Talent Times
Two: An Interview with John Case
by Karen Dionne (Backspace:
The
Writer's Place).
When The Genesis Code, one of my all-time favorite thrillers, first came out in 1997 and went on to hit the New York Times bestseller list, outside of the publisher and a handful of others, no one knew that its author, John Case, was really two people, the husband and wife writing team of Jim and Carolyn Hougan. Since the runaway success of their first novel, the Hougans have written four more tight, action-packed thrillers: The First Horseman, The Syndrome, The Eighth Day, and their latest, The Murder Artist, just released this October.
I was privileged to spend an hour with the Hougans at Bouchercon, the premier conference for mystery and thriller writers held this year in Toronto, Canada, where I was finally able to ask them the question that I had wondered about ever since they came out from behind their pseudonym:
What’s it like to co-write a novel as husband and wife?
Jim: Well, honestly, the only really bad arguments we’ve had in our marriage, which is over thirty years, have been when we started collaborating on The Genesis Code. Before that we had disagreements, like everybody in a marriage will, but we never really - shouted - at each other until we started collaborating.
Carolyn: *laughs* It was brutal.
Jim: The arguments, I think anybody would agree, were deeply stupid, but also very necessary.
Carolyn: I don’t think they were stupid. One person has to cave a lot, that’s all, and guess who it is.
Jim: *indignant* We both cave.
Carolyn: You don’t cave. I used to go in and sneakily change things, which hopefully you would never see again. In the process of writing a novel, you write it, and write it, and write it about ten times, and then you read over the copyedited manuscript, and then there are the galleys, and then you read the page proofs, so by the time you’ve gotten that far, there’ve been a lot of chances for people to - sneak in and do things. *smiles*
The Genesis Code is a wonderful novel that absolutely blew me away the first time I read it. That extra plot twist at the end came as a complete surprise, yet it made so much sense and left me feeling utterly satisfied.
Carolyn: It was hard to keep it postponed. One way to write a thriller is to keep the information back as long as you can, but it’s really hard. I’m glad it worked.
It definitely worked for me. Your first sentence is beautifully done as well; in fact, I’ve often used it at writer’s groups as an example of an excellent opening: “Father Azetti was tempted.” In just four small words, you identify the character, supply the setting, and set up the conflict. I love the way this sentence telegraphs that the chapter is going to be about a priest who faces a temptation, but then in the subsequent sentences, the temptation turns out to be something very small.
Jim: *laughs* Right. He wants a sandwich.
But then as the chapter unfolds, the temptation that Father Azetti faces turns out to be a very large one: breaking the trust of the confessional.
Jim: Exactly. He doesn’t know how tempted he is.
So who wrote that wonderful first sentence?
Jim: I think we can take co-credit here. The truth is, I wrote the first sentence, which is so great, and Carolyn wrote the last sentence for The Genesis Code which is even better, because it reveals everything in the book.
Carolyn: I dreamed the last sentence, and it was beautiful, because it just tied everything up. We knew where we were going, but that was the perfect ending.
“You knew where you were going” - does this mean you outline your books before you begin to write?
Carolyn: We brainstorm and outline a lot. I don’t even think it has to do with collaborating so much as it has to do with when you’re writing a mystery, you have to know where you’re going, so you can foreshadow and do everything properly. Our books are very complex. It isn’t like Jim is writing one part, and I write another part, because that’s not how we do this. I write the rough draft, and he comes in behind and cleans it up, although sometimes I’ll leave a space and say, ‘You write this. I can’t write this, I’m stuck.”
Jim: It’s also the case that even before we get to the writing part, there’s the long conversation that goes on for weeks and months about how this book plays out. Our outlines will run one hundred pages. They’re a drag to read, in a way, because it’s just one thing after another. It’s all plot.
Carolyn: But it’s a big help when you go to write it, although it’s impossible to put everything in the plot. Parts of the outline will be well developed, and then in other parts we’ll write, ‘And then an avalanche of action’ because there’s no information there.
Jim: You see all the turns in the book that way, which you have to do, because in writing a thriller, you’re always laying little time bombs in different parts of the book, and you need to know when they’re going to go off.
Carolyn: Plus it would be a disaster working the way we do if we didn’t outline, because, and this has even happened, I might write something in the beginning of the book that I’m going to need somewhere, and he won’t know that, so he’ll write it out. Then when I read it over, I’ll go, “You got rid of Tammy. I needed Tammy. She wasn’t just an extra person.”
Sounds frustrating.
Carolyn: It’s messy.
How did your collaboration come about?
Carolyn: My career as a solo novelist had sort of dwindled down. In the time before they had the computer to keep track of how many books you sold, they used to count on you to develop your readership. Well, that came to an end around my third book, and I was on my fifth editor - editors were being fired back then and this is happening a lot now too. Jim was signed up with Little Brown to write a book about Beirut, but he got so far along with the writing and then he needed to go there to finish it, but he couldn’t - it would be like trying to go to Baghdad now - it would be very difficult.
Jim: I had been an investigative reporter for a long time, and I had written a couple of books about the intelligence community, so we’ve always been writers, and writers together. At some point or other the basic idea for The Genesis Code came to us - I think it occurred to me --
Carolyn: Yes, you had the basic idea, and then I roughed in the first six chapters.
Jim: I wanted to be a part of it because I thought it would be a fun book to write. I thought that writing a book together would be just grand. *smiles*
I was curious who did the actual writing because I knew you had a non-fiction background, Jim, and I’ve been told that fiction and non-fiction use an entirely different set of writing muscles.
Jim: I’ve also written a novel under my own name, Kingdom Come.
Carolyn: Kingdom Come has a lot of DaVinci code stuff in it; it’s a really interesting book. Jim got tired of being my rewrite man, and wanted to write one of his own. You should read it.
I will. I’m sorry to say I missed that book because I’ve been keeping an eye out for novels by ‘John Case.’
Carolyn: How a book does in the market has a lot to do with publicity, it really does. For The Genesis Code they put four chapters of it on all the Amtrak trains and did a brilliant job. But when Bertelsmann bought Random House, they fired the entire Ballantine publicity department - downsized it - so I think that maybe that kind of thing is happening all over the publishing industry. There’s a lot of consolidation. We lost our original editor, then we had another for three months, and now we have our third at Ballantine.
Jim: That’s over five books.
That’s a lot of change.
Carolyn: It is a lot of change. Our editor now is wonderful, but he didn’t just get us dumped on him, he had another ten authors.
Jim: He’s gotten a whole lot of extra work. The reasons our earlier editors left had nothing to do with competency - they were both excellent editors. It think it’s just a difficult job to hold down.
A lot of editors leave to become agents.
Carolyn: Right. Our first editor had been there for a long time; she was an older employee and they wanted her to take a pay cut. She said no, so she left and she’s with Penguin now. It wasn’t like she wasn’t good at her job, she pretty much named her own way that she wanted to work when she moved, and she was a big loss to them that way, but that’s business.
I think a lot of writers aren’t aware of the business end of publication. They think in terms of craft, and believe that if they write the best novel they possibly can, it will get published.
Carolyn: That’s not true, and so it’s one reason not to be depressed when a novel isn’t accepted, because really, a lot of times it’s a 23-year-old kid who’s reading your novel. It’s very difficult to get it to the eye of a senior editor unless you enter a contest - it’s really difficult.
Jim: I’ve been really lucky in terms of the books I’ve suggested that have gotten advances, but I know a lot of others who haven’t been nearly so successful. Sometimes some very good book ideas and chapters are just out there languishing.
Carolyn: Along with my first book. I can’t say I’m glad my first book wasn’t published - I’m not - I think it was a very good book.
The Genesis Code has a strong religious theme. Was there editorial pressure to avoid panning a certain religion?
Jim: Publishers are hinky about religion.
Carolyn: They are very nervous. But you know, we have this organization in The Genesis Code called Umbra Dei, which is a thinly disguised Opus Dei, and Dan Brown just came out and called it Opus Dei. In fact I had it as Umbra Dei - they made me change it to Umbra Domini and that was because they were afraid of litigation from the Catholic Church.
Jim: When The Genesis Code was first proposed - and that was the plot and a hundred pages or something like that - there were a number of questions that came back to us though our agent, that well, you know they really like the story, they like the writing, but they were afraid of the subject matter. How will Catholics react to it? And there really was no basis, literally, there was no basis for that concern, but just because it was about religion, that worried them. To their credit, they went ahead with it anyway.
Do you think that people are more religious now than they were in the past?
Carolyn: I think there’s a lot of interest in religion now, more so especially since The DaVinci Code.
Jim: We live in a country that’s very religious, much more so than the countries of Europe. I think that probably forty or fifty percent of the people in the U.S. would classify themselves as deeply religious - mostly Christians.
Carolyn: In Italy, it would be one percent. Our books sell very well overseas.
Jim: So it would be odd to exclude religious issues from discussion, because religious issues are essentially having a huge impact on American politics, and world politics. To decide it’s too sensitive to discuss or write about is kind of crazy.
I’d like to talk for a moment about the kind of books you write. When Lee Child visited the Backspace discussion forums last summer, he said, “If you want a truly wide readership, you need to reach those people who hardly read at all, right out there at the margins of literacy (by our standards). Anecdotally, the highest praise I’ve heard from people like this is: “Great book! I finished it!”
Carolyn: *laughs*
“To finish a book is a gratifying experience for them, and they praise the book for ‘helping’ them through.”
Your books are what I would term ‘smart’ books. You do a great job with your science, but it’s sometimes difficult, cutting-edge stuff, and your work often deals with religious themes. Both are topics that require a certain degree of literary and intellectual understanding on the part of your readers. Do you feel that this has narrowed your readership, or do you think that the result is perhaps a smaller, but more appreciative, audience of loyal readers?
Jim: Sometimes people ask who you are writing for, who do you have in mind, and really, I’m writing for myself and for Carolyn. I was thinking about how one goes about deciding what book you’re going to do next, and with me at least, there’s usually some sort of material that I’m very interested in that I just want to read about, a place I want to go maybe, to look into it. Once you decide on a subject matter, then crafting a story within that context is not so difficult. It’s almost as if the research material comes before the characters. I write the book that interests me, or interests us, dealing with the material that we’re fascinated by.
I think that even though the material is often serious and sometimes complex, I don’t believe that actually limits us. I believe that good books will be found, and you develop a readership through word of mouth. There are some people writing in the genre who I think are brilliant, and whose books can sometimes be quite difficult: Alan Furst is one of those. I like John le Carré as well.
Carolyn: I think we’re good story tellers. I think if you tell a good enough story, then the characters will grip the readers. If you get the voices right, readers will be dragged right along through the technical stuff. You have to learn how to present it in such a way so that most people get it. I think we’re pretty good at that. I actually grasped DNA while writing The Genesis Code, though it’s gone now.
Jim: I think if you’re looking to design a book that’s going to sell a lot of copies - basically if I had to do that with a gun to my head - I’d write it as a movie. Look at Dan Brown’s book - it’s got 105 chapters. I think we probably have twenty-five.
Carolyn: And you know James Patterson has two page, and even page-and-a-half chapters. Smash cuts.
Jim: Sentences that are nine words instead of nineteen. I believe that the way we watch movies has affected the way we read books. I think that younger people growing up with the kind of movies they’ve got, are going to expect that kind of experience from books.
Carolyn: If you watch or rent an old movie, even a movie like Rocky, which isn’t that old, the pace of it seems almost elegiac. I like those sort of things. I can relax a little bit. I’m still gripped, but I can enjoy these characters talking to each other. But other people, like my son, will say, ‘I’m going to go get some popcorn now.”
Your newest book, The Murder Artist, came out October 12. Unlike what might be called the traditional thriller format which follows say, three different story lines taking place in three different locales until they all converge, The Murder Artist is written in first person, present tense. Crichton’s Prey is also written in first person and opens and closes in present tense. Do you see this as a trend?
Carolyn: Some people think present tense is edgy, more literary, but a lot of people think it’s too flashy, too showy. I don’t necessarily disagree; I think it really depends on the book. Present tense really does immerse you in the moment, and for a book like this that doesn’t have a major backstory to get in, I think it works well. It keeps your focus.
Jim: First person is very limiting. It can also be a virtue in certain circumstances because it creates mysteries around a character that you can share with the reader. I don’t know that there’s a trend; I think different material has different demands.
Carolyn: The Murder Artist is way different from what we’ve written before. Jim is very big most of the time on confining ourselves to one point of view, which of course we couldn’t do in The Genesis Code - it wasn’t possible. But as soon as we possibly could get from the priest to Joe Lassiter we did. The First Horseman has the villain’s point of view as a kind of counterpoint, and that’s the only one of our books where we did that. But this story of the murder artist is just a different kind. It’s not an international thriller; it all takes place in the United States. It’s such a personal story, that if I tried to write it in third person, I’d have this guy thinking and doing things he couldn’t. It demanded first person.
One last question: The title of your newest book is The Murder Artist, and in your previous novel, The Eighth Day, the main character, Danny Cray, is an artist. The picture you drew of the art scene in that book is absolutely accurate - I know, because my husband is an artist. I don’t think that kind of insider knowledge can be faked, so now I’m wondering: which one of you is the artist?
Jim: Carolyn is the artist. She's a talented water-colorist, who's been painting for many years. As for me, I'm doing well if I can keep my crayon within the lines.
Thank you both so much for your time. Best wishes for continued success in your careers.
Interview from Reader's Digest's Select Editions Volume 1 (published in 2005); reprinted with permission:
| An
instant was all it took for Alex Callahan to lose sight of his
six-year-old twin sons at a Renaissance fair. They have vanished
without a trace. With no clues to go on, the police even begin to
suspect Alex himself! Taking matters into his own hands, Alex begins a
desperate search for his boys, following a twisting trail into the
arcane worlds of magic and voodoo. Breathless, ticking-clock suspense. |