Lincoln Child
I had been a fan of the museum ever since coming to New York as a dewy-eyed college graduate. I loved nothing better than taking the behind-the-scenes tours and seeing the cubbyholes where real-life Indiana Joneses hung their pith helmets. After each such tour I would leave the museum thinking, “What an amazing old pile! When I retire I’ll have to write its history.” Then one day I realized: “You dolt! Why go to all that work when you can pay some other poor scrivener to do it?” After all, I was a book editor, and it was my job to find new projects for my house to publish. I found Doug’s articles in the museum’s magazine, and I invited him to lunch. He was exactly the kind of person I was looking for: young and hungry looking (note to Preston-Child readers: imagine Bill Smithback). I pitched the idea of an informal history and armchair tour of the museum, to be written by him. He immediately jumped at it: he was more than ready to graduate from articles to full-length books. And that was the birth of what was to become Doug’s nonfiction title Dinosaurs in the Attic.
During the writing of the book I was always pestering Doug for a real behind-the-scenes tour, not the two-bit one that the tourists got. But he was afraid to do it, because I didn’t have the appropriate security clearance and he wasn’t able to get it for me. But finally he hit on a plan: it would be a midnight tour, when presumably nobody would be around to check our credentials. Doug had a special key that would get us into many odd places and storage rooms full of strange things. So it was that, one midnight, Doug snuck me in for a personal guided tour. And what a tour! I saw flesh-eating beetles, whale eyeballs in formaldehyde, rooms full of dinosaur bones as big as VW Bugs. We ended up on the fourth floor, in the (then-named) Hall of Late Dinosaurs (no pun intended). There was a terrific storm outside, and flickers of lightning from the ceiling skylight illuminated the huge, ancient T. rex towering over us. I don’t know what possessed me, but I turned to Doug and said, “This is the scariest building in the world. Doug, we have to write a thriller set in a museum like this.”
He turned to me, eyes shining with emotion-or maybe it was just that last wee nip of Macallan making an unwelcome reappearance.
And then a guard making his rounds surprised us. I don’t know who was more scared: us, the guard, or the T. rex. But that’s a story for another time.
Doug
No, let’s tell that story now. When the guard surprised us, I thought, now I’m in deep shit. But Linc’s brilliant wit saved us-the first of many such rescues. As the guard inched into the dark hall, shining his light around, anxious voice booming out, “Who’s there?” Linc came up with the perfect reply. He cried out, “Thank God, you’ve finally found us! We’ve been wandering around for hours looking for the exit! How in the world do you get out of this place?”
The guard escorted us out the security exit, never knowing I was a rogue museum employee conducting an undercover tour.
Linc and I began discussing our novel, set in the museum, which we had decided to call Relic. One evening, Linc and I were sitting on his porch in Westchester County, sharing a bottle of good single malt. Between tipples of malt and discussions of what fine fellows we were, what rare geniuses, and how we would take the literary world by storm, we managed to hash out the plot to Relic. I agreed to take a crack at the first few chapters.
In the meantime, I had moved from New York City to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the calls began coming. How were the chapters going? Fine, just fine! I would reply. After a year of this, Linc’s patience began to wear thin. He is not normally the kind of person who employs vulgar language, but I do recall him telling me one time, “Doug, just write the fucking chapters already.”
So I finally did. To my great surprise, I enjoyed the experience. I had always thought of myself as a serious writer, in line for a Nobel Prize, but I found I enjoyed writing a novel about a brain-eating monster loose in a museum a lot more than I expected.
I sent the first few chapters to Linc. He called me and said he liked them very much, except for one thing. I had two New York City cops, partners, who were the investigating officers. “Doug, they’re both the same character,” Linc said.
“What do you mean?” I was immediately furious at this slight to my literary talent.
“You got this one guy, Vincent D’Agosta, ethnic New York City cop, rough on the outside with a heart of gold. And then you’ve got his partner-exactly the same, except he’s Irish.”
After profoundly damning Linc’s contemptible literary taste, I finally came around to seeing his point.
“What we need,” Linc said, “is a detective no one’s ever seen before. A real fish out of water. Someone who will act as a foil to D’Agosta and to New York City itself.”
“Oh, God,” I said, “not another ‘unique’ detective, please! What, you mean like an albino from New Orleans?”
There was a long silence and then I heard Linc say, “An albino from New Orleans… Intriguing… Very intriguing… ”
Linc
The thing one has to keep in mind is that we wrote Relic as a lark. Don’t get me wrong: we had high opinions of our writing skills and our ability to craft an interesting story. I’d edited dozens, hundreds, of novels, and Doug has always had a far deeper knowledge of literature than most English professors could boast (and he himself has taught writing at Princeton). What I mean is that we wrote the story to amuse ourselves rather than others. A lot of first-time novelists try to write what they think other people want to read, or cynically attempt to write a novel that will have the broadest appeal. Not us. We wrote-for want of a better word-irresponsibly. We created eccentric characters and put them in extravagant situations. Having two of us in on the job improved-or exacerbated-the situation. I’d read something Doug wrote, would be hugely amused, and would then expand on it. If he wrote a scene of a terrified mob stampeding past an upended table of free hors d’oeuvres, I’d add a gratuitous bit about a huge bolus of pâté being ground into mud beneath the running feet. And then Doug would have some character knocked to the ground, landing face first in the pâté, and so on, each trying to top the other.
It was into this hothouse atmosphere that Agent Pendergast first stepped. In those days Doug frequently wrote four out of every five new chapters, while I did significant rewriting and produced the outlines for the chapters to come. So one day I received, via 2,400-baud modem (don’t laugh; it was the Pony Express of its day), what would eventually become chapter fourteen of Relic. It was an exciting rough draft. Among other things, in it Lieutenant D’Agosta is so revolted by a particular sight that he vomits his breakfast of scrambled eggs, ham, cheese, and ketchup all over a museum courtyard. This happens moments after Agent Pendergast makes his very first appearance. (The two events are unrelated.)
What is remarkable is that even in this first chapter, Pendergast displays some of the traits that go on to become his defining attributes: touchstones that readers return to again and again like mantras. For example, the first word out of his mouth: “Excellent.” Or, when discussing certain personal flaws: “A very bad habit, but one that I find hard to break.”