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Tess Gerritsen, according to the Chicago Tribune, has “an imagination that allows her to conjure up depths of human behavior so dark and frightening that she makes Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft seem like goody-two-shoes.” And that’s just the way her readers like it. Gerritsen’s books have hit The New York Times bestseller list a number of times. Germany’s readers, too, have put her on their top list, and, in the United Kingdom this year, Vanish was No. 1 in paperback and The Mephisto Club, her latest, held the No. 2 spot in hardcover.
Gerritsen stands out for many reasons. She’s the only female novelist writing medical thrillers that are on the same level with the “big boys.” She’s one of only a few successful Asian American novelists. She’s also one of the only authors who maintains a blog on her website, and is willing to write about the thorny issues, the burrs that she says get under her “thin skin.” And she’s a mother who gave up her medical practice to raise a family, write, and fiddle, too.
Born, raised, and educated in California, this West Coast girl, medical degree in hand, moved farther west—to Hawaii, where she practiced for eight years—before she moved almost as far east as one can go and still be in the U.S. Since 1990, she has lived in Camden, where she has never practiced medicine, a place, she says, that she immediately knew was where she could live and write her books.
The great-granddaughter of a poet well-known in China, Gerritsen has written since she was a child. A recent trip back west unearthed a “book” she wrote when she was seven years old, one of many hand-stitched books she made and her parents dutifully saved. This September marks the publication of Gerritsen’s 20th novel (none of them hand-stitched), The Bone Garden.
Growing up in San Diego, her mother used to take her and her brother to horror movies, scary movies. She is convinced that it introduced her to the idea of getting across themes or emotions through the whole medium of horror and suspense. Looking back, she sees an education in the American horror film as a pretty good way to learn how a good story unwinds, what it is that gets your heart beating faster.
A number of her novels have been optioned for film, and she is currently in negotiations for a TV series based on police detective Jane Rizzoli, the star of her last six books.
Your brother is also a doctor. Do doctors run in the family?
No, they run in Chinese-American families.
And that’s because?
I think immigrant families, in general, are very practical, especially Asians. And when I was growing up, and I’m sure every Asian child in California was told the same thing by their parents, “You don’t want to starve, you want to have a job you know will always be there, do something practical.” That’s why you have so many Asians in engineering and science. That’s why I became a doctor.
Was writing your first choice?
Absolutely. I told my father I was going to be a journalist. He just said, you’re going to starve. He said, you can always go into medicine and write on the side. And so I did. I wrote all the way through medical school and my residency. I always thought that would be the way it was.
No writing “on the side” now. When did it shift?
Well, my first published novel was written when I was on maternity leave. I wrote a number of romances for Harlequin. They’re still out there, with “new” releases all the time.
What do you mean—“new” releases?
Harlequin owns all the rights to the books they publish. They’re very clever. They know that some of their writers will go on to have significant careers. As Nora Roberts has. As I have. So whenever I have a new book out, they trot out one of my old romances with a new cover, new PR.
Romance to medical thrillers is a huge shift. How did that occur?
It came from a dinner conversation with a former policeman. He had a new job protecting American businessmen in Russia. He had heard rumors of kids vanishing and being shipped to the Middle East as organ donors. Up until then, I had never seen medicine as all that interesting as a world of fiction. [That conversation became Harvest.] I have come to recognize when a good idea hits me. I feel it right in my stomach. That’s what happened then.
How scary is that first draft?
You could get thrown into the worst depression in the middle of writing a book. You can’t see the forest for the trees. Everything you write looks horrible. You don’t see how it all fits together. But you know that at least once you get that first draft down you can go back and fix stuff. Nora Roberts, the most prolific writer in the world, has said, “I can fix a bad page, but I can’t fix a blank page.” It’s so true. If you get it down, you can fix it. But if you don’t ever have anything to work on, what can you do?
You’ve put out a book a year for 20 years. How do you do that?
It’s because I’m expected to. The way the book industry is structured is that you sign a contract and there’s a deadline. Because I’ve always been a good little schoolgirl, I make my deadline. It’s hard. You can’t wait for inspiration. You just have to sit down and work. I wish I had two years, I wish I had five years a book, but I don’t.
Could you?
There’s a business reason, as well. If you don’t have a new book on the stands in 18 months, there’s a danger that people forget you. I’ve been in the industry long enough to observe that authors who can’t turn in a book that frequently, their careers start to stumble after a while. They can’t ever achieve the salability.
There must be a downside to producing a book that often!
For me, yes. That’s the trouble with being at this level of publishing. Your pragmatic side is always clashing with your creative side. Creatively, I would love to be doing a lot of different stuff. But the pragmatic side is saying that I have to put certain elements into the book to make sure my readers will be happy.
So what might you write?
I would like to do something without a murder in it, for once! Something that doesn’t have suspense, something more “slice of life.” But …
You have a No. 1 bestseller in the U.K., but in the beginning, you weren’t such a big, take-off, hot seller there.
No, I was a big flop. I was a flop for about four books. I was at a point where I couldn’t even get a book contract.
What changed?
I would say it was finding the right publishing house. They believed in me, in the book. It was The Surgeon. They designed a revolutionary cover at that time in England—very white, very stark—and they threw everything behind that book.
What makes for a commercially successful book?
There are a number of elements you need to come together to make something magical happen. If just one element is off—not the right agent, or a good editor, the idea not quite right . . . They all have to work together. And the public has to like it. That’s the great unknown. A lot of it’s luck, and a lot of it’s hard work. And did I say the right agent? I can’t say the right agent enough. The right agent is as important as the right husband.
And you obviously have the right one.
I do now. It’s my third—the agent, not the husband.
Gerritsen stands out for many reasons. She’s the only female novelist writing medical thrillers that are on the same level with the “big boys.” She’s one of only a few successful Asian American novelists. She’s also one of the only authors who maintains a blog on her website, and is willing to write about the thorny issues, the burrs that she says get under her “thin skin.” And she’s a mother who gave up her medical practice to raise a family, write, and fiddle, too.
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Born, raised, and educated in California, this West Coast girl, medical degree in hand, moved farther west—to Hawaii, where she practiced for eight years—before she moved almost as far east as one can go and still be in the U.S. Since 1990, she has lived in Camden, where she has never practiced medicine, a place, she says, that she immediately knew was where she could live and write her books.
The great-granddaughter of a poet well-known in China, Gerritsen has written since she was a child. A recent trip back west unearthed a “book” she wrote when she was seven years old, one of many hand-stitched books she made and her parents dutifully saved. This September marks the publication of Gerritsen’s 20th novel (none of them hand-stitched), The Bone Garden.
Growing up in San Diego, her mother used to take her and her brother to horror movies, scary movies. She is convinced that it introduced her to the idea of getting across themes or emotions through the whole medium of horror and suspense. Looking back, she sees an education in the American horror film as a pretty good way to learn how a good story unwinds, what it is that gets your heart beating faster.
A number of her novels have been optioned for film, and she is currently in negotiations for a TV series based on police detective Jane Rizzoli, the star of her last six books.
Your brother is also a doctor. Do doctors run in the family?
No, they run in Chinese-American families.
And that’s because?
I think immigrant families, in general, are very practical, especially Asians. And when I was growing up, and I’m sure every Asian child in California was told the same thing by their parents, “You don’t want to starve, you want to have a job you know will always be there, do something practical.” That’s why you have so many Asians in engineering and science. That’s why I became a doctor.
Was writing your first choice?
Absolutely. I told my father I was going to be a journalist. He just said, you’re going to starve. He said, you can always go into medicine and write on the side. And so I did. I wrote all the way through medical school and my residency. I always thought that would be the way it was.
No writing “on the side” now. When did it shift?
Well, my first published novel was written when I was on maternity leave. I wrote a number of romances for Harlequin. They’re still out there, with “new” releases all the time.
What do you mean—“new” releases?
Harlequin owns all the rights to the books they publish. They’re very clever. They know that some of their writers will go on to have significant careers. As Nora Roberts has. As I have. So whenever I have a new book out, they trot out one of my old romances with a new cover, new PR.
Romance to medical thrillers is a huge shift. How did that occur?
It came from a dinner conversation with a former policeman. He had a new job protecting American businessmen in Russia. He had heard rumors of kids vanishing and being shipped to the Middle East as organ donors. Up until then, I had never seen medicine as all that interesting as a world of fiction. [That conversation became Harvest.] I have come to recognize when a good idea hits me. I feel it right in my stomach. That’s what happened then.
How scary is that first draft?
You could get thrown into the worst depression in the middle of writing a book. You can’t see the forest for the trees. Everything you write looks horrible. You don’t see how it all fits together. But you know that at least once you get that first draft down you can go back and fix stuff. Nora Roberts, the most prolific writer in the world, has said, “I can fix a bad page, but I can’t fix a blank page.” It’s so true. If you get it down, you can fix it. But if you don’t ever have anything to work on, what can you do?
You’ve put out a book a year for 20 years. How do you do that?
It’s because I’m expected to. The way the book industry is structured is that you sign a contract and there’s a deadline. Because I’ve always been a good little schoolgirl, I make my deadline. It’s hard. You can’t wait for inspiration. You just have to sit down and work. I wish I had two years, I wish I had five years a book, but I don’t.
Could you?
There’s a business reason, as well. If you don’t have a new book on the stands in 18 months, there’s a danger that people forget you. I’ve been in the industry long enough to observe that authors who can’t turn in a book that frequently, their careers start to stumble after a while. They can’t ever achieve the salability.
There must be a downside to producing a book that often!
For me, yes. That’s the trouble with being at this level of publishing. Your pragmatic side is always clashing with your creative side. Creatively, I would love to be doing a lot of different stuff. But the pragmatic side is saying that I have to put certain elements into the book to make sure my readers will be happy.
So what might you write?
I would like to do something without a murder in it, for once! Something that doesn’t have suspense, something more “slice of life.” But …
You have a No. 1 bestseller in the U.K., but in the beginning, you weren’t such a big, take-off, hot seller there.
No, I was a big flop. I was a flop for about four books. I was at a point where I couldn’t even get a book contract.
What changed?
I would say it was finding the right publishing house. They believed in me, in the book. It was The Surgeon. They designed a revolutionary cover at that time in England—very white, very stark—and they threw everything behind that book.
What makes for a commercially successful book?
There are a number of elements you need to come together to make something magical happen. If just one element is off—not the right agent, or a good editor, the idea not quite right . . . They all have to work together. And the public has to like it. That’s the great unknown. A lot of it’s luck, and a lot of it’s hard work. And did I say the right agent? I can’t say the right agent enough. The right agent is as important as the right husband.
And you obviously have the right one.
I do now. It’s my third—the agent, not the husband.
