The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives

Douglas Preston

My first job out of college was as an editor at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It was over a quarter mile from the front door of the museum to my office, way in the back, and it took seven and a half minutes to make that walk (I timed it). I had to pass through the great African Hall, with the elephants, a series of smaller halls, the Egyptian Alcove, the Hall of Man in Africa, the Hall of Birds of the World, the Precolumbian Gold Hall, and the Hall of Mexico and Central America. It is one of the largest museums in the world, and I found it an amazing place to work.

Part of my job was to write a column about the museum in Natural History magazine. I wrote about the Copper Man, about the Ahnighito meteorite, about Meshie the chimpanzee, about the dinosaur mummy, and the Star of India.

One day, I got a call from an editor at St. Martin ’s Press. He had been reading my columns in the magazine and wondered if I would do him the kindness of joining him for lunch at the Russian Tea Room to talk about a possible book.

I said I would certainly do him that kindness, and I rushed down to the Salvation Army to buy a jacket so I could get into the Russian Tea Room. When the appointed day came, I showed up expecting to meet an éminence grise from St. Martin ’s Press. Instead, waiting for me at a table in the back was a kid even younger than I was: Lincoln Child.

Lincoln Child

I had been a fan of the museum ever since coming to New York as a dewy-eyed college graduate. I loved nothing better than taking the behind-the-scenes tours and seeing the cubbyholes where real-life Indiana Joneses hung their pith helmets. After each such tour I would leave the museum thinking, “What an amazing old pile! When I retire I’ll have to write its history.” Then one day I realized: “You dolt! Why go to all that work when you can pay some other poor scrivener to do it?” After all, I was a book editor, and it was my job to find new projects for my house to publish. I found Doug’s articles in the museum’s magazine, and I invited him to lunch. He was exactly the kind of person I was looking for: young and hungry looking (note to Preston-Child readers: imagine Bill Smithback). I pitched the idea of an informal history and armchair tour of the museum, to be written by him. He immediately jumped at it: he was more than ready to graduate from articles to full-length books. And that was the birth of what was to become Doug’s nonfiction title Dinosaurs in the Attic.

During the writing of the book I was always pestering Doug for a real behind-the-scenes tour, not the two-bit one that the tourists got. But he was afraid to do it, because I didn’t have the appropriate security clearance and he wasn’t able to get it for me. But finally he hit on a plan: it would be a midnight tour, when presumably nobody would be around to check our credentials. Doug had a special key that would get us into many odd places and storage rooms full of strange things. So it was that, one midnight, Doug snuck me in for a personal guided tour. And what a tour! I saw flesh-eating beetles, whale eyeballs in formaldehyde, rooms full of dinosaur bones as big as VW Bugs. We ended up on the fourth floor, in the (then-named) Hall of Late Dinosaurs (no pun intended). There was a terrific storm outside, and flickers of lightning from the ceiling skylight illuminated the huge, ancient T. rex towering over us. I don’t know what possessed me, but I turned to Doug and said, “This is the scariest building in the world. Doug, we have to write a thriller set in a museum like this.”

He turned to me, eyes shining with emotion-or maybe it was just that last wee nip of Macallan making an unwelcome reappearance.

And then a guard making his rounds surprised us. I don’t know who was more scared: us, the guard, or the T. rex. But that’s a story for another time.

Doug

No, let’s tell that story now. When the guard surprised us, I thought, now I’m in deep shit. But Linc’s brilliant wit saved us-the first of many such rescues. As the guard inched into the dark hall, shining his light around, anxious voice booming out, “Who’s there?” Linc came up with the perfect reply. He cried out, “Thank God, you’ve finally found us! We’ve been wandering around for hours looking for the exit! How in the world do you get out of this place?”

The guard escorted us out the security exit, never knowing I was a rogue museum employee conducting an undercover tour.

Linc and I began discussing our novel, set in the museum, which we had decided to call Relic. One evening, Linc and I were sitting on his porch in Westchester County, sharing a bottle of good single malt. Between tipples of malt and discussions of what fine fellows we were, what rare geniuses, and how we would take the literary world by storm, we managed to hash out the plot to Relic. I agreed to take a crack at the first few chapters.

In the meantime, I had moved from New York City to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the calls began coming. How were the chapters going? Fine, just fine! I would reply. After a year of this, Linc’s patience began to wear thin. He is not normally the kind of person who employs vulgar language, but I do recall him telling me one time, “Doug, just write the fucking chapters already.”

So I finally did. To my great surprise, I enjoyed the experience. I had always thought of myself as a serious writer, in line for a Nobel Prize, but I found I enjoyed writing a novel about a brain-eating monster loose in a museum a lot more than I expected.

I sent the first few chapters to Linc. He called me and said he liked them very much, except for one thing. I had two New York City cops, partners, who were the investigating officers. “Doug, they’re both the same character,” Linc said.

“What do you mean?” I was immediately furious at this slight to my literary talent.

“You got this one guy, Vincent D’Agosta, ethnic New York City cop, rough on the outside with a heart of gold. And then you’ve got his partner-exactly the same, except he’s Irish.”

After profoundly damning Linc’s contemptible literary taste, I finally came around to seeing his point.

“What we need,” Linc said, “is a detective no one’s ever seen before. A real fish out of water. Someone who will act as a foil to D’Agosta and to New York City itself.”

“Oh, God,” I said, “not another ‘unique’ detective, please! What, you mean like an albino from New Orleans?”

There was a long silence and then I heard Linc say, “An albino from New Orleans… Intriguing… Very intriguing… ”

Linc

The thing one has to keep in mind is that we wrote Relic as a lark. Don’t get me wrong: we had high opinions of our writing skills and our ability to craft an interesting story. I’d edited dozens, hundreds, of novels, and Doug has always had a far deeper knowledge of literature than most English professors could boast (and he himself has taught writing at Princeton). What I mean is that we wrote the story to amuse ourselves rather than others. A lot of first-time novelists try to write what they think other people want to read, or cynically attempt to write a novel that will have the broadest appeal. Not us. We wrote-for want of a better word-irresponsibly. We created eccentric characters and put them in extravagant situations. Having two of us in on the job improved-or exacerbated-the situation. I’d read something Doug wrote, would be hugely amused, and would then expand on it. If he wrote a scene of a terrified mob stampeding past an upended table of free hors d’oeuvres, I’d add a gratuitous bit about a huge bolus of pâté being ground into mud beneath the running feet. And then Doug would have some character knocked to the ground, landing face first in the pâté, and so on, each trying to top the other.

It was into this hothouse atmosphere that Agent Pendergast first stepped. In those days Doug frequently wrote four out of every five new chapters, while I did significant rewriting and produced the outlines for the chapters to come. So one day I received, via 2,400-baud modem (don’t laugh; it was the Pony Express of its day), what would eventually become chapter fourteen of Relic. It was an exciting rough draft. Among other things, in it Lieutenant D’Agosta is so revolted by a particular sight that he vomits his breakfast of scrambled eggs, ham, cheese, and ketchup all over a museum courtyard. This happens moments after Agent Pendergast makes his very first appearance. (The two events are unrelated.)

What is remarkable is that even in this first chapter, Pendergast displays some of the traits that go on to become his defining attributes: touchstones that readers return to again and again like mantras. For example, the first word out of his mouth: “Excellent.” Or, when discussing certain personal flaws: “A very bad habit, but one that I find hard to break.”

Doug had put the initial touches on a character that, I saw immediately, had the potential to be deeply cool. He was cultured and cultivated. He was unabashedly eccentric. He could take in a crime scene with a single heavy-lidded glance… though you wouldn’t comprehend the depth of his perspicacity unless he chose to reveal it to you. He could descant at length, and with extensive learning, on the beauty of a particular painting-and then point out in an offhand way the fresh bloodstains that had recently marred it. This was exactly the kind of character I could sink my teeth into. So I was quick to add my own eccentric touches. As I did so, I had several antecedents in mind: Sherlock Holmes (of course), Futrelle’s Thinking Machine, and (perversely) Christopher Walken’s character in The Dogs of War (from whence came the many references to Pendergast’s feline grace). But for me, the single biggest influence was Alastair Sim’s insouciant portrayal of Inspector Cockrill in the obscure English mystery film Green for Danger.

Still, perhaps the strangest thing about the creation of Pendergast is that neither Doug nor I can articulate with any precision what each of us ultimately brought to the character. It’s as if Pendergast told us what to do, rather than the other way around. Even, say, my recollections of the name are probably apocryphal. I think Doug had initially spelled it “Prendergast” and at some point I dropped the first R. But this may well be completely wrong.

Doug

In this way, Pendergast just sprang out of our heads, fully formed, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. The strange thing about Pendergast is that we don’t know him very well at all. We didn’t even know his first name for the first five years of our writing partnership. In a strange way, Pendergast created himself. He came into being in a completely different way than all the other characters we’ve created.

I’ll give you an example: Corrie Swanson, Pendergast’s sidekick in Still Life with Crows. First we picked her name. Then we gave her an age, eighteen, and a style, Goth. But we decided she wouldn’t be a typical Goth; she’d be a smart Goth. A non-drugged-out Goth. A misunderstood person who loved reading, father gone, mother an alcoholic, Corrie lived in a trailer in a tiny Midwestern town and prayed someday to get out. And so on and so forth. We made lists of what kind of music she listened to and even compiled a CD of her favorite tunes. We made lists of the books she’d read and diagrammed out all her friends and enemies at the local high school. We gave her a minor criminal record, undeserved, and a bad relationship with the local sheriff and his son.

We built her from scratch. We knew more about her than would ever go into a novel. We created her the way we created all the other characters in our novels.

Except Pendergast.

When we were done figuring out who Pendergast was, we never wrote him a backstory. We never gave him a family. We didn’t know where he went to school, what he did before becoming an FBI agent (beyond a few juicy rumors), what kind of books he read. Even though we knew exactly who he was as a character, we knew absolutely nothing about his history. No personal details.

This is, oddly enough, exactly how Pendergast would want it. He is a secretive soul, reticent, an enigma. He knew all these things, and that was enough. He would reveal them to us in time.

It was only after writing half a dozen books that we have begun to piece together his backstory. We learned his first name began with A in the third novel, and learned in the fourth what that A stood for. We still don’t know what his middle initials-X. L.-stand for. Some say L is for “Leng.” But we don’t know that for sure. Just the other day, Linc and I had an argument about that. I said it couldn’t be “Leng” for a number of obscure Talmudic reasons. Linc disagreed. E-mails went back and forth. And we still don’t know.

Linc

A few years ago, our audio publisher asked us to write up an interview with Pendergast… They thought that having us “interview” Pendergast in our own voices (and having René Auberjonois, the voice talent, “be” Pendergast) would make a nice extra for the audiobook version of Brimstone.

So Doug and I dutifully sat down and began work on the interview. We did this in the way we frequently work (and, in fact, the way the very piece you are reading was created): one of us will make a start, then lob the work-in-progress through the virtual ether to the other. In time, with enough back-and-forths, the work will grow, through accretion, into a lustrous pearl (or an inert lump, as the case may be).

As usual when it came to Pendergast, the interview basically wrote itself. Pendergast took the reins and led the conversation in his own direction. And when it was complete, Doug and I were quite surprised by some of the things he had revealed. In particular, I was struck by Pendergast’s lack of appreciation for our chronicling of his exploits. You would think every Johnson would appreciate his Boswell, but not Agent Pendergast. He was not only ungrateful, but he seemed to have a distinctly low opinion of our talents.

Although Pendergast’s disapproval of our efforts might be galling, the amount of enthusiasm and support our readers have shown has had precisely the opposite effect. We’re surprised and delighted by how vigorously people have taken our special Special Agent to their hearts. There are websites devoted to the most obscure Pendergast arcana; there are online forums in which readers recount (sometimes rather shockingly) their personal Pendergast fantasies (including one site called Pendergasms, which we shall not explore further in these pages). There are even Pendergast bumper stickers rumored to be seen in the wild!

Doug

Many people have asked us why Pendergast was cut from the movie version of The Relic, which was released by Paramount Pictures in 1997 and became a number one box office hit.

I remember well receiving a series of drafts of The Relic screenplay. In each successive draft, Pendergast’s role withered until, in the last one, he had vanished completely. I asked the producers why. I got various explanations, which boiled down to this: he was too complex, too eccentric, and too scene-stealing a character to be in a movie. The screenwriters were having a lot of trouble with his personality, voice, and manner. He was a character who had rarely, if ever, been seen before on the silver screen, and he was not a Hollywood “type.” They could not write him and they could not cast him. To Hollywood, he was “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” to borrow a phrase from Churchill. They couldn’t get a handle on him. On the other hand, Pendergast’s sidekick, Vincent D’Agosta, was very much a Hollywood type, the tough-talking Italian-American cop with a heart of gold. So D’Agosta became the star of the movie, played by Tom Sizemore, cast alongside Penelope Ann Miller as Margo Green, James Whitmore as Frock, and Linda Hunt as the museum’s feisty director.

Linc

One thing we’ve particularly enjoyed is doling out-in maddeningly small amounts-Pendergast’s backstory. Certain of our readers are desperate to learn more about him. And his natural reticence is the perfect foil for our scattering little hints and trace clues like gold dust throughout the stories.

What started as relatively uncoordinated and spontaneous asides has now morphed into a cohesive history, replete with certain mad and half-mad relations (Aloysius is not only the last of his line, but one of the few to be born compos mentis). We meet, or hear about, relatives of his-Great-Aunt Cornelia, Comstock Pendergast, Antoine Leng Pendergast-who have decidedly perverse and criminal minds. Even the Pendergast family mansion, the Maison de la Rochenoire, once a famous landmark on Dauphine Street in New Orleans, was ultimately burned to the ground by an angry mob.

Certainly the most memorable of Pendergast’s relatives to date has been his brother, Diogenes, who became the antihero of his own trilogy: Brimstone, Dance of Death, and Book of the Dead. (We had intended it to be a single book, but it basically “ran away” into something much bigger than we’d planned, not unlike the Castle Bravo thermonuclear test.) Diogenes first surfaces-if you can call it that-in our third Pendergast novel, Cabinet of Curiosities. I wrote a chapter in which Pendergast takes a mental journey through a purely intellectual reconstruction, a memory palace, of his childhood house. (Please don’t ask; read the book and you’ll understand what I mean.) As he walks down the upstairs corridor and passes his brother’s room, he observes that the door is locked and chained, and would always remain so. There was no reason for me to add this other than sheer perversity; I knew this tantalizing tidbit would set our readers frothing at the mouth. But as with so many things in our books, it essentially took on a life of its own. Once he’d trodden the boards, Diogenes refused to leave the stage; and we began adding increasingly frequent allusions to his dreadful past and shocking misdeeds. It wasn’t long until he demanded-and got-his own trilogy.

Doug

It was only through the introduction of his brother, Diogenes, into the series that Pendergast’s character reached completion. We conceived Diogenes as a twisted Mycroft Holmes, brilliant, perverse, refined, and utterly criminal. His name alludes back to two sources: the Diogenes Club of London, where Mycroft Holmes lived, and the Greek philosopher Diogenes himself. The real Diogenes was a cold, unforgiving fellow who wandered the streets of Athens by day with a lantern, searching for but never finding an honest man. When Alexander the Great paid Diogenes a visit and asked the reclining philosopher if there was anything he could do for him, Diogenes waved his hand and replied that he could step aside and cease blocking his sunlight.

This seemed a perfect name for our über-villain.

The two brothers complete each other: one a top FBI agent, the other a brilliant criminal. Between them, the date of a perfect crime and a challenge: stop me if you can.

Slowly, bit by bit, as we wrote the trilogy, the full dimensions of Aloysius Pendergast’s life began to emerge. It was as if he were finally revealing himself to us. By this time, Pendergast had become a real person to us-more real, in fact, than many flesh-and-blood people we know. Living with this strange and enigmatic man for so many years, spending hours with him every day, watching and recording his every movement, had turned him into a real human being. I am sure we’re not the first novelists who have had this experience, but it is certainly peculiar when it happens.

The really odd thing is, it turns out we don’t like Pendergast very much. He is cold, haughty, judgmental, and unforgiving. He himself likes very few people-and those he does like are not often aware of that fact, since he is so reticent with his feelings. There is a kind and gentle side to him, but it is deeply buried in the eternal snows of his personality. You could not have a jolly dinner with Pendergast, a casual conversation, a lighthearted exchange of pleasantries. You certainly could not “hoist a few” with him.

I am afraid Pendergast reciprocates these chilly feelings toward us. Pendergast finds me a bit dull, slow on the uptake, of conventional morality and habits. He would not care to visit my house, where the chaos of children would disturb his peace. He would find my conversation charmless and most of my friends idiotic, vapid, uncultured, and middle-class. He would despise my interests in the outdoors, skiing, horses, and boats. And he would be horrified at the fact that I live in a small town in rural Maine where there are no restaurants, theaters, concert halls, museums, or even a decent grocery. Pendergast and I have little in common beyond a love of fine food, wine, art, music, and the Italian language.

I daresay he wouldn’t like Linc much better. Certainly he would find Linc more congenial than I, wittier and more charming, the effect marred by an unfortunately low and vulgar turn of mind. He would find curious Linc’s acquisitiveness, as evidenced by his collections of rare pens and books. He would shake his head in dismay at Linc’s suburban lifestyle, the Mercedes and Range Rover in the garage, the Dalmatian in the backyard, and the neat flower-beds and manicured lawns of his New Jersey neighborhood. He would, however, enjoy Linc’s connoisseurship of green tea, and he would approve of both his library and his reclusive impulses, and no doubt they would have a great deal to talk about when the subject turned to Dr. Samuel Johnson and eighteenth-century English poetry.

Linc

Most of all, Pendergast would consider our obsessive chronicling of his life utterly useless and a colossal waste of time-not to mention annoyingly intrusive.

I should add that while we may not like Pendergast very much as a person (in the way that we like, say, Bill Smithback), we most certainly admire his mind and relish his eccentricities.

How better to conclude this portrait than with a transcription of the original version of the one and only “interview” I mentioned earlier on? It took place-we like to think-at Pendergast’s apartment in the Dakota, Central Park West and 72nd Street, New York City, on August 31, 2004.

Pendergast: Gentlemen, welcome. Would you care for a sherry? I have a fine Amontillado aging in a back room.

Child: Why, that would be very kind-

Preston: Linc, remember what we talked about…?

Child: [Sighs] No, thank you, Agent Pendergast.

Pendergast: As you wish. I hope we can keep this short. I have neither the time nor the inclination to bandy civilities with a couple of writers, even ones as distinguished as yourselves [mordant smile].

Preston: We’ll try to keep it short. Let me begin by asking a fairly simple question: why do you always wear a black suit?

Pendergast: That kind of vapid query is precisely why I eschew interviews.

Child: Agent Pendergast, a lot of our readers are curious about your background and the history of your family. Can you tell us something about your parents, your childhood and later education?

Pendergast: I would prefer to keep the questioning on a professional level. Suffice to say I was born and raised in New Orleans to an old family of French ancestry. After the loss of our family home by fire, in which my parents were killed, I attended Harvard University, from which I graduated summa cum laude in 1982.

Child: We never knew you went to Harvard.

Pendergast: There is much you two don’t know, despite all your pretensions to the contrary. And much you will never know.

Preston: What did you major in?

Pendergast: Anthropology.

Preston: That doesn’t seem like an obvious major for a future FBI agent.

Pendergast: On the contrary.

Child: You did graduate work, didn’t you?

Pendergast: Yes, at Oxford University. I have a dual PhD in classics and philosophy, and I took firsts in both.

Preston: And then, I believe, you went into the Special Forces? We’ve heard rumors that you were engaged in a number of black ops.

Pendergast: If I was, I could hardly be expected to discuss them, could I?

Child: Getting back to your childhood, we know the Pendergast mansion was burned by a mob. Why?

Pendergast: [Long pause] The Pendergast family was, shall we say, eccentric, and not at all popular with the local folk-but it was my great-aunt Cornelia who was the proximate cause.

Child: Cornelia? The one in the Mount Mercy Hospital for the Criminally Insane?

Pendergast: That is correct.

Preston: What did she do?

Pendergast: She was a chemist of no small talent, which is all I am going to say on that subject. I believe I’ve already made it clear that I would prefer to avoid personal topics. Mr. Preston, would you care to be questioned about that streak of mental instability in your own family? For example, I understand that your brother Richard-

Preston: [Loudly clearing his throat] The interview is about you, not me.

Pendergast: Quite.

Child: Moving on, I wonder if you would tell us about some of your more interesting cases.

Pendergast: Other than the ones which you have so regrettably sensationalized in your books? On a personal level, the most remarkable case I worked on was in Tanzania -the attacks of the red lion.

Preston: The “red lion”?

Pendergast: It was, according to the local tribal legend, a monstrous lion that attacked only at night; it had an unquenchable hunger for human flesh. And it was of a color never before seen. The killings flared up while I was on a bushbuck hunting trip. Over the space of five evenings, twenty-four people were killed, their livers eaten.

Child: How horrible. But I assume-since you call it a “case”-the murderer turned out to be human?

Pendergast: More or less.

Preston: More or less? What does that mean?

Pendergast: There are degrees of humanity, Mr. Preston. The two of you wrote up my recent case in Medicine Creek, Kansas; you should know that. In any case, the chief presented me with a brace of elephant tusks by way of thanks. [He nods to a doorway] They make a rather dramatic entrance to my study, don’t you think?

Child: Was this the same hunting expedition on which your wife accompanied you? Where you were charged by the Cape buffalo?

Pendergast: Yes. In fact, my wife was instrumental in working out some of the highly peculiar psychological aspects. It was our last case together.

Preston: If you don’t mind me asking, what happened to her?

Pendergast: [Stiffly] That question lies outside the bounds of this interview. Earlier, I said there are many things about me you will never know. The fate of my beloved wife is one of those. Now, gentlemen, if you don’t mind, this interview is over; Proctor will see you out.