Monday, April 6, 2009

Tess Gerritsen

From Ali Karim's interview with Tess Gerritsen at The Rap Sheet:

Ali Karim: You now have a very successful series going, featuring Detective Jane Rizzoli of the Boston Police Department and medical examiner Maura Isles. However, you’ve switched genres several times in the past, starting out writing romantic thrillers, then moving on to techno-medical thrillers [beginning with Harvest in 1996], science fiction, and finally crime novels. How has your readership reacted to these switches?

Tess Gerritsen: They get very confused, very confused. I know that some of my crime readers occasionally come across one of my earlier romance books and they are completely flabbergasted to find out that I used to write romance. On the other hand, some of my crime readers come across Gravity [1999] and are surprised to discover that I wrote science-fiction.

AK: Some of your science fiction was in the mode of the late Michael Crichton, who also liked to move around between the genres, at one point writing mysteries under the nom de plume “John Lange.”

TG: Precisely. I think basically I write whatever I feel like writing, and wherever it takes me.

AK: A novel’s location is so often key to the telling of a tale. You set ...[read on]
--Marshal Zeringue