Tess Gerritsen was at Waterstones on Deansgate, Manchester, recently to promote her latest novel, The Mephisto Club, featuring Detective Jane Rizzoli and Doctor Maura Isles. Chris High managed to speak with her.

Hi Tess, it’s nice to meet you. I won’t take up too much of your time. You must be shattered, having started the tour last night in Nottingham? How did it go?

Nice to meet you, too. I’m fine. I arrived on Saturday so I’ve had a couple of days to get over the jet-lag. Nottingham was fine, thank you. It’s a lovely place. I had a great time.

Good. So, how does a medical graduate of the University of California become a full-time writer? Do you miss practicing medicine?

I have been a writer since I was seven years old, so I guess what you could say is I’m actually a writer who became a doctor and the real reason I became a full-time writer was that I became a mother and couldn’t combine medicine with being the mother I wanted to be. It was then that I decided I was going to do what I’d always wanted to do. My husband is a doctor, so now I see his frustrations. American medicine is fraught with concerns about lawsuits and its practice is not so much about being a doctor but rather about being a bureaucrat. I’m very happy being a writer.

Are there any major differences between the UK and US readership? Do the readers look for different things?

I think the UK readership is a lot more intrigued by the bloodiness of their crime fiction. American readers are more into the why’s and wherefores of the storyline, I think, than the actual blood and gore.

The Mephisto Club is and incredibly dark novel. How do you keep the intensity running throughout?

I don’t really plan my novels and I started this book thinking about where evil comes from. Writers tend to concentrate on the motive behind the killings in their books and rarely does it get down to the more philosophical question as to where evil originates and what makes a killer a killer. The biblical source material was also pretty frightening, despite my not being particularly religious. The thought that there could be some kind of supernatural force that can get deep down into somebody’s soul and drive them along is pretty disturbing.

Peter Millar of The Times has said you have “turned your attention to what might seem Dan Brown territory” and there does seem to be a proliferation of books with religious or semi-religious undertones. Do such comparisons with other writers bother you?

The only comparison I think that can be drawn between my book and Dan Brown’s is religious conspiracy but because of the phenomenon that exists surrounding his novel any new book with religious themes will, in some way, be compared to his. To stop writing books with these themes cuts out storylines relating to history and the bible and a lot of other things besides. It’s a little like romance writers being constantly compared to Danielle Steele. I was a major in anthropology and have always been interested in ancient history and have always been fascinated in the comparisons between the light and the dark of the human psyche. It’s an interesting question. Why do some people in power almost voluntarily start wars and use politics to justify the fact that they want to see bloodshed? I’m thinking in terms of Hitler and Pol Pot here, as well as others more recent. To me it’s not only interesting, but also scary.

The ending of the novel implies there is more to come from the Mephisto Foundation. Would that be correct?

I really don’t know the answer to that but when I finish this new novel, I hope to know. I have had a lot of feedback from readers who would like to see it as a spin-off, so maybe. They are an interesting group of scholars. I think it’s really important that, as a writer, you don’t produce the same thing over and over. There are a lot of authors who make their stories gorier or they change the killer or the method and that’s it. For me that’s so unfulfilling and I always want to take my characters in a direction they’ve never gone before.

Your Website is pretty impressive and I love the 10 Creepy Ways Die section. How important a tool do you feel having a Website is to an author?

Thank you. I’ll tell my Webmaster and he’ll be delighted. Of all the promotional tools available for which we have to pay, I would say having a Website is the most important. You can reach everybody with it. You should see the Ten Creepy Ways To Die yet to go online, by the way. There’s some great stuff there.

What’s next for Tess Gerritsen?

I’m currently writing an historical mystery set in the nineteenth century, which is a particularly horrifying time. Imagine what it was like to get an amputation without anaesthesia, for instance, and I wanted to set a mystery around a medical student in the 1830’s and the book is due in July of this year.
 
The Mephisto Club, Bantam Press Jan 2007 Paperback £14.99

Read more on Tess at www.tessgerritsen.com
 

See the recently filmed podcast with Tess...
 
Podcast Feed Address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TessGerritsenVideoPodcast
 
The compressed mpeg4 set of the four clips can be downloaded here:
www.yada-yada.co.uk/podcasts/TransworldPublishers/TessGerritsen/TessGerritsen_mp4.zip