Not the Usual Suspect

Robert Crais swears, “It still always surprises me when I find a real human being who’s read one of my books.” Never mind that his detective fiction has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. “Deep inside, I’m still 14 years old in Baton Rouge, La.”

He adds, “You can’t tell me L.A. isn’t magic.”

Crais, a lean, boyish 46, is sitting before book-filled shelves in the living room of his home high in Sherman Oaks. He’s talking about “Demolition Angel,” his new thriller just out from Doubleday that doesn’t even mention his popular detective, Elvis Cole.

For this book, he created Carol Starkey, a chain-smoking, boozing LAPD detective fighting to get back her job on the bomb squad three years after almost being blown to bits. She is cynical and sarcastic. Edgy and tough-minded and profane. And, somehow, you can’t help but like her. She is tough as nails on the outside. On the inside, says Crais, she’s falling apart, “two heartbeats away from exploding herself.”

A starred Publishers Weekly review described Starkey as “one of the most complex heroines to grace a thriller since Clarice Starling locked eyes with Hannibal Lecter.”

“Demolition Angel” was sold to Columbia TriStar before it was even finished and is destined to be a motion picture produced by Laurence Mark (“As Good as It Gets,” “Jerry Maguire”).

Starkey’s creator, who may or may not have a say in casting her, says, “Ashley Judd would be terrific. Sandra Bullock would be terrific.”

It’s all a long way from there--Baton Rouge--to here, from rejection slips to bestsellerdom.

It was 1976 when Crais, having “hung around for five years” at Louisiana State University studying mechanical engineering, quit school and followed his dream to Los Angeles. Eight months after landing, he sold his first TV script, to “Baretta.”

To pay the rent, he “lugged mail crates up three flights of stairs all day long.” He also cleaned dog runs.

He had no contacts in show business, knew zilch about scriptwriting. So he’d buy used scripts for $2.50 apiece, study them and actually measure their length. And he watched lots of TV. His second break came when Jack Klugman hired him as story editor on “Quincy, M.E.,” a gig that lasted 18 months.

He was beginning to believe in the magic that lures hopefuls to Los Angeles. As he says, “Nobody goes to Bogalusa, La., because they have a dream.”

It’s certainly not what his parents had in mind for their only child, whom they adopted when he was 5 months old. His father, an Exxon oil refinery worker, hoped his son would be the first in the family to work in Exxon management. Crais’ was a family in which “everyone either worked for Exxon or was a police officer, a very blue-collar, working-class family.”

But young Crais had other ideas.

“I was the kid in the library. I was the kid who read voraciously, the kid with the Super-8 movie camera making his own movies. As far back as I can remember, I wanted to tell stories.”

As a teenager, he discovered the novels of Raymond Chandler and “wanted to see if I could do that. Raymond Chandler was one of the people who turned me on to the crime novel, and to L.A.” Later, he devoured the works of Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald.

He Turned to Sci-Fi and Made His First Sale

But as a “baby writer,” Crais cut his literary teeth in science fiction. At the time, “there wasn’t much of a market for mystery short stories, but a huge marketplace for science fiction.” He began submitting short stories to magazines and getting rejections. He was 23 when he made his first sale.

He was destined to be a novelist, he just knew it. He did churn out two novels--”They were the worst. They were the Great American Novel. They were me trying to learn how to write a book,” convinced that it was a matter of sticking paper in the typewriter, waiting for “divine inspiration” and then--voila!--”500 pages later you’ve created art.”

“I didn’t have a story to tell. They were just dogs. It was me typing.”

His first published novel, “The Monkey’s Raincoat,” an original paperback from Bantam in 1987, was rejected by nine publishers. That it found an audience, Crais says, was due to the persistence of obscure booksellers “who were hand-selling it to customers.”

It went on to garner him the first of three nominations for the Edgars--sort of the mystery writers’ Oscar--this one in the best original paperback category.

The genesis of that novel was the death of his father in 1985 and his realization that, after 45 years of marriage, his mother “had never written a check, paid a bill, used a credit card.” It was, he recalls, “that moment when our roles reversed and I became the parent. I used my writing to sort out my life and help me make sense of things.”

Specifically, he created a character he named Ellen Lang, an anachronistic woman who, like his mother, found herself unprepared for life without her husband.

The book introduced Elvis Cole, the detective whose adventures would fill the pages of seven later Crais novels, most recently last year’s “L.A. Requiem.” He named him Elvis partly in homage to his mother, a big Presley fan who hung a portrait of that Elvis on the wall of the Crais home.

But he also wanted a name that would set Cole apart from an older generation of detectives like Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. Elvis Cole is not a “no-guff kind of private eye” with a bottle of booze in his desk drawer and a life populated with carbon-copy bleached blonds.

“Elvis,” he explains, “is much more of a modern male. Besides, Mike never had much of a sense of humor.”

When Doubleday signed Crais to a three-book contract, it was with the expectation that after “L.A. Requiem,” it would get two more Elvis Cole escapades. Crais had a different idea.

Author Kept New Character a Secret

The author, convinced that “Requiem” was “the peak of my career, that it could never be better than this,” decided to create a new central character, Carol Starkey. He didn’t bother to tell his publisher, afraid the response would be, “Hey, Crais has lost his mind.”

So he just wrote, answering the publisher’s queries with vague responses such as, “It’s going great. They just assumed it was another Elvis Cole book.”

In time, “they read it, they flipped over it. It was full speed ahead.”

The plot of “Demolition Angel”: An earthquake shakes L.A. as Starkey and her supervisor/lover are closing in on a bomb. He is killed; she is resuscitated after almost three minutes dead. Three years later, she finds herself on the trail of a bomber-for-hire called “Mr. Red,” who targets her as one of his victims.

It was while Crais was researching “L.A. Requiem” that he became intrigued with the LAPD’s bomb squad facility in Glendale and the men and women who make up the elite squad. He wondered what motivates them. Detonating a pipe bomb, he says, is like “approaching a sleeping pit bull.” One wrong move and you may be ripped to pieces.

It’s a macho world, and the “bomb chicks” in particular interested him.

“It’s one thing to think of a 6-foot, 200-pound male wearing a 95-pound armor suit,” another to picture a woman wearing something that weighs almost as much as she does and is like “being wrapped in heavy blankets.”

Besides, he says, “I’m attracted to smart women, strong women.”

Crais planned “Demolition Angel” as a stand-alone novel. He did not envision Carol Starkey as a female Elvis Cole, destined to morph into the heroine of book after book, to become an icon of Crais fans. Which helps to explain why he had no hesitancy about selling “Angel” to a filmmaker, something he’s steadfastly refused to do with Elvis.

Yes, he could reach hundreds of thousands of new fans via TV or films, he acknowledges (though a paperback printing of 600,000-plus for “L.A. Requiem” isn’t too shabby). But Crais is fiercely protective of “a wonderful collaboration between myself and my readers” that’s built up over the years. “Everyone who reads those books has a very personal, and slightly different, picture of Elvis and Joe [Pike, his partner].”

Another Elvis Cole Book in the Works

Currently, he’s juggling the next Elvis Cole book, the screenplay for “Demolition Angel” and another one-off novel, in which he promises to introduce “a whole new character” about which he’ll give no hints.

As for Starkey, he says, “I’ll probably never write about her again, but these things take on a life of their own. This enthusiasm for her, and for the book--that’s kind of persuasive. I may not be able to let go of her. I fell in love with her.”

Crais is nothing if not prolific, having turned out nine novels in 13 years and amassed an impressive list of TV credits, including “Hill Street Blues,” “Cagney & Lacey,” “Miami Vice,” “L.A. Law” and a handful of movies of the week.

“I’m a very structured person,” he says. “I write seven days a week.” His day starts about 4:30 a.m. with a good run or a session in the gym. “Typically, I’m at my Macintosh by 7.” He’ll write until about 3, unless he’s on “deadline hell,” when he’ll put in 12- or 14-hour days in his home office.

If he needs a break, he may retreat to the kitchen--”I absolutely love to cook”--and whip up one of the dishes from his native Louisiana: gumbo, jambalaya, or red beans and rice.

A private pilot, Crais loves aerobatic flying.

“It’s sort of like having your own roller coaster,” he says, but deadline demands have kept him grounded. “If you’re going to fly safely,” he says, “fly often.”

When he needs insights into characters’ psyches or the world of “shrinks,” he turns to wife Pat, a psychotherapist. When in need of inspiration, Crais finds it in the landscape of Los Angeles. It was while jogging at Lake Hollywood that he came up with the plot line for “L.A. Requiem,” in which a woman’s body is found in the lake.

He may visit onetime haunts of other L.A. writers such as Robert Heinlein or James M. Cain.

“When I see where they lived, I’m that 14-year-old boy . . . it excites me to think maybe in some small way I’m making some contribution to that literary fabric.”

For him, plot comes last. A Crais book begins with the characters. Does he relate to them? “I’ll be sitting there crying while I write” or laughing out loud.

As in the past, he called on the LAPD while researching “Demolition Angel.” Because explosives experts and bomb technicians were “justifiably concerned” that the book not be a how-to manual on building a bomb, he changed key facts, giving the reader just enough to make for realism.

He spent weeks visiting online bomb-making sites, most of them “creepy.” Postings included one by Dr. God--”a guy with no self-esteem problem at all”--and Sir Pyro--”a guy with delusions of nobility.” These are not terrorists, he explains, but people with a compulsion to build and set off bombs, just as arsonists feel compelled to set fires.

By the time he interviewed the head of the explosives division at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Washington, D.C., Crais was “paranoid,” convinced that “big brother was watching [and] I had to be on the kook list.” Introducing himself, he hastened to say, “If you guys are watching, I’m not crazy.”

Would the LAPD Rampart scandal ever be grist for his storytelling mill? “Possibly,” Crais says, but fictionalized. “It’s the stuff of good drama. Good men and women gone bad.” He doesn’t worry that he’d become persona non grata with the police.

“Good cops don’t like bad cops,” Crais says. “You can talk about the blue wall all you want, [but] there’s nothing more a good cop wants than to get rid of a bad cop.”

Crais is finally beginning to believe that real people are out there reading his books. “L.A. Requiem” brought a “Dear Bob” fan letter from President Clinton. “I never met the man,” he says. “I was floored.”

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A Glimpse at Crais’ Newest Character

So who is Carol Starkey? An excerpt from “Demolition Angel” by Robert Crais offers some insight:

Starkey woke the next morning on the couch, her body clenched into a fist. Her neck was stiff, and her mouth tasted as if it were lined with sheep’s wool seat covers. It was 4:20 in the morning. She had gotten two hours’ sleep. . . .

Starkey lit a cigarette, then gimped into the kitchen, where she found a small amount of orange juice that didn’t smell sour. She tried to remember the last time that she’d been to the market, but couldn’t. The only things she bought in quantity were gin and cigarettes.

Starkey downed the juice, then a glass of water, then got herself together for the day. Breakfast was two aspirin and a Tagamet.

Starkey enjoyed the solitude because it was easier. No one intruded. No one stared behind her back, thinking that she was the one, the tech who’d been blown apart and stitched back together like Frankenstein’s monster, the one who had lost her partner, the one who had escaped, the one who had died.

Reprinted with permission from Doubleday.

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Beverly Beyette can be reached at beverly.beyette@latimes.com.