I believe that living and growing are about discovery — moving from our original view of something, through a process of conflict and enlightenment, to a clearer view. It’s about figuring out what’s really going on, separating truth from illusion. It’s about what good detectives do in the stories I like the best.

    Great mystery-thrillers are ultimately about real life. They’re about us. They are illuminating exaggerations of the learning we engage in every day. I’ve always felt that the most satisfying stories are those that mirror life’s dangers and tragedies clearly — the foolish risks, the collisions, the frightening unknowns, the hidden evils — and provide sound resolutions.

    Reviewers have described Think of a Number as a nail-biting thriller, an exciting police procedural, a poignant examination of a marriage in trouble. I see it as the story of a smart and troubled good guy locked in a struggle with a smart and troubled bad guy.

    The hero is an intense homicide detective whose attachment to the game creates all the excitement, all the rewards, and most of the problems in his life. He’s a genius when it comes to dealing with maniacs and murderers, but a disaster when it comes to dealing with his wife and son — a fantastic cop shackled by his own ineptitude as a husband and father. I think that sort of central character helps the book become many things to many people.

    I’ve been asked how much of my main character, Dave Gurney, is based on my own history and personality. After all, we were both born in the Bronx and both graduated from Fordham College. We both had high-pressure careers in the city, and we both moved to a remote rural area completely different from what we were accustomed to. And I’ll admit that some of Dave’s thoughts and feelings parallel some of my own. However, he definitely has concerns, talents, and perspectives that are different from mine. I mean, he’s a homicide detective! He has the steeliness, the confrontational abilities for that. He has the stomach, the toughness for it.

    I think I understand Dave Gurney well enough to write about him, but I could never do what he does. I’ve also been blessed with a life far less fraught with trouble and tragedy than his, lighter and brighter in so many ways. My wife and I have been given so many gifts — our life together, the good fortune to live in a beautiful place, lots of laughter, our children, our grandchildren.

    I hope you enjoy Think of a Number — and that all the mysteries you encounter in your own life have satisfying solutions.

Think of a Number by John Verdon - Book Trailer

Sixty-one hours. Not a minute to spare.

Here are the facts:

The hero: “Jack Reacher is the coolest continuing series character now on offer.”
—Stephen King

The situation: A tour bus crashes in a savage snowstorm and lands Jack Reacher in the middle of a deadly confrontation. In nearby Bolton, South Dakota, one brave woman is standing up for justice in a small town threatened by sinister forces. If she’s going to live long enough to testify, she’ll need help. Because a killer is coming to Bolton, a coldly proficient assassin who never misses.

Reacher’s original plan was to keep on moving. But the next 61 hours will change everything. The secrets are deadlier and his enemies are stronger than he could have guessed—but so is the woman whose life he’ll risk his own to save.

The opening: “Five minutes to three in the afternoon. Exactly sixty-one hours before it happened.”

What others have said: “Child really is that good at heroic suspense writing.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

I didn’t have the same luxury of time in writing Two in the Hat. I had an agent and an editor in New York asking me for updates and looking for the finished product. A finished product they had paid me to write. As the deadline approached, I hadn’t written a single scene yet; I had notes (pages and pages of notes) written on yellow legal paper, sticky notes in my car, napkins, the back side of my business cards, whatever I had handy when I got an idea for book two. But they were just notes. Even with established characters, there was no chance of making that one year deadline.

And I was right.

If I was going to make my extended deadline (six extra months!), I needed to be more efficient in my writing. Some time earlier, I had seen Lee Child and Joseph Finder at the New England Crime Bake writers’ conference arguing the issue: to outline or not to outline. I had also heard Andrew Gross advocate for the importance of outlining in writing his novels. I was desperate, so I decided to give outlining a try.

I started writing Two in the Hat with a chapter-by-chapter outline, plotting out the whole novel. First I mapped out the beginning and the ending (which, just as for book one, I already knew). Then I started filling in the rest of the story. Within a few weeks I had more than a hundred chapters mapped out, the entire novel from beginning to end.

Yet, even with an outline, I ran into a larger problem. I learned that the biggest issue with writing a sequel is in striking the proper balance between the interests of new readers as opposed to those of loyal readers who have come back for more. I didn’t want to bore return readers by reintroducing every character (the ones who were still alive anyway) or by rehashing every event that had occurred in Eight in the Box. On the other hand, I didn’t want new readers to be confused about certain characters’ motivations that were shaped by past events.

This, I was to discover, was a recurring problem throughout the process of writing a sequel. Ultimately, I decided to write Two in the Hat as if it were a stand-alone novel. I would simply assume that the reader knew everything that had happened in Eight in the Box. Then, during the editing process, my agent, editor and writers’ group read the book with an eye toward any place where information needed to be added to prevent confusion for new readers. It turned out that very little needed to be added. The story flowed nicely.

I learned the value of outlining and that every novel, even a sequel or a book in a series, needs to stand on its own. If the book is well-written, with strong characters and a good story, then it will hopefully entertain every reader.

Here are the facts:

The hero: Homicide detective Angel Alves

The situation: Memories of the infamous Blood Bath killer still loom large in Boston. So when a pair of students turn up bizarrely slain, Angel Alves fears that another serial killer is stalking the city. Alves and his ex-partner Wayne Mooney must set out to stop grim history from repeating itself. But as they’ll quickly learn, matching wits with a twisted mind is a dangerous game.

The opening:
“George Wheeler felt around with his right foot until he found solid ground. He swung his left foot out of the minivan and tried to stand. It was impossible without the use of his hands, and they were tied behind his back.”

What others have said: “A terrific down-and-dirty crime novel that reeks of street authenticity. I loved it.”
—Dennis Lehane

Here are the facts:

The hero: Alex Delaware, a post-modern detective of sorts, who relies on his psychological prowess to get to root of his cases.

The situation: Her name is Elise Freeman, and her chilling cry for help—to whoever may be listening—comes too late to save her. On a DVD found near her lifeless body, the emotionally and physically battered woman chronicles a year-and-a-half-long ordeal of monstrous abuse at the hands of three sadistic tormentors.

The opening:
“The woman had haunted eyes. Pale, drooping at the outer edges, they stared into the unseen camera with an odd combination of defiance and defeat”

What others have said: “Kellerman really knows how to keep those pages turning.”
—New York Times Book Review

Here are the facts:

The hero: David Harwood, a small-town reporter in need of a break. A dedicated husband and father.

The situation: A warm summer Saturday. An amusement park. David Harwood is glad to be spending some quality time with his wife, Jan, and their four-year-old son. But what begins as a pleasant family outing turns into a nightmare after an inexplicable disappearance. A frantic search only leads to an even more shocking and harrowing turn of events.

A small sampling:
“You can’t get the cuff over his hand?”
“How many times do I have to tell you? I’m gonna have to cut it off.”
“I thought you said it would take forever to cut the cuff.”
“I’m not talking about the cuff.”

What others have said: “If you like Harlan Coben, you’ll love Linwood Barclay.”
—Peter Robinson, author of All the Colors of Darkness

Here are the facts:

The situation: It starts with an unspeakable series of grisly murders across three states, a trail of blood leading, finally, to the small Tennessee town of Serenade. There, two more brutal killings lure the Special Crimes Unit into what may be the ultimate trap.

A small sampling: “Hollis nearly jumped out of her skin. She looked up and was angrily aware of the crack in her voice when she demanded, ‘Where the hell did you come from?’”

What others have said: “Kay Hooper keeps me guessing until the very end.”
—Linda Howard

Read an excerpt:

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Here are the facts:

The situation: The dogs sense it first. High in the Colorado Rockies, a change is coming. Nothing can stop it, nothing will ever be the same. Because what’s out there will leave you Breathless.

Opening line: A moment before the encounter, a strange expectancy overcame Grady Adams, a sense that he and Merlin were not alone.

What others have said: “Koontz is a superb plotter and wordsmith. He chronicles the hopes and fears of our time in broad strokes and fine detail, using popular fiction to explore the human condition.”
—USA Today

Read an excerpt:

Here are the facts:

The players: Chef Billy Blessing—well-known New York City restaurant owner, and charming host of Wake Up America!, a popular morning show program.

The situation: It seems network TV can be murder, and Billy Blessing finds this out the hard way when his network’s head honcho is found dead. Even worse, it seems the death was caused by a fatal coq au vin that came from Billy’s restaurant… which means he’s the prime suspect.

Opening line: “The big guy lumbered toward me, waving the cleaver. Weeping like a baby.”

What others have said: “This is a funny, funny, very funny mystery that really gallops along and has several cool twists. Maybe Al Roker should quit his day job.”
—James Patterson

Read an excerpt:

“Once upon a time,” I’ll think. I’ll look around the room and spot, perhaps, my DVD player. “Once upon a time a guy sat down to watch a DVD.”

What DVD?

“Okay, it was Cannibal Holocaust. Jim wasn’t really into gore movies, but he’d lost a bet with a friend about whether or not he could devour an entire watermelon in one sitting, so there he was.”

Then what?

“Well, he decided he needed some liquid courage to watch the hideously violent film (he really didn’t like gory films). When he went to the refrigerator, the beer was gone.”

Why? Who drank it? Him?

“No, the beer was one of six twelve packs polished off at the poker party the evening before. The poker party, by the way, was something Jim and his friends had put together a year before. Instead of playing for money, they put a ‘Fear Factor’ spin on it. Hence the watermelon, hence Cannibal Holocaust. Hence no beer. Jim decided he’d have to go buy some, so he went to the store.”

In what? A car, a truck a van?

“Beat up ten-speed bicycle. He lost the car a few months earlier in a similar poker game. (Yes, Jim has a gambling problem.) So he takes off on his ten speed, to buy some beer. It’s the middle of the night, but the 7-11 isn’t far. However, just as he’s about to turn off his street, he hears a blood curdling scream and a naked woman bursts out of the house on the corner and races across the lawn. A man runs after her, wielding a hatchet…”

And so on. It’s a silly exercise, but it almost never fails. The key is to try and go left when you’d normally go right. Lots of sudden ninety-degree angles and improbability. I swear, it’s like WD 40 for the mind.

Of course, we never get to find out what happened to Jim. Did he save the girl? Did he shrug and cycle on? If we want to get complex about it, maybe this is what happens:

“Jim leaps off his bike and gives chase to the man with the hatchet, but gets there too late to save the girl. The hatchet gets buried in her skull twice before Jim manages to tackle the bad guy. A brutal fight ensues, a violent, desperate, knock-down drag-out . Jim is at the losing end, being strangled to death, when his grasping hand finds the handle of the hatchet. He grips it hard, yanks it out of the poor girl’s head, and chops at the bad guy, again and again, lost in his own hysteria, fury, and desperation. When the police arrive, they find him there, hatchet in hand, wild-eyed, standing above two dead bodies.

The cops, of course, end up assuming he was the original assailant, and he is arrested. No evidence to the contrary is found, and Jim goes to death row - all because he went out to buy some beer. He never does get to watch Cannibal Holocaust. He never gambles again.”

Try it sometime. Give yourself a license to imagine the ridiculous or the strange or whatever, without censor, and see if helps.

A final one, in honor of it being Halloween:

Once upon a time, two kids came to my door for Halloween Candy. They came alone, and they were never seen again. The very next day, the dirt in the crawl space of my basement was freshly turned, so freshly turned.

So happy.

Happy Halloween and happy reading.

When I’m writing the first draft, I operate from the ‘let it all hang out’ position. I use every character idea, every plot twist (silly or not), every last drop of emotion, and all of the worst and most violent scenarios I can conceive of. I don’t censor myself on a first draft in any way, shape or form. It’s kind of like taking a digital photograph: you can always make a big photo smaller, but you can’t make a small photo bigger (well, you can, but it looks like crap).

There are things that I’ve written in some first drafts that will never see the light of day, and that’s as it should be. There have been at least two violent passages in my novels that were deleted forever from my harddrive. I mentioned this once to a reader in Germany, who told me: ‘Oh, no, you should keep those! Maybe one day you can put out an ‘unabridged’ version with all the gory parts intact.’ I explained to him that I wasn’t interested in writing books that get burned, nor was I interested in being hung in effigy.

Yeah, they were that bad.

There have been plot twists that went beyond the ridiculous, and plenty of stilted, awful dialogue that I am actually ashamed to have written.

All of that’s okay, because it works for me. I basically give myself a pass to create a mental environment where anything goes, where anything can be imagined or said. The result is the first draft - an obese, possibly obscene, probably monstrous thing. Kind of like Jabba the Hut.

Then I set it aside and wait a week.

The next draft is where I break out the carving knife. I read and cut, read and cut. I get rid of the overly gratuitous, the stupid, the unnecessary. Because I didn’t censor myself, I am usually left with a lot of good stuff. More importantly, I generally end up writing a book that pushes my own boundaries, because I gave myself no limits on the first draft.

William Blake’s famous paragraph: “The path of excess leads to the tower of wisdom. The pleasure of satisfying a savage instinct, undomesticated by the ego is incomparably much more intense than the one of satisfying a tame instinct.”

I don’t necessarily agree with this in life, but I absolutely agree with it when it comes to first drafts.

Every writer has their own way of doing things. For me, every book is a war. A knock-down, drag-out, Fight Club kind of thing. I get obsessed when I’m writing, and every book takes its toll. I go into some dark, messed-up places, and it’s not always a day at the races. Sometimes it’s banging on a piñata made of meat. A piñata that squeals at you. But I digress…

Once the second draft is done, and I’m satisfied with it, then the time comes to let someone else read the book. I will generally send it to my agent, as she used to be an editor, and I trust her insight. She’ll read it over and give me her notes. I’ll consider what she’s said and dive back down the rabbit hole to revise. This is generally the last big struggle, the final battleground for the most major revisions. After this revision and a final re-read by my agent, I send it on to my editor.

The editor/writer relationship is incredibly important and unbelievably valuable. I’ve heard stories (haven’t we all) about eccentric (or cranky) famous authors who refuse editorial collaboration. This mystifies me. Every book of mine that’s been published became a much better book as a direct result of the editorial process. All writers have tics and blind spots. You need a second set of eyes to make sure yours have been discovered and dealt with.

Once all of the above is done, and the book has been officially put to bed, I put it out of my mind and try not to think about it again. I’ve never gone back to re-read a book once it’s been put through the above process. It becomes the past.

I immerse myself, instead, into all the things that’ll get those creative wheels turning; books, movies, music, the good, the bad and the hideous. All to get myself ready for that next first draft and the war that comes with it.

SH: You’ve written a whole lot of books now. How many? When did you publish your first novel and what was it?

TP: My new novel SHADOW SEASON is my 20th published novel. My first, DARK FATHER, was a very immature horror novel that’s full of bombastic experimental literary fireworks with no grounding in actual storytelling. I wrote it when I was 21 and I thought I was going to be the next William S. Burroughs or something.

SH: Was it a series book? How many series do you have going now?

TP: I’ve written a couple of presumed series but never made it to the third of any of them thus far. My first two mysteries THE DEAD PAST and SORROW’S CROWN were a pair, my two westerns GRAVE MEN AND COFFIN BLUES followed the same two protagonists, and THE COLD SPOT and THE COLDEST MILE are the first two in what I really hope will be a trilogy following my career thief Chase and his stone cold killer grandfather Jonah.

SH: Who published your first book? Can you tell us a bit about your road to getting published? How you got an agent submitted your book, etc.

TP: Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster published DARK FATHER. My career started very ass backward. It’s a miracle that the book got picked up since I did absolutely everything wrong at the beginning. I submitted a partial manuscript over the transom. The book wasn’t finished. And I sent a dark fantasy novel to an editor in charge of the literary line. But the fates were smiling. Somehow the novel caught the attention of the powers that be and it got picked up. My first agent was someone who swung the boilerplate contract, took her 15%, and left me cold. I went through another four agents in the almost 20 years since then, but none of them ever managed to sell a single book for me. We either clashed personally or professionally. All of the sales I handled on my own until the most recent, when I finally hooked up with someone who I get along with on both a personal and business level.

SH: How long have you been working and supporting yourself as a writer, strictly?

TP: Since the beginning. It’s been a tight tight seriously tight struggle, brother, but somehow I’ve managed it.

SH: What advice would you offer young writers today about starting off a career as a fiction author? Other than head for the hills. Just kidding. Seriously, do you still think it’s possible for a young writer to support him or herself with his/her fiction?

TP: It can happen, but I have no advice on how anybody can make it happen beyond the obvious. Learn your craft. Get an agent or publisher that you see eye to eye with and who will encourage you along a very difficult path. There’s a lot of damn work involved and not much security.

SH: What are some of the best ways you have seen to publicize a novel? Online or off. Can you tell us some of the things that your publisher has done for you that have helped? How about some things that you’ve done yourself?

TP: There’s no one thing that stands out among the many. It’s all a battle of inches, of increments. You push in every venue that you can think of, you make yourself accessible, you do your damnedest to promote. You build your fanbase one at a time, you do signings, you hit conferences, you push to get reviews, you give as many interviews as you possibly can without boring the shit out of the reader. You become a sucker and join up with all these sites. Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, whatever. You strain to reach as many people as possible and you hope to Christ that your product is strong enough to keep them coming back for more.

SH: How did you cut your teeth as a writer and really learn to get your chops? Can you tell us about this process for you?

TP: It was hard-fought battle finding my own voice. Some writers have a unique and powerful voice right from the beginning, but I wavered like hell. Like I said, my first novel wasn’t grounded in a mature worldview yet because I didn’t have one myself. After selling the first one there was a long dry spell where I wrote several more books but couldn’t find anyone who’d publish them. I decided I needed to go back and really learn the short form. I spent a year doing nothing but writing short fiction, finding my voice, learning how to edit myself, how to sharpen the prose. Once I started selling short stories regularly and building something of a name for myself in the horror/dark fantasy field, I then went back to all those unsold novels and started mercilessly editing and restructuring them. Once I did that, they began to sell as well. It was a long road made a lot harder because I needed to get a few more years under my belt, had to find out a lot more about myself and the world, in order to put it into the books and really connect with a reader.

SH: Who are some of your favorite writers and people who influenced your work?

TP: Man, the list is endless, and it’s all over the literary map, but if I have to name just a handful I’d say David Goodis, Charles Williams, Fredric Brown, Cornell Woolrich, Donald Westlake, Jim Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, Donald Barthelme, and Charles Bukowski. I’ve been lucky enough to have had three true mentors in my life: Jack Cady, Dick Laymon, and Ed Gorman. The three of them helped me immensely when I was starting out. They were encouraging through the roughest times and always had a kind word or a bit of advice when I needed it. Jack and Dick are gone now but there isn’t a day that goes by that I’m not thankful to them. And Ed remains a best friend to many of us in the field. He’s the best of the best.

SH: I notice that some of your characters are legitimate bad asses, brawlers, grifters, card sharks, and underworld geniuses. Do you have to put yourself into this world, or how do you figure out how to write these guys? What kind of research are you up to?

TP: The most recent books THE COLD SPOT, THE COLDEST MILE, and SHADOW SEASON all deal with cops and criminals and living the bent life. The research is pretty minimal as research, meaning I read tons of cop & bad guy books and certain elements stick with me. I used to be a true crime addict too, so some of that has rubbed off as well. And film noir as a whole has a great meaning for me. The intense and basic concept of a good guy being pushed or pulled over the line where he’s forced to do something bad. It’s the call of fate. You fight the good fight every day but sometimes you give in to your baser instincts. You want. You desire. You covet. You fear. You grab. You snatch. You cheat. You get older and realize that life isn’t what you’d hoped it would be, and there’s a real terror there, a hope that you can somehow put your past behind you and filch whatever it is you think you need. The internal conflict is in all of us, I think. So I put myself in that criminal world because at heart I’m a covetous prick like anyone. I just live out the life in fiction.

SH: What’s next for you?

TP: As mentioned my new novel SHADOW SEASON hits stores in three weeks. It’s about a blind ex-cop turned teacher at an isolated private girls’ school who has a lot of unfinished business with his dirty ex-partner. Some bad dudes are roaming the campus during a blizzard and the seductive teenagers are putting my handicapped protagonist through hell. So, lots of giggles and guffaws. The next book is entitled THE UNDERNEATH, another one that deals with the bent life. It’s about a guy who returns home to his family of career thieves on the eve of his murderous brother’s execution. There’s a lot of unanswered questions about his brother’s killing spree, and my protagonist has a lot of regrets and remorse about abandoning his pregnant ex-girlfriend. It’s as much a family drama as it is a crime tale, and in some ways its my most ambitious book yet.