Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Ridley Pearson
He writes thrillers and rock ’n’ roll music, yet he has the gentle, apologetic air of a shy classics professor. He confides the self-doubt that washes over him every day, the “luck” of getting published, the terrifying sureness that it could all crumble tomorrow. An hour later, I glance down at my notes and remember, with a pleasant jolt, that Ridley Pearson’s twice hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list; he’s jammed with Stephen King and Dave Barry; and he and Barry wrote a young-adult series that became a Broadway hit and is soon to be a Walt Disney movie directed by Gary Ross, who did The Hunger Games. As for Pearson’s grown-up thrillers, they’re so cunningly plotted that they often anticipate the future.
You wrote about a crime gene in Chain of Evidence, and a genetics conference took up where you left off. You plotted high-tech arson in Beyond Recognition, and somebody wound up dying exactly that way. Undercurrents has helped solve three homicides. Yeah, I’ve had this uncanny ability, this luck, and it’s still happening, which is really kind of weird. My curiosity tends to lead me to topics far outside the mainstream, and two years later, when the book’s published, that topic has bubbled up and is now on the front page. I seem to have a bit of a nose.
Another prescient moment in your research led to you adopting a little girl from a Chinese orphanage. I was writing a book about illegal immigrants coming in by container ship, something which had not yet been widely discovered. In the course of my research, I discovered that between 30,000 and 40,000 kids a year were being put into orphanages parentless. Marcelle and I saw the research right when we were talking about trying for a second child, and we said, “Shouldn’t we do this?”
This is Marcelle, your second wife, whom you married in an English castle? That’s a bit of a stretch. We got married in a beautiful town church in the Cotswolds. We were older and didn’t want to do the 300-person wedding. About 24 people signed up to come, and we took over an entire manor house. It was a black-tie wedding. Marcelle wore a black dress, one of a kind, what do you call it? Yeah, couture. We played croquet before the ceremony and had tea.
Brilliant idea. Which brings us to creativity—what nurtures it? Freedom from conformity. And if you believe in genes, I had a really creative grandfather on my mother’s side, the amazing-workshop-in-the-basement kind of guy. An inventor, a goofball, a nut. My paternal grandfather was a pitch-perfect musician. I was born into, as we all are, a dysfunctional family—my father was an alcoholic—so I was sort of emotionally abused as a child, so I was told to never complain. To this day, I’m terrible in relationships, because I just never complain. So I spent hours in my room or goofing off with my brother in the woods avoiding home, because I was too young to understand it and too human not to know that something was going on. And that, I think, enabled me to invent. I created worlds to run to and live in and be in.
Your parents do sound supportive, though. I was tested in every which way, and they kept telling me that there was nothing I couldn’t do. So I was just let loose in the candy store. I can’t imagine now, as a dad, having a kid who had a lot of academic ability come to me and say, “I’m going to head off and be a road musician.” My dad said, “You are a poor lost soul, and I’m not going to support you, but I will be at every gig.” And every gig that was within four hours, my parents came to.
Do you wish they’d written the occasional check? If they had given me money, my life would have been a disaster. I was dirt poor for 11 years. In Providence, we had two rats so big we gave them names. My guy was Harvey. We had the two holes in the wall, and we wrote their names in magic marker above them. They were wharf rats, and they could get up on the edge of the bed. [He mimes their pointy, bared teeth.] It was dead winter, and I lived in the down pants my grandfather wore on his deathbed, because he was so skinny he needed warmth.
You’d started out premed at Kansas University—what happened? I loved the sciences. I appreciate logic. I even plot that way; I’m a heavy plotter. But I dropped out of college. That’s my life’s huge regret. I’m a finisher. I started Boy Scouts, so I got Eagle Scouts. This is something I didn’t finish, and it just rubs me wrong. I feel inadequate.
Um…you’ve done just fine. I got lucky. Every morning I wake up and feel lucky. That’s why I work 10 hours a day: I know somebody else is going to take my job away. I work scared. What the degree would have given me is a faster track at teaching. I love to teach, but I don’t have the credentials. So I have to wait in life for someone to come along and say, do you want to teach? And that’s a long wait. Yeah, I’ve made a ton of money, and I’ve made bestseller lists, and I’m very proud of all of that. But I think where I excel is bringing enthusiasm to teaching and inspiring others.
So why did you leave college? My friend Otis called and said, “Dude, I’ve got cancer. I’m going to go live with my parents and go through some horrific treatment, and I know this is asking a lot, but I would really like you to be there.” I never even hesitated; I just packed up and went. We were like brothers. He came home every day and threw up and lay on the couch, and we all took care of him. And when he felt well enough, we sang.
You’d played in a band together in high school? Yeah, and as Otis got better, we began to play coffeehouses in New York, get some exposure. We put our high school band back together and played for five years, and Otis and I played for six more.
Was that the band with the funny name? No, after those 11 years, I moved to Idaho and started to write, and I played music at night with a couple bands I helped create. One was The Sensational Toast Points. We loved those little crustless bread sandwiches. It was just a joke, ’cause we were a joke band. Everybody had day gigs, and we played the clubs of Sun Valley by night on the weekends. We went out in these 4-by-5-foot pieces of toast with holes cut in them, or in smoking-jacket robes from the ’40s. But we played really good original music as rock ’n’ roll, poppish, danceable music, and it was a sensation. We drew huge crowds.
Interesting that your musical talent predated your writing. I came out of the womb a musician. Our family was ridiculously musical. Not that we’re any good. But every Sunday, we played music together. My dad played banjo-mandolin strung as a ukulele, my mom played a gut-bucket bass, my brother played guitar, I played baritone uke, and my sister played recorder. We did Bob Dylan, Kingston Trio, all of that.
How did you make a living? You said you wrote for eight and a half years without getting published. I was doing odd jobs and playing music, barely making a living. But I was doing two things I loved: writing all day and playing music all night. And being in music was the best boot camp for creativity a person could ask for. I wrote all my songs, and I would bring them to the band. Sometimes I would score the entire piece and give them each their parts. We’d rehearse—sometimes a single song two hours a day for six weeks. We got the songs very tight and very clean. I’d be thinking, “Man, does this song sound great tonight.” And then I would realize: “The flute player is not playing the part I wrote. The bass player’s doing something I don’t even understand.” I realized how other people can make it better.
You take more easily to collaboration than most writers. I have never been a solo writer. Dave Barry, I’m sure if his editors cut his stuff, Dave would string them up by their thumbs. But I work better in a collective, collaborative environment. Those eight years of getting no’s killed me. But I never thought, “I’m Ridley Pearson. You don’t get it.” What I thought was, “I’m Ridley Pearson, and I’m not getting it.”
You’re not as cocky as you could be, you know. [He shrugs.] To be a writer, you have to be really secure, and I’m always a little bit insecure. Besides, one of the things about being a professional writer is, you feel somewhat stupid every day, because there’s always somebody telling you something you are not doing right.
Isn’t it dangerous to heed all criticism? Yeah. As much as I appreciate editorial input and editorial collaboration, I do get really upset when I feel like my work has become a committee effort. Focus groups have destroyed television. And the minute you get three or four editors on a book, it becomes focus-group television. It may reach a wider audience, but it’s been pulped up to do that.
Tell me about your first book. My joke is that even Kinko’s wouldn’t publish it. Franklin Heller, who came out of retirement as a book agent and tried to sell that first book for me, said, “I hope you are not in this business to make money, because you will never make money in writing.” I said, “Right. I’m doing this because I love it.” He said, “So you will start another book tomorrow.”
And St. Martin’s Press bought your second book. Hardcover. The editor said, “I only have two problems: the premise and the ending.” So I started the book all over. I started with the first sentence, and without looking at that draft, I rewrote it four times. They accepted it and they published it. Later, when we started selling the back list to film, one of the books that sold was the first one. They told me, “We don’t want you to have a coronary, but the scriptwriter changed the premise and the ending.” And they’d changed it to exactly what I had the first time.
You’ve written several series of your own, but also a tie-in novel for Stephen King’s Rose Red miniseries. They said, “It will be an 18-year-old girl, and it’s set in the early 1900s, and you are a 45-year-old guy in the 1990s.” And I said, “Yeah, I’ll write it.” It was one of the most fun projects I’ve ever done, and the only book I never outlined. I went through the Library of Congress and found journals from young women who’d crossed the prairie in the 1890s, all excited. Their command of language was so stylized and so beautiful, it was musical. So I jumped into that sound and wrote every day in this very flowery prose that I so enjoyed. To this day I get letters from people, academics, really upset because they thought it was a real diary.
You also write the Kingdom Keepers series for young readers, about kids fighting evil in Disney’s Magic Kingdom. Now you might be writing a young-adult TV series? Steel Trapp. I haven’t gotten the producer’s word back on that first draft yet. I check my phone every 10 minutes [he pulls his phone out]…a-a-a-a-nd it’s still not there. But I think it’s really doable. We worked on a treatment for months, and I finally threw the thing in the trash and started over. I’d been trying to write a really strong pilot, so you would see it and get the entire setup. And what I ended up writing was an episode with one or two little teases of the backstory. We will tell it in little tiny glimpses over a season.
What’s different about writing for young adults? Not much. I think if you were to write down to what’s considered a younger audience, they would sniff it out really quickly. They are actually an incredibly difficult and critical group to write for. They call you out on everything. As a writer, you’re in a head, you’re in a voice, and you write. I can write for younger kids because I am a young kid. Dave and I both were really 13-year-olds trapped in 50-year-old bodies.
What prompted you two to write the Peter and the Star-Catchers series? You gave Peter Pan a full backstory. When our oldest daughter asked how Peter met Captain Hook, I realized there were all these unanswered questions. Why doesn’t he want to grow up? Why can he fly? He detaches from his shadow—that fascinated me. Why would a person want to do that? I said to Dave, “You write—how can I say this respectfully?—booger jokes, and I kill people for a living. What if we combine our talents?”
You’d played together in The Rockbottom Remainders. How did that band start? A media escort in San Francisco thought it would be really fun to throw a bunch of authors together who also played music—a one-night gig for charity. And we played for 20 years. I learned a million things about writing, especially from Dave, Scott Turow, and Steve King.
What do you find yourself changing when you rewrite? In my first drafts, I tend to write very acerbic, caustic dialogue. I don’t mean it to be. My guys tend to be kind of snide—I think that’s funny, but nobody else does. They think these guys are assholes. So I end up going back to take that out.
You won the first Raymond Chandler Fulbright to Oxford. What was that year like? It was amazing. They said, “We are going to pay you to be a visiting don at Wadham College, Oxford, and your job is to research and outline your next book. They gave me an office that overlooked the Bodleian and I lived above the Kings Arms pub that had been built in 1055, and I hung out with some of the greatest minds in the world. I’m kind of shy. My first day at lunch—the dons eat in this old library—they were all collected at the end of the table and I left four or five chairs between me and them, and one came over and put his hand on my shoulder and said, “You are the Fulbright fellow, yeah?” I said, “Yeah, I’m Ridley.” And he said, “Ridley, he who sits apart is apart.”
It took you months to realize you could invite anyone you wanted to meet to High Table and they’d come. I brought someone from Scotland Yard to dinner with the dons, all of whom love mysteries, and at the end he said, “Ridley, do you know what you have with this High Table thing?” So in my last month, every week I had two prominent people come, and I was able to just drain them of research, and they got drunk with the dons. It was a case of Dorothy’s slippers: I had had this magic all along, and it took somebody saying, “Do you know what you have?” That is another life lesson: Take nothing for granted. This gangly little American dude had access to what every Brit wants, which is access to High Table.
You grew up in Connecticut, lived a year in Oxford, and settled in St. Louis? I love St. Louis. I quickly became a major, major supporter of St. Louis after moving here. I think St. Louis has what Seattle had before Microsoft came. It was a really special place then. When you move here, you realize it’s a place with 38 museums, a multitude of important universities, and all the brilliant minds it takes to populate those universities. And everything is within 20 minutes of everything else, with almost no traffic. We have major sports teams, great restaurants, people that understand kids, a church on every corner, and the second-oldest symphony in the country.
No complaints? The one thing that upset me, as an East Coast probably liberal, was the way St. Louis still seems so—we’re a racist city. And I don’t understand that. Pete Santos and David Walters and I started America Scores St. Louis, an affiliate of a national group that combines soccer and poetry for inner-city kids, to bring them into teamwork, keep them moving, and get them reading and writing. We have elevated the key scores of all these kids on national tests. Because one of the first things I said to David when I met him was, “What is with this town’s attitude toward blacks? It’s like prehistory. There’s a chain-link fence around North St. Louis.” I don’t get why we don’t pour money into the schools, pay companies to move there. We could turn this thing around in five or 10 years.
Your sport is…er…recreational tree-climbing? I climbed trees as a kid in New England and some of my worlds were up there, those imaginative worlds I lived in. Robert Fulghum introduced me to recreational tree climbing—climbing trees as an adult in a safe way that doesn’t hurt the tree—and it just made me a kid again. You wear this modified rock-climbing gear that allows you to go really high up. I think the highest I’ve been was 175 feet in a 400-foot old-growth redwood tree, which it’s illegal to climb, but I have climbed them. The first branch was 60 or 70 feet off the ground, so we had to reach it by bow and arrow, shooting lead lines up, and then you tie into the tree on things we call monkey tails, 15-foot-long pieces of seat-belt material sewn into carabiners, and then you can free-climb, unclipping and reclipping them. You look down on bald eagles flying. Then there’s what we call topping out: You go up into the smallest part of the tree and tie in to the stem and hold on to these tiny branches, and you’re moving all around in the wind, and your heart is beating 5,000 miles an hour. You pop up out of the tree, and the very top of the tree is at your navel, and you can see the whole world.
