Pizza, Death, and Writing: the Shane Gericke Interview

Me: Thanks for the sawbuck, Shane. Just about covers the delicious fatty snacks I needed to power me through this death march—er, interview.

Shane: My pleasure. Gonna share those bacon strips, right?

Me: No.

Shane: Wow, you are a writer.

Me: I learned my social graces from the best writer I know.

Shane: That’s surprisingly nice of you to say.

Me: I’ll suck up that much for a sawbuck. Fulsome praise costs extra. So, you always wanted to be a writer, right, er?

Shane: I see what you did there. All right, you want early years, I got early years. I received my first typewriter at age 7, thanks to Santa’s wise and forward-thinking parental elves. Six decades later, I still typewrite every day. The technology is MacBook Pro laptop instead of finger-spraining manual Underwood, but my goal is the same: Write like my hair’s on fire.

Which is why you have less of it now than at age 7.

Nobody likes a weisenheimer.

Your words are so hurtful to me, Shane. Especially when I brought a bottle of Ardbeg whisky and a deep-dish Chicago pizza to share.

Scotch and pizza, our favorites!

We know, right?

I take it all back, Me, you’re the bestest of the best. OK, first question, go.

[opens notebook] “If you were a tree, what tree would you be?”

Seriously? You can do better for ten bucks.

Well, then, “boxers or briefs?”

The Incredible Hulk doesn’t like close quarters. So, commando.

[sighs] I’m gonna regret taking this gig, aren’t I?

Yeah. But that’s why we have whisky.

[brightens] [takes noisy swig of Ardbeg] [grimaces from violent nasal fire] [scoops out battleship-sized triangles of thick and delicious sausage pizza from container redolent of hot, damp cardboard]

Lou Malnati’s deep-dish sausage. Excellent choice. You know from Chicago pizza, my friend.

Back atcha. But what I really want to know is, How come it’s spelled “Gericke” with a G, but pronounced “YER-kee” with a Y. Were you dropped on your head at birth?

Yes, but that’s not the reason. When the seven Guericke brothers (note the additional U in the surname, which provided the “YER” sound) emigrated from Germany in the 1800s, they dropped the “U” to make the name look more, I guess, American. All it did was give their descendants a headache trying to explain YER vs. GRR pronunciation.

Are there any famous Gerickes? I mean, besides you?

Sure. Uncle Otto.

Er, um, ah, sure, but refresh my memory . . .

That would be Otto von Guericke, a genius aristocrat, inventor, and mayor of medieval Magdeburg, Prussia (now Germany) in the mid-1600s. Note the “U” in Uncle Otto’s “Guericke.” Did I mention he was a genius?

Must have skipped a generation with us, bro.

True dat.

Not someone, but something: the cowboy movie from 1950, “Shane.” The little blond kid chasing after gunslinger Alan Ladd hollering, “Shane! Come back, Shane!” Remember that? My folks did, and when I popped out later that decade, they handed it to me. Which I appreciate, despite the phonetic challenges: “Shane Gericke” is a cool name for a writer. It’s exotic enough to stand out, and gender-less enough to let readers assume what they want. Best of all, my books sit next to literary phenom Tess Gerritsen’s on store shelves. When fans reach for her book and grab mine by accident—it has happened, and more than once—I ring up a sale. Thanks, Tess!

Tess says you’re welcome. I hear you got hooked on writing at age 7. True?

True, and for that you can credit Mrs. Feely. I was in second grade in the tiny town of Lincoln Estates, forty miles south of Chicago, where I grew up. One snowy morning I was practicing Parker Penmanship on one of those lined gray tablets with the wood slivers embedded in the paper. (I have no idea why I remember these weird little details. I just do.) My teacher, Mrs. Francis Feely, hair of snow and eyes of plutonium (she didn’t miss much), walked into the classroom with a stack of mimeographs—

Mimeographs? WTF is a mimeograph? Some kinda French mime, right? Pale knobby knees and a pastel beret? Geez, I hate those glass rooms they build . . .

Chill, dawg. Mimeograph machines (also called “dittos”) were the precursor to Xeroxes. Teachers typed a handout onto a stencil master. They hooked that to the ditto machine and cranked the handle. Voila, copies popped out the other end. It was a “wet” technology, not dry like the later Xeroxes, so the copies were damp from ammonia “toner.” You could get high breathing that stuff. In fact, there was a scene in the movie “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” where an entire classroom of kids sniffed a mimeo’d test in unison and—

Uh, never mind. What was this mimeo’d doohickey she handed out?

Mrs. Feely called it a newspaper. There were “news” stories about events and people at the school. Each story was topped by the name of an eighth-grader.

They call that a byline, right?

As in, “By David Robinson” or “By Drake Tungsten,” right. The stories were written by the older kids and distributed to the entire school, which didn’t take long; we had only 130 kids in grades one through eight. (No kindergarten back then; to this day I am deficient in napping and rounded scissors.) Lincoln Estates was an unincorporated hamlet of about 300, just two miles down the Lincoln Highway from Frankfort, our local “teeming metropolis” of 2,000. (Chicago, 40 miles north, was a magical trip to the Land of Oz, except the yellow brick road was Harlem Avenue.) Classic small-town America, Lincoln Estates was: one gas station, two churches, three taverns, and hundreds of working-class Americans who called it Home.

So you liked this smelly purple newspaper?

I was enchanted. This was news! It was happening right now! More important, girls admired newspaper writers! I asked Mrs. Feely if I could write a story and have a byline. Not missing the opportunity to slip a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down—teachers are wily that way—she said, “If you learn proper English, reading, spelling, and punctuation, yes, then you could write for a newspaper.” Given what I see on social media these days, her theory has changed, and not for the better.

Not just a writer, but a newspaperman. Seeing those bylines on that smelly mimeo flipped a switch inside me, and I never looked back. Sadly, by the time I got to eighth grade, the school board had killed the newspaper—budget cuts. For a ream of ditto paper? Sheesh. But I got to write for the high school paper, the Lincoln-Way Squire (the school mascot was the Knights, we were the Squire, get it?) and became editor in chief. Fun fact: The Squire’s music reviewer was Karla DeVito, who went on to become the female lead singer with rock star Meat Loaf, then a solo career. She’s married to actor Robbie Benson. Hi, Karla!

Was that your first big break?

Yes. But there were more. We writers like to pretend we became a success entirely on our own, pulling ourselves up by our verb-encrusted bootstraps whilst crouched over a stone tablet carving Trvth. The reality is we’d never become published without the help of teachers like Francis Feely and editors like Ed Czerwinski, who ran my hometown weekly, The Herald. He was looking for someone to cover high school sports and asked the principal at Lincoln-Way if anyone was interested. I was, and I met Ed in the newspaper’s office: a battered warren of rooms attached to the back of a restaurant.

How’d the meeting go?

Swell. This was the big-time for a small-town kid—the office smelled like a paper mill from all the yellowed newspapers piled about. It had battered dial telephones, manual typewriters, carbon paper, and grease pencils, the essential tools of the trade back in the day. We used the darkroom in the back to develop the black-and-white film we shot (Tri-X Pan, for those who remember the glory that was Kodak). We talked awhile, and then he treated me to lunch. I was thrilled. Every newspaper should come with its own restaurant.

You took the job?

In a heartbeat. Ed asked me to cover Lincoln-Way sports: football, basketball, and baseball every week, with stories on “minor” sports like wrestling and gymnastics as time permitted. I’d cover every ballgame, home and away, write features, and take all the photographs. For this he offered the princely sum of $30 a month. I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to write about sports, and thought this was so much money I’d never need any more in my life.

I trust you came to your senses about moolah?

Mother Gericke raised no stupid children. After a year and a half of working for Ed, I went to college to pursue a journalism degree. While attending classes, I worked as a paid reporter and editor at the Northern Star, the student newspaper at Northern Illinois University. I spent four happy years in that job. I met my wife, Jerrle, in the newsroom. (I wrote news, she covered sports. A match made in heaven.) I wrote a feature about Eddie Collins, a scrawny local nudist who decided to run for President of the United States. It got picked up by a Chicago magazine and I got paid. A polemic I wrote about our disgraced college president was judged the nation’s best college newspaper editorial in 1978 by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation. I flew to San Francisco to pick up my award. It was the first time I’d ever been on an airplane.

If you were a tree, what tree would you be?

Bite me.

Guess that makes you a softwood. [snickers] When did you get your first full-time newspaper job?

Right after I graduated college in 1978. I was hired by the Daily Dispatch in Moline, Illinois, one of the fabled Quad-Cities of Moline, Rock Island, Davenport and Bettendorf. It was a demanding job, and my boss, Gerald Taylor, liked how I was willing to try anything, so he let me go to town. I learned a ton about story editing, page layout, working under deadline pressure, and producing high-quality daily newspapers. I worked there three years, then took a similar job with the Joliet Herald-News, a paper with a bigger circulation and much closer to where Jerrle and I both grew up: Chicago and Lincoln Estates, respectively. I worked the midnight shift for a year and a half, and then got the phone call for my dream job.

The show? The varsity? The big dance?

Yes, yes, and yes—I was gonna work for the fabled Chicago Sun-Times. I’d grown up reading that newspaper—my folks had it delivered to the house—and in 1982, the year I started, it was one of the nation’s leading and largest newspapers. Mike Royko was a columnist. Ditto Ann Landers, Roger Simon, and Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning movie critic. The chief copy editor had kept my resume—I applied for a job during my senior year in college—and he figured what the hell, give the kid a chance. I was hired as an editor in the business section, which was expanding to take on the bigger Chicago Tribune, which was across from the Sun-Times Building in downtown Chicago. Fun fact: the Sun-Times Building was demolished and replaced by Trump Tower Chicago.

Is the Billy Goat Tavern nearby?

The famous Saturday Night Live “cheeseborger, cheeseborger, no fries, cheeps” skit was based on that newspaperman bar, which was literally yards from the basement door of the Sun-Times. My job interview was held at the Billy Goat. The chief copy editor liked to get candidates drunk to see if they could hold their own under the influence.

Or perhaps the chief copy editor liked drinking on company time?

Ummm, perhaps. After our second pitcher of dark beer—two guys, two pitchers, what could go wrong?—he said I could talk without drooling so he offered me the job. My hangover the next day was Brobdingnagian—that’s a ten-dollar word for “really big”—but so worth it. One of my most cherished writer-guy memories.

How long did you work there?

Started in 1982, left at Y2K. By then, I had worked in newspapers for decades, and I was also the chairman of the Chicago Newspaper Guild, the reporters’ union at The Bright One.

The, um, “Bright One?”

What the paper called itself in radio ad campaigns: “Wake up, wake, up, wake up, wake up, wake up to The Bright One, the Chicago Sun-Times!” (Don’t blame me; I didn’t write the jingle.) Anyway, I loved being an ink-stained wretch, but the thriller-novel itch had gotten too big to not scratch, and the shiny new millennium seemed a good time to do it.

What is a thriller novel? How does it differ from a mystery novel?

I define a thriller as a mystery on crack. In other words, a thriller is a story built for speed. It’s designed to grab readers by the eyeballs and hurl them down the train tracks to the collapsed bridge over the waterfall as a hurricane bears down on the nuclear power plant that’s under siege from terrorists firing Ebola-coated bullets from machine guns.

And a leggy young scientist with doe eyes and fearless spirit (and Jeep that needs a good washing) who’s the only character brilliant and brave enough to Save Our Planet from the Hellbeast of Extinction?

I was trying not to be sexist. But now that you mention it, well, as long as she admires hunk-a-riffic writers with pewter hair . . .

“Pewter?” You’re grayer than winter in Finland. Grayer than perch gone bad. Grayer than the fate of Old Yeller—

Said the pot to the kettle.

Touché. So, you’ve always wanted to write thriller novels?

Yes. When I was a kid, my maternal grandmother took the train from Chicago to our teeny town to visit us. (The Illinois Central electric line, for those of you familiar with Chicago transportation.) Every visit, “Nana” brought each of us—my two sisters, Marianne and Diana, and me—a book to read. (Thank you, employee discount at Marshall Field’s.) Marianne received “Nancy Drew, Girl Detective.” Diana got “The Bobbsey Twins.” I got “The Hardy Boys,” the long-running series starring teenage brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, who solved crimes and thwarted criminals alongside their dad, “world-famous detective Fenton Hardy.”

Makes sense you’d like cop stories. Your dad was a police officer, right?

A police sergeant, yes, so reading these crime capers was kinda-sorta like I was out on patrol with Dad, catching crooks. (In college, I got to ride along with him on the midnight shift, drinking over-boiled cop coffee and listening to war stories. Swear to God, cops and firefighters tell the best stories. Another fond memory.) I loved those detective books, read them under the covers with a flashlight late at night, which my parents pretended not to notice because I was reading, an activity of which they approved. The Hardy Boys made me think that someday, maybe, I could write a crime novel. Decades in newspapering seemed perfect training for that job, so, brimming with Everest-sized overconfidence, I left a perfectly sensible newspaper job for the vagaries of book publishing.

Bet you were an overnight success.

You crapped out on that bet, mimeo breath. My first two manuscripts didn’t go anywhere—I queried a hundred literary agents and publishers, and not one of them took it. They admired the writing but declared the subject impossible to publish—religious terrorists strike the United States—so they’d take a pass. (Remember, this was pre-9/11.) Looking at the manuscripts now, I can see the writing was uneven—crazy good in some spots, sputum in others.

Great word, “sputum.”

I try, I try. The emotions, the passion of the writing, those pulsed off the pages like heat rays. The plot was there, too. I simply didn’t know how to tell it correctly. Long-form writing is an art unto itself, and must be learned through endless hours of writing, cussing, and rewriting. In journalism, a long story is 1,000 words. In fiction, you’re talking 100,000. Story management is entirely different, and I didn’t know that. But I kept at it and learned.

Leading to your first published novel in 2006.

Yes, Blown Away. After my religious terrorism manuscripts went the way of the dodo bird, I decided to write a nice little crime story starring a female cop who fights a serial killer—Emily Thompson, rookie police officer in Naperville, Illinois, the Chicago suburb where I lived from 1984 until I moved to Arizona in 2022.

How did you make a publisher say “Deal”?

I told myself to keep the story simple and exciting, skip the fancy allusions and rhetorical flourishes. I finished it and found a literary agent to make the rounds on my behalf. Kensington Publishing bought the rights. Remember I said I’d written Blown Away as a nice little standalone cop thriller? Well, Executive Editor Michaela Hamilton had grander plans and asked if this was the debut of a series. I lied like a rug and said yes. (Only a dope turns down a multi-book deal, right?) I had almost no time to concoct a plot for the second book, but I managed, and Cut to the Bone was the result. Torn Apart became the third of my bestselling crime trilogy, and was shortlisted for the prestigious Thriller Award and named a Book of the Year by Suspense Magazine. So yes, I was an overnight success—only twenty-five years of practice, two unsold manuscripts, and a hundred rejections. Easy!

Can I buy your first three books?

They will be available in 2026.

2026 is so far away. Do you have a book I can buy quicker?

Glad you asked. It’s called Ocean of Bones, and it’s out September 4, 2025. It’s a standalone adventure novel. You can pre-order it right now for delivery in September.

Pre-order it is! But standalone? What does that mean?

That it’s not part of a series. It’s a book that stands alone.

Gotcha. Hey, did you expect to make millions on your first manuscript?

To be painfully honest, yes. I was counting my chickens not only before they were hatched, but before the rooster got that certain gleam in his eye for Henny Penny. When I wrote Crusade, my first manuscript, I was planning the New York Times-bestseller party before I mailed the first box to the first agent. Two weeks later the letter appeared in my mailbox: We’re sorry to inform you. Ditto on the follow-ups: Rejected! Rejected! Rejected! You . . . are . . . rejected! More than a hundred rejections.

Almost as many times as girls rejected you for senior prom, I hear.

I swear I’m going to kill Dean for telling you that story. And hey, even if it took a while for us to make the connection, Kim turned out to be the prettiest, smartest, and coolest senior prom date. And, also, remember what I said about shaddup?

[snickers] So what’d you do after all those rejections—uh, book rejections?

When a nail is tired of being hammered, it either disappears into a hole or it bends. I bent by abandoning religious terrorism for a simple cops-and-robbers tale. By the time I finished writing it, my expectations for success were considerably, uh, lessened. So honestly, I wasn’t expecting anything extraordinary—sell a few thousand copies, earn a few reviews, and build on that.

Did magic happen?

Unexpectedly, delightfully, yes. Blown Away came out May 6, 2006. On May 23, my editor called to say congratulations, you hit the Barnes & Noble bestseller list. I’d turned 50 that very day, so between 50 and that news, I was speechless.

I’d be speechless too.

There is no I in WE, dumbski.

Uh, right. A bestselling novel on our first at-bat. Dang!

I was blown away, no pun intended. As a baby novelist, you honestly have no clue whether your own mother will like your work (for the record, she did), let alone millions of strangers with choices on how to spend their entertainment dollar. But they did, and Blown Away went on to win Debut Mystery of the Year honors from RT Book Reviews along with a truckload of stellar reviews. Foreign publishers snapped up translation rights: Germany, China, Slovakia, and Turkey.

And then the rest of the trilogy.

Cut to the Bone appeared the following year, and after that, Torn Apart, which was shortlisted for the Thriller Award for Best Novel (a very big deal) and named a Book of the Year by Suspense Magazine, all of which helped ease my lingering embarrassment at my overweening early overconfidence. I was tickled pink.

“Tickled?” Not very macho for a thriller writer . . .

Tickle this, mi hombre.

Put that thing away, you’ll shoot your eye out! [accepts applause for homage to A Christmas Story] All right, switching gears: even though fiction characters are faker than a politician’s smile, are they real to you? Does it feel like you could invite them for dinner?

Of course they seem real. I have conversations with them all the time, just like with flesh-and-blood friends. The character conversations are strictly in my head, of course. If we talked aloud, the friendly folks in the white coats would come a-callin’.

Does everyone in Chicago say, “Da Bears!” like those Superfan guys on TV?

Yes. I’m sure the Pope does too since he’s from the South Side.

Awesome, dude!

We don’t say “awesome, dude.” Ditka don’t surf.

Sorry, just back from L.A. All right, translate this into Chicago for me: “Say, good fellow! Let us gather our chums who are milling at yonder dockside conversing with the mayor. We shall partake in fine dining, and then attend a sporting event, where the battle will be fierce but fair and the best team shall prevail.”

[clears throat] “Yo, Skeezix! Grab dem guys standin’ by Hizzoner—yeah, yeah, Da Mare, over dere, by dat dinghy—an make it snappy. We’ll stop by the Jewel’s for hot dawgs and sammiches, den go watch Da Bears cream Da Packers, who are suckwads.”

“Skeezix”?

Just seeing if you remember your Chicago comics heritage.

Haw! I remember Gasoline Alley now! So, you gonna wash down your “hot dawgs” and “sammiches” with Pabst Blue Ribbon—

PBR? Seriously? What did I ever do to you?

Point taken. [urp] Are your books based on real police officers and their cases?

You mean like on Dragnet? No. Emily Thompson isn’t real. She’s a figment of my overcaffeinated brain. Just like Marty Benedetti, Annie Bates, Hercules Branch, the Zodiac killers, the Executioner, the magical deer, and all the other characters in my books: fictional. Basing characters on actual human beings (and deer) limits what I can do with them in the books. So I make them up. (Speaking of Dragnet, check out this hilarious sendup of Sergeant Joe Friday: The Copper Clapper Caper.)

How do you toast yourself when you’re done making stuff up?

If you’re referring to alcohol, and I think you are, what makes you think I imbibe?

We’re a writer.

Good point, Me. My favorite Scotch is Ardbeg, an uber-smoky single-malt whisky that makes my ears buzz like happy little honeybees. It goes great with deep-dish pizza. Course, everything goes great with deep-dish, doesn’t it?

I’ll say. Any movie possibilities for your books?

Flurries of interest over the years, but nothing solid. That’s Hollywood—no movement for years, then bam comes an eye-popping offer. I’d like that. I could get one of those Kangol hats and wear it backwards, like Tarantino!

Landscape photography, primarily, which lets me hike the glorious Sonoran Desert to shoot pictures, which you can buy at FineArtAmerica. Watch for a twenty-percent-off sale!

Nice way to slip in a plug for your photos.

Hey, the rent doesn’t pay itself.

I said that in admiration, not condemnation, cause we all gotta make a living. But please go on, what else do you do in your off time?

I read, travel, and study the mysteries of ancient Scotland.

You’re Scottish?

I’m an American of many generations. But my ancestry is half German and half British, with the British part breaking down to Welsh, English, and Scottish. I gravitate to the Scottish part most because of the romance of the Highlands, the photographer’s dream of a wild landscape, and the skirl of the bagpipes—

Ow, bagpipes! A bag of banshees.

Damn right. I love them. I could listen to the pipes all day.

That explains your hearing loss.

What?

Ha-ha. Anything else about how you spend your off time?

Road trips. I love taking road trips.

You go by yourself?

Got no choice. I used to everything with my honey, Jerrle, my wife of four decades, proving that yes, one can live happily ever after. Sadly, she died in 2015 of metastatic breast cancer. MBC is eviler than a mob enforcer, I’ll tell you.

Ah, geez, cancer sucks. I’m sorry for our loss, man. 

Thanks. Me, too. She was a magnificent woman and my writing muse. But her memory will live on through my books, each of which were written with her in mind.

Who were your early writing influences?

Newspaper reporters. As I noted earlier (yay, you, for reading this far), I spent a couple of decades in the business. I revere serious journalists, because they are gods—nobody else keeps an eye on the government and corporate leaders who affect our daily lives.

And in fiction?

My earliest influence was “Franklin W. Dixon,” who wrote the Hardy Boys series beloved by millions of boys and girls worldwide. “Dixon” was the pseudonym for the posse of freelance authors who wrote the books for the series syndicator.

After that came Mickey Spillane and his Mike Hammer; Robert B. Parker and his Spenser; John Sandford and his Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers; and Frederick Forsythe for Day of the Jackal, a book I read so many times the pages literally fell out. I tried to love Robert Ludlum, but his plots were so twisty-turny I couldn’t keep track. Author Gayle Lynds kept up his tradition after he died, and she was far easier to read. All those cool adventure stories made me dream I could be a thriller novelist someday.

And now you are.

Yes, thanks to the wonderful readers who buy my books. Without them, I’d have to work at, um, THIS PLACE, which would really, really, really, really suck. Really.

My trilogy of the holy: James Lee Burke and his Dave Robicheaux series; John Sandford and his Prey series; and Lee and Andrew Child and their Jack Reacher series.

Burke has no peer in descriptive language; I can smell, taste, and hear the swamps of South Louisiana where his main character, New Iberia Sheriff’s Deputy Dave Robicheaux, chases bad guys and, occasionally, the ghosts of the Confederacy. I like to think my Ocean of Bones has Burkeian overtones, but readers will be the judge of that. Sandford features two dynamite lead characters—Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers—a move-it-along writing style, an eye for telling details, and cop humor so compelling that if he wrote auto repair manuals, I’d read them. As for Jack Reacher and his creators, what can I say but, Wowee-wow-wow.

When I have a taste for historical fiction, I reach for a Lady Emily book by Tasha Alexander, who’s married to Reacher author Andrew Child, who is Lee’s brother. Andrew took over the series when Lee decided to shift his talents into the Reacher movies with Tom Cruise and then the Reacher series on Netflix. They’re an all-in-the-family story factory.

Any other authors you admire?

Hundreds. Fiction and nonfiction. Even the folks who write the copy for the back of cereal boxes. But to name one I’d have to name them all and there’s not enough digital ink on the Internet.

Switching gears again, I hear you were an Eagle Scout.

“A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful . . .” I still have the medal in my desk drawer. Sadly, I do not fit in my little green uniform any longer, for I am no longer little. But Mom sewed my patches and merit badges on a U.S. Army blanket (Dad won the Bronze Star as an Army combat engineer in Korea. He brought home a . . . wool blanket. Go figure) and gave it to me when I got married. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice.

[turns wistful] I only made Tenderfoot in Scouts. Whenever I whittled a stick I cut my finger, so they made me join Camp Fire Girls. 

I’m sorry. You can have my blanket if you want. Use it as a napkin for your deep dish.

Really? Thanks! [tucks blanket around thick, working-class neck, immediately slops tomato sauce on Beekeeping merit badge] Do you read thriller novels, or do you just write them?

I devour thrillers with even more enthusiasm than pizzas. Thriller novels are the highest form of literature. Quit rolling your eyes; thrillers tell hard truths about life, they keep your attention till the very last word, they’re chock-a-brim with a deep understanding of the human spirit, both pure and evil, and the writing is crisp, clear, and exciting. That’s the very definition of “literature.” Proust, Joyce and the other literary “gods” could have taken lessons from David Morrell, Steve Berry, and Laura Lippman.

James Effing Joyce. Sweet Jaysus, I hated Ulysses.

Everyone hates Ulysses. It’s as reader friendly as a porcupine dipped in anthrax. And don’t get me started on Finnegan’s Wake, the most portentous slab of “writing” I have ever tried to read. “Sod’s brood, be me fear! Sanglorians, save! Arms apeal with larms, appalling. Killykillkilly: a toll, a toll. What chance cuddleys, what cashels aired and ventilated! What bidimetoloves sinduced by what tegotetabsolvers! What true feeling for their’s hayair with what strawng voice of false jiccup! O here here how hoth sprowled met the duskt the father of fornicationists but, (O my shining stars and body!) how hath fanespanned most high heaven the skysign of soft advertisement! But was iz? Iseut? Ere were sewers?” Really? If I’d handed that to my publishers, my next “book” would be the employee’s manual at McDonald’s. But this is considered Literature. Sigh. Give me two liters of James Lee Burke, stat. Stirred, not shaken.

Let’s talk about your author bio.

My bio? Which part?

“Having been held at knifepoint, hit by lightning, widowed by cancer, pin-cushioned by killer bees, and choked by a pulmonary embolism the size of a Buick. But the sound of his singing voice convinced him to stick with writing and photography, and so he became a bestselling crime novelist and award-winning photographer.”

You know I can’t sing.

No kidding. But I’m fascinated by your first sentence: death, death, death, death, and, um, death. Almost. You got some splainin’ to do, Lucy.

[rolls eyes] You do Desi Arnaz worse than I sing. But to your point, I was held at knifepoint in an outhouse at a state park when I was eleven. I’d just finished doing my business when two men jumped me from the stalls. They threw me against a wall, stuck a knife in my neck, and demanded to know what I’d seen. I said I didn’t see anything, I just came to pee. They debated whether to let me go or cut off my head and stuff me in the two-holer. I voted for letting me go. They did. Much later in life I figured out they were getting their jollies by scaring a kid. But at the time? I was petrified I was going to die with my head in one hole and me in another and my parents wouldn’t find me. To this day I hope hyenas ate their stupid faces on their way home. Are there hyenas in Illinois? No. But I was eleven, what did I know?

Good Lord, Shane, that’s terrible.

I thought so too. But you suck it up and get on with life, right?

Speaking of moving along . . . lightning?

I was hit by lightning at age fourteen. Eight of us Boy Scouts were swimming in the river at summer camp when the waterfront director ordered us out of the water. We griped and moaned because it was a hot summer day. He said he heard a little crackle on the AM radio station he was listening to and didn’t like it, so, Out. We climbed onto the riverbank just as a bolt of lightning struck from a clear blue sky. We were all knocked unconscious. When we came to, we saw the director slumped motionless in the watch tower. We climbed the ladder to see he was as green as an old penny. We tried to resuscitate him to no avail—he’d been killed instantly, the rest of us only knocked out. By then the storm, which had hidden itself behind the hills next to the camp, marched over the top and opened up like fire hoses. An ambulance skidded its way through the mud and took him away, but that’s all the help we got—the storm had flooded area roads so badly they were all closed, so we laid all night on banquet tables in the dining hall. The storm ended the next morning so we finally went home.

Remind me to never go camping with you again.

Lucky for you I’m built for hotel rooms and air conditioning, not tents and mosquitoes.

What’s next?

I told you about metastatic breast cancer killing my Jerrle four days short of her 60th birthday.

Yes, you did. That was a dreadful year.

I will hate 2015 for the rest of my life.

Amen. And the killer bees?

I was photographing a sun-fried wooden cabin in western Arizona in spring 2025. It was part of the ruins of Poston, one of the dozen remote concentration camps in which this nation locked American citizens during World War Two for the “crime” of Japanese ancestry. A hive of Africanized honeybees—aka killer bees—lived inside the cabin and decided to come out and play. People die from being stung hundreds or thousands of times by these hyper-aggressive assassins, but I smooshed bees on my head and arms as I ran for my car fifty yards away. I only got stung a dozen times before I closed the door on them. I was fortunate.

Those stings hurt like hell. Speaking of hell . . .

Pulmonary embolism the size of a Buick, baby! I had Achilles tendon reconstruction surgery in early December 2024. A month later I started feeling a little rundown, and it was a hard to catch my breath after any kind of exertion. I had no pain, though, so I put it down to postsurgical ick. One day my sister Diana and her boyfriend Gary dropped by to visit. She thought I didn’t look so good, so I explained. They finished visiting, went home, and an hour later she called: “We’re going to the hospital, Big Brother.”

You didn’t argue?

Argue with my sisters? What am I, an idiot? She hotfooted us to Mayo Clinic, which had performed the tendon surgery. ER doc asked what was ailing me, I told her, and she frowned. “I don’t like your story,” she said. She sent me for a rapid CT scan and when she read the results, said, “You have a pulmonary embolism that’s plugged up both lungs. You’re going into surgery immediately.” As nurses prepared me on the gurney, I heard the doctor say into a phone in the hall, “Page the crash team. He’s coming now.” The surgery was successful, but it was a very near thing. In the ICU the next day, the hospital doctor said if I’d waited just two more days to come to ER they couldn’t have saved me. Thank goodness for sisters and their sixth senses about Big Brothers.

Let’s buy her a pizza too!

Lou Malnati’s for everyone! Diana and Marianne and Gary and David; everyone was wonderful helping me recover from the embolism surgery and the Achilles, for which my foot was still casted. I couldn’t ask for a better family.

Let’s end it on that heartwarming note. Thanks for asking me to conduct this interview, Shane. You’re not nearly as big a weenie as everyone says.

Thanks. I think.