Where Light in Darkness Lies

PW: Your first novel, Light of Day [reviewed here], deals with teenage suicide, violence and a single father's despair—how did you come to such emotionally fraught material?

Jamie M. Saul: I had an idea for another book, and in that book was a very minor character, a teenage boy who committed suicide. The more I explored what I thought I was going to write, the more interested I became in that teenage boy. I had some idea why he did it, but I didn't have all the nuts and bolts of it—there would have been a moral dilemma for him. I decided to do a single parent, and being a man I said, I'll make it a single father. And I also thought, there's not much being written about single fathers raising children, so let's see where this goes. I more or less gave Danny the father I wanted, and that's how that happened.

PW: One of the things I admired about your book was that it managed to be very dramatic without ever becoming melodramatic.

JMS: Bless your heart.

PW: It's true. Given the subject matter, were you concerned about melodrama?

JMS: I have a little gauge in me that says, Don't go over the top. I also have a really good agent who read this. My wife is a book editor, and she read a draft of it, and Jennifer Brehl, my editor at Morrow, really tightened it up and put the final polish on it brilliantly. I don't think I went over the top. But if I did, they would have brought it back and said, "This is too much!" I think the book has a lot of ambivalence and irony in it, and I really wanted the book to have that. No one does anything for just one reason.

PW: Your book also combines an emotional depth one expects in literary fiction with a story that bears some traces of a mystery novel. Are you interested in crime fiction?

JMS: I'm not interested in crime fiction, but of all the novels I've read that I really liked, there always seemed to me to be a matter of finding something out—something hidden, something secret, something subcutaneous. And in that sense it's like a mystery. If you read The Great Gatsby, [you wonder] who is Gatsby? Who is this man?

PW: You've written for a couple of television dramas. Which came first for you, television writing or fiction? Has one affected the other?

JMS: I always wanted to write fiction, and journalism paid the rent. I did freelance magazine work early on, and that led to Top Cops. In some respects, a story is a story. If you're interviewing somebody, and something happened to them, you still have to have a beginning, middle and end to it.

PW: What's next for you?

JMS: I'm working on a new book. It's a love story, without the issues of Light of Day. The thing that's been interesting about Light of Day is that there's been a lot of in-house support for it. Most of the readers who have responded to it were women, and I found that really satisfying. I kind of wrote this with a female audience in mind, in that I wanted them to see the emotional depth of a man. The fact that women have responded to it, so far, has been really rewarding to me.