Crais-y About Elvis

Robert Crais has his 11th Detective Elvis Cole novel, Chasing Darkness, debuting this month, and like most authors, he's hot on the book tour trail. Since Crais currently lives in Santa Monica and his protagonist walks the streets of Los Angeles, it's not surprising that many of Crais's publicity appearances will be in California.  The Pasadena Star News published a Q&A recently with Crais, focusing on his Laurel Canyon ties. As to how he got his start writing novels, the former Hollywood writer said, "My last job, I think, was for the Johnny Carson company. I was doing a detective show with a great writer named Jeffrey Lane. When that show ended, my dad died and I didn't want to go back to another studio situation. So my wife and I agreed that I would take a year off. I rented a cabin in Lake Arrowhead, and that's where I wrote the first book." And the rest, as they say, is history.

The Orange County Register also managed to snag an interview with Crais, who is going to appear at Book Carnival in Orange this coming Sunday. "I started at the bottom in this," Craig says of his 1987 debut, The Monkey's Raincoat. "There were no big ads in the New York Times, there were no TV commercials. It was people like Ed and Pat Thomas who discovered me with that book and believed in Elvis Cole and pushed the book on readers," he says of Book Carnival's owners. "They literally hand sold that book, book after book. They're what makes this mystery community special."

Shelf Awareness tagged Crais recently for its ongoing "Book Brahmins" series, in which he was a series of questions, to wit:

On your nightstand now:

The books I'm currently reading are manuscripts for possible blurbs, so I shouldn't name them. But the books I'm looking forward to reading soon are Shadow Bridge by Gregory Frost, At the City's Edge by Marcus Sakey and Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere.

Favorite book when you were a child:

I remember the story, but not the title. Maybe a Shelf Awareness reader can help. It's an adventure story about three children marooned on a desert island, a la Robinson Crusoe, and how they survive. It held amazing, adventurous factoids like "banking the fire." These kids kept a fire going for weeks by "banking the fire" every night. I never understood what "banking the fire" was, but it seemed magical. I read that book again and again, and wish I recalled the title. We're talking the early '60s. If you have any ideas what this book might be, please write to me through my website.

Your top five authors:

Robert Heinlein, Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, Harlan Ellison, Mark Twain.

Book you've faked reading:

Pretty much everything assigned by my 10th grade English teacher. I got a "D" for the year. We were supposed to read all manner of ponderous, uninspiring tomes, but I was hiding in back of the class, reading Mailer and Ellison and Truman Capote. I was a terrible student. I chased work that inspired me.

Book you are an evangelist for:

I like helping newer writers, so if I find something special I spread the word. I felt this way about Ace Atkins' book, White Shadow, and The Crime Writer by Gregg Hurwitz, which held some of the best passages about Los Angeles I've read in years. When Joseph Wambaugh returned with Hollywood Station, I couldn't stop talking about it, though Wambaugh hardly needed my help.

Book you've bought for the cover:

That's easy. Paperback covers were once painted by fabulous painters like Frank Frazetta, James Bama and Jim Steranko. I used to collect those guys. I bought anything with a Frazetta cover. Didn't matter what the book was—I bought it for Frazetta's art.

Book that changed your life:

Harlan Ellison's book of essays, The Glass Teat, which chronicles his views about the television industry. Here I was, this totally out-of-the-loop kid in Louisiana, with no real belief or expectation that someone like me could be a writer—"writing" was something larger-than-life people did, like becoming astronauts or actors or president. But The Glass Teat demystified the working world of television, and convinced me that if "they" could be a writer, I could be a writer. So I came out to Hollywood and did it. Every good thing in my life began when I moved to Los Angeles. The Glass Teat, like any meaningful book, opened the door to possibilities.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

The Old Man and the Sea. I've read it several times, and each time it leaves me awed.