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

Elvis Cole and Joe Pike are twenty years old as I write this in 2007. They came to life in my first published novel, The Monkey’s Raincoat, in 1987. Twenty years is a long time. I had no idea they would be with me for twenty years. I hadn’t planned on creating a series (I thought The Monkey’s Raincoat would be a one-shot) and certainly did not expect these two characters of mine to become so successful both in the United States and abroad (at this writing, Elvis and Joe are published in forty countries around the world). Aspiring writers certainly hope for this kind of good fortune, and dream about it, but only a fool would expect it. Yet here we are twenty years later, me, Elvis, and Joe. And you.

If you’re reading this, you probably groove on my guys and maybe even snap up my new books as soon as they come out. And then you move on to a new book by Mike Connelly or T. Jefferson Parker or Lee Child, or any of the scores of other terrific writers currently plowing the crime fiction fields, and a whole new set of characters are in your head. But get this-

Elvis and Joe never leave me. Elvis Cole and Joe Pike have been in my head every day for these past twenty years, and likely will be every day for the rest of my life. When I’m writing the current book, I’m thinking about the next, one book leading to another as sure as a stream flows downhill. And even when I’m writing a stand-alone in which Elvis and Joe do not appear, they are still behind the trees in my head, knowing their turn will come again soon, and I am always aware of them.

Part 1: Making the Climb with Elvis Cole

Elvis Cole and I were near the top of Mount Lee where the service road ends at the big communication station they have above the Hollywood sign. Then we climbed higher. When you reach the station, you are in a chain-link-and-concertina-wire box designed to protect the sign and the communication station, but the north side of the box is a steep, rocky shoulder with a narrow path cut to the peak. I followed Cole up, busting through brittle waist-high brush to a small clearing at the top of the mountain. Up there, we were above the fence and the video cameras and the motion detectors. We were alone at the top of Los Angeles.

Cole brushed the sweat from his eyes, then stood with his hands on his hips, looking out at our city. It had been a long, fast hike up the hill. I was sucking air like an iron lung, but he wasn’t even breathing hard.

Cole said, “Some view.”

“Where’s Pike?”

“I left a message on his cell, said we’d be coming up here, but I never heard back. You know how he is. Might be down there right now, watching us. He’d do that just to see if we could spot him.”

Cole studied the surrounding canyons, their cut ridges furred with pale gray chaparral and scrub oak. Spotting Pike would be like spotting a flea lost in hair, but I figured Cole could do it if anyone could.

I said, “You see him?”

Cole pointed.

“Sure. Right there.”

“Where?”

“Right there. He’s waving.”

I followed his finger toward a blur of dead brush, then, out of the corner of my eye caught Elvis Cole smiling.

I said, “Funny. Make fun of the writer. Ha ha.”

Cole offered his bottle of water, but I had my own. We drank, washing away the steep hike up from Griffith Park before I gazed out at the city. I never got tired of the view from that high place. The City of Angels spread south below us in a flat plain all the way to the Channel Islands and Santa Catalina. Skyscraper islands broke the surface to mark downtown, the Miracle Mile, Century City, and the Wilshire Corridor. Behind us, the San Fernando Valley ran north into a head-on collision with the Verdugo, San Gabriel, and the Santa Susana Mountains. The top of Los Angeles was a good place to talk. We did that sometimes. Often. Like we were doing that day.

Cole said, “Want to ask you something.”

“Listen, if it’s about the Dodgers tickets… ”

I had great season tickets and laid off ten or twelve games to Cole every year. Gratis. He used my seats to trade for information. In Los Angeles, choice Dodgers seats worked better than a court order.

Cole raised a hand, stopping me.

“Not the Dodgers. I’ve been wondering about our relationship, me and you. I want to ask you something.”

“If you want more games just say so.”

He wanted more Dodgers tickets. I can read him like a book.

“Don’t get pissy. Even if I did, you’re making more dough off my cases than I do. Look at how many e-mails you get through the website, people asking how come I always work for free.”

“You don’t work for free. Peter Alan Nelsen paid you a load.”

“And how long ago was that, Lullaby Town ?”

“Jonathan Greene paid you up front in Sunset Express. So did Jody Taylor in Voodoo River . Besides, I’ve only chronicled ten of your cases…”

Cole widened his eyes, making a big deal.

“Chronicled. Am I being chronicled?”

“I only cover your interesting cases. Our readers wouldn’t care about the boring dogs you work to pay the bills.”

“So my day-to-day is too dull to be chronicled?”

“If it’s not the tickets, then what?”

Cole had more of his water, then tucked the bottle into a pocket on his cargo shorts. He considered the city for another moment, then took off his sunglasses to look at me.

“Why me?”

“Why you what?”

“You could chronicle cops or lawyers or architects, but you chronicle me. I’ve been wondering why.”

Cole had never asked that before, though I often thought about it. He was right: I could have written any type of fiction, from dark fantasies to so-called literary fiction to Westerns. The choice was mine, but I had chosen to write about Elvis Cole, a private investigator who lived and worked in Los Angeles. I had my reasons, and weighed their values and importance again with each new book.

I said, “You represent hope.”

Cole stared at me with an expression that said he got it but maybe didn’t agree with it. Or like it. I tried to explain.

“Why didn’t you become a police officer?”

“That how we’re going to play this? I ask a question, you answer with a question?”

“Bear with me. It’s true I could write other things, but it’s also true you could have chosen a different line of work. You’re relatively bright-”

“Thank you too much.”

“You could have become a police officer.”

“Too many bosses. Way I work now, it’s like being a writer. I don’t have to salute. I’m not staring up the ass of a command structure.”

“Ha. Writer.”

“Think about it-if I worked Hollywood Robbery, all I would see are robberies in Hollywood. Devonshire Sex Crimes, nothing but sex crimes in Devonshire. Me being freelance, I can do whatever I want. Like you.”

“Not like me. All I do is make up stories. You put yourself on the line for people in need. That makes you more. Especially because of who you are.”

Cole frowned at me.

“Like how?”

“You’re ordinary.”

“This is a compliment?”

“If you were a cop or an FBI agent, you would be part of an enormous bureaucratic system. You would have the full weight and authority of that system behind you. Even if I had cast you as a man struggling against the system from within, you would still be part of a team. You would have power. I didn’t want that.”

I tipped my head toward the city and the millions of people spread across that great flat plane, continuing.

“You’re on your own. Like me. Like them. You’re one of us, so, I think, you’re a metaphor for us.”

“What do you mean, us? You’re a bestselling novelist.”

“I wasn’t always a novelist, and these books about you didn’t start out as bestsellers. We’ve come a long way, brother.”

Cole grunted his agreement, then adjusted his cap. The late-morning sun was bright. Cole was wearing the faded blue Dodgers cap he wore when hiking or running or driving around with the top down. So was I. We often dressed alike.

When he finished with the cap, he said, “So how does that make me Mr. Hopeful?”

“Didn’t say you’re Mr. Hopeful. I said you represent hope. To me and to people like me. Look at is…”

I waved at the city.

“Those people down there, me, most folks-all we have is ourselves. The tranny drops a week before Christmas, some dip keys the new car, the rent jacks up, and we’re left wondering how we’re going to make it. That would be where you come in.”

“I don’t do transmissions.”

“All you have is yourself.”

“I have Pike.”

“You know what I mean. A lone character who faces the dark side in this crazy world inspires me. If you can survive, then I can survive. If you can persevere, then those people down there can make a difference in their own lives. You see?”

“Bro, do not oversell this. I’m just trying to hang on like everyone else.”

“That’s why you’re worth writing about. You’ve had what most people would call a pretty tough life; so has Pike. You could have become cynical and despairing. You could have given up on yourself, and people, and sit around moaning about how bad you have it and how life is shit, but you don’t.”

Cole slowly shook his head. His voice was quiet.

“No. I won’t do that.”

“That’s what I love about you. That’s why you represent hope. You hang on to yourself with the humor and the Jiminy Cricket stuff and that damned cat, and the determination with which you help people become better than they are, just the way you’ve become better than you were. If you can hang on, I can hang on. If you can beat the odds, then I can beat the odds. Through you, I get to see the world as a better place, so maybe our readers feel the same way. You give me hope, man, and I believe hope is worth encouraging. Hence, the books.”

Cole stared at the city as he thought it through.

“It sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself.”

“Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to crime fiction-I get to work through my fears. Maybe I need you to reassure me.”

Cole didn’t look pleased.

“Like I’m what, some kind of hero?”

“People need heroes, bro. Always have and always will. Heroes give us the hope.”

Cole still didn’t look happy with me, like he knew I had dodged the hero question.

He said, “Life isn’t fair.”

“No, but I guess, down deep, I think it should be.”

Cole nodded.

“Me too. Gotta tell you, though, all this makes me uncomfortable. Like I have some standard to live up to.”

“Don’t freak out. Watching you live it through makes you worth writing about.”

He stared at the city again.

“Do people really think you look like me?” Cole asked.

“Ha.”

“You don’t look anything like me.”

“I kinda think I look like Pike.”

“Writers.”

“Have I answered your question? Let’s head back. Unlike one of us, I’m real. My legs are getting stiff.”

He frowned.

“You keep saying I’m fictional. Has it occurred to you that maybe I’m real and you’re the fiction?”

“It’s my name on the books.”

“Uh-huh. So if I’m just someone you imagined, and here you are talking to me, maybe you’re crazy.”

What can you say to something like that?

Cole said, “Maybe you’re a figment of my need to be chronicled. Maybe I’m writing books about a guy who writes books about a private investigator.”

“Who would write about a guy who spends all day typing? Talk about yawn.”

“You joke about me calling myself the World’s Greatest Detective. Maybe I’m not joking. Maybe I need to be famous so badly I’ve imagined there’s a guy writing books about me and that guy is you. Think about it.”

Cole will say things like this with a straight face.

I said, “Elvis Cole, Mentally Ill Detective?”

“I can’t believe people think you look like me.”

“Listen. Let’s start back. My legs.”

Los Angeles spread out before us in all directions as far as we could see. Down below, other hikers were coming up the trail. We made our way back through brush that was dry and brittle from the heat. I looked for Pike, thinking he might be watching us, but I did not see him.

Cole said, “You think I could have a few extra games this year?”

I knew it. He’s like that.

Part 2: Pike’s Way

The sunglasses, twenty-four/seven. The empty, humorless expression. The sleeveless sweatshirt. The arrow tattoos that move him forward. The silence.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Joe Pike.

I first saw Joe Pike at the Florida Drive-in Theater in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Would have been the late ’60s, one of those triple-bill nights southern drive-ins are famous for. Me, I would have been a kid, carted to the drive-in by my mom to get me out of the house, or maybe alone, having snuck across the marshy fields and cane reeds on foot to slip between the rows of cars. I remembered him years later when I was creating the characters and story that would become The Monkey’s Raincoat. Gunfighter eyes peered out of a face burned dark by the sun, so cold they went beyond cold into the empty void of deep space. The thin, humorless lips. Your worst nightmare if he paints you with his rattlesnake gaze. Clint Eastwood. A Fistful of Dollars. For a Few Dollars More. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. A walking can of whup ass. I could have left it there, but I never leave well enough alone.

Mr. Eastwood, the God Priest of manliness back in the day, was not the flash-image inspiration for Joe Pike-he was what I imagined when I first imagined Elvis Cole. In those early days of thinking about Elvis, I envisioned Cole as the stereotypical loner, and those first notions were as clichéd as they come. Cole listened to moody jazz. He had an apartment in Hollywood with a window looking out at a neon sign. He smoked, liked cheap bourbon in a shot glass, and was big on smoking and sipping the bourbon as he watched the neon sign blink. Yawn. When I came to my senses a few days later, I dropped all that and created the character you know as Elvis Cole.

Even as I developed Cole (and the themes worth spending a year of my life writing about), I knew I wanted Cole to have a friend. Butch and Sundance. Batman and Robin. Lucky Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin. Thelma and Louise. Spenser and Hawk. Spade and Archer (even though Archer was dead). Before I wrote The Monkey’s Raincoat, I wrote a lot of television, and watched even more. Cagney & Lacey. Miami Vice with Crockett and Tubbs. These friendships had always inspired me (both as a reader and a writer). Cole was not going to be part of a formal organization like the police-I identified more closely with an outsider who did not have the power and authority that come with the badge-but I also had no interest in writing about a character who was so disaffected that he was empty of friends. Elvis Cole needed a friend. Note that I am using the word friend, not partner. The human stuff of friendship was-and is-important in all of this.

That image of the man with no name appeared, but that’s where it ended. The image reappeared but quickly changed. The narrowed eyes and sharp-cut jaw evolved within Elvis Cole’s house in the Hollywood hills and became something much more compelling. I was once aboard a ship in the South Pacific where the water was seventeen thousand feet deep. Water that deep grows dark as it swallows the light. It is bottomless. When you see a shadow move in that darkness, the hair will stand up on the back of your neck. You know all the way down in your DNA that something dangerous swims in those waters. I was drawn to it. Out there at sea, I leaned across the rail again and again, trying to see into the depths. I still do, only now the water is Pike.

For a piece like this, I find it easier to describe Elvis Cole than Joe Pike. Armchair psychologists will no doubt pipe up with the certain opinions that this is because I identify more with Cole or that he is my alter ego (he isn’t), but I think it is less a factor of identification than understanding. Pike is an iceberg, and I am trying to understand the parts of him beneath the water. Careless swimmers have disturbed the silt. The waters are murky, the shadows indistinct and shifting, the darkness increases as the water deepens, and Pike is a very deep presence.

Listen. I wanted the fun and kickass good time of this enigmatic character-the twitch is there for you to enjoy-but Pike and Cole were always more. My fiction is about underdogs. And because I want there to be justice in this world, underdogs must have heroes… or they must become heroes. In many ways, the more I thought about Elvis, and who he was, and how he came to be Elvis, the more I thought he might have taken another road that could have led him to become someone like Pike. Elvis has chosen to engage life; Pike, in many ways, has stepped outside it. Somewhere in his past, he became “other.”

Once upon a time for, I guess, advertising purposes, a publisher dubbed Joe Pike a “sociopath.” He isn’t. I once thought of Elvis and Joe as a kind of yin and yang, a view that has been echoed by more than a few readers and reviewers. They are not. Nor is Pike simply Elvis Cole’s assassin; a handy-dandy, guilty-pleasure author’s device for getting Cole out of the morally queasy side waters of dropping the hammer on bad guys without benefit of judge, jury, constitutional protections, or hand-wringing after-action remorse. Pike is Pike. Like Elvis Cole, he is an underdog who has turned himself into a hero.

My books are about self-creation. I’m big on that. You can either be the victim of your past or rise above it. Both Elvis and Joe have done just that, but having risen isn’t a done-deal, over-and-out, now-I-can-relax kind of thing. Having risen, you have to maintain, because that whole “rising” business, well, it’s an ongoing process.

And there lies a key difference between Elvis and Joe. I suspect Joe Pike thinks about this stuff. I also suspect that Elvis Cole doesn’t-he just lives it, as natural to him as breathing or saying funny things, until “forced” to voice his philosophies in order to set a client straight.

Their example is the example of choices made. Cole doggedly embracing the “normal” and aggressively cultivating those parts of himself that consciously resist the darkness of his own experience-the Disney icons, the science-fiction films he enjoyed as a boy, the relaxed and comfortable attire (Hawaiian shirts and sneakers), the quippy, self-effacing sense of humor. These are the proud standards telling you this man is living life on his own terms. His very job-private investigator-tells you he holds himself apart. Cole is, at the end of the day, the product of these lifestyle choices. He would be a great guy to have a beer or catch a Dodgers game with.

Joe Pike is a conscious representative of our righteous rage at injustice. He is what happens when society fails.

The product of abusive childhood violence, Pike learned early that if you want justice, you must look to yourself. Pike was an only child living with his mother and a violent, alcoholic father at the edge of a small town. He and his mother suffered regular beatings from his father. Society did not save him-not the police, friends, or neighbors. No Eastwood-like hero rode into town to save Mrs. Pike and her young son. Joe learned his father’s lesson well. No one will save you, so you had better save yourself. You don’t wring your hands or try to “handle” a bully. You deal with a bully by employing an overwhelming physical response. Presented with a threat, you confront it head-on. Pike’s philosophy (and his rage) was boiled to its primal base: dominate or be dominated. So Pike set about preparing himself to control his environment, and does.

The seeds of this was the rage he felt at his own helplessness, I think, but Pike’s rage is not mindless. He knows that some part of himself was lost (probably in childhood), and he has spent much of his adult life, I think, learning to deal with his “otherness” and maybe even trying to give life to that dead part of himself. To think he is mindless-floating in the dark waters like his namesake fish, all cortical activity and no forebrain-would be a mistake.

Though I know many things about Pike, he is still a mystery obscured by the deep water. When Pike is within himself and seemingly disconnected from his surroundings, he has pulled back from the outer world to a place I describe as “the green world”-a natural, primal world where he feels safe. On the face of it, the green world represents the safety of the forest where he hid from his father. But the green world also represents the primitive nature of Pike’s character. We are one with, and part of, that nature. We are the animals in the forest, whether that forest is a leafy green glade or the sprawling city of Los Angeles. Our animal natures are revealed in either place.

Pike would probably tell you, if he thought it was worth spending the breath, that he has accepted the responsibility for his own security. Pike doesn’t give a lot of due to what we call “black-letter law.” Pike has a very strict moral and ethical code, but it is a code independent of written statutes.

When Larkin Conner Barkley asks him, in The Watchman, whether he feels remorse at having killed men, Pike is able to answer without hesitation.

“No.”

And he doesn’t. He has accepted a certain matter-of-factness about these things. If a man threatens you, you put him down. It is the natural order. No sense worrying about it, so he doesn’t. These are not feelings or thoughts that Pike would share, so I’m not sure even Elvis knows how far away Pike goes when he goes to that green world. It’s as if Pike has settled into a temporary moment of transcendental calm like a Zen warrior, divorced from the chaos around him but at peace with it. We can’t see his thoughts in that deep water, and might not understand them even if we could.

The space between us and how Pike sees the world is part of his mystery. His lack of emotion suggests an inner landscape that has been carpet-bombed and left as barren as the desert surrounding Tikrit. It also suggests an emptiness waiting to be filled, and therein lies his tragic nature and the uniqueness of his friendship with Cole. Pike recognizes that Cole’s inner landscape is teeming with life. Pike admires this life and wonders at its depth and complexity, and would sacrifice himself without hesitation for his friend. This is not something a sociopath would do.

This is the stuff of heroes. These books are heroic fiction with liberal doses of myth and adventure, but I hope they are more than escapist fantasy. Though these are crime novels, the “crime novel” is simply the canvas upon which I have chosen to paint, and my subject matter, I believe, is larger than guns, gunfighting, macho posturing, and the relative thrills of wing chun arm traps and high-velocity action sequences, though these things are certainly part of these books, and I hope you enjoy them. I do!

I write about people. My thrill of accomplishment doesn’t come from the blind-side plot twist, but from that nuance of character that touches you, moves you, involves you, and, I hope, surprises you-not with the “aha!” of an unexpected plot reveal, but with the resonance of human understanding.

People always ask me where Joe and Elvis came from. Here’s the answer:

You are Joe Pike.

You are Elvis Cole.

Meaning that some part of you identifies with some part of them, so much so that in that instant of identification, you are them and can understand them. Pike’s loneliness. Cole’s longing. And in that moment what I am writing about isn’t just action and clues, but fully realized human beings.