"The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives" - читать интересную книгу автора (Penzler Otto)

ELVIS COLE AND JOE PIKE
BY ROBERT CRAIS

Elvis Cole and Joe Pike are twenty years old as I write this in 2007. They came to life in my first published novel, The Monkey’s Raincoat, in 1987. Twenty years is a long time. I had no idea they would be with me for twenty years. I hadn’t planned on creating a series (I thought The Monkey’s Raincoat would be a one-shot) and certainly did not expect these two characters of mine to become so successful both in the United States and abroad (at this writing, Elvis and Joe are published in forty countries around the world). Aspiring writers certainly hope for this kind of good fortune, and dream about it, but only a fool would expect it. Yet here we are twenty years later, me, Elvis, and Joe. And you.

If you’re reading this, you probably groove on my guys and maybe even snap up my new books as soon as they come out. And then you move on to a new book by Mike Connelly or T. Jefferson Parker or Lee Child, or any of the scores of other terrific writers currently plowing the crime fiction fields, and a whole new set of characters are in your head. But get this-

Elvis and Joe never leave me. Elvis Cole and Joe Pike have been in my head every day for these past twenty years, and likely will be every day for the rest of my life. When I’m writing the current book, I’m thinking about the next, one book leading to another as sure as a stream flows downhill. And even when I’m writing a stand-alone in which Elvis and Joe do not appear, they are still behind the trees in my head, knowing their turn will come again soon, and I am always aware of them.