WHATBOOK..?
...are you reading now?
A DANGEROUS Man by Robert Crais. Bob is a good friend and a helluva writer.
In this book we get to see his two greatest creations, Elvis Cole and Joe Pike. I’d love to see Leonardo DiCaprio play Cole and Brad Pitt play Joe Pike, particularly after their wonderful collaboration in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood.
Bob is like a Porsche when it comes to writing. Indeed, it’s quite fitting that he drives that model of car. Like the Porsche, his writing is elegant, stylish, funny, can fire on turbos when need be and dive deep when the plot demands it, but this is far and away some of the smoothest writing and best storytelling you’ll ever read. He’s written a lot of books, but just keeps getting better and better.
...would you take to a desert island?
MY STANDARD reply is ‘100 Ways to Get Off a Desert Island If You’re Unlucky Enough to End Up On One’, but I will refrain from using that here. I would pile up on mysteries, because not only are they great reads, they’re like Sudoku in that they keep your mind engaged as you ferret out the puzzles.
Thrillers are books that you can re-read over and over, so you won’t have to bring an endless supply. You’ll just continue to fascinate yourself as you read them again and again. And you never know, somewhere buried in one of those mysteries might be a nifty way to rescue yourself.
... first gave you the reading bug?
THE Freddy The Pig series by Walter Brooks, set on a farm in upstate New York. For a kid who loved animals, there was nothing better than animals dressing up as humans and having these amazing adventures, complete with wonderful illustrations. I loved mystery too, particularly Alfred Hitchcock And The Three Investigators series. They were kids my age who solved mysteries in California. I loved them so much as a child that as an adult I found and bought first editions; I go back and re-read them particularly around the holidays, which is when my parents would give them to me as presents.
As for literary fiction, it was Huckleberry Finn and To Kill A Mockingbird. Again, kids in adult situations always fascinated me.
... left you cold?
MY VERY strict rule is that I don’t like to disparage any other writer. I consider that pretty unclassy. With that said, any books that I was forced to read at school (notably Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand) are ones that left me cold. The last thing we want to do is turn off entire generations to reading because we told them what was good for them.
The choice of what to read should be a personal adventure and we should always allow it to play out. We don’t force kids to listen to certain music and watch certain films or TV shows, or play only approved video games. It’s not an apples-to-apples comparison for obvious reasons, but I think we tend to be a little too controlling when it comes to what books are chosen for reading.
DAViD BAlDAcci will be appearing at capital crime on September 28 at the Grand connaught Rooms, london Wc2B 5DA. Other guest speakers include Anthony Horowitz, Peter James, Elly Griffiths and Rachel Abbott. The festival runs from September 26-28 — for more information and tickets, visit capitalcrime.org. One Good Deed by David Baldacci is out now (Macmillan, £18.99).