Writing the flip side of homicide

For all their writing lives, Faye and Jonathan Kellerman had a glib answer to the incessant question. No, they were not going to combine talents and do a book together.

No need for a married couple to play with explosives around the house, they would say. Who knows what kind of sparks they’d touch off by trying to contain two egos in one volume. Besides, they’d say, there’s economics to consider. A pair of bestselling authors gets more space on the bookstore shelves if they write separately.

Then, a twist in the plot. As you might expect, considering their hometown, it started with Hollywood.

The Kellermans are big in the realm of popular fiction -- very big, indeed, having sold some 60 million whodunits between them. But their names are curiously rare in movies and TV, a fact all the stranger because they live in Beverly Hills and rub shoulders with those in the business.

So inevitably, a friend who is a producer enticed them to think about a project. In the duality that is the Kellerman household, they pitched two. One is still passing around town. The other had this problem and that problem and -- stop.

Faye looked at Jonathan. Jonathan looked at Faye. What does Hollywood know? Thank you very much, we’ll make it into a novel.

OK, so which of them would write it?

Faye retreated into her softly lighted birch-paneled office just to the left of the front door. She began a first draft, five to 10 pages a day. Jonathan walked to the far corner of the other side of the house, to his leather-paneled word-shop out by the garden, and began a first draft, five to 10 pages at a time.

The result is “Double Homicide,” due out in autumn. It will be a flip book with a cover that reads, “By Jonathan and Faye Kellerman.” Flip the book over and another cover will read, “By Faye and Jonathan Kellerman.” Start from either side, read to the middle. Bestsellers united.

There’s nobody like them: not in Southern California, not anywhere.

They are as wholly improbable as they are successful. Synopsis: Raised in households of modest means, an overachieving dentist and an overachieving doctor meet, fall in love, become mystery crime novelists and move to Beverly Hills.

Forget the story line about the tempestuous, tortured, suffering writers. Substitute curved driveway, sprawling lawn, butterflies in the garden, summer weddings upcoming for the two oldest of their four children. Peek in on them and you catch glimpses of an orderly, small-town, religious life in the vast city.

And five to 10 pages a day. Per person. Forty pages a week in the leather office; 40 pages in the birch office. Four hundred pages apiece in 10 weeks. Then the rewriting. A novel a year, give or take, each of them. Plus what they have now done together.

They have a house in Malibu, a place in Santa Fe. They just bought in New York. They do their own research. Jonathan plays the guitar every day and right now is letting his fingernails grow and teaching himself classical. Faye plays the mandolin and the guitar. With her delicate hands, she once built a guitar. They jam every so often. They work out in the gym daily. As a hobby, Jonathan paints. Their youngest daughter is 11 and lives at home. They have two dogs that are both older than their daughter. Their kosher kitchen was designed for home cooking.

“Overworked and overpaid,” jokes Faye.

Perhaps things can be explained by circuitry.

“I’ll tell you about this matter of left-brain, right-brain,” says Jonathan. “What’s important are the nerve bundles that connect the two, the corpus callosum.”

Thus, under a single roof a pair of ample and well-traveled corpora callosa link right-brain imaginations with rigorous left-brain, scientific kinds of minds that get a young woman math whiz a doctorate in dental surgery and allow a man to finish up a clinical internship in psychology and a doctoral dissertation in the same year. The outcome: The 20 novels of Jonathan Kellerman have all been New York Times bestsellers; nine of Faye Kellerman’s 17 books have also been bestsellers.

‘I love rewriting’

In the words of his wife, “Jon loves writing more than anyone I know.”

In his own words, Jonathan Kellerman says, “I’m getting paid to do what used to get me in trouble in school -- spacing out and making up stories.” He smiles. “There is nothing I don’t like about writing books. I love writing. I love rewriting. I love research.”

He is sitting on the patio, near the koi pond, wearing all black, which he favors. His hair is black, his eyes deepwater blue. He is a compact man. There is never anything like a pause -- not even a split second -- before he forms an answer to any question you care to throw at him.

He was born in Queens and has been writing since he was 9. He enrolled at UCLA at 16. He wrote for the Daily Bruin. He was the Bruin’s cartoonist. He played guitar gigs to earn spending money. In his senior year, he won a Goldwyn Award for the manuscript of a novel. An agent inquired how was he going to capitalize on the recognition.

“I told him I was going to USC to get a PhD in psychology. He looked at me like I’m nuts.” Three years later, it was Dr. Kellerman. He took over a private practice. He became the founding director of the Psychosocial Program at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, specializing in the emotional care of seriously ill children. He was a prolific writer in scientific journals. His first book was titled “Psychological Aspects of Childhood Cancer.”

While still at UCLA, at 8 p.m. on Oct. 24, 1970, Jonathan, then 21, met an 18-year-old who shared his appetite for academics and music. It was “sports night” at the Westside Jewish Community Center. First thing, he and Faye serenaded each other on their guitars, sappy folk songs and bad rock ‘n’ roll. “I always hoped this thing was going to get me a chick,” he recalls. Three months later, they decided to marry. The wedding occurred in 1972.

With a family and a booming day job, Jonathan Kellerman still had an itch. In the stolen hours of night, he adjourned to an unfinished garage. “Just me and the spiders.” He wrote novels, eight or nine of them. He approached writing as therapy. None was published.

He quit writing several times but found himself strangely depressed. “It was an incomplete part of my life.”

Two things happened. First, his work as a psychologist was giving him legitimate insight into human behavior. He wasn’t a callow kid anymore. He had learned a thing or two about the strange -- let’s say bizarre -- ways of people. Then he changed tactics. He decided to write not just for himself but in more disciplined fashion for the benefit of readers. That is, he learned to rewrite. His model was an earlier California mystery writer, Ross Macdonald.

In 1983, Kellerman sold his first book for a $6,000 advance. It was a creepy tale of murder and a child’s memory of molestation, told in what is now his familiar style of twisting plot, relentless suspense and expository psychology.

It was published in 1985. Jack Miles, then the Los Angeles Times’ book editor and today a prominent author, found Kellerman’s writing “deft” and “truly three dimensional.” Two years earlier, the McMartin Pre-School of Manhattan Beach had splashed into the headlines with shocking allegations of molesting. “When the Bough Breaks” put Kellerman on the national bestseller list and introduced the world to L.A. psychologist and police consultant Dr. Alex Delaware, who is at the center of 17 of Kellerman’s stories. It was the only Kellerman work to be made into a movie.

He wrote two more books while maintaining his clinical practice. Then he gave himself to the writing life full time.

Jonathan Kellerman is now 54. He has four books remaining on contracts for 11 books. A typical press run for a new novel is 350,000 hardcover, 1.5 million paperback. He has plot outlines for 34 books in his files.

Suddenly an author

“I have a complicated relationship to.... “ You can almost finish the sentence for Faye Kellerman. A complicated relationship to her writing, to her faith, to dentistry. If Jonathan gulps his work just like he eats, Faye Kellerman picks at hers as if wanting to be sure.

“I have a complicated relationship with everything,” she says, laughing.

Faye was born in St. Louis and began her higher education at a junior college to spare her family the expense. By the time she graduated from UCLA, she was an accomplished fencer, married and eight months’ pregnant. She never practiced dentistry.

Jonathan tells the story of her emergence as a writer. One day she stepped from her office and presented him with a completed manuscript. Until that moment, she hadn’t spoken of it except to say she was dabbling. After all, her dyslexia required her to memorize words rather than sound them out phonetically. Could she be a writer?

She was sure he wouldn’t like her book. He did. She wasn’t sure she believed him. OK, he’d prove it. He sent the book to his agent, Barney Karpfinger, who was prepared to roll his eyes. He liked it.

The slight, graceful woman with a pent-up imagination was suddenly an author. Jonathan had taken years to fulfill his dream and be published; Faye succeeded with her first try. Issued in 1986, “The Ritual Bath” took its name from the mikvah, or rite of spiritual purification in Orthodox Judaism.

As did Jonathan’s, Faye’s first book launched a crime-suspense series with a twist on the standard private-eye approach. Her principal characters are the devout Rina Lazarus and LAPD homicide Det. Peter Decker, who have carried 14 of her 17 books, along the way offering a running seminar on the rituals and faith of Judaism.

The Kellermans call themselves “modern orthodox.” Ask them about it and Faye fondly describes the cyclical rhythms, the familiar holidays and observances that flow one to another and provide punctuation marks to the narrative of their lives. Jonathan speaks of the coherence of belonging to a defined community within the polyglot confusion of a megalopolis.

Unlike Jonathan, Faye was not an instant success with book buyers. This first effort, she recalls, sold only 1,300 copies. Critics were encouraging, if mixed. The Los Angeles Times called it a “leisurely story ... sweetly romantic” but with a “contrived ending.” Soon enough, though, readers found the formula habit forming. Her press run now is about two-thirds as large as Jonathan’s.

She is sitting on the couch in her large and airy living room, surrounded by an eclectic array of art and books all exactly arranged. She is dressed in jeans, her hair the color of autumn straw, her eyes a shade darker. Her smile, as a novelist might say, didn’t grow up with her. It remains throwback to girlhood. She is talking about “this complicated process.”

“I have a more ambivalent relationship to my writing. Sometimes I own it. Sometimes it owns me.” She procrastinates a little in the mornings before settling into the five- to 10-page routine. “We don’t give ourselves excuses not to work.”

Her books, like Jonathan’s, arise from abominable crimes. But her stories tend to unfold more around families and, sometimes, family secrets.

She is 51. Ask her what’s ahead, she’ll show you the half-completed manuscript in her office, an out-of-series story that takes place in prewar Germany. After that, she wants to catch up on Rina and Peter. And the new writing partnership with Jonathan, why it’s only started.

Internet tempests

Twenty years in the big leagues creates it own kind of pressure. Your fans expect that magic mix of the fresh and the familiar. All the while, you also want to reach out to new readers. Plus there are the endless potshots of critics to endure, an ever more interesting process when readers, friend and foe, battle it out publicly on the Internet, often forgetting their manners. These days, nothing is too small for argument. Even the pedigree of Dr. Delaware’s ex-girlfriend’s novelized dog, Spike, is the subject of chat room debate: Is it a French bulldog or not?

Spike is. So is one of the Kellermans’ real dogs, Archie.

Perhaps having two writers under the same roof makes it easier. Who better to understand the strokes necessary to support a writer’s exposed ego? Who can more thoroughly appreciate the fact that marriage means sharing everything -- except those hours in the office when the door is closed?

They used to read each other’s work every 20 pages or so. The suspense was almost unbearable. Faye would take a drive rather than watch Jonathan read her work. There were, as they recall, “some cold nights” after his critiques.

It became easier as they learned how to provide more pleasure than pain. These days, they are more relaxed and wait to read blocks of 100 pages or 200. Each is the other’s biggest fan, of course. And why not? They only have to drive through the gate that leads to their handsome Colonial home for evidence of their good judgment.

Their leap now into collaboration occurred happenstance but not without two decades of practiced confidence in their ability to face each other over a page.

Beyond those first words that were written separately, they aren’t revealing much about the process of creating their forthcoming flip book. That’s intentional: a mystery about the mystery. They envision it as a new series and have a contract for a second installment.

Husband and wife writing partners are not unheard of in popular fiction, sometimes utilizing a single name. But long-timers in the publishing industry cannot recall anything remotely like this: when a married couple of such individual accomplishment and longevity team up.

“I’m smiling because it was bound to happen,” says Daisy Maryles, executive editor of Publisher’s Weekly. But only the Kellermans could make it so. “Check out the bestseller list and see how many of those writers are married?”

The plotting and those other things that typically occur deep in the writer’s solitary mind were resolved, Faye allows, in the most intimate of ways: pillow talk. But of the writing itself, Faye will say only that “it involved a lot of sending pages back and forth.”

“That will be the fun of it,” she adds. “To say who wrote what.”