He may be one of the world’s most successful psychological thriller writers – 80 million books sold and rising – but no one except yours truly gives Jeffery Deaver a second look as he walks into The Merrion Hotel drawing-room.
“Growing up, I was like most kids in that I wanted to be famous and get both the acclaim and the girl!” laughs the 65-year-old Illinoian who’s as genuinely charming in person as most of his characters are deviously psychopathic in print. “Now though, I love the fact that I’m able to sell three or four million books around the world every year, but largely remain anonymous. I clearly don’t look like Brad Pitt or George Clooney and can’t imagine what it’d be like to be either of those two gentlemen. You’d have to live your life in a cocoon surrounded by security.”
Deaver’s teenage plan for getting acclaim – and the girl! – was to become the new Dylan.
“I was 12-years-old when, like Bob, I discovered The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem,” he resumes. “I learned all about 1916 and The Troubles from playing old Irish ballads on my guitar. I moved to San Francisco and gigged in places like The Coffee Gallery in North Beach where 10-years earlier Janis Joplin got her start. I met John Prine and generally lead that West Coast folkie life. I wasn’t bad at the songwriting, but fell short in the singing department so had to reevaluate my future!”
Dreams of being a Rolling Stone cover star dispensed with, Deaver bagged himself successive degrees in journalism and law, with no prizes for guessing which one lead to the bigger paycheques. His songwriting gene remained dormant until 2012 when he penned an album of songs to accompany XO, the third Kathryn Dance novel in which his CIA investigator heroine tries to stop an obsessive stalker from destroying a beautiful young country singer.
It’s a book that’s written from personal experience.
“I’m not a beautiful young country singer, but I have been stalked, twice,” Deaver reveals. “One person, who was probably a schizophrenic, thought I’d stolen his life and his body of work and written about him. The other was a woman who became very incensed that I wouldn’t help her solve her sister’s murder. It was actually a methamphetamine overdose, but being in denial she’d come up with this theory that the drugs had been maliciously supplied by the Police Commissioner. She turned up at one of my store appearances and said, ‘I’ve read your books, you’re very smart, you know crime. You can help me get to the truth and uncover the conspiracy to ensure that my sister didn’t die in vain.’ When I told her, ‘I’m very sorry for your loss, but I can’t,’ she snapped
and went, ‘Okay, you’re gonna regret that.’ I can’t be 100% sure it was her, but afterwards I got a lot of threatening emails through my website.”
Kathryn Dance gets to save the day again in Solitude Creek, the latest Deaver page-turner in which another of those devious psychopaths of his manufactures situations whereby people panic themselves to death. Not content with racking up yet another bestseller, Jeffrey has also been turning his attentions to the small screen.
“TV is definitely where I’d like to go,” he confirms. “Hollywood being so security- minded I can’t give you the details, but I’ve been approached by somebody about doing an alternative thing, very much influenced by Breaking Bad and both versions of House Of Cards. Having no talent whatsoever for doing scripts, I’ll do the extended outline treatment and then hand it over to other people.”
A James Bond nut since the age of eight, Deaver was thrilled in 2010 when the
call came through from the Ian Fleming estate asking him to write a new 007 book.
“That meant so much to me,” he beams. “A previous book of mine, Garden Of Beasts, which is about an American hit man forced by the CIA to go to Nazi Germany and assassinate a fictional character, won the Steel Dagger Award for Best Spy Novel of the Year that the Fleming estate sponsors. I doubt up till then that they knew me from Adam.”
Was there a strict template which had to be followed?
“You’d have thought so but, actually, no. I said, ‘I want to set it in the present day with Bond still a young agent’, and they went, ‘Sure!’ The process was remarkably painless.”
Deaver is delighted that after years of being critically sneered at, best- selling authors like himself are finally being recognised for their literary merits.
“None more so than Stephen King,” he notes. “He’ll be remembered in a hundred years; I won’t. There’s something about him that’s unlike anyone else. His imagination is just unstoppable. You read every sentence and say, ‘I can feel that. I can see him doing it.’”
He’s also generous in his praise for John Connolly, the Dublin writer he
met at a publisher’s dinner and with whom he’s subsequently become bezzies.
“What I love about John is how he switches genres. Whether it’s his police detective, Charlie Parker, his occult books or the stuff he writes for children, it’s always brilliantly conceived and perfectly executed. I’ve done things like the XO album and The October List, which starts with Chapter 36 and then goes backwards in time, but I can’t genre- hop like John.”
What Deaver can do is get inside the minds of some seriously disturbed people.
“Let’s be honest, we’re all fascinated by evil and how – to lesser and greater extents – it lurks within us,” he concludes. “What I really mean is that it’s fun to write about the bad guys!”