The Joys of Fictional Collaboration
PW Talks with Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
by Leonard Picker -- Publishers Weekly, 5/15/2006
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child complete their crime trilogy, which involves an ancient Egyptian curse and began with Brimstone and Dance of Death, with Book of the Dead (Reviews, Apr. 24).
Eleven years after your series character, FBI Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast, debuted in Relic, he's still going strong in Book of the Dead. What's surprised you the most about how he's developed?
LC: We never anticipated that he would become our bread-and-butter character. We were pleased at how he came out, but the level of almost fanatical loyalty he's aroused in our regular readers was a very gratifying shock to us. He really took off four books ago, around the time of Cabinet of Curiosities. We'd written a number of stand-alone adventure novels, and then we both got an itch to see Pendergast again.
DP: What surprised me is that he's sort of seized the books we've written and through sheer force of character taken them in a direction that maybe we weren't quite prepared to go. We actually don't know much more about him than our readers do.
One of Pendergast's longtime associates was apparently killed in Dance of Death by his arch-nemesis, only to resurface toward the end of that book. What went into that decision?
LC: In that case, Doug and I both initially intended to kill that character off, because we felt that no one would have expected it, but before the book was finished we ended up waffling a bit and allowing the character to survive.
DP: We actually did a little experiment. Lincoln created a fake e-mail account and went on one of our bulletin boards and...
LC: I posted a question about a rumor I'd heard about that character's being killed off, and the response was so vociferous that we felt our fans would never forgive us.
How do you share responsibility for writing together?
LC: Traditionally, Doug and I talk about the next chapters, and I write up a detailed outline that Doug uses to write a rough draft of those chapters that I then rewrite, extensively or not...
DP: Depending on how bad it was. Sometimes Lincoln will tell me that a chapter I wrote was so bad that it has to be cut completely, so you can imagine that we have some pretty exciting exchanges.
