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Best-selling author returns to her St. Louis roots By Cynthia Billhartz Gregorian ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH 07/15/2008 Iris Johansen, author of dozens of best-selling thrillers such as "Blind Alley," "Firestorm," and "Body of Lies," was born, raised and married in St. Louis. The former airline reservations agent now lives in Atlanta and has won numerous writing awards. More than 25 million copies of her books are in print. Her son, Roy Johansen, Edgar Award-winning screenwriter and author of several mystery novels, lives in Los Angeles. Recently, mother and son collaborated for the first time on a mystery thriller called "Silent Thunder." Its heroine, Hannah Bryson is a brilliant marine architect who's preparing a decommissioned Russian submarine for exhibition in a U.S. museum. When Bryson discovers a lethal secret about the submarine, it launches her into a life-or-death adventure and puts the fate of the legendary sub at risk. The Johansens will return to St. Louis on Thursday to sign copies of their new book at the St. Louis Public Library. We spoke by phone with Iris Johansen last week. Q: How did you go from working as an airline reservations agent to writing best-selling books? A: I always wanted to write, but I had children and life got in the way. When they were in their teens, I suddenly realized I was going to have empty-nest syndrome very soon and that I needed to fill my life. So I started writing. I'd get up at 5 a.m. and write. I'd take my legal yellow pad and sit in the lounge at work and write. I'd come home at night, clean up and then write. I started with romances (The first, "Stormy Vows," was published in 1983); I'm an avid reader. You pick up so much from that. It sinks in and eventually, if you're a storyteller, it comes out in your own format. Writing romances was the best learning format I could have chosen. They have happy endings so you don't have to deal with angst. Plus they're simple stories that rely on a lot of emotion. I started with small books, then historicals and single-title formats, then romantic suspense. An important element is characterization. You have to make people care about your characters in any type of book you write. If they don't like the protagonists, they won't care if they're in danger. Q: Who came up with the idea to co-write a book and why? A: Roy and I had been trying to think of a plot together for years, and didn't come up with anything. One day he said, "I think I've got it. Have you ever (written about) a submarine?" I said: "What? I'm not Tom Clancy." Roy had come back from a museum in Chicago where they had a decommissioned submarine. So we talked and began getting excited about it. It's fresh, interesting and not Tom Clancy. We had a ball with the research. We went through a decommissioned submarine in Long Beach, which was so interesting. They're so confined. And on this particular one, the sailors were only allowed to shower every other day for three minutes with sea water. Can you imagine that? And living on top of each other. Q: What was it like to collaborate with your son? A: It's a challenge. You have to relinquish some creative control, and I'd probably not be willing to do it with anyone else. But I respect Roy so much, and we wanted to try it. Every time we got a bunch of pages from the other we'd either be laughing or pulling our hair. So it was a challenge, but probably one of the most fun projects I could ever hope to work on. I'm writing another one with him that's coming out next summer and we're using the same (work) format. It worked for us. When we first started writing "Silent Thunder," we would tip-toe around each other because we didn't want to hurt each other's feelings. But then we learned that we needed to be absolutely ruthless. So by chapter five we were pretty hard on each other. We learned to serve the work and not each other. Q: How did the process work? A: It took two years to write after coming up with the plot. We then jumped back-and-forth. We're both the type of writers who write by the seat of our pants. Therefore the plot kept changing. We kept getting pages from each other, and it would be such a surprise because the plot would take a sudden detour. The other person would read it and say, 'Oh my gosh. What are you doing to me?' But it was really exciting. It got to a point where I couldn't wait to get his part. Characters often changed from being one thing on page 50 to someone entirely different on page 250. And they became deeper and fuller. Sometimes we'd have to talk about it. With my stuff, too, because I can get pretty out there. But we're both visual writers and since we both have that capacity, we think alike and say, "Oh boy, I can see that." Q: You've been at it longer and you're the mom. Does that give you veto power? A: Nah! No way. Roy's been a script writer for 10 years and won an Edgar so he's a professional and I respect that. And he respects the professional side of me. Q: What did Roy bring to the table that's new? Will we recognize what's his and what's yours? A: Roy loves twists. A couple of times, he knocked my socks off and I'd love the scene so much and I was so proud. We worked really hard to make (my work and his work) absolutely seamless. Booksellers have said, "I don't know how you did it." |
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