Maxim Jakubowski

Jeffery Deaver's books have no direct message to convey. Whether on the state of society, the underlying causes of good and evil, geopolitics or the primal urges that makes man a dangerous animal. His only ambition is to tell stories, and keep the reader transfixed, surprised, shocked and unable to set the pages down until the tale is fully told. He wishes to be seen as an entertainer. In this respect, he bears similarities to the late Giorgo Faletti, or maybe it is the other way around as Faletti was well-known to be an admirer of Deaver's superbly engineered plots and frantic storytelling (and vice versa). It might, in the grand order of things, be seen as a lesser ambition for a writer to merely dazzle and grip the reader's imagination in these times where so much is wrong in the world, but I would strongly argue it is a greater calling, because so often works of pure entertainment, as the Golden Age of Hollywood has demonstrated over and over, can tell us more about the world and humanity's deepest impulses by overtly ignoring it and sticking to the ripping yarn. A famous film mogul once said that if he wanted to send a message, he would rather use Western Union. Deaver is the master of the story, and leaves it to his millions of readers to draw their own conclusions, after they have recovered from the breathless, lightning speed of the stories and the ingenious and at times devilish twists and roundabouts that will fox them on the corner of every page. I can think of no greater accomplishment that the mission he has assigned himself.

"My responsibility as a thriller writer is to give my readers the most exciting roller coaster ride of a suspense story I can possibly think of. This means that, rather than looking through newspapers or magazines for inspiration, I spend much of my time during the early stages of a book sitting in a dark room and trying to think up a story line that will fit the typical Deaver novel: one that features strong (though possibly flawed) heroes, sick and twisted bad guys, deadlines every few chapters, a short time frame for the entire story (eight to forty-eight hours or so), lots of surprising plot twists and turns and plenty of cliffhangers."

Born in 1950 in Chicago, Jeff wanted to be a writer from an early age. He obtained a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Missouri and a law degree from Fordham University and began his working life as a journalist before a successful career in practicing law, alongside a brief foray as a folk singer. Following two minor efforts in the horror and heist caper field (Voodoo and Always a Thief are now long out of print and much sought after volumes by collectors), he launched his career in crime and thriller writing with a trio of novels featuring Rune, a streetwise female amateur sleuth who gets involved in the shady backdrops of the film world, beginning with Manhattan Is My Beat (1988). His interest in the world of film-making continued with a further trilogy featuring John Pellam, a location scout, initiated with Shallow Graves (1992). But he finally found his stride and achieved major popular success with a series of gripping stand alone psychological thrillers, when Mistress of Justice (1992), The Lesson of Her Death (1993), Praying for Sleep (1994) And A Maiden's Grave (1995) were issued in quick succession and to major acclaim. But it was when he created Lincoln Rhyme, a quadriplegic detective and taciturn character whose private torments are often hinted at, necessarily assisted in his investigations by fashion model turned cop Amelia Sachs, a fully mobile younger assistant, and the first volume in the series, The Bone Collector (1997) was published that Deaver hit on the formula that cemented his success: exhaustive research and convoluted plotting with a twist on every corner and an implicit pact with his readers that he would reward the time they spent reading his books with a potent mix of thrills and spills and no diversions of the type he often decries in others.

"If I had the talent and energy to write literature, I would. It's something that I admire, but I don't see it as my job. There are various functions of books. You can read a novel that is an artistic novel, and it will - and I consider this to be the point of art - increase our breadth of knowledge about the human condition and rearrange our perceptions to make us aware of geopolitical conditions, and though these are wonderful things and I hold them as very high standards, that's not what a thriller is meant to be."

What does annoy Deaver is writers who kid themselves about what they do. "I've heard people" say, "Well, I write for myself", but I think, "You know what? No, you don't." By definition, writing is communication.

"Poets, in general, touch a much smaller audience than mine, and my own objection is when I hear another author bemoan the fact that people aren't reading their books and hearing their message. There may be a reason why people aren't reading them."

The rest, as they say, is history with Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia soon successfully moving to the big screen portrayed by Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie and a plethora of awards coming Deaver's way all over the world. By now he has been nominated for seven Edgars, won two Daggers and countless other prizes in a variety of countries. The eleventh Lincoln Rhyme thriller The Skin Collector is his most recent book in the series, was published internationally this year, 2014.

Deaver describes his concept for Lincoln Rhyme and the acknowledged influence of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson: "Like Lincoln Rhyme he has to out-think the villain, which I respect," he says. "I hate these movies in which it comes down to the climactic final scene and it's just about who can beat up the bad guy first. We see a Bruce Willis movie and the bad guy is beating up Bruce Willis. We have five minutes left of the movie and the bad guy is beating him up and beating him up but is there any doubt in anybody’s mind that Bruce Willis is somehow going to find a reserve of strength and turn tables on this bad guy? Well Conan Doyle didn't do that."

Undaunted by the fact that he he is responsible for a world-acclaimed series that sells in the millions of copies, Deaver also writes alternate stand alone novels that are equally unputdownable as well as another major thriller series featuring as heroine Kathryn Dance (who made a brief initial appearance in the 2006 Rhyme novel The Cold Moon, as does Rhyme make occasional appearances in the Dance novels in a minor capacity); she is an investigator for the California Bureau of Investigations with a talent for kinesics, the reading of body language who draws on minute reactions to assess her interviewees and, ultimately, catch the criminals. Like Rhyme, her cases also heavily involve the use of forensic science, another area of expertise that Deaver has intensely researched, and the series rivals the Lincoln Rhyme novels in popularity.

But what also makes Jeffery Deaver's novel stand out from the crowd is the "quality" of his villains, who always prove particularly memorable, imaginative and sinister. This stems from his acute sense of the dread that accompanies us and his intuitive knowledge of the way the reader reacts to fear and an atmosphere of menace. "I really do like to scare my readers," Deaver says "That's my job, really."

The villain in The Skin Collector, for instance is a tattoo artist, and it's no spoiler to reveal his modus operandi, which is revealed in the first chapters. Instead of ink, the killer uses custom-brewed poisons that kill slowly and painfully. He also uses New York City's vast underground of abandoned tunnels and passageways as his hunting grounds.

As such, Deaver exploits a trio of common fears - needles, poisons and dark places.

"Mostly, I wanted to create a sense in the book that, if you go into the basement, if you go into the laundry room - what about that access door? Somebody might be in that laundry room with you. Everybody's afraid of the underground, of the dark. Here in North Carolina we have crawlspaces, but where I grew up in the Midwest, we had cellars. And when I lived in Manhattan, you were underground all the time. It's creepy."

One of my own favourite novels of Deaver's is Garden of Beasts (2004), an out an out spy novel in which an American hit man is despatched to Berlin in Nazi Germany on a secret mission with terrible implications. It represents an attempt by Deaver to stray from his highly succesful formula and engages in the delicate (for a writer) process of world building, being set in the historical past. It succeeds wonderfully in evoking the world of the late 1930s and the foreign climes of Germany in much troubled times. In conversation, Jeff has confessed to me it is one of his favourite books, but it also proved his less commercially successful ones and he has not returned to that particular genre or created a sequel with the same main character, which is a great pity as it provided us with a further glimpse into the diversity of talents. However, the book did not go totally unnoticed as it brought Jeffery to the attention of the Ian Fleming estate, when it won the Steel Dagger in the UK, and he became only the second American author to be invited to write a new James Bond novel. This was Carte Blanche (2011) which transported 007 to Dubai and became a major international bestseller and demonstrated once more Deaver's admirable writing skills and powers of characterisation and action writing to a whole new audience.

When it was announced that Deaver would be joining the Bond franchise, he revealed "The novel will maintain the persona of James Bond as Fleming created him and the unique tone the author brought to his books, while incorporating my own literary trademarks: detailed research, fast pacing and surprise twists." Asked how he immersed himself into the legendary British action spy's mindset: "It is a writer's responsibility, as a novelist, to step into the minds of all his or her characters. Doing that is something that I happen to enjoy a lot. I am a rather empathetic person. I don't mean that in a good sense, that I care about people necessarily. What I mean is that it is easy for me to take a look at somebody, if I know anything about their life, through either research or having lived these sixty years, and write about them with some credibility. I have written about elderly African American characters. I've written about teenagers. I've written about women. I've written about heroes. I've written about bad people. And I seem to have a facility, I won't call it talent, but I have a facility with a little bit of diligence and research, to step into the mind of someone who is different from who I am. So that has not posed a challenge at all in creating the Bond character as we now know him, although he is British… technically Scottish and his mother was Swiss, but he is a British citizen."

And, needless to say, Deaver delivered on all counts and cemented his status as one of the world's premier thriller writers.

The years to come will no doubt see more canny exploits and dangerous times for Lincoln Rhyme, Amelia Sachs and Kathryn Dance, but I am confident Jeff will keep on surprising us with further original and as unpredictable as ever stories - have I not mentioned he is one of the foremost experts of the crime short story, where at lesser length his tales invariably prove little, precision-engineered gems? - as well as non-series related novels to delight and surprise and, who knows, maybe even a brief return to the art of folk singing?

No one deserves the Raymond Chandler Award more!