Alex Delaware Read online

  Alex Delaware

  A Mysterious Profile

  Jonathan Kellerman

  Alex Delaware

  Back when I practiced child clinical psychology if you visited my private office in Sherman Oaks, California; or my hospital digs at Childrens Hospital of LA, in east Hollywood; or the suite I shared with two pediatricians in Glendale, you’d find few clues about my personal life.

  No photos of the wife or the kids propped on the desk, no shots of me driving fast cars or playing guitar or posed with Faye in Hawaii or Paris or Santa Fe or Jerusalem. Nothing but a few framed diplomas.

  The successful—and ethical—practice of psychotherapy depends upon a thorough ego vacuuming: putting your own needs, desires, conceits, and fantasies into cold storage during the forty-five minutes you spend facing another human being in emotional crisis. Realizing it’s all about that person and not about you.

  According to some schools of psychotherapeutic thought, an occasional smidgeon of “self-disclosure”—dribbling out judicious bits of autobiography in the name of empathy—can benefit the patient. But even proponents of that open approach are clear that the only shrinks qualified to risk exploiting their private lives as therapeutic tools need to be experienced, rigorously self-appraising, and acutely aware of psychological boundaries—the precise spots where they end and the patient begins.

  One cardinal trait of an effective psychotherapist is the ability to “actively listen,” a talent that transcends gimmicky phrases such as “I hear what you’re saying” and depends on a sincere suspension of the judgmental self as well as a genuine interest in the emotional life of the patient. After a few years, learning to listen on twelve cylinders can carry over to the so-called real world. You start to do it outside the office.

  During my years as a psychologist, I prided myself on not playing shrink with my loved ones; when I left work, I was intent on being just another husband-dad. Sure, I’d try to be patient and sensitive, but I also needed to be free to occasionally lose my temper, pass judgment, and, yeah, even discipline the kids if they needed it. One of the nicest things my acclaimed novelist son, Jesse, ever told me was “Dad, you never treated me like a patient.” (Jesse’s a great guy and a terrific son, but I’m sure there were many less charitable appraisals by him and his three sisters when I blew my stack or otherwise indulged a sometimes bellicose nature.)

  Despite all that, there were times when I’d like to think my training helped me as a father. I understood the developmental stages that affected children’s thoughts and feelings. I got that while kids weren’t miniature adults, they deserved to be treated with respect. Perhaps most important, I realized that quality time wasn’t sufficient; you needed quantity time. I spent a lot of time with my kids, and when I wrote fiction in my home office—which was, and still is, festooned with personal stuff—the door was always open, literally and figuratively.

  When I wasn’t the cause of my kid’s problems, I tried to be part of the solution by actively listening.

  I haven’t treated patients in a decade and a half, but there are occasions when I still slip into listening mode. That’s because I’m an extremely, perhaps pathologically, curious guy, genuinely interested in other people and the stories they tell. That has led to what my kids describe as “Uh-oh, Dad made a new friend.”

  Hence, the guy in the Southwest Airlines departure barn at Albuquerque Airport who started schmoozing with me during a twohour delay getting back to LA after a family vacation in Santa Fe. He was an interesting fellow who fixed mammoth oil rigs for a living, often under storm conditions. He had a lot to say about the challenges of his job and his life, and I listened. I learned a lot about heavy equipment and life on the Texas gulf.

  Then there was the leather-clad former corporate CEO I ran into at a Malibu restaurant who now filled his spare time with crosscountry jaunts on his Harley.

  The woman who planned high-level parties in Washington, DC, and had met quite a few … interesting people.

  The kidney transplant surgeon who used to own a country music station and now bought insurance companies, aiming for one purchase a year.

  The former child actress who sold real estate. The septuagenarian great-grandfather who washed cars for a living and spent his free time Rollerblading.

  Et cetera.

  People talk to me; I listen.

  Nothing bores me more than my own story. I want to hear about other people’s lives, and the only way to do that is to Stay Out of the Picture.

  I mention all this because it goes a long way toward explaining Alex Delaware and the structure of the novels that feature him.

  People talk to him; he does his best to keep the focus on them.

  When I was twenty-one, I won a literary prize and thought I was hot stuff.

  Unfortunately, no one in American book publishing agreed.

  Thirteen years of late-night typing in my unfinished garage earned me enough rejection slips to paper a hedge fund honcho’s Xanadu. Finally, I got good enough to publish my first novel, When the Bough Breaks. But even that was no quickie; I wrote the book in 1981; it was accepted in 1983 but held until 1985 because the editor who bought the book left and the corporate drones at my publisher couldn’t figure out what to do with a story featuring a psychologist, a gay cop, and a story line that ventured into the then-uncharted territory of child sexual abuse.

  My advance was six grand, which amounted to about three bucks an hour, meaning Bough was bought as what’s charitably termed a “small book” in the publishing biz.

  This means it was predestined to disappear and that would be the end of my literary career.

  Being totally naive about the business of publishing, I had no idea that I was being set up to fail, and was, in fact, as happy as a pig in swill. Because I’d been vindicated: no longer was I a pathetic, selfdeluded mope with a good day job.

  I was a novelist!

  To my publisher’s amazement, Bough earned a hefty (by 1985 standards) paperback sale and garnered rave reviews, including a gracious showcase by the eminent British-born critic John Gross (whose departure from the New York Times has rendered that tedious periodical sorely lacking in sparkling critical talent).

  Mr. Gross featured my book in a Times daily review along with write-ups of new novels by Dick Francis and John D. MacDonald. Which is kind of like opening for the Beatles.

  Dick and John and I all got good reviews, and people went out looking for When the Bough Breaks. Some people even managed to find it. Reorders poured in. The book became a word-of-mouth bestseller.

  The rest, as they say, is history. But by no means linear history. It took two more bestsellers, including one that stayed on the New York Times list for three months, and switching to a new publisher to get me working with people who understood what I was about.

  None of this is intended as a gripe-fest. I didn’t deserve to get published one second sooner than I did, because until then I simply wasn’t good enough. And one vital component of getting good enough was embracing an old saw: Write what you know.

  Yeah, in retrospect that’s a great big duh. But prior to 1981, I simply wasn’t ready for self-revelation—for what sportscaster Red Smith described as “sitting down every morning at your typewriter and opening a vein.” (I paraphrase, but you get the gist.) Nor had I experienced quite enough of life’s dark side to have something important to say.

  In 1981, my thick skull finally cracked open just wide enough to absorb the obvious epiphany: It was time to create a protagonist who shared my background as a child clinical psychologist.

  Like me, Alex Delaware earned a PhD in psychology at age twentyfour.

  Like me, he’d worked in a pediatric hospital, including long hours on the cancer ward, and had burned out.

  Like me, he’d treated kids who’d experienced severe trauma, including as crime victims. Like me, he’d learned more than he believed possible about the darkest side of life.

  Like me, he had dark hair and blue eyes, though his locks were curly and mine are wavy.

  He’s right-handed; I’m a southpaw. He’s Midwestern to the core (more on that later), and I was born in New York City and raised in LA.

  He sees twenty-twenty; I’m myopic.

  He’s taller and thinner than I am. And, of course, he’s younger, because one of the nicest things about writing fiction is playing God, and the benevolent deity that I pretend to be has chosen not to age his characters in real time.

  Overall, I think of Alex as a down-to-earth yet dashing fellow. Energetic, confidently masculine, analytical, insightful, hopelessly compassionate, and, most important, addicted to the truth. In a perfect world, these are all virtues I’d choose for myself.

  Right from the beginning, I set out to create a true hero, not an antihero, because in 1981, the antihero was the default cliché.

  Unlike me, Alex lives in an idiosyncratic house up in the hills of Bel Air and is single. That last detail is most important, because a married guy with kids wouldn’t—shouldn’t—get into the kind of fixes Alex finds himself in. I, on the other hand, have been married since the age of twenty-two, and I am the father of four and, to date, the grandfather of one.

  Truth be told, I am a thoroughly domestic guy who has suppressed a natural tendency toward recklessness and risk taking in order to let my loved ones maintain a sense of security. Exceptions do arise: a few years ago I was zipping ar
ound the Laguna Seca racetrack at 130 mph in a Formula 1 car. I’ve owned an Alfa Romeo, an Aston Martin, and a supercharged Porsche, so you can see where my heart lies, automotively. And sure, there have been dark moments. Years ago, I was nearly stabbed to death in San Francisco. I’ve played guitar for a room full of homicidal maniacs at a state hospital for the criminally insane. Have been the only Jew on a bus full of Arabs during a jaunt to the West Bank town of Hebron. Walked the old city of Jerusalem at three a.m. Survived cancer. But no more motorcycles, no flying lessons, no bungee jumping, no carving tools or power saws because, enough scars.

  The most dangerous tool I wield nowadays is a ’65 Fender Stratocaster.

  Delaware, on the other hand, throws caution to the Santa Anas. Therefore, he will forever remain single and just a bit alienated from the loyalties and routines of domestic life.

  For some reason, there is a cadre of readers that really want him to get hitched. Sometimes they write me requesting nuptials in an upcoming book. I appreciate their loyalty, but my response is consistent: when wedding bells chime for Alex, you can be sure the series is over. Unlike a police officer, whose involvement in crime is part of his routine, Dr. D’s entrée to murder necessitates a deft suspension of caution. He simply must be maritally untrammeled in order to take the kinds of risks that contribute to a gripping story.

  When, after thirteen years of failure, I began writing When the

  Bough Breaks, I believed the process to be my final attempt at breaking in as a novelist. Maybe it would’ve been. Who knows? Thank God that hypothesis was never put to the test. The point is, because I saw the book as my final audition, I obsessed about coming up with something fresh and different. If I wasn’t able to come up with something new, I didn’t deserve to break in. As part of that scheme, I set out consciously to sidestep as many of the conventions of the hard-boiled-detective novel as I could while preserving the guts and soul of the genre.

  Write what you know meant there was no other kind of book I could’ve written.

  My day job as a psychologist was nothing but sleuthing—hour by hour (forty-five-minute segment by forty-five-minute segment) I conducted investigations that traversed the back alleys of the unconscious. Every time a new patient arrived in my office, the process unfolded: solving a psychosocial whodunit in order to ameliorate suffering. A lot of nasty stuff got unearthed along the way.

  What I was attempting to achieve as a psychologist were daily triumphs of psychic archaeology: digging up long-buried shards of experience in an attempt to build a coherent picture of a troubled human being, in order to help that human being. If that’s not detective work, I don’t know what is. I’m anything but a Freudian, but I do believe that we ignore the past at our peril. That belief has informed every novel I’ve written.

  Still, detective story or not, When the Bough Breaks might very well have turned out as the gravestone marking the death of my literary aspirations. This was do or die, dude; clichés needed to be shunned.

  Hence, a troubled psychologist in a nice home office, instead of a wisecracking PI with a seedy inner-city office, a chronic drinking problem, and a buxom secretary whose barely secret love for the boss inexplicably evades the boss’s notice.

  Hence, a detailed, accurate, compelling investigation that didn’t test the limits of reality more than it had to.

  Most important: my book would feature no effete amateur prancing about as he shows up the pros. Because I detest books that treat murder like a parlor game. You know the type: plummy-voiced, tuxedoed twits with all the character depth of a sandwich sign huffhuffing in the parlor as a body molders yards away.

  What could be more dehumanizing than viewing homicide as just another fatuous riddle, easily solved by applying the flimsiest approximation of logic?

  Having witnessed the effects of violence as a psychologist and court consultant, I was determined to communicate the nightmare that is homicide and its repercussions. That proved easy, because Alex Delaware, like me, turned out to be a driven perfectionist whose persistence often draws him into some rather extreme territory. (Several years ago, I delivered the keynote address at the national convention of the American Psychological Association. Facing an audience of a couple thousand shrinks, I felt like the ultimate clinical demonstration. Maybe that’s why I began my speech, “I stand before you as living proof of the positive aspects of the obsessive-compulsive personality.”)

  Driven, yes. Able to leap tall buildings by himself, no.

  My hero would eschew a tortured relationship with the cops. Not only was that the most hackneyed of plot devices, but experiences working with the courts and the criminal-justice system had taught me that detectives from the private and public sectors often meshed quite well and that experts were well received.

  This was going to be a crime novel. I needed a cop.

  The problem was, yet another gruff, world-weary homicide dick was the woolliest cliché of all.

  On the other hand, a gruff, world-weary gay homicide detective … interesting.

  Enter Milo Sturgis.

  One of the questions I’m asked most frequently is what led me to make Milo homosexual. The answer is simple: the quest for something new and interesting and original. And what could be more compelling than a man, newly open about his sexuality, whose very presence in the Los Angeles Police Department would engender tension.

  The timing was right. Long gone were the days when LA cops routinely busted gay bars—and gay heads. (Though I was able to plumb that brutal territory for flashback scenes in The Murder Book—a novel about which I will have more to say.) Which doesn’t mean that the Los Angeles Police Department during the early eighties was in any way gay friendly. Quite the contrary. Even nowadays, when a handful of gay cops have gone public, I’m doubtful that homosexuality will ever be totally accepted in the paramilitary organization that is the LAPD.

  In 1981, there were … ahem … no gay cops in the LAPD. If you believed the official account. I knew from my contacts that there were several gay cops in the LAPD. And that, for the most part, they went about their jobs without much fuss—neither running from nor flaunting their sexuality.

  Just cops, like any others, doing the job.

  In 1981, “gay but so what” seemed to me a revolutionary concept. The more I thought about it, the fresher and more innovative became the notion of a homosexual homicide detective operating within a homophobic organization that tolerated him, barely, because he did the job better than anyone else.

  But Milo couldn’t be gay—the feather boa, lisping, limp-wristed gay of camp theater and episodic TV and West Hollywood Halloween parades. Because, apart from being the worst sort of cliché, a guy like that wouldn’t survive a single shift in the LAPD. No matter how high his solve rate.

  No, the cop I conceptualized would be different: tough, grumpy, sloppy, and also altogether professional and highly intelligent. A homicide veteran with a precarious foothold in the world of law enforcement based on nothing other than raw talent.

  Milo’s homosexuality is right out in the open in When the Bough

  Breaks, as he announces it to Alex because he doesn’t want Alex to find out some other way and freak out. Alex reacts with surprise, then acceptance. The two of them become friends.

  After the book was published, I received a ton of nice mail from gay people along the lines of “I’ve always loved mystery novels, but they’re so homophobic. Thanks so much for Milo.”

  Bear in mind that in 1985, gay characters in mainstream fiction were just about nonexistent. No Will & Grace, no Brokeback Mountain. No Project Runway.

  Was I out to create a social revolution? Hell, no. With thirteen years of abject failure behind me, I never even expected to publish the darn thing, let alone write a series or build the foundation of a durable career. Looking back, I realize that low expectations fed my courage: with nothing to lose, I had the fortitude to create a novel that, at first glance, had absolutely no commercial potential.

  Shrink, gay cop. Scores of molested kids.

  Once my editor left, the drones at my publisher opined that the book was weird, hard to characterize, and, y’know, kind of yucky.