Odd twists, turns led Gerritsen to literary fame

It's interesting how it's only in retrospect that we can identify the ingredients -- the events, the influences, the accidents of fate ­-- that combine to one day serve us in a career.

Take best-selling author Tess Gerritsen, who might well owe her worldwide success to such disparate elements as Nancy Drew, FBI hiring policies, her Chinese-American upbringing, horror movies, a medical degree and one incredibly fortuitous change of plans.

Oh, and literary talent. Lots and lots of literary talent.

Gerritsen will visit Las Vegas on Wednesday for a presentation and book signing at the Clark County Library. Her latest mystery, "The Silent Girl" (Ballantine Books, $26), which hits bookstores the day before, revolves around a bizarre Chinese legend and a murder in Boston's Chinatown that reunites awkward partners Jane Rizzoli and Maura Isles.

While growing up in San Diego, Gerritsen was a big fan of the mysteries of Nancy Drew. Don't laugh: Speaking by phone from her home in Maine, Gerritsen calls the noted teenaged detective an inspiration for "every single female published author I know of who writes mysteries.

"She was the first I can recall to give girls a vision of what was possible for them. We could do anything. We could solve mysteries. We could help the police. We could do it with our girlfriends along, and we could have a boyfriend and we could drive and stay out until midnight."

Gerritsen loved the Nancy Drew stories and knew she wanted to be a storyteller herself. She also wanted to be a cop until discovering around the age of 10 that, back then, "the FBI was not hiring women."

Why a cop? "I think I just wanted to catch criminals," Gerritsen says. "But, then, I got waylaid into medicine.

"Parental pressure."

Gerritsen earned a medical degree and spent several years as an internal medicine specialist, which, it turns out, helps her in nailing down the medical details -- autopsies and such -- in her stories.

But Gerritsen also would write -- in the call room during her residency, during maternity leave from the hospital -- and saw a few of her short stories published.

In 1987, Gerritsen's first novel, a romantic thriller, was published. She followed it up with eight more romance thrillers -- and discovered that "it's really hard to get two people to fall in love believably" -- as well as a 1993 TV movie before seeing her first medical thriller, "Harvest," published in 1996.

That novel was inspired by a conversation with a cop who had visited Russia and told Gerritsen about how "kids were being kidnapped in Moscow and shipped off to the Middle East as organ donors."

Gerritsen was appalled but also knew that "it was a story I had to tell."

"Harvest" hit the New York Times best-seller list, and Gerritsen wrote several more best-selling medical thrillers. Then, in 2001, Gerritsen's crime thriller "The Surgeon" was published. In it, readers met a minor character, a homicide detective named Jane Rizzoli who, Gerritsen says, "was supposed to die.

"In fact, as I introduced her, I thought, 'OK, this is going to become one of my sacrificial characters.' I knew exactly how she was going to meet her end, so I wasn't paying a lot of attention to (her) character development."

But, as the story progressed, "I thought, 'Wow, I like this woman. She's not going to die.' "

Gerritsen let Rizzoli live -- "barely," she adds -- and brought her back, later to be paired with medical examiner Dr. Maura Isles in subsequent best-sellers.

Besides bringing the duo back, "The Silent Girl" gives Gerritsen a chance to use to literary effect some of her own experiences growing up Chinese-American by introducing a new character, detective Johnny Tam, "as my point of view, my voice."

"It's a chance to introduce an Asian-American hero and have him speak for me," Gerritsen says. "The things he talks about I have experienced; for instance, this feeling of collective shame when a crime is committed by an Asian anywhere."

The story also involves the Chinese legend of the Monkey King, a mythical character with supernatural strength and magical powers. Gerritsen remembers her mother, a Chinese immigrant, telling her stories about the character when she was a child.

That's not surprising, though, because Gerritsen's mother also learned English by watching horror movies with her daughter. Gerritsen laughs.

"I grew up screaming a lot in the movie theater. But it was a terrific training ground. Hollywood tells a great story, and I learned from Hollywood how to make a pulse beat faster. And, to me, the ultimate storytelling is scaring somebody. That comes from my childhood."

In addition to the new novel, Rizzoli and Isles this month appear in the second-season premiere of "Rizzoli & Isles," the TNT series based on Gerritsen's books. Gerritsen says the books and the series take the characters in different directions, but that she's OK with that.

"It's a very different thing, and it's what they needed to do for TV," Gerritsen says. "I write my own universe and stick to my own universe. I haven't changed anything in the books because of the TV show."

And, because of the TV show, newcomers are "paying attention to the books," adds Gerritsen, who's pleasantly surprised that her characters "have morphed into multiple universes."

Even, she notes, as leads in fan fiction written by "fans who want Maura and Jane to be lovers."

She laughs. "I know authors who totally freak out about that. First of all, there's nothing I can do about it. Second, to me it's just fun to see how these women I have created have morphed into so many mutations."

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@
reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280.