“YOU REALISE I'M LIKELY to be shot,” a gaunt-faced Jeffery Deaver said as we
rounded the Piazza Venezia at speed, heading for the Quirinale, one of the
fabled Seven Hills of Rome. It was said mostly in jest, but Deaver had just
done something unusual: he had written a short story with a political moral.
Even more unusual: for once I had managed to guess the ending. The Weapon is
a story about the CIA's so-called “extraordinary rendition”, involving
kidnapping and torture, illegal but ignored when carried out on foreign
soil. In this case, Italian.
“I wrote it specially, because there has been an instance revealed recently
involving Italian nationals. And I thought it would go down well.” It did,
receiving rapturous applause when he read it aloud to a background of
incidental music in the extravagantly ornate surroundings of the Teatro
Argentina, at Rome's 2008 literary festival.
But that's Deaver for you: he knows what his audience wants and makes sure
they get it. Deaver is big in Italy, as he is in Britain, and back home in
the United States, despite being ashamed of some of his Government's recent
actions.
For all the horrors that occur between the pages of his fiction, Jeff Deaver
is a very moral maker of monsters. He's also an extraordinarily nice guy.
His lean frame, trademark dark suit and thick-framed glasses hardly suggest
a man whose other loves include wine, cooking and Celtic folk music. He is
also a sports car enthusiast, though one who has so far turned down an
invitation to take on The Stig in Top Gear because of “that damned left-hand
stick shift”.
What Deaver mostly does is work hard, putting in ten hours a day, which has
enabled him to produce 27 books to date including his latest, The Broken
Window, which heralds the return of Lincoln Rhyme, his brilliant, irascible,
infuriating and inspired quadriplegic forensic criminologist.
Apart from being a role model-redefining character for the severely disabled -
not designed as such, just the product of Deaver's love for working through
almost impossible situations - Rhyme is an engaging and credible lead
character that most authors would kill to have created. In The Broken
Window, he is drawn into a plot of spellbinding complexity when a cousin is
framed for murder by a killer with a genius for mining the immense banks of
personal data we let others accumulate on each of us.
Imagine someone implicating you in a crime on the basis of your Nectar card,
credit card and Facebook accounts, coupled with your NHS records, driving
licence details and wine club membership. But then that couldn't happen,
could it? We know how well government and private institutions guard our
data...
Deaver says the inspiration came from a traumatic incident in his own life
when he found himself a victim of identity theft. “It wasn't a big loss in
the end, about a thousand dollars. But sorting it took a year out of my
life.” Rhyme was a relatively late arrival in Deaver's fiction but has
become his most enduring one, though a cameo appearance by a criminal
psychologist in an earlier novel has now spun off into a series character in
her own right.
Kathryn Dance, heroine of his previous novel The Sleeping Doll, is an expert
in kinesics, which means that she can read the involuntary body language of
interrogation suspects, a role that Deaver discovered during media coverage
of the O.J. Simpson trial.
“They had a woman jury consultant” - in US cases both defence and prosecution
are allowed to reject jurors - “who specialised in kinesics. She could tell
when they were lying.” Despite enjoying his “standalones”, Deaver knows what
his audience soaks up most readily: “Readers love series characters. They
get to know them and identify with them. I have people write to ask for more
details - not about the crimes, but about their personal lives.” And he
never makes them simple. Dance is a widow with children, while Amelia Sachs,
the tough, fast-driving NYPD detective who is not just the crippled Rhyme's
fellow crime-solver but also his lover, suffers from chronic arthritis.
Dance works for the California Bureau of Investigation, which allows Deaver to
add a West Coast location with which he is at home - he has a house in
Monterey - to New York, where he lived for 20 years.
The research is as complex as the plotting; he will spend seven or eight
months putting the ingredients together, before dealing with the actual
writing in as little as three. He reckons that there is no such thing as
writers' block, just writers who have run out of ideas: “If you know what
you're writing before you start, it's not a problem.
That's not to say things can't change. Deaver is a master of the double - if
not triple - whammy. Without giving anything away, I can reveal that a
second twist in The Sleeping Doll came to him only halfway through writing.
In his own words, a Deaver novel is a “rollercoaster ride”. He makes sure of
that as meticulously as any fairground ride architect: planning the
white-knuckle dips, nerve-shredding turns and tension-building climbs with
the utmost precision.
At home, amid the admitted chaos of his working conditions, he has a big board
on which he plots, forever rearranging strips of paper: incidents, scenes,
to make sure the balance of pace - action, characterisation, violence and
revelation - never let up. If the reader has a dull moment, Deaver feels
that he has failed.
Once, when giving a lecture on creative writing, he took along as props a tube
of toothpaste, shower gel and a deodorant. “These are consumer products,” he
told his bemused class. “So is popular fiction. There's a reason why they
never make liver-flavoured toothpaste. It's not what people want.” He sees
his own prodigious output as “meat and potatoes writing”, or “what Graham
Greene called his 'entertainment' mode”, and admits “I'm not a literary
stylist,” though he hugely admires John le Carré for being so.
Nor is he a fan of the gentle murder investigations to be found, for example,
in the No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books of Alexander McCall Smith, whom
he has met and personally likes. He finds the pace just a little too gentle:
“I'm thinking, what's happening here? Isn't it time we killed someone?”
Dance and Rhyme, he says, are his “Yin and Yang”, as different as chalk and
cheese, and will now alternate annually in his output.
His only difference of opinion with the direction of the hit film of his
bestselling Rhyme novel, The Bone Collector, was that the movie men included
an “angry cop” Hollywood cliché and added a touch more gore, which he found
superfluous.
“But they do their job, and I do mine. I think of the writer who, when asked:
‘Do you mind what they did to your books?', turned to the shelf behind him
and said, ‘Whew, they're all still there'.” In creating a world of violent
crime, he has his own rules to avoid putting off more sensitive readers. “I
never hurt animals or children,” although in many of his novels the threat
to do so is chillingly palpable. You suspect that it will all come right in
the end, but you can still never feel sure until you get there.
Buy a book by Jeffery Deaver and you get exactly what it says on the tin -
though comparison with a bottle of dependable wine is more accurate: an
abundance of character, lots of body (or bodies), a kick where it counts and
a warm glow of satisfaction afterwards. The difference is that the corkscrew
twist usually comes at the end.
The Broken Window by Jeffery Deaver
Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99; 432pp Buy
the book here
Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at Harrogate, 2008
Saturday July 19
Jeffery Deaver talks about his new novel The Broken Window and discusses his
inspirations.
How will the relentless advance of technology affect crime writing? The future
of the genre is debated by a panel of Natasha Cooper, Cody McFadyen, Peter
Lovesey and Ben Richards.
The SAS soldier turned thriller writer Andy McNab gives away some secrets of
his explosive trade.
Sunday July 20
Tess Gerritsen explains how her medical training informs her thrillers.
www.harrogate-festival.org.uk/crime
