity. [NGRI] This “convalescent leave” was granted because he is no longer viewed as a threat. He is under severe restrictions and most remain in psychiatric treatment in order to remain free.

As a forensic psychiatrist, I’ve written about this topic in both my fiction and non-fiction books. A question I’m asked frequently is, “How can someone who has committed a murder be found Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity.” Although this plea is rarely used, it is often hyped in the media.

NGRI cases make headlines either because the crimes committed were against famous people or were heinous crimes such as the murders committed by James Holmes, the Aurora, Colorado shooter, who snuck into the midnight screening of The Dark Night Rises and shot innocent people.

Less than one percent of criminal defenses involve NGRI pleas, and of that number, very few are successful. So the actual number of defendants who are found to be “not guilty” because of insanity, is very, very small.

The heart of the NGRI defense involves the concept that the person committing the crime lacked the capacity to differentiate right from wrong by virtue of brain damage, mental retardation, or a mental disorder causing an inability to act within the law’s requirements at the time the crime was committed.

Perhaps the biggest misconception about NGRI pleas is the belief that if found Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity, the defendant “got away with murder.”

Not true.

A defendant found NGRI is remanded to a state mental hospital indefinitely. The hospital stay usually exceeds the time which would have been served had the defendant been found guilty and sent to prison!

The acquitee (the term applied to someone deemed NGRI) undergoes treatment in a locked psychiatric facility under the aegis of the state’s Department of Corrections.

Once each year, a review board convenes to decide if the acquitee has been “restored to sanity.” The board is comprised of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals. Almost always, the board recommends continued confinement with medication.

“Restoration of sanity” is rarely achieved.

In fact, the average stay in a locked mental institution for insanity acquitees is thirty-five years, whereas the prison term for these same crimes would be twenty years.

Had John Hinckley been convicted of the crimes he committed, he would have long ago been released from prison.

A successful NGRI plea doesn’t mean the defendant got away with a thing. In fact, he often pays a higher price for the crime committed.

A Man Who Writes of Madnessand Hope!

“Bedlam’s Door”

 

Mark Rubinstein’s eye-opening “Bedlam’s Door” (Thunder Lake Press, $15.95, 280 pages) might not be fiction, but it certainly helps us better understand the methods and motivations of the psychologically damaged who populate both sides of the genre.

Rubinstein, who practiced psychiatry in the military and afterward, has framed his book around a series of case studies that, taken as a whole, strive to provide a keen and often scary grasp of what makes people do the inexplicable. For our consideration, he presents patients who suffer from a myriad of conditions, from surgical addiction to identity disorder, trauma, and depression, just to name a few. All in captivating prose that provides a unique insight into the fragility of the human mind.

In reading “Bedlam’s Door,” I couldn’t help but be struck by how Rubinstein’s well thought-out conclusions apply to a literal rogue’s gallery of fictional villains, as well as heroes, from Hannibal Lecter to Jack Reacher, from Darth Vader to Batman. A masterful treatise on mental (un)health, as professionally polished as it is riveting.