Voices on Writing: T. Jefferson Parker
by Barbara DeMarco-Barrett

I met T. Jefferson Parker in 1988 or so, soon after I moved to Southern California and joined the Fictionaires, a critique group of which Jeff was a long time member and by then, a bestselling novelist. Laguna Heat and Little Saigon had been published, and he was working on his third book, Pacific Beat, which has remained one of my favorites. Since then, he's written more than a dozen novels and has won many awards, including the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best Novel, the highest award for mystery novelists, twice. He likes snakes (has four as pets), and likes to escape to the desert in the spring and fall to write without the bother of telephones and computers. He lives with his wife and two sons in San Diego County. And the T. of his name? It's silent, placed there by his mother because she thought it would "look better on the door of a president."

BDB: Before we talk about your new book, The Renegades, let's talk a bit about how you became a suspense novelist. When you graduated from UC-Irvine, you started out as a journalist.

TJP: At UCI I wanted to be a novelist. I mean, that was a secret desire. I didn't have anywhere near the confidence to come out of that closet at the age of 21. So I decided to be a reporter, kind of ease my way into fiction. It was a good decision.

BDB: Why?

TJP: You really get a crash course on the way things work, when you cover a city for a paper. I covered political elections, cops, business, cultural events. Great education.

BDB: How long did you work as a journalist while writing fiction at night?

TJP: I worked as a reporter for five years, and as a technical editor for another two years before I got an offer for Laguna Heat. I had been writing after work and on weekends for about five years.

BDB: I remember a story about you working as a reporter for the Daily Ensign in Newport Beach, Calif., and carting home the big typewriter to work on your novel.

TJP: Yep! I'd grab a stack of fresh paper and my IBM Selectric and drag it home for work in the evenings. My editor, Jean Halliburton, was very encouraging.

BDB: What did you bring from journalism to fiction writing?

TJP: The best thing that journalism taught me was how things work. It gave me a look at government, police, all manner of "special interest" groups, and of course, a long good look at reporters. The first thing I found interesting about being a reporter was that everybody wants to use you. They want you to make them look good, in one way or another. A journalist sees plenty of naked or at least ill-disguised human emotion and ambition. It's eye opening to a 22-year old kid who has spent his last four years reading Joyce and Shakespeare.

BDB: You rewrote Laguna Heat something like seven times before it was ready for primetime, I also recall. You said you would write it over in various authors' voices until you found your own.

TJP: Oh, yes. I wrote a draft of bad Hemingway, and a draft of bad Raymond Chandler, and drafts of bad Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison. I was literally all over the map. Finally I had to make a deal with myself and I sat down to write it one more time in nobody's voice but my own. I figured at least I'd have a book that was mine. So I gave it one more shot and after that, I thought it was good enough to send out.

BDB: So after seven years of working on that novel as you held down a day job as a reporter, you were an overnight success. I'm assuming it was then you left your day job.

TJP: Yes. It was funny, though. The book was published the same week I got fired from my technical editing job. So I found myself published, unemployed and poor all at the same time.

BDB: Not poor for long, though. Laguna Heat became a bestselling mystery and an HBO movie.

TJP: That book really made the early part of my career. It was terrific good fortune to have the sales be good and the HBO movie made. I bought my first house with that movie!

BDB: Fast forward through a dozen novels to your current novel, just out: The Renegades. Where did this story come from, and was it a similar place that all of your novels come from?

TJP: The very center of the novel was an article I read about "gangs" within the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department back in the '80s and '90s. These weren't really gangs, but groups of like-minded deputies who banded together for reasons of solidarity. Some said they were harmless. Some said they were racist and shady. They had names like The Regulators, the Reapers, the Saxons, and so forth. That got my imagination running. So in The Renegades, you've got some very bad deputies running around.

BDB: While Laguna Heat took seven years, you now write something like a novel a year. How has your process streamlined to allow you to do this?

TJP: Well, you get better at it, like anything else you pretty much spend your whole life doing. I've got no day job! But mainly, you learn how to sift through things faster, get to the heart of the story more economically, see the clichés and the wrong turns and the pitfalls coming. I play tennis, and at my level, whoever makes fewer mistakes wins. Well, writing a novel is like that. You learn not to make mistakes. I may not be perfect at this, but when I'm writing, and I get a whiff of my own untruth, ignorance or contrivance, I try to correct it, very quickly. I mean, as a reader, I don't forgive that kind of lassitude from a storyteller, so how can I condone my own?

BDB: Have any of your novels come straight from something you read in a newspaper or magazine?

TJP: Not really. I might take a story like the deputy gangs we talked about, and spin it outward into a novel. But I've never based the larger workings of a story on "real life" stuff. I think someday it would be interesting to write a "true crime" story.

BDB: You're not reticent about including parts of your life in your books. What I'm thinking of is Summer of Fear in which the narrator's wife is very ill.

TJP: Yes, I've written some fairly personal things, used parts of my life. My first wife died of brain cancer many years ago and I just plain could not not write about it. So I did. A thriller isn't the best place to really tackle subjects like that, but that's what I did.

BDB: Yet, your novels are not autobiographical. Any opinions about novels taken from life? Should writers write memoirs if they need to largely crib from life?

TJP: You're right; my novels aren't autobiographical except in a very tangential and covert sense. If my life were more interesting I'd certainly write a novel about it! I look at novelists like Jack London or Hemingway or John le Carré and I think: Wow, I wish I'd lived a life like that!

However, it should be said that a novel is a work of the imagination first and foremost. I've read dozens of dreary manuscripts based on very harrowing real life events, most of them written by cops. What amazes me about great writers is how they can inhabit a story that clearly only happened in their minds. But they allow you into a world that is hyperspecific and unique and seemingly genuine. In an odd way a fiction writer learns to depict reality in order to create an elaborate lie. I think when all is said and done we read fiction to enjoy someone's imagination and their skill at relaying it.

BDB: What's on your nightstand right now?

TJP: Chuck Box, Cormac McCarthy, Sanyika Shakur. A hairy-chested bunch!

BDB: Any authors particularly inspiring?

TJP: So many. I'll take Melville and Conrad and Warren and Mailer and Didion and McCarthy to my grave. And McGuane and Toni Morrison. Heck, why not Nicholson Baker and Michael Chabon? And some crime guys like me—how about Raymond Chandler and Don Winslow? So many others, too.

BDB: And finally, what advice do you have for journalists who may have a novel in the works?

TJP: Well, you're in a good place. You're looking at the world and covering it. I loved my early newspaper days. I worked on a small weekly in Newport Beach, and that paper really covered the city. Endless stories, tons of characters and events. Plenty of crime and pride and ambition and surprises. Go forth and report back! Turn it all into a whopping novel. Why not?

More at www.tjeffersonparker.com

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Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is editor of The ASJA Monthly and author of the award-winning best-seller, Pen on Fire (Harcourt, 2004). She hosts Writers on Writing, which podcasts at http://writersonwriting.blogspot.com