Read, twist and shout

Jeffery Deaver's new novel , 'The Vanished Man', has so many twists that readers may have to unscrew it from the shelf in order to read it, writes John Connolly

Let's get this out of the way right from the start. The writer Jeffery Deaver is a very pleasant man - funny, smart, modest, good company, and certainly one of the prime exponents of the twist-filled thriller working today - but in the right light he can look a bit, well, sinister.

He is one of the few mystery writers who could conceivably play one of his own villains. Hand him a book detailing long-forgotten crimes committed in New York, and you have the serial killer from his breakthrough novel, The Bone Collector. Give him a high-powered rifle, and he is the assassin known as The Coffin Dancer. Put him in a cape and a magician's hat, and he becomes the demented illusionist in his latest book, The Vanished Man. Admittedly, the murderous Chinese people-smuggler from The Stone Monkey might be a bit of a stretch for him, but everybody needs the occasional challenge.

"Most crime is about two stoned kids shooting guns at each other from 10 feet away and killing a bystander," he explains, looking only mildly threatening over early morning coffee and toast. "It's not about elaborate psychologically twisted and brilliant criminals like Hannibal Lecter or some of the villains that I create, but mundane crime is as boring and pedestrian as any other mundane activity. I create larger-than-life villains, but I do like them to have a little substance to them, or else readers don't feel a threat. I spend a lot of time on the villains, but I distance myself from all of my characters. People always ask me which of my ex-girlfriends is this victim supposed to be, but I'm very objective about them." In short, this means that he probably does not regularly entertain thoughts of actually feeding people to rats (The Bone Collector), putting them on a boat and blowing them up (The Stone Monkey), or spread-eagling them on a table in a New York apartment and sawing them in half (The Vanished Man), which is all to the good.

Still, there are skeletons in the Deaver closet: he used to be a folk singer . . .

Born in the American midwest in 1950, Deaver began writing in his early teens. "I always wanted to write, so I started out by writing very bad, angst-ridden short stories. I was very pudgy and clumsy and had no talent at sports, so my heroes were always pudgy, clumsy kids who had no talent at sports, but who were rescuing cheerleaders and pom-pom girls. I had no aspirations to create great literature." He also wrote, and still writes, poetry, but recognising that few people make a living at poetry, he studied journalism at the University of Missouri.

"A lot of my friends went into journalism to make a difference - this was the 1960s - but I was not politically motivated. I just wanted to make a living writing. I was still writing fiction: slightly more sophisticated but still angst-ridden short stories, probably about young journalists rescuing cheerleaders and pom-pom girls."

I see a theme running through his early work at this point. "Yeah, desperation. Desperation for a date."

Upon graduation, Deaver worked as a magazine writer before returning to university to study law, eventually becoming a corporate lawyer on Wall Street. He continued to write, producing two novels so awful that he literally destroyed them rather than send them to a publisher. The third novel he submitted was rejected, but the fourth, Hoodoo, was accepted by a small paperback publisher.

Then the problems started.

Deaver winces slightly at the mention of Hoodoo, an occult story. The book still pops up for sale on the Internet, possibly because he has tired of trying to buy up all of the copies in existence. "I did not know about structure and stories at that point. I did a first draft, checked for typos, and sent it off to my publisher. The next thing I got back was a box of finished books. There was no editing at all. I had done a two-book contract for no money, and I sent in the second book, Always A Thief. I said that I needed some editorial input, and they said, 'Well, Jeffery, this book is pretty much what we want, but there's one problem: it's too short and there's not enough sex in it'. Which there wasn't, so I wrote one 50-page orgy scene and added that in. Mercifully, it's now out of print."

Deaver no longer makes such mistakes. His writing process is, for me, one of the most painstaking I've encountered in modern mystery writing. He spends eight months outlining the story, section by section, in minute detail, even down to the inclusion of crucial paragraph breaks, until eventually he has about 200 pages littered with notes and reminders to himself. At the same time he is doing his research, and adding that to the outline. (He is a meticulous researcher, although his preference is to use the Internet and books for his research.) Only when all of this is complete will he begin writing his first draft of the novel.

"You never quite know where a book is going to go," he explains. "You can approach writing it in one of two ways: you can sit down and write an outline or you can start out just by writing the book, like I did earlier in my career. I would get a third of the way through and realise I'd written myself into a corner and would have to throw out two or three weeks' worth of prose - or, worse, try to change the plot. I would throw out so much stuff because of that. Then I would try and outline what I had already written. I just felt it was easier, basically because I'm lazy, to do the outline first."

Deaver now has 20 novels to his name - most famously, the series of forensics-based thrillers featuring the character of Lincoln Rhyme, a brilliant, quadriplegic investigator entirely paralysed below the neck, with the exception of one finger. Assisted by his policewoman lover, Amelia Sachs, and a cast of characters of varying degrees of eccentricity, the books have helped to make him a bestseller, assisted in part by a Hollywood movie of The Bone Collector which featured Denzel Washington as Lincoln Rhyme.

"I never intended the Rhyme books to be a series," says Deaver. "I thought The Bone Collector, the first book, was an interesting concept. I wanted to write a very cerebral, Holmesian character who combats crime with his thought processes more than fast car chases and shooting. Basically, I thought, how is this for an ending: a completely physically helpless character is trapped in a locked room with the bad guy? How do I accomplish that? In the end, I decided to go the whole way and make him a quadriplegic, and introduced the element of assisted suicide, because if the bad guy doesn't get him he's going to get himself. The story kind of came out of that, but it has been a challenge in each book to pit him against characters who are not only mobile but masters of disguise, villains who can get close to him or close to the people that he cares about."

The latest Rhyme novel, The Vanished Man, pits his hero against a master magician who uses the tools of his trade - quick costume changes, sleight-of-hand - in order to get close to his victims and kill them. In common with many of Deaver's books, The Vanished Man has so many twists that readers may have to unscrew it from the shelf in order to read it. As he will readily admit, Deaver has rarely met a twist that he didn't like, although The Stone Monkey, which is just out in paperback, is virtually a masterclass in leading the reader astray through the use of just one.

"Sometimes I do need to take a deep breath and back off, but I am addicted to them. One of the reasons I do multiple twists is that readers are brilliant. Readers are very, very smart, and they will catch on to something. So as long as I have one thing that gets by them, that's okay.

"I'm very fortunate that I get paid to do what I do. It's actually a treat for me to get paid to do what I do, because my job is just to give readers the most fun that they can possibly have."

The Vanished Man is published by Hodder & Stoughton (€13.40). The Stone Monkey is published by Coronet (€8.40)

John Connolly's latest novel is Bad Men, published by Hodder & Stoughton, price £14.99