Best-Selling Author Jeffery Deaver on His New Series and His Favorite Books

Michael Giltz

2 September 2024 at 4:54 pm·10-min read

Best-selling author Jeffery Deaver talks about some of his favorite books as well as his new novel Fatal Intrusion, a collaboration with fellow author Isabella Maldonado.

But what’s going on here? Why after decades of going solo has this acclaimed talent suddenly chosen to write a book in full creative partnership with another writer?

Deaver is one of the most acclaimed and best-selling thriller writers around. He has multiple book series to his credit. The new CBS drama Tracker is based on his books about Colter Shaw and proved a huge hit right out of the gate. And his most famous creation is Lincoln Rhyme, the forensic criminalist. That series is 16 titles strong, with The Watchmaker’s Hand ($10.99; G.P. Putnam’s Sons) coming out in paperback on October 22.

Is quality slipping? Hardly. The Wall Street Journal wrote about The Watchmaker's Hand, “one would be hard pressed to name a better writer of beat-the-clock thrillers.” Booklist said about it and the series as a whole, “The Rhyme novels are remarkably consistent: the writing is superb, the characters intriguing, the stories spellbinding, and the plot twists shocking.”

He doesn’t belong to writers’ groups where people kick around ideas and get feedback. Deaver jokingly calls himself a curmudgeon and has said he doesn’t play well with others. (Though it must be said he proves very generous with his time and chats away happily about everything from James Bond to his favorite songs.) So after 35 years of success, what made him make a leap of faith and work with Isabella Maldonado?

Naturally, it began with ruthless infants. Deaver was attending a conference in Chicago called Murder & Mayhem some seven or so years ago. He was in the green room with Gillian Flynn of Gone Girl fame and Isabella Maldonado.

“We just fell into this uproarious repartee about co-writing a book involving an infant Mafioso,” says Deaver. “Baby hitmen and so forth. I don’t know where that stream of consciousness came from but clearly the three of us had great fun talking about it.”

Maldonado and Deaver stayed in touch, he read her thriller The Cipher and happily gave it a rave review. When they bumped into each other again at another author’s event, the joking about a collaboration got serious.

“After forty books, to say let’s just try something completely different than I’ve ever done before?” says Deaver. “It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

They proved an ideal fit, with Deaver emphasizing they very much co-authored this thriller; that’s why their names get equal billing on the cover. Both love outlining their stories, both place the reader as paramount and they both write stories that barrel along, answering the question about what’s going to happen next?

Fatal Intrusion by Jeffery Deaver and Isabella Maldonado ($28.99; Thomas & Mercer) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

The result is Fatal Intrusion, the story of Carmen Sanchez, a by-the-book Homeland Security Investigations agent forced to pair with the rules-breaking Professor Jake Heron, a cyber security expert. Bodies are piling up in Southern California and the murders revolve around a dark web collective urging on mayhem for the sake of it.

Are Deaver and Maldonado confident in success? Well, book two is already scheduled for next fall. So this is just the beginning of a beautiful friendship for both them and Sanchez and Heron.

Meanwhile, Deaver shares his lifelong love affair with reading. When Parade compiled a list of the best thrillers of all time, Deaver was generous enough to tell us what he loves about The Day Of The Jackal. Now he dives deeper.

Best-selling Author Jeffery Deaver on His Favorite Books

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

“My favorite of his,” says Deaver. “For me, it’s the coming of age story, growing up in Chicago. He was older than I am, but not a lot older. I knew what he was talking about. What a young person goes through, he kind of nailed it for me. His adventures were a lot more extreme than my adventures. He traveled around the world. He got some businesses going–this is Augie March I’m talking about. He got some businesses going that were a little shady and got involved with some of the wonderful characters that Bellow created. This is literary fiction, not a lot of twists and turns, though there are plot reversals. But oh my god, the way he puts words together. It’s just, it’s just breathtaking.”

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow ($20; Penguin Classics) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

The Arms of Krupp by William Manchester

William Manchester is a writer perhaps best known for his multi-volume biography of Winston Churchill, which Deaver has read. (In fact, Deaver finds it hard to read fiction when actively writing a book so he devours a lot of nonfiction.) But he’s chosen a portrait of a German family that made its money in arms manufacturing.

“It’s a lot of book,” says Deaver about the near-1000 page work about the dynasty that essentially armed Germany for its wars from the end of the 19th century and through both world wars.

“There’s always a personal element in why we pick books. My father was a flier in World War II and was shot down, nearly killed. We almost would not be having this conversation now. It was a small attack fighter and this was after D-Day. The Luftwaffe was almost gone by then but they were hit by flak and my dad was a gunner. The pilot held the plane steady and said, ‘We’re going down. Bail out.’ And my father did. They were 300 feet above the ground, which is very low, but the parachute opened. He was injured but the plane crashed and the pilot was killed.

“Apparently you could go to the Defense Department–I don’t know if you still can–and he got pictures of the wreckage. He had memorabilia, like a knife with a swastika on it that he found in a farmhouse in France and liberated. He slipped it in his pocket. So we had things like that around the house and Time-Life books on World War II. So I was always fascinated with it and just picked that up. I’m also obsessed with this podcast by Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook called The Rest Is History.”

The Arms of Krupp by William Manchester ($25; Back Bay Books) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Collected Poems 1943-2004 by Richard Wilbur

“When I look at Richard Wilbur, there’s of course substance to the poem,” says Deaver, who decries the banal outpouring of unstructured emotion found in bad poetry. “There’s something he wants to say. And it could be about relationships, society or whatever. And then there’s the form. That’s the spoonful of sugar that makes the story go down. It’s rhythmic in rhyme but with considerable variation. We think we’re hearing a rhyme, an echo in our head. And then it doesn’t appear and that makes us think, ‘Oh, how interesting.’

"I wrote a crime story for Amazon that’s called ‘Scheme,’ and I loved [doing] it because the clues are in a series of poems that are sent by the apparent killer. So I got five poems published and they were read by maybe 100,000 people. That’s not going to happen if I try to publish in a little literary magazine.”

Collected Poems 1943-2004 by Richard Wilbur ($19.99; Ecco) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism by John Updike

“Oh, it’s just brilliant,” says Deaver. “I have written let’s just say 50 novels, a hundred short stories. You put yourself out there. I tell my students, you’ve got to have a thick skin. You’re going to get trashed. Also, don’t get too on your high horse if somebody likes it because the next review is probably going to be not so pleasant. The thing about Updike is, he is the epitome of a critic to me, in this sense. He doesn’t say, ‘I like this’ or ‘I didn’t like this.’ He would not review anything if he did not have a working knowledge of the creator’s body of work and what I would call competitors. Or if we don’t want to put it into such capitalistic terms, similar creators. And he would say how he felt the thing he was reviewing stood up to that. He was also very articulate. He was smart and I like smart.

“The bulk of criticism we see nowadays–that’s far too broad to say, but much of the criticism we see and certainly of genre fiction, the reviewer doesn’t know much about the genre, doesn’t know much about the author’s work and just comes up with some clever phrases. Updike didn’t just review books; he reviewed architecture and music and maybe television and theater? Like Saul Bellow, he was an intellectual.”

Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism by John Updike ($20; Random House Trade Paperbacks) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

“I just wanted to pay simple homage to Doyle,” said Deaver about choosing this Sherlock Holmes novel as one of his favorites. “He helped me develop the sense of character. There were twists: oh, a speckled band; a snake! Oh wow, that’s a surprise. We like who [Sherlock Holmes] is and he was tormented. He informed Lincoln Rhyme to a great extent.”

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle ($5.95; Signet) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org

<p>Courtesy of Penguin Books</p> — Courtesy of Penguin Books

Doc Savage: The Man Of Bronze by Lester Dent as Kenneth Robeson
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré

The Man Of Bronze is one of the first novels featuring Doc Savage, who premiered in a series of pulp magazine short stories. Deaver actually named “any” Doc Savage novel. “Oh, Doc Savage, yes,” said Deaver. “I actually don’t know if they are still available."

A quick internet search reveals the original novels are out of print.

"I just devoured those. When you’re eight, you don’t worry about political correctness. I loved all the Edgar Rice Burroughs books. I don’t remember much about Tarzan or Pellucidar [a land found inside the core of the earth invented by Burroughs]. Oh and H.G. Wells!

“I was just a nerd when I was growing up. We had weapons, like cap guns and bows and arrows. I would get my friends together and I would actually rewrite the ending of Fort Apache or some other John Ford western because I didn’t like it. Or I might have liked it and reenacted it.

"Okay, Doc Savage. He had his coterie around him. I liked the idea that there was a team. It was good against bad and I was just kind of a sucker for that. And there was action and a vital sense of location and I always wanted to travel.

“I liked John Le Carré and [his novel] Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy should be on the list. But that’s probably the least-cynical of his books. Smiley was a hero; Smiley was a good guy. He was my kind of hero. He didn’t pull out a gun; he didn’t even carry a gun. He did the right thing, whatever it took. Even if poor Ann cuckolded him, he was going to find the mole. And Doc Savage was the same.”

Doc Savage: The Man Of Bronze by Lester Dent as Kenneth Robeson (out of print)

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carré ($20; Penguin Books) Buy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org