I remember one night, sitting in the Columbia house, just typing out a paragraph without a lot of thought. I have no idea where it came from. I wrote of-hmm, what’s a good Southern-sounding name?-oh yeah, Earl, yeah, that’s it, Earl. Let’s make Earl a Marine too, and, oh, I know, this’ll be cool, let’s have him win the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima; in fact, let’s have him fight his way across the Pacific, island to bloody island, killer, hero, Marine, a man of legend. Oh, then he comes back and becomes a state policeman. Now let’s have him killed ten years later in a squalid cornfield by two white-trash skanks with those dog-of-the-South names, I know, we’ll call them Jimmy and Bub Pye; there you go. Achilles slain by two Yocums, or Snopeses. Yeah.

I typed it up and forgot all about it.

And yet, when I was finished-years later, it seemed-that’s what stayed with me. Achilles felled in the corn, two worthless punks crowing. It was so sad; I just had to know more, and the only way to learn it was to write it. And that’s what I did. As for Bob Lee and Point of Impact, there’s not much more to tell. Once I had him, I had the book. Everything else more or less happened in the time it should have happened. There was a last, desperate rewrite, where I solved another narrative problem by breaking a single villain into two, one Colonel Ray Shreck, ex-Green Beret, and the other Hugh Meachum, CIA executive and espionage entrepreneur extraordinaire. (Somehow they became Danny Glover and Ned Beatty in the movie. Go figure!)

Yet, when it was done, published to good reviews but disappointing sales, I found that Bob and his father, Earl, would not go away. I tried to banish them, for until then I had taken craftsman’s pride in not repeating myself. But they wouldn’t go away, and I had to write another book. And then another. And then… My life’s work had arrived, and I was the last to know it.

Born in 1952 in Saint Louis, Missouri, Faye Kellerman graduated from UCLA with a bachelor of arts degree in theoretical mathematics in 1974. Four years later, she received her doctorate of dental surgery, although she has never practiced dentistry. She is an Orthodox Jew, as is her husband, bestselling mystery novelist Jonathan Kellerman. The Kellermans are the only husband and wife writers ever to appear on the bestseller list of the New York Times simultaneously for two separate books. Jewish themes and characters are frequent and important elements of most of her novels.

In addition to the much-loved novels about Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus, she has written two nonseries mysteries-The Quality of Mercy (1989), a historical thriller, and Moon Music (1998), a serial-killer novel set in Las Vegas-the short-story collection The Garden of Eden and Other Criminal Delights, and two books with her husband, Double Homicide (2004) and Capital Crimes (2006). Stalker (2000) and Street Dreams (2003) feature police officer Cindy Decker.

The Kellermans live in Beverly Hills and have four children, one of whom, Jesse, is also a successful mystery writer.

One of the most frequently asked questions that I have fielded over my twenty-two years as a published crime fiction writer is: how much of me is in my characters? More specifically, how much am I like the female protagonist of my series, Rina Lazarus? I’ve answered this question hundreds of times, and usually I respond with the following: I am not Rina Lazarus. Rina Lazarus is a fictional entity that I’ve created. She is not based on a single representation but a composite of my experiences and my imagination. Then I add: all of my characters have Faye Kellerman in them. How it could be otherwise? They all come from my unique and sometimes subconscious process of blending fact and fiction, real and imaginary.

But the response does beg the question: how much of me is Rina Lazarus? I find it amusing and not unpredictable that people rarely ask: how much am I like my male series character, Peter Decker? More often than not, Peter takes the starring role in my novels, so if there is any character who is a manifestation of me, why wouldn’t it be Decker?

To answer the question honestly and completely, I’d like to go back to the origins of Peter and Rina. Where did they come from? Who were they before they appeared in fiction and how have they evolved?

To best respond, I need to reconsider my first published novel, The Ritual Bath, where Peter and Rina made their debuts. I’ve italicized the word published because at the time, I didn’t know that The Ritual Bath was going to be my first novel. I had made a few attempts at writing and was now trying to pen a story that would be interesting, entertaining, and, most important, would capture the eye of some farsighted editor. But the characters didn’t come from thin air. To help you understand the biographies of Peter and Rina, I’m going to give you a little background about the author.

As a young child, I had a vivid imagination. Most kids do, but mine seemed to last a little longer and to be just a tad more florid than those of most children. I not only had imaginary friends, I had them in many different locales and diverse centuries. My friends were Greek goddesses of mythology, dames from medieval Europe, turn-of-the-century Boston blueblood girls in boarding schools, barefoot Okies from the dustbowl, and prisoners in concentration camps. Anything I heard or saw was re-created, enhanced, and then acted out in private. My “friends” and I went through a slew of adventures, and all before I reached school age.

School.

Nothing quite kills a fertile imagination like rote learning. No one is saying that times tables aren’t important, but how could such humdrum triviality compete with all my terrific escapades? Nonetheless, school is a necessary evil, and at the age of six I started first grade. And that’s when I discovered that although I had an elaborate imagination, I was saddled with a brain that had a hard time integrating letters with phonetics. Reading was difficult because I couldn’t sound out words. I learned how to read English the same way I learned how to read music-by sight-reading. In actuality, I learned how to read music before I learned how to read words. And, as I did with the notes on a scale, I had to memorize words in order to get my brain to properly translate what my eye saw. To do this, I resorted to a number of memorization and mnemonic tricks. I recall that I could easily identify the word look because of the two O’s that in my six-year-old mind resembled two wide eyes. My dyslexia stalled my reading for a while, but luckily I was compensated with a facility with numbers. I always say in my talks that I could work with X, Y, and Z as long as the letters weren’t strung together to make words. I did not like English. I did not like writing papers and essays. I did like creative writing, but so little of that is done in school that my preference didn’t matter much. As far as learning, I took the path of least resistance and was a math major in high school and college, graduating from UCLA with a BA in theoretical mathematics in 1974.

My next incarnation was in dental medicine. I attended UCLA Dental School and graduated in 1978 fully intending to practice dentistry, but fate had other plans. Jesse Oren Kellerman was delivered about two and a half months after I graduated. I don’t know what I was thinking when I thought I’d be up on my feet a week after birth. I must have been on another planet when I thought I could easily integrate career and children. I had to learn on my own that babies are a lot of work. This was a revelation to me. For the first six months of my son’s life, I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t get anything done other than to take care of the little rascal. It helped to know people in the same situation, but as I had always been a competent person and prided myself on being organized to the point of compulsive, I felt I should be doing better.