The Scorpion's Tail: Dialogue between authors Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child: A Dialogue

Lincoln: Let’s get started. The Scorpion’s Tail is the second novel in the Nora Kelly series. 

Doug: The Nora Kelly and Corrie Swanson series, you mean. 

L: Look, Doug, I realize you have a soft spot for Corrie, but this series is officially called the— 

D: Are you saying Corrie isn’t as important to the book as Nora? 

L: No, but the point is— 

D: Corrie is the one who first investigates that corpse with a face of agony found buried in New Mexico. Nora only comes in later. And where did this “officially” come from? It ain’t “official” to me… 

L: Okay, okay. Slow your roll. 

 D: And it was my idea to add the, ah, bizarre nature of the poor victim’s death. 

L: Here, you can have all your Legos back. If we go on like this, we’ll give away all the surprises. Well…maybe not all the surprises, because this novel has more than its share. 

D: All right, but don’t shortchange Corrie. She’s got a temper. 

L: Not as wicked as Constance’s. 

D: Hopefully those two will never meet. Anyway, what I find interesting is that both Corrie and Nora played vital roles in many of Pendergast’s cases, but they never met each other—until now. 

L: They first met in Old Bones. That was our first novel in the series, about the archaeological excavation of one of the infamous Donner Party camps, where Nora discovers something even worse than the cannibalism history tells us of. The Scorpion’s Tail is the second novel in the series. 

D: That Donner Party story was pretty crazy. A truly sick and twisted idea, in fact. 

L: It was your idea, pardner. 

D: Thank you. 

L: People ask how Nora and Corrie managed to get together for this series. Nora Kelly is an archaeologist who first appeared in Thunderhead, and then she went on to play a crucial role in The Cabinet of Curiosities and a number of other Pendergast cases. She now works at the Santa Fe Institute of Archaeology and directs excavations of ancient sites in the area. Corrie Swanson helped Pendergast when she was a teenager in the Still Life With Crows case. Under his mentorship, she’s now a rookie FBI agent, fresh out of the Academy and a little uncertain of herself. Corrie’s expertise is in forensic anthropology—that is, looking at bones and figuring out who they were, how old they were, what they looked like, and how they died. Basically, Nora digs the bodies up and Corrie figures out what happened to them. Together, the two women become a kind of investigative brain trust. 

D: One wields an archaeologist’s brush—the other a gun. L. It’s such a perfect matchup I’m surprised I didn’t suggest it before. 

D: You suggested it? 

L: Don’t I suggest all the good ideas around here? But let us not dwell on such trivialities and talk about the book itself—avoiding spoilers, of course. 

D: Okay. Well, the story opens in a remote ghost town called High Lonesome at the northern edge of the Jornada del Muerto Desert of New Mexico. This is one of the harshest deserts in the country, a place so remote it was chosen as the test site for the first atomic bomb detonation in 1945. The local sheriff of Socorro County, Homer Watts, surprises a looter up at High Lonesome, who’s found a mummified body in a ruined cellar. There’s a shootout and the looter gets a bullet in the knee, while poor Homer gets his ear shot off. Because the desiccated body is found on Federal land, the FBI gets involved and Corrie is assigned to the case to determine if it was a homicide or accident. She brings in Nora to dig the body up. What they find is…grotesque, unspeakable, and at the same time oddly wonderful. 

L: I think you better stop there before we get into spoiler territory. 

D: I’ll shut up, except to say that everything they assume about the body turns out to be wrong. I’ll close by mentioning this is a case where Nora unearths, instead of an ancient curse or forgotten disaster, something connected in a horrific way to the modern world, something so shocking that…well, the story’s like one of those French cakes with dozens of layers. 

L: Gâteau Mille Crêpes? 

D: Exactly. Every time I try to cut out a slice to share with our readers, I find myself about to reveal two, three, or even more hidden layers. 

L: We can talk about the setting, at least, without fear of spoilers. And you’re the perfect person to do so, since you know that country. 

D: Thanks, my good man. One of the things I love about this series is its grounding in the New Mexico. We have Nora, working at the Santa Fe Institute of Archaeology, and Corrie working out of the FBI’s Albuquerque Field Office. New Mexico has a lot of history, legends, and mysteries to work with. 

L: Such as? 

D: I’m thinking in particular of stories of buried treasure. 

L: You’ve been obsessed with that subject ever since you first read Robert Louis Stevenson. Speaking of your youth, didn’t you once travel all over New Mexico on horseback? 

D: Yes. In fact, in 1995 I crossed the Jornada del Muerto on horseback with my pal Walter Nelson, 120 miles of some of the toughest country you can imagine. The very name says it all, Jornada del Muerto means “Journey of the Dead.” It was called that because the old Spanish trail from Mexico City to Santa Fe crossed this desert, and the route was literally lined with the bones of horses and livestock and hundreds of crude graves. The high desert, with its slot canyons and arroyos and mesas, is in some ways a labyrinth. When you’re far from civilization for weeks at a time, traveling on horseback and not following trails or roads, you have a good chance of stumbling on things that are strange and often unique. For example, on that ride we encountered a secret military installation. It was used for—well, I’d better not say what for—but it plays a role in the book’s climax. 

L: Hold on. I thought you made that up for the book. 

D: I know you did. Don’t worry, I changed the location and details, and besides that was twenty-five years ago… 

L: Please, I’d rather not know any more. The main point here is that you’re uniquely familiar with the remote areas in which The Scorpion’s Tail takes place. Isn’t it true that among other things you’ve stumbled upon untouched ancient Pueblo ruins, perfectly preserved, that nobody else has seen in hundreds of years? 

D: It is true. And I won’t say where they are, either, because they should be respected—in other words, left alone. 

L: And didn’t you say that, while researching non-fiction articles for Smithsonian and The New Yorker, you stumbled upon a cornucopia of legends and stories of the old West…and the new West…that have a surprising amount of truth to them? 

D: Yes. The Scorpion’s Tail makes good use of some of those legends and stories, such as the absolutely true story of the treasure of— 

L: Whoa there, Doug. 

D: Oops, spoilers again. 

L: We’ve said about as much as we can say, so if you’re interested, Doug would love you to buy the book so he can keep up the payments on his Rolls-Royce. 

D: Yeah, right. And Linc wants you to buy the book so he can continue to bet on the horses, drink martinis, and buy Bitcoins to hide under his mattress. 

***

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have published over thirty books together, most of which have been New York Times bestsellers, some reaching the #1 position. Their most recent novel, The Scorpion’s Tail, was published on January 12, 2021.

Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child: Partners in Crime

Partners in Crime: Authors who Collaborate. I'm happy to continue this series here on Mystery Fanfare with Guest Posts by both Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child.

Be sure and check out other guest posts by Partner in Crime writing partners: Guest Posts from Mark Zubro, Bill Crider, Charles Todd, Mary Reed & Eric Mayer, Max Allan Collins, David Corbett, Michael Stanley, Jeffery Deaver, Reed Farrel Coleman, and Charlotte Elkins, and Eric Beetner & JB Kohl and Hailey Lind.

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are an incredibly productive writing duo. On February 22 they will launch the first in a new thriller series, Gideon's Sword. The book has already been optioned by Paramount. For Preston & Child's full list of collaborative novels, go HERE. For their solo novels, go HERE.

Before We Got Caught by Douglas Preston

My first job out of college was as a writer and editor for the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I wrote a pokey little column in the magazine Natural History. An editor from St. Martin's Press, who had been reading my pieces, called me up and asked if I wanted to write a history of the Museum. I said yes -- and that became my first book, Dinosaurs in the Attic. After the book was published, I gave the editor a tour of the Museum – late at night, because I was afraid of getting caught showing an unauthorized person behind the scenes. I showed him all the best places in the Museum to which I had access--the dinosaur bone storage room, the collection of 30,000 rats in jars of alcohol, the whale eyeball collection, the preserved mastodon stomach with its last meal inside, and a lot of other unusual things. We ended up in the Hall of Late Dinosaurs around 2:00 a.m., with only the emergency lights on, the great black skeletons looming in the darkness around us--and the editor turned to me and said: "Doug, this is the scariest damn building in the world. Let's write a thriller set in here." And that was the birth of Relic. That editor, of course, was Lincoln Child. We both discovered we shared the same kind of sick, twisted view of the world.

And so began our long and fruitful collaboration which, 14 best-sellers later, has produced GIDEON’S SWORD, the first book in a brand new series starring a rather sketchy character named Gideon Crew.

In order for our partnership to work we have to trust each other. When Linc tells me something I've written is pure crap, I have to believe him. (But not after roundly denouncing his execrable taste, hideous judgment, and deplorable illiteracy.) This trust is the only thing that can make a writing partnership like ours work. We are not prima donnas who think that every word that trips off our pen is a precious pearl to be treasured and endlessly polished. Linc slashes away at my work and I do the same to his, and in the end, despite getting serious bent out of shape with each other, we end up with something that is, I believe, better than what we could have written on our own.

The idea for GIDEON’S SWORD came about when I was researching potter’s fields. I learned that New York City maintains the largest potter’s field in the world, on an uninhabited island situated in Long Island Sound. Called Hart Island, almost a million bodies are buried there, in mass graves, dating back to the Civil War. When I read this, I was astounded; I immediately called Linc and we brainstormed. A half an hour later we had the basic plot for GIDEON’S SWORD worked out, along with the determination to use this fabulous setting to the fullest in the novel. Because Hart Island isn’t just a burial ground—it is covered with amazing ruins: of a boy’s workhouse, a tubercularium, a yellow fever quarantine, an abandoned Nike missile base, and (most wonderful of all) an overgrown baseball field with the very bleachers taken from the legendary Ebbets Field, home to the old Brooklyn Dodgers.

My wife Christine and I rented a boat and made a guerrilla landing on Hart Island, to photograph the place for the novel. Before we got caught (that’s a story for another day) Christine, who is a professional photographer, got off some good shots. Here’s one of them. Enjoy!

Writing Together by Lincoln Child

I edited Doug Preston’s first non-fiction book, Dinosaurs in the Attic. This was an armchair behind-the-scenes tour of New York’s American Museum of Natural History and the various real-life Indiana Joneses who worked there over the years. In the process of writing and editing this book, Doug and I became friends.

A few months after the book’s publication, Doug sent me the opening chapters of a new book he wanted to write: a murder mystery, set in the Museum. I called him up and told him that good murder mysteries were quite hard to pull off, and that—unless your name was Agatha Christie—they didn’t always sell all that many copies. I suggested instead that he write a thriller, set in a fictitious natural history museum—and that he write it with me.

And so RELIC was born. In the beginning, I sent Doug chapter outlines and he fleshed them out into complete chapters, which I then revised and edited. (I would write occasional chapters myself, but early on Doug wrote the lion’s share.) We began the book as a lark, really, and its progress was sporadic and slow. But over the course of writing it, an odd thing happened. Watching Doug bring my outlines to life, I became aware all over again of just how the creative process works. (I’d written short stories and even novels in high school, but working as an editor had, perhaps perversely, sapped my own interest in writing.) And as Doug watched me take his first drafts and polish them, tightening here and rewriting there (this was a process I likened to taking a lump of coal and, under extreme pressure, transforming it into a diamond), he learned how to streamline his own prose even more.

Over the next several books, I began to shoulder more of the writing process, and Doug more of the revising process. And then another odd thing happened. The more joint books we wrote, the more our styles blended, until there came a point where it was difficult for an outside reader to know who had written which paragraph.

Doug and I have both written solo novels as well as joint ones, and we can attest that the processes are very different. Writing by yourself can sometimes be a lonely affair. You come to a fork in the road, and you are never quite sure—until the book is successfully finished—that you’re taking the right turn. You wonder if, half a dozen forks later, you’ll realize you zigged when you should have zagged. In a joint book, there’s always somebody else you can ask for advice, somebody you can fall back on if your imagination is flagging or if you’ve written yourself into a corner. Naturally, solo books are wonderful things—you can take a unique pride in having written them, and there’s no co-author to fight with over what’s going to happen in the next scene—but in certain specific ways, I’ve found that a writing partnership can be an even more rewarding creative experience. But then again, I would always have rather been one of the Beatles than Bob Dylan…