Where his muse leads him
After years as a successful musician and record producer, Reed Arvin is trying out a new label: author. It suits him well.
By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published November 4, 2004
For Reed Arvin, writing thrillers is a second career. He spent almost 20 years as a musician and record producer for such artists as Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith.
He was always intrigued by writing, though, and published a first novel, The Wind in the Wheat, in 1994. About five years ago, reeling from a bout with cancer and a bitter divorce, he switched to writing in earnest, publishing The Will in 2000 and following it this year with The Last Goodbye (HarperCollins, $23.95), about a down-on-his-luck Atlanta lawyer who falls for a beautiful opera singer and gets entangled in a plot involving high-tech medical research.
Arvin, 48, and his artist wife, Dianne, live part of the year in Nashville and the rest of the time in a condo at Isla del Sol in St. Petersburg.
What made you decide to leave the music business and write full time?I got cancer. Physically I couldn't really be a record producer anymore. Being a record producer is a lot like being an athlete in that there's a term of relevance. I wanted some say about the transition.
I don't have any training as a writer. I have a lot of training as a musician. But a lot of the best musicians I was working with didn't have any formal training as musicians. Writing tantalized me. I didn't have an MFA from Iowa or anything, so I just started writing.
Why did you choose to write legal thrillers?I don't really like that term. My guys are lawyers, but they don't go to court. I'm not a lawyer. But both my parents are lawyers, and I know enough about it to know that nothing in the world is so boring as a courtroom.
It's a framework. When you write a thriller, all the action is going to be elevated. You can bring the readers along if everything else is firmly grounded in reality. That's why there's so much research in my books.
How much time do you spend doing research before you write?Research for The Last Goodbye took about six months. That's the most fun to me, getting out and meeting these people and talking to them. I miss one thing about my life as a musician: Music is communal. There's no hang as cool as the music hang.
Writing is solitary. The research is my opportunity to get out. You get to meet amazing people. For Last Goodbye, I did a lot of work with Richard Caprioli, director of the Mass Spectrometry Research Center at Vanderbilt University. With Richard, I not only got the science, but he's a fascinating person. That's where I got the subplot that revolves around the tremendous ego of these scientists. You know, they'll tell you the money is fine, but what they really want is to be first.
Is it difficult to get people to talk to you about the subjects you're researching?People love to talk about what makes their world special. With the cops, the prosecutors, the research scientists, the social workers, it's almost a secret knowledge.
Why did you choose to set The Last Goodbye in Atlanta, rather than in, say, Nashville or St. Petersburg, where you've lived?Central to the story was a power couple who was black. So, all signs pointed to Atlanta. Also the cultural background, the opera, and the high-tech research.
I could move to some place sexier. Film rights have a lot to do with it. Set a book in Nashville, you're saying, "This will not be a movie."
Ever think about casting the movie as you're writing the book?Oh, sure, for Last Goodbye, Halle Berry, Denzel Washington. Roll camera. Denzel would have the gravitas that character (pharmaceutical company mogul Charles Ralston) needs to be believable.
Once the research is done, how long does it take you to write a book?It takes me about a year to write. It could go faster if I outlined. But I really don't want to find out what's going to happen before you do. I intentionally write myself into dead ends without knowing the way out.
I love to end a chapter and make you say, "Oh, shoot, I can't stop now." I don't want to let you go.
I have no actual idea how it works. I'm just dogged. When you read the book, you're reading the fifth draft, and every draft is shorter. It gets shorter one word at a time.
Your books don't have a series character. Was that a deliberate choice?It was tempting to do. It would be the only way I could finish (one) every year. And you know, if you have a book called K Is for Killer, and somebody likes it, they go looking for A Is for Whatever and come out of Barnes & Noble with an armload of books. But I don't want to be locked into the same scenario every time.
What is your next book about?This one is set in Nashville. It's based on a case there involving a Lost Boy from Sudan who's accused of murder. My wife was on the jury, and of course she couldn't talk about the case. But she told me, "You have to come down here and see it."
Does your wife often help you with your books?I'm really lucky in that I'm married to a phenomenal woman who's very creative. She's always dropping little seedlings for me to think about. We're a mutual admiration society.
If you're a writer, your world is women. Editors, publishers, agents, they're all women. I consider that a bonus, to be around strong women.
My books have been praised for descriptive power, and I can take absolutely no credit for that. I can only credit my mother, for two qualities. One, she was an English major, and there was always an elegance in her speech, an appreciation for literature. The other quality was her being blind.
All the men in my family are far more verbal than most men, my father, my brother, myself. That's because we had to describe everything for her.
My mom, Kay Arvin, became the first blind woman judge in the United States. She's 82, and she's razor sharp. After she had The Last Goodbye read to her, we had a long talk. And I had some things to answer for.
At a glanceReed Arvin appears at 10:15 a.m. Saturday in Miller Auditorium. He is also on the Keeping Them In Suspense panel at 10 a.m. Sunday in Sheen Auditorium.