What makes a good crime novel: a murder on the first page; a complex heroine; scenes of gruesome violence perhaps? It's none of these for bestselling author Tess Gerritsen, but "it's tension," she told Weekend Review at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature held in Dubai last month. What she loves is the threat of something about to happen; something lurking behind a door; or an undisclosed menace that could strike at any moment.
"What I think is a really readable book, what makes you keep turning the pages is this overall sense of being off-balance, that something is not right," she said, "That's the secret of that — a book that glues you to the page".
Gerritsen followed an unconventional route to becoming a full-time author, having first qualified and practiced as a medical doctor. She had, however, started writing as a child and knew she wanted to be a writer from an early age. But being the daughter of immigrants that tend to be "incredibly" focused on financial security, her father told her she wasn't going to make a living as a writer.
"So I was a good little Chinese girl and I went to medical school as he wished," she said.
Having had to abandon her first love — writing — as a child, she found time to return to it when she was on maternity leave with her first child.
"I went back to my first love," she said, after working in a practical profession that she "wasn't in love with".
In 1987 her first book, romantic thriller Call After Midnight, was published and eight other romantic suspense novels followed.
Eleven years later, Gerritsen published her first medical thriller Harvest, which reached the New York Times bestseller list. With two young children, the author said she had to learn to write in "snatches" and become very focused.
"You learn to work around your children's rhythms; I was very lucky that both my children took long naps," she said, adding that she would take the opportunity of writing a couple of pages of her books while they were sleeping.
The less time you have, however, the more efficient you are as a writer, she said: "And now I'm a full-time writer, I'm very inefficient. It takes me just as long to write a book now as it did when I had two kids at home".
Gerritsen's books have now been translated into 37 languages and more than 20 million copies have been sold worldwide.
The fourth medical thriller that followed introduced Dr Maura Isles as a secondary character. The Rizzoli and Isles series was soon after born and is now nine titles strong. Homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles are also the stars of a TV series, which airs on MBC4 in the UAE.
The creation of the Rizzoli and Isles series was in fact very "organic", as first Isles and then Rizzoli were introduced as minor characters. Rizzoli was first introduced in The Surgeon (2001) but, Gerritsen said, "she was supposed to die in that book and she ended up not dying. I introduced Maura Isles as a second character so they became a duo just because I couldn't stop where their lives were going".
Rizzoli has been described as a "hard-driving very aggressive homicide detective" and is a working-class girl, a "blue-collar cop" as Gerritsen called her, while Isles comes from a more privileged background as a doctor. "You wouldn't normally expect them to get on very well, you wouldn't expect them to really relate," she said. However, the chalk and cheese characters are a crime-fighting female duo, with the same goal: "to catch the bad guy". Jane is impulsive and brash and not afraid to say what she thinks, while Maura is the "cool, logical, Mr Spok half of the duo", she said.
Gerritsen admits that Dr Maura Isles is similar to herself — where she went to medical school (the University of California, San Francisco), what she studied in college and what kind of car she drives.
One of the dilemmas that cause most comments among Gerritsen's readers is her romantic misadventures — she falls in love with the wrong man, a Catholic priest.
This affair of the human heart is unpredictable and even fairly intelligent women make really bad romantic choices, she said.
"There's something about the unobtainable man; they're very attractive".
Gerritsen's next book The Silent Girl is, she said, the first one that encapsulates so much of her own life because of its setting in Boston's Chinatown and its plot basis on the Chinese fairytales her mother told her as a child.
The Monkey King featured in a children's fairytale. He's a creature that's born out of the mountains, Gerritsen recalled, becoming King of the monkeys and then immortal. Eventually through time and misadventures he becomes a holy creature and a force for good.
In The Silent Girl, people are being killed in Chinatown, and the only clue left are monkey hairs. Rizzoli becomes acquainted with the Chinese legends and starts to wonder if there's really something supernatural going on.
The Silent Girl, will be out in July and forms the ninth in the Rizzoli and Isles series.
