Thomas H. Cook is the author of twenty-seven books, including two works of true crime. His novels have been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Macavity Award and the Dashiell Hammett Prize. The Chatham School Affair won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel in 1996. His true crime book, Blood Echoes, was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1992, and his story "Fatherhood" won the Herodotus Prize in 1998 and was included in Best Mystery Stories of 1998, edited by Otto Penzler and Ed McBain His works have been translated into fifteen languages.
Twists in a Mysterious Life
by Thomas H. Cook
I had not intended to become a mystery writer, which is strange since my first book was about a New York City homicide detective who is given the assignment of solving a murder. Actually, there were two murder victims, neither of which was human. The dead were two fallow deer, both given to the New York City Children's Zoo by a very prominent NYC family, hence the assignment to the case of a homicide detective. The detective goes from witness to witness and, of course, finds the killer. And I didn't think of this as a mystery? It was, of course, a by-the-book police procedural. I didn't realize this, however, because I'd never read a mystery, much less a police procedural. The book was nominated for an Edgar. Voila! I was a mystery writer. My next novel was fully mainstream, but the one that followed it was a serial killer mystery. My fourth book was another mainstream novel. I was really in trouble. Nobody knew what sort of writer I was. In fact, I didn't know what sort of writer I was. A friend suggested I write a series character. I did three books with this character, then got really bored with him. There is nothing worse than being bored by your own characters, and so I dropped the series at book three. Now what?
I truly didn't know. I moved to Spain, wrote a book so bad I didn't even submit it to my agent. I felt washed-up, exhausted, more or less brain dead. Then, rather suddenly, I got a new idea. I would write a book that was both a mystery AND a mainstream novel. That book was MORTAL MEMORY, and since writing it, I have done nothing but blend, or at least attempt to blend, elements of the crime novel with elements of the mainstream novel. The result, at least in terms of my career, has been mixed. I have gotten loads of critical praise, awards and nominations for awards, and loads of translations, with actual success if France and Japan, but in the U.S., neither fame nor fortune have been mine. I have come to think that the problem is not with the books, but with the way readers in America are demarcated. This demarcation is severe. People who read "mainstream," rarely approach the "mystery" section of a bookstore. As for "mystery" readers, they are equally demarcated by sub genres: cosy, police procedural, thriller, private eye, series characters, etc. I don't write books that fit well into any of these categories. Once, at a speech in Nashville, a reader said, "Mr. Cook, your problem is that people don't know what they're going to get when they pick up one of your books." My response: "Isn't that a good thing?" It is, in fact, a good thing, but it is hard on readers who are shelling out upwards of twenty-five dollars on a writer whose books they can't entirely predict. This reluctance to take a chance was brought home to me recently in London. I had just walked out of my publisher's office in Bloomsbury. The cabbie asked if I were a writer. I said that I was and that I wrote "crime novels." He then mentioned a very well-known crime writer and said, "I just bought the sixth book by her. Boy, did the last four suck!" And yet, this cab driver had bought yet another book by this author rather than take a chance on buying a book by an unknown writer, with no series character, namely Me! The fact is, we should all read outside our comfort zones from time to time. We should all occasionally choose an author with whom we are unfamiliar. I sometimes think of reading only within one genre as akin to never traveling beyond your own town or farm or city. I am currently writing a non-fiction book about visiting "the saddest places on earth," and though these places are very different, I have gotten something powerful from each of them, something I would not have gotten had I stayed home, or merely gone to various places within one genre of tragedy, say from one death camp to another. What has made this experience moving is the variety of places I have visited. I only wish the reading public would do the same, visit different writers, genres, worlds.
