San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Is ‘Odyssey’ really the end?
With his 10th Rick Cahill novel, author Matt Coyle may be ready to say goodbye to the San Diego private detective who changed his life
There’s a point toward the end of our interview where local novelist Matt Coyle admits, somewhat humorously, that he’s unsure how he’s going to move on from Rick Cahill. There’s a sometimes mournful cadence to Coyle’s voice, a pronounced uncertainty similar to those who are fresh out of a multi-year relationship, uncertain what the future may hold.
“Twenty years in one relationship is the longest I’ve ever had by far,” Coyle says laughing from his Clairemont home. “And with Rick, it’s even the most successful.”
This is one of many instances in which Coyle speaks of his signature character not only as if he were real, but as if they’d been living together for nearly two decades. In many ways, they have been. Coyle repeats the time frame for emphasis.
“Twenty years. I can’t imagine not writing him again. He’s a part of my life, strange as that sounds,” Coyle says. “He changed my life.”
Lucky for readers of the Rick Cahill series of books, which centers on the private investigator that Coyle spent nearly a decade developing and first debuted in 2013 with “Yesterday’s Echo,” their favorite protagonist is going out (for now?) with a bang. Hitting bookstores on Tuesday, “Odyssey’s End” marks the 10th book in the series. Given the reverence with which Coyle speaks of the character he first conceived so long ago, it raises the question: Why would Coyle want to move away from a character that has won him multiple industry awards and garnered him thousands of devoted fans?
“I think it was time to do a palate cleanse anyway,” says Coyle, who is currently writing his first book that doesn’t feature Rick. “I think that challenging yourself in a different way is important. I think that no matter where I was in my career, it would have been a good time to try something different.”
Like many of the other nine books in the series, “Odyssey’s End” finds Rick investigating a unique mystery, while also balancing personal relationships, protecting his family, and dealing with his own deteriorating health.
Each book takes place in and around San Diego, with real-life landmarks and neighborhoods featured prominently throughout the series. In the new book, Rick is hired by a former antagonist to track down a missing woman. Naturally, things get complicated and our hero ends up chasing down shadowy figures while being outgunned at nearly every turn. To add to his troubles, he’s also dealing with a body and temperament that are rapidly diminishing due to what he believes is chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a brain disease that results from physical trauma.
“He definitely changed, and I certainly didn’t see him with this disease when I first started,” Coyle says. “I didn’t go into it envisioning a regular character with a potentially fatal disease,
and I certainly don’t think my publisher ever imagined that. Why would you want to kill off a character who is doing well?”
Rather than keeping Rick ageless like many popular mystery and thriller characters, Coyle has allowed fans of the series to see Cahill age in real time.
“When I started, I only had a couple rules that I wouldn’t break: First, I wanted every physical hit and every emotional hit to have resonance, to matter,” says Coyle. “He’s got plenty of emotional scars and he has plenty of external scars too, which I’m always having to remind myself which ones he has when takes his shirt off or something. But the rule was always that everything has to matter; everything has to add up.”
The other rule Coyle recalls initially instilling in the character was that Rick would not have any sidekicks. The author admits, however, that he’s enjoyed writing the character of Moira Mcfarland — Rick’s on again/off again counterpart since the second book — so much so that he ultimately decided to include her more in the series.
“They blossomed even thought they often have a very tumultuous relationship, sort of like an older brother/little sister dynamic,” says Coyle, more than once referring to Moira as the “conscience of the series.”
“I don’t think I would’ve got Rick to 10 books if she hadn’t been around to pull him out of the darkness a bit. She’s not a particularly funny person, but their interactions lighten things up a bit.”
Still, in a journey that Coyle looks back on as a series of “broken rules” and “happy accidents,” he says the “biggest challenge” has been to write each of the books as a stand-alone adventure. That is, the reader would not necessarily need to read the previous books to understand the current one. This episodic approach is often a “delicate balance,” as Coyle describes it, but one that he’s tried to perfect.
“Everything that happens to this guy in one book carries over to the next book,” says Coyle. “For a new book, you have to give a new reader a sense of how this guy got here — how he sometimes makes irrational decisions and has a darkness that seems to follow him — but you don’t want to bore old readers by putting too much backstory in there.”
Another testament to Coyle’s strengths as a writer is how he doesn’t shy away from the tedious nature of private detective work. Sure, there’s plenty of suspense, intrigue and red herrings, but there are also stakeouts, injuries and jumping fences to catch, or even get away from, the bad guys. These expository moments help the reader form a bond with Rick, giving the character an everyman feel as opposed to the bang-bang-shoot-’emups that saturate the mystery and thriller genres.
“Of course I don’t want to bore the reader, but I also want to give them a sense of what Rick is thinking,” says Coyle. “Even when he has to kill someone, he’s not blowing the smoke off the gun and putting it back into his holster. He realizes he took someone’s life and dwells in the cosmic karma of an act like that. Yes, those are bad people, but it’s important to explore what that does to him.”
Reflecting further, Coyle states that Rick may have never existed at all if not for a series of karmic events in his own life.
Coyle grew up in a “tract home section of La Jolla” where he says he always wanted to be a writer after his father gave him Raymond Chandler books to read. Even after graduating from the University of California Santa Barbara with an English degree, it still took Coyle three decades of working in the restaurant and golf industries before he came back to writing.
“Those jobs, especially the sales jobs, they prepare you for the writer’s life,”
Coyle reflects. “There’s a lot of rejection in the writer’s life, and if you work in sales at a company, you’re used to that rejection. It really does help.”
One day, when the golf company he was working at was restructuring, he says he could have told his supervisor what he wanted to hear and remain employed.
Instead, he was honest with what he believed were his strengths and was let go.
“It’s a decision that probably cost me a lot of money,” recalls Coyle, adding it was then that he decided to return to his first love of writing. “In a way, that decision saved my life.”
And just as Coyle has saved his signature character’s
When: Where:
7:30 p.m. Tuesday Warwick’s, 7812 Girard Ave., La Jolla Admission: Free warwicks.com
Online: life dozens of times over the years, he’s quick to point out that, in many ways, Rick has also saved him. The climax of “Odyssey’s End,” while wholly satisfying, does leave the reader with many questions as to the hero’s fate.
“I’m so lucky to have readers,” Coyle says. “While I don’t think many of them want Rick to go away, if he did in this book, I think they’d at least think it made sense.”
While Coyle is reluctant to fully commit to an answer on whether he’ll revisit Rick in the future, or even reveal whether he’s alive, the author is ready for the next chapter in his own life.
“I’ve been in his mind for 20 years,” Coyle says. “I can’t imagine not writing another Rick book. I just can’t.”
He pauses before adding, “But if I don’t, this would be a good way to end it.”
“Homeward” by Angela Jackson-brown: Widowed and pregnant with a child from a fling, Rose returns to her Georgia hometown in 1962 to lick her wounds, facing a judgmental family, an intolerant community, and her own regret and bereavement. Introduced to members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, she finds a sense of purpose in the resistance effort and soon meets Isaac Weinberg, a Jewish champion for the cause who awakens feelings in her that take her by surprise. As the fight moves to her hometown, Rose finds her voice, and her metamorphosis parallels the country’s vital transformation seeded by the Civil Rights Movement.
“One Hundred Days”’ by Alice Pung: Writing to her unborn child, 16-year-old Karuna documents the 100 days she spends locked in the public housing apartment she shares with her overprotective mother, where her feelings of claustrophobia and entrapment clash with her need for her mother’s help and approval. The two women engage in a battle for power over themselves and each other, both believing they are acting out of love. Pung shines when conveying the feelings of a child whose adulthood is fast approaching, and the emotions of a mother who is losing control.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERS
Fiction 1. “The Exchange” by John Grisham (Doubleday)
Well, everybody was terrified about the future back in John Jacob Astor’s day, and with good reason.
Q:
You write about Caroline Astor, who appears as a character in the HBO show “The Gilded Age” and created “the 400” list — the people she believed were refined and wealthy enough to be part of New York society. She was self-appointed royalty who held tremendous power for decades.
A:
It was news to me when I wrote the Vanderbilt book. I had not realized that the people like Caroline Astor and Ward Mcallister and the people doing these quadrilles viewed the building of these houses, the creation of society, as a sort of a national American enterprise — doing something for the country to establish America on par with the old countries of Europe. With Ward Mcallister, it was just borrowing everything from France — French chef, French food, French paintings, French decor. I actually bought a book of William Vanderbilt’s house, the art collection in his house. I paid like $40 for it online; no one else really wanted it. And they were the ugliest paintings you can possibly imagine. I mean, they are these treacly, awful paintings.
Q:
One of the conclusions in the book is that money was the ultimate power, more so than taste, more so than education. It always seems to come down to the money.
A:
Money was obviously the price of entry. There was a time when it was these old Dutch families trying to keep hold of New York and set up the barriers to entry. That certainly broke with the Vanderbilts; there were other people who tried to do it and were shunned. But the other revelation, which I had not realized, was the advent of hotels and these public spaces that suddenly allowed the democratization of entry into society. I mean, who thinks about society like New York society now? That just seems dead to me. I’m sure there are society parties, but that idea seems so antiquated and archaic. Now it is all about money and technology.
Q:
Issues of class are always going to exist in some form — where you live, where you went to school — but with enough money and enough drive, you can overcome a lot of those things.
A:
Absolutely. By the way, a lot of Caroline Astor’s pearls were fake. And her house was probably really dusty, and these paintings weren’t actually all that valuable. So, again, when you scratch away ...
Q:
There’s a lot of theater?
A:
I know that firsthand.
Q:
In 1912, Vincent Astor inherits his father’s fortune after poor Jack goes down on the Titanic: $69 million at that time, $2 billion today.
A:
One of the things that’s stunning about the Astors is just the sheer volume of fresh money that was coming in every year from the rents on these slums. There are a lot of families whose money was made a long time ago; the Vanderbilts stopped making money, they stopped the enterprises and became so top-heavy that it just imploded.
Q:
From a business perspective, you could argue that Vincent made a terrible mistake by selling off some of the most valuable real estate in the world.
A:
He clearly was not interested in doing what every generation of male Astor had done previously. Look, there are a lot of great books that have been written about various aspects of the Astor family. And we rely on a lot of other books and have footnoted that. What I like about this book is that it’s a broad view from John Jacob Astor to Brooke Astor. And also this idea of the name Astor: what it means and how it came to evolve, including the Astor Hotel bar scene.
Q:
What is your takeaway from this book?
A:
It’s very easy to think of this as a story about a wealthy family and their business. And there’s a lot of that in this. But my takeaway is just sort of the human cost of all of this. As unrelatable as the life the Astors led is, there are all these very human moments and human frailties, and how that plays out under the weight of and with the benefit of all this money.