Jack Kerley

BIO

Jack Kerley spent twenty years in a successful advertising career before writing THE HUNDREDTH MAN, his first novel. An avid angler and outdoorsman, he lives in Newport, Kentucky.

INTERVIEW

June 24, 2005

Bookreporter.com's Suspense/Thriller Author Spotlight Team (Carol Fitzgerald, Joe Hartlaub and Wiley Saichek) interviewed Jack Kerley, author of THE DEATH COLLECTORS. Kerley explains why he wrote this novel, a good deal of which focuses on individuals obsessed with collecting memorabilia associated with serial murderers. He also talks about the creation of Marcella Baines, whose presence hovers in the background from the moment she is introduced, his decision to write to an art theme, and the direction in which he may take some of his characters in future projects.

Bookreporter.com: A good deal of THE DEATH COLLECTORS is focused upon individuals obsessed with collecting memorabilia associated with serial murderers. What sparked your interest in writing about people obsessed with serial killer memorabilia?

Jack Kerley: The Manson Family murders fascinated me when I was a teenager, people handing their lives over to a five-foot-tall madman who bathed erratically. I'm also intrigued by folks who beg imprisoned psychopaths for writings and other souvenirs. A while back, I read an article about serial killer writings and paintings offered via an online auction site. The elements converged, and I was off and running…er, writing.

BRC: Did you spend some time with such individuals while writing THE DEATH COLLECTORS? If so, they obviously don't gather for swap meets, at least highly publicized ones; how did you locate them? Were they reluctant to participate in your research? And how closely do the characters in THE DEATH COLLECTORS mirror their real-world counterparts?

JK: The characters were fiction, knit together from various sources including websites, psychological texts, and tomes on serial and mass murderers. Some people collect such objects as a lark, others probably get aroused by it. There are strange folks out there.

BRC: What was the wildest collectible that you heard about?

JK: The tombstone of Ed Gein is, last I heard, still missing. Gein remains one of the United States' most notorious serial murderers, his deeds occurring in the 1950s. The classic film Psycho is said to be based on Gein and his ghoulish exploits. Prior to his killing spree, Gein robbed body parts from graves, so his missing tombstone is somewhat just. The most prevalent collectibles are letters and notes. "Artwork," often little more than scribbles and doodles, is also fairly common.

BRC: Did any collectible rankle and otherwise upset you?

JK: No, though some websites devoted to serial killers have a quasi-reverential tone I find unsettling.

BRC: THE DEATH COLLECTORS contains a number of very memorable characters, perhaps none more so than Marcella Baines, who is only present for a few pages yet whose presence hovers silently in the background from the point in THE DEATH COLLECTORS in which she is introduced. Tell us about creating Baines.

JK: I made the character a woman because so many women write imprisoned killers, a strange phenomenon. Visually, I partially modeled Marcella after the scariest-looking woman I recall, the actress Carol Channing. Synchronistic Moment: While writing the Marcella scene, I went to an art gallery and saw a ceramic sculpture, a Channingesque woman's face with overblown eyes, scarlet lips framing immense white teeth. Not meant to be sold, the sculpture was tucked away under a table. When I got down on the floor to admire it, the artist asked what I was doing. "Bonding," I replied. The piece, renamed "Marcella," now inhabits my dining room. We have dinner together.

BRC: What made you decide to make Marsden Hexcamp an artist? What research was required to flesh out this aspect of the story?

JK: I collect art, heavy on whimsical and outré works. Writing to an art theme felt right, and twisting the art in a dark fashion juiced the action. I studied art history in college, research was minimal. Marsden Hexcamp's first name, by the way, came from American painter Marsden Hartley. Carson Ryder, my protagonist, named himself after the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. My favorite scene is when Ryder meets a man who believes he's the late French artist Marcel Duchamps.

BRC: We enjoyed the touches of humor in the dialogue and working relationship between Harry and Carson. An example is the opening of THE DEATH COLLECTORS during the award ceremony. Are these scenes as much fun to write as they are for readers to read? Do you find it difficult to interject humor into such dark stories?

JK: Humor simply appears. It's wonderful to be writing, realize a character has just said something funny, and start laughing. Humor, to me, should arise naturally from the characters and situation, in this case the verbose mayor, Carson's compulsion to address the audience, and the squealing microphone we've all suffered through.

BRC: With the publication of THE DEATH COLLECTORS, you have gone from "debut author" to an author with an ongoing series. What has been the most rewarding part of the publishing process for you? What about the most surprising part?

JK: Most rewarding: Seeing the words in book form. Most surprising: The number of folks asking who I think should portray the major characters in a Hollywood production.

BRC: We don't want to give any part of THE DEATH COLLECTORS away, but there is one scene involving the discovery of a body --- where the vultures got there first --- that was truly memorable. What was the inspiration for that scene?

JK: When seven or eight years old I saw a circling of buzzards, finding beneath it a deer carcass being ravaged by screeching, fighting birds. They seemed driven, Hitchcockian. It remains a powerful mental picture and I'm happy it found employment --- though a tad subdued --- in THE DEATH COLLECTORS.

BRC: Your Carson Ryder novels have been set in Mobile, AL, yet you live in Newport, KY, a city whose past certainly contains a rich, deep vein of ideas for crime novels. Do you have any plans for a novel set in Newport?

JK: Newport, once called "Sin City of the South" owing to wide-open gambling and prostitution, is tamed but not sedate. Though small, it offers several potential conflicts from a writer's point of view: North v. South v. Appalachia; poverty beside wealth; Christian fundamentalism abutting conservative Catholicism...any or all could provide impetus for a story. But right now I'm enjoying the Mobile Bay region as a setting, and spend upwards of three months a year in the area. There's something about the summer heat and abundant water that helps me grow stories.

BRC: On a related note, you've created some interesting chemistry involving Ryder and television reporter DeeDee Danbury, counter-pointed nicely by the animosity between Danbury and Harry Nautilus. You've also moved Ava Davenelle, Ryder's love interest from THE HUNDREDTH MAN, off the page, at least temporarily, but she can always come back. Can you tell us what sort of plans you have for Ryder, personally and professionally, in the future? And do you have any intention of perhaps moving Nautilus to the forefront in a future work?

JK: I never know my direction until writing, the scenes and conflicts drawing reactions, and sometimes growth, from the characters. Carson will probably always wrestle past demons while trying to fashion the world to his idea of Right. There are events in Harry Nautilus's backstory that I know, but have never used --- the origin of his name, for instance. I'd like to bring some of them to the fore, pushing him out there as well. It's not too far off, I suspect.

BRC: Who are your favorite authors, irrespective of genre? And who among them, if any, have influenced your own work?

JK: Some of my favorites, and major influences, aren't prose writers, but poets: Shakespeare, Eliot, Cummings, Roethke, Dickey...rhythm, color, verbs, appeals to the senses. Poetry leaves me breathless and dizzy. And to really push the genre concept, music is a major influence. I think Charlie Parker blew poetry from a saxophone.

BRC: What are you working on now and when can readers expect to see it?

JK: The third book in the series is well under way. In it, Harry and Carson believe they're trying to solve a horrendous crime before it happens. Of course, things aren't always as they seem.

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