There is a saying that there is no one more devout than a convert. And when it comes to a committed relationship with a city that runs deep and runs true, there is no writer more devoted to Los Angeles and its environs than Robert Crais, whose latest Elvis Cole and Joe Pike novel, Racing the Light, was published on November 1, 2022. That’s not to say that other writers past and present haven’t given the City of Angels its rightful due, or that Bob’s Los Angeles is all moonbeams and unicorns—after all, this is crime fiction, bad things happen to good people— it’s just that Bob’s affection for the locations where the denizens of his novel work and live pours out on the pages. Bob loves his characters, even the cranky Jon Stone, and Bob puts his whole heart into, as he puts it, “a world I call Elvis Coles’ Los Angeles.” And never more so than now in this novel, the 19th in the Elvis Cole-Joe Pike series.
It is an understatement of galactic proportions to say that the past three years have been, well, unsettled. Fiction writers may toil in universes of their own creation, but the real world bears down on them nevertheless, and often in unexpected ways. That was the case with Bob Crais as he started a new book to follow up his previous Elvis Cole-Joe Pike, A Dangerous Man, published in August 2019. You know, in the Before Times. And then Bob Crais’s world changed…
Robert Crais: My last book, A Dangerous Man, came out in August of 2019. And I was well into writing what would’ve been the follow-up book, another Elvis Cole novel. But I took an interesting detour. On October 1st [2019], about two months after A Dangerous Man came out, I met with a cardiac surgeon, who told me that I needed a quadruple bypass, and if I didn’t have it immediately, I wouldn’t make it to the end of the year. So, that changed the plan. By the way, have you heard this?
Nancie Clare: I had heard that you had a health scare. All I asked was if you were okay, And I was told, yes.
Robert Crais: I am okay, now. I’m going to meander in this answer, so please, you’re gonna have to massage it when you do your thing.
Nancie Clare: Couldn’t be happier to do it
Robert Crais: I mean, listen, this came as a total surprise to me. I was always a fitness guy. You know, I was. I was a runner. I was hiker, a gym rat. As far as I knew, I had no symptoms of cardiovascular disease. In fact, literally the day before the bomb dropped on me, I was out hiking with a pack, man, you know—just like I did this morning—and felt great. But I had a checkup, thank God, because being me, I could have easily put it off. They did the appropriate scans and tests, and one thing led to another. and I literally was a walkin’ heart attack. And it was a stunner. October 3rd, two days later, I had the surgery. And recovery was not easy. It was long and difficult; I had to have additional procedures. And so it drew out.
And as I began to recover, my world had changed. Everything had changed for me. This came as such a surprise—like, suddenly I was confronted with my mortality. I tried to return to the book I was writing, and I simply had no interest in it. Whatever excitement I had felt about that project, the magic that I felt about it simply was gone. And in fact, I wrestled for a time with the thought, “I may never write again.” I went through a period where I thought, “I don’t wanna write again.” It was very, very difficult. But, you know, time passed and I realized that I’m a writer. I get up every day, I write, and I’ve been doing that for 45 years.
I didn’t know what else to do, <laugh>. So, little by little, I, I forced myself to open this very laptop and try to find to find some story magic that would excite me again. And it was long and hard to do for a variety of reasons: the confrontation with my mortality, the huge amounts of anesthesia, pain killers and other drugs that were being pumped into my body. You don’t wait for inspiration, though, you earn it. You roll up your sleeves, and you earn it by working every day. And so, there was the 10 minutes a day, and in the beginning that was all I could do.
It was 10 minutes of trying to focus and concentrate and think. But what I was thinking about mostly throughout that period was about the nature of truth and trust. I know part of it was one of the big elements of recovering. On many levels I felt my body had betrayed me. Because again, it was such a surprise. You know, I could load up with a pack and climb up hill, and I’d do four or five hard miles every day. And I never knew this thing was inside me. And how can I not know? And it made me really realize, it made me appreciate, just how important knowing the actual truth is.
Nancie Clare: And, meanwhile, the rest of the world is grinding to a screeching halt because of the Covid-19 pandemic…
Robert Crais: January [2020], the pandemic rolls out. And every day we’re seeing on TV all these different reports: What is Covid? Where did it come from? How do we treat this thing? There was so much conflicting information out there. So, who do you trust? Who do you know to trust? Who’s telling the truth here? What’s real, what isn’t real? We’re in this, this chaotic, confused time. And then out of blue, even the United States Navy gets into the act, releasing official footage of unidentified aerial phenomena, which they still haven’t explained. Where did that come from? <laugh>, Right? I mean, what’s going on? I’m taking all this stuff in, and I’m here in Los Angeles and as you know, in the past two years, we’ve had three city council members indicted on corruption charges.
Nancie Clare: <laugh>. Yes. And we’re in the middle of another City Council embarrassment…
Robert Crais: Right? Yes. It’s crazy. And I think I began to see what I wanted to write about coalesced in this character that’s in the new book, Josh Schumacher, this marginalized dismissible podcaster whose parents have dismissed him. Society views him as an oddity, an outcast. But he’s absolutely committed to uncovering the truth. He sees himself as a warrior for justice and he’s willing to uncover the truth no matter what. It’s a single most driven compulsion. I fell in love with Josh, and I thought he, in many ways, he represented me and what I was experiencing and going through. And so, Racing the Light came together. I found the fire again. Josh and the other elements of the story just took off for me. And suddenly that 10 minutes a day became 15 minutes a day became 30 minutes a day, became hours. It took a while to come back, but then I was on fire, and the book just rolled out.
Nancie Clare: Knowing more now about your health scare reinforces the feeling I got reading Racing the Light, I found the story very close to the heart, and now I realize that’s both literal and figurative…
Robert Crais: <laugh>, I guess it is. <laugh>, no pun intended. Right?
Nancie Clare: Or, pun intended. <laugh> This story begins as Elvis’s stories often do, with someone coming to him to find a missing person. In this case Josh Schumacher or Josh Shoe, as he calls himself; his podcast is called “In Your Face with Josh Shoe,” which I loved. And, who’s looking for him? His mother, Adele Schumacher of Toluca Lake, California, you know, where Bob Hope lived, and not far from the studios at Disney. It’s a very lovely area and weirdly weird, I find. Adele is described as “touched” by her ex-husband, but she’s as far from stupid as you can get. So, where did Adele come from? I loved her because she’s an older woman but wasn’t invisible to Elvis. He saw her, saw how she felt about her son, and saw that she definitely had issues. Older women are rarely seen.
So I wanted to know where she came from because she gets the story going.
Robert Crais: She came about because when I was creating Josh, I felt that his commitment to uncovering the truth of what was going was so strong because he had come from, among other things, a life filled with lies. And as I thought about who his parents might be, because I already knew where I wanted Josh to be at the beginning— a podcaster with this fringe podcast, right? The, the whole paranoid conspiracy orientation of his, of his life and beliefs, crashed UFOs and the like.
Nancie Clare: Area 51?
Robert Crais: Area 51, men in black, et cetera. I thought it would be interesting if there were shadows of that in his childhood. In other words, it simply didn’t come out of the blue. I wanted him to have very accomplished parents who consider him a failure. He’s living off his mother. And so it seemed to fit perfectly to me that they were affluent people who had earned their money by doing something that was never quite explained.
In fact, Elvis finds out later that they were, in fact, high-end government contractors, scientists who worked on secret projects, like for DARPA, where they did consequential, confidential work, but they could never say what they did. So automatically, Josh comes from a place that’s filled with secrets. Josh’s parents, now divorced, are both brilliant people, although his mother Adele is an abject paranoid. He grew up with a mother who believed she was being watched. In fact, Elvis muses at a point in the book that Adele is the way she is from all the years of living the lies they were telling everyone. All the years of living deep in the black had changed them—and Josh— which I think is true.
Nancie Clare: Lucy Chenier, Elvis’s on-again-off-again girlfriend, and her son Ben, who Elvis saved from what was supposed to be a fake kidnapping that turned into a real one orchestrated by Ben’s biological father are back in the picture. It’s clear Lucy loves Elvis but is fearful of the consequences that come with his job. But I think she sees Elvis as a rock, as an anchor. Someone whom she can depend on.
Robert Crais: In The Last Detective a phony kidnapping arranged by Ben’s biological father becomes an actual kidnapping. Ben goes through some horrendous traumatic experiences in that book. And Elvis saves Ben and brings him home to his mother Lucy. Elvis is a guy who has always wanted a family. Elvis had his own traumatic childhood. Elvis never had stability. He wants a woman to love him and, and who he will love back. I think Elvis Cole would love children, but that hasn’t worked out for him.
Here’s what I write about: I write about the re-creation of Elvis, Joe and all the characters. We all have things happen in our past. We all have our burdens to bear. You can choose to allow all the bad things that have happened to hold you back, or you can choose to rise above those things and move forward into a better life for yourself. Elvis did, Joe did. It’s been an ongoing theme in almost all my characters, because I believe it.
Nancie Clare: I think facing and transcending or surmounting your fears, no matter what they might be, is always dramatic. They may seem minor to an outsider, but your fears are inside of you. Lucy’s fears are inside of her; her preconceived notions of what might happen, and all those what ifs. It was a brave act because she faced her fears. She was not defined by her fears; the things that had happened in the past won’t hold her back.
Robert Crais: Lucy realizes that all the decisions she made [about Elvis] weren’t so much for Ben as they were for her. She had succumbed to her fears, and now she’s rising above those because she’s realizing that Elvis Cole is too great of a guy to not have in her life. And he’s too good of a man to not have in her son’s life. From Lucy’s point of view, Elvis is the man she wants for Ben’s father. And this is the book where she lays that out for Elvis., I think is an enormous commitment on her part.
Nancie Clare: Well, let’s talk about the space time continuum.
Robert Crais: Okay. Please!
Nancie Clare: The Monkey’s Raincoat, the first Elvis Cole book, came out in 1987. Elvis, Joe, Jon Stone—who pretends he’s so mercenary, but I read The Promise and I know he isn’t—and Lucy are aging, shall we say, gracefully?
Robert Crais: Yeah. Here’s, here’s the Secret. It’s Fiction!
Nancie Clare: <laugh> Bravo.
Robert Crais: When I wrote The Monkey’s Raincoat, Elvis was a few years older than me, <laugh>, now he’s many years younger than me. They don’t age on the same timeline as I do. The characters inhabit a world I call “Elvis Coles’ Los Angeles”: And in that world, they don’t have bad backs and shot knees, simply because I don’t want them to age in that way. I couldn’t tell you exactly how old they are in, in, I sort of have this vague sense that the guys are probably in their early forties,
Nancie Clare: Maybe…
Robert Crais: Maybe, you know, don’t pin me down, they’re somewhere floating in there. I respect when other writers age their characters, it’s just a personal choice. These are my characters. Elvis and Joe aren’t out there fighting and shooting it out with bad guys in their seventies. That would make for a silly read. So, they’re forever younger.
I enjoy the physicality the guys bring to the books. My books are kind of a mish mash, meaning they’re detective novels, but they’re also part thrillers and part procedurals. And they’re a bromance <laugh>. I could probably write a pretty good scene about two old cods sitting around talking about how their knees are shot and their backs ache and all that. And it’d be fun. But I see these guys in an alternate universe. Again, Elvis Cole’s, Los Angeles, and, and they’re sitting on the porch of Elvis’s A-frame. I love spending time with them and I don’t wanna put ’em through aging! I like them too much to have ’em have heart surgery. That’s not gonna happen.
Nancie Clare: I want to ask about your social media. One thing I’ve always noticed and appreciated is that your posts are chock-a-block with pictures of Los Angeles, most often in the wee hours when you are on walks. Your photos demonstrate how physically beautiful Los Angeles is: the mountains and the trees, and the sunsets, even the ribbons of red and white lights on the freeways. I think there’s no one more devoted than a convert. Now you are originally from Louisiana; I’m originally from Quebec. I think if you fall in love with this city and you’re from somewhere else, you embrace it and hold it as tight as you can.
Robert Crais: True. Listen, I fell in love with this city the day I arrived. I came here specifically for a reason. I wanted to be a writer; I wanted to work in television. And that’s where television was—Los Angeles. The day I got here, which was in the summer of 1976, I drove up to Mulholland Drive, and I looked out at the city. I looked east, I looked west. I drove out to the Pacific, and I simply fell in love with the landscape here and—with the city.
I thought it was beautiful. It is beautiful. It is unlike eastern cities, which are vertical, our city, is horizontal with pockets of verticality. I loved everything about it except the traffic. Hate the traffic. Still do—traffic’s worse than ever, and someone should do something.
I loved the diversity here. I love the different foods. I don’t sleep well, so I leave the house very early in the morning when there’s no traffic. That’s when I do my hikes. I hike in the morning early, in the dark mostly. And also if I’m just trying to vibe the city, if I’m looking for settings for a book or a scene, or if I’m just looking for inspiration, that’s when I drive around the city. That’s when I see coyotes walking down the center of residential streets.
I live here now because I choose to live here now because I still love it. I could live anywhere. I find Los Angeles as magical today as I did then. It is a place for dreamers; even though that term has begun to mean only people who come over the border from the south. Well, bullshit. Los Angeles is the place where people from all over the planet come to make their dreams come true. Whether it’s getting a minimum wage job because there’s nothing else where you come from, or it’s to make motion pictures or it’s to design rocket ships in the desert. Dreamers come here. I was such a dreamer. I didn’t know anyone here. I came here with a dream and that magic is still here.
Nancie Clare: Your health has explained why you are as a self-described grumpy vegan? <laugh> or reluctant vegan?
Robert Crais: Resentful vegan. The day I had heart surgery, I became a vegan. Believe me, I’d much rather eat pork chops and ribs. But here we are. Cholesterol is not my friend.
Nancie Clare: In your books, Elvis is obsessed by food. He’s cooks and knows all the best taco places, all the good enchiladas, where to get Guatemalan and Thai food, where to where to get coffee, where to get pastries. Reading your books is like reading “Best of L.A.” food. Under the circumstances of your resentful veganism, is this difficult? Is it painful or is it a vicarious thrill where you can relive the moment of a sublime Taco Asada?
Robert Crais: No, you know what? He’s still me. He’s still Elvis Cole. Elvis does a lot of the things he does because I enjoyed doing them too. He cooks because I always cook. I was big cook, still am.,
Nancie Clare: You recently tweeted out a picture of a, a brisket, I think
Robert Crais: Ribs, brisket. I still take great pleasure in it. It’s a love and passion that I have still have. I don’t eat it but make it for my family. Elvis loves tacos because I love tacos. I used to love going all over all over the city to try taco stands and taco trucks. We’re talking tacos, but it could be Musso and Franks, it could be, you know, Pacific Dining Car!
Nancie Clare: Cole’s?
Robert Crais: I’ve never had Elvis go to Cole’s because of the same name.
Nancie Clare: Elvis goes to Philippe’s instead
Robert Crais: He does go to Philippe’s. All those places, they’re the fabric of Los Angeles where we eat. One of the joys is all the, is the diverse food cultures here, you know, it’s not far away. There’s Little Ethiopia, Thai Town…
Nancie Clare: Koreatown…
Robert Crais: Koreatown. Oh, oh my God. I mean, you can eat different kinds of foods every meal, every day of the day of the week, as long as you can put up with the traffic to get there. That’s all part of my love for Los Angeles. Those are the things that make Los Angeles wonderful. Los Angeles is a character in the book. I don’t think Elvis Cole could be Elvis Cole in any other city. For Elvis to be Elvis, as I know him, he has to be in Los Angeles.
Nancie Clare: Now that the fire has been lit, are you working on the next book?
Robert Crais: I’m writing it! I’m writing the next Elvis Cole novel now. I’ve been working on it for about oh, three months now. Maybe, maybe a little more even. You know, ever since this happened, after I recovered, I was like churning, racing the light. It’s just like the energy seems endless now. When I finished Racing the Light, I already had an idea for the next book. I’m a ball of fire. I’ve gone nuclear—stand back!
