Q. How come it’s spelled “Gericke” but pronounced “Yerkey?” Were you dropped on your head at birth?
A. Yes, but that’s not the reason. When the seven Guericke brothers (note the additional U, which provided the “yer” sound in the pronunciation) emigrated from Germany in the 1800s, an Ellis Island bureaucrat chopped out the U to make the name “more American.” Hah! It just gave all of us Gerickes a headache trying to explain.
Q. What about Shane? Where’d that come from?
A. I was named after the Alan Ladd cowboy movie of the same name. The little blond kid running after Alan yelling, “Shane! Come back Shane!” Remember that? My folks liked the name, and most important, it didn’t remind them of anyone they hated. Thus I became Shane. It’s a great name for a writer, Shane Gericke: the name is blessedly gender-less, so readers assume whatever they like. The author behind the name is, in contrast, All Guy All the Time, with a steely gaze and manly chin. Or so he likes to tell himself.
Q. So, Shane, you got hooked on writing at age 7?
A. Yep, and you can credit Mrs. Feely for that. (Or blame, if you don’t like my books.) I was in second grade at Ann Rutledge Grade School in Lincoln Estates, the 300-population crossroads south of Chicago where I grew up. One snowy winter morning I was practicing my Parker Penmanship, and my teacher, Mrs. Francis Feely, hair of snow and eyes of steel, walked into the classroom with a stack of mimeographs.
Q. Mimeographs? What’s that?
A. The precursor to Xeroxing. Teachers typed the test, quiz or whatever onto a master stencil. They hooked that to the mimeograph machine. They cranked the handle and, voila, copies popped out the other end. It was a “wet” technology, so the copies were damp from the blue ammonia “toner” the machine used. Smelly, too. You could get high breathing that stuff too long—
Q. Whoops, never mind. What was on these papers she mimeoed?
A. I had no idea, so I asked. Mrs. Feely replied it was a newspaper, and handed me a copy. I read it eagerly. There were little stories about events and people at the school. Each story was topped by the name of one of the eighth-graders.
Q. A byline.
A. A byline, as in, “By Len Heine” or “By Alice Jones.” The stories were written by the eighth-graders and distributed to the entire school, which didn’t take long; there were only a hundred or so students grades one through eight.
Q. So you liked this smelly blue-ink newspaper?
A. I was enchanted. This was news! It was happening right now! More important, the writers got their names in the paper and everybody saw them! I asked Mrs. Feely if I could be a writer and have a byline. Not missing the opportunity to slip in a lesson—geez, teachers were wily back then—she said, “If you study hard and learn English, reading, spelling and punctuation, you could write for a newspaper.” Though given what I see on the Internet these days, that’s changed, and not for the better.
Q. That’s when you knew you wanted to be a writer.
A. That was the moment I decided I would be a newspaperman—seeing those bylines on that wet, smelly mimeo. Naturally, by the time I got to eighth grade the school board had killed the newspaper—budget cuts. But I worked on the high school newspaper, the Lincoln-Way Squire (the sports teams were the Knights, get it?) and as a senior in 1973, became its editor.
Q. Was that your first big break?
A. Mm-hm. We writers like to pretend we became a success on our own—pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps whilst crouched over a stone tablet carving Truth. The reality is we’d never be published without the help of people like Francis Feely and Ed Czerwinski, who ran my hometown weekly, The Herald. He was looking for someone to cover high school sports, and asked the principal at Lincoln-Way if anyone would be interested. The principal recommended me. Probably to get me out of his hair—the stories I was writing for the Squire were a bit, uh, sensational, with headlines like: “Asst. Principal Denies Beating Student.” Ed and I met that weekend at his newspaper office, a battered pair of rooms attached to the back end of a restaurant.
Q. How’d the meeting go?
A. Terrifically. I loved the office—it smelled like a paper factory with all the yellowed newspapers piled about, and it had phones, typewriters, and pencils, the essential tools of the trade. Had a darkroom in the back, too, to develop the black-and-white photographs we shot to fill the newspaper every week. We talked there awhile, and then he treated me to lunch at the restaurant. I was thrilled. Every newspaper should come with its own restaurant.
Q. You took the job, right?
A. In a heartbeat. Ed asked me to cover all the sports at Lincoln-Way High School: football, basketball and baseball every week, with stories on other sports like wrestling and gymnastics as time permitted. I’d write up every ballgame, home and away, write features, and take all the photographs. For this he offered the princely sum of $30 a month. I couldn’t believe I was getting paid to attend and write about sporting events, and thought this was so much money I’d never need any more in my life. Fortunately, I came to my senses, and after a year and a half of working for Ed, I went off to college to pursue a journalism major. I worked as reporter and editor at the Northern Star, the student newspaper at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, about 90 miles west of Chicago. I spent a great four years in that paid job—I met my wife, Jerrle, there; and an editorial I wrote my senior year was judged the nation’s best college newspaper editorial in 1978. The prize was a free trip to San Francisco to compete in the William Randolph Hearst Foundation college writing contest. I didn’t even make honorable mention in that write-off—curse all the great young talent in that room!—but was thrilled nonetheless: that trip was the first time I’d ever been on an airplane.
Q. When did you get your first full-time newspaper job?
A. Right after I graduated college in 1978. I was hired by the Daily Dispatch in Moline, Illinois, one of the fabled Quad-Cities of Moline, Rock Island, Davenport and Bettendorf. It was a terrific job, and my boss, Jerry Taylor, liked how I was willing to do anything, so he let me go to town. I learned a ton about editing, designing and producing high-quality daily newspapers. I worked there three years, and then took a similar job with the Joliet Herald-News, a paper with a bigger circulation and much closer to where I’d grown up south of Chicago. I worked there a year and a half, and then got the phone call for my dream job.
Q. The big time?
A. Yep—I was gonna work for the fabled Chicago Sun-Times. I’d grown up reading that newspaper—my folks got it at the house—and in 1982, when I started, it was one of the nation’s ten biggest newspapers. Mike Royko was a columnist. So was Ann Landers. Roger Simon. And Roger Ebert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning movie critic. The chief copy editor had kept my resume—I applied for a job while at NIU—and he figured what the hell, give the kid a chance. I became a copy editor in the business section, which was expanding heavily to take on the bigger Chicago Tribune, which was across from the Sun-Times building in downtown Chicago.
Q. Is that where the Billy Goat Tavern is?
A. The famous Saturday Night Live “cheeseborger, cheeseborger, no fries, cheeps” skit was based on that bar, which was near the basement of the Sun-Times. My job interview was held there, in fact—the chief copy editor liked to see if candidates could hold their own while getting drunk out of their minds, so he held his interviews in a bar. (He liked a bit o’ the drink, too.) After the second pitcher of dark beer he offered me the job. My hangover the next day was brobdingnagian . . . and so totally worth it.
Q. How long did you work there?
A. Started in 1982, left in 1999. By then, I had worked in newspapers for 26 years, and was chairman of the Chicago Newspaper Guild, the reporters’ union at the Sun-Times. I still loved being an ink-stained wretch, but the thriller itch had gotten too big to not scratch, and the turn of the millennium seemed a good time to do it.
Q. You’ve always wanted to write thrillers?
A. Ever since I can remember. When I was a kid, my maternal grandmother took the train from Chicago once a month to visit us. (The IC electric line, for those of hailing from the City of Big Shoulders.) Every visit, Nana brought each of us kids—I have two sisters I adore, Marianne and Diana—a book to read. Marianne got Nancy Drew, Girl Detective. Diana got the Bobbsey Twins. I got the Hardy Boys, the long-running blue-cover series starring teenage brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, who solved crimes and knocked down criminals alongside “world-famous detective” Fenton Hardy, their father. I loved those books, ate them up, and thought someday maybe I’d write a crime novel. My newspaper background was perfect training for it, so, brimming with confidence, I left a perfectly fine newspaper job in 2000 for the uncertain world of book publishing.
Q. You were an overnight success, right?
A. Wrong, mimeo breath. The first two manuscripts I wrote didn’t go anywhere—I queried hundreds of literary agents and publishers, and not one of them wanted it. They said the writing was good but the subject was too difficult to place—religious terrorism in the United States, pre-September 11—so they’d take a pass. Looking back on the manuscripts now, I see the writing was awfully uneven, too, but they were much too polite to mention it. The story was there, but I simply didn’t know how to tell it right: long-form writing is an art unto itself. In journalism, a really long story is 1,000 words. In fiction, you’re talking 90,000 to 120,000. Story management is entirely different, and I didn’t know that. But I kept at it and learned.
Q. Leading to your first sale in 2004.
A. Blown Away. After the failings of my terrorism manuscripts, I decided to write a nice little crime story with a female protagonist that fights a serial killer—Emily Thompson, rookie police officer in Naperville, Illinois, the Chicago suburb where I live and where my series is based. I told myself to keep it simple, keep it exciting, and skip the fancy literary allusions and rhetorical flourishes. I finished it and made the rounds. Bill Contardi at Brandt & Hochman, one of the premier agencies in New York City, where book publishing is based, liked it and took me as a client. He put it out for bid. Michaela Hamilton, executive editor of Kensington Books, also in New York, bought the rights. Like I said, I’d written Blown Away as a nice little stand-alone cop thriller. But Michaela asked if was a series debut, so I lied and said yes. (Only an idiot turns down a multi-book deal, right?) I had one day to concoct a plot for the second book. Cut to the Bone was the result, and a series was born. So yes, I was an overnight success—it only took 25 years, two failed book manuscripts, and a couple hundred rejections from the best agents and editors in the business. Easy!
Q. Blown Away was published in 2006. Did you expect great things?
A. When I wrote my first (failed) manuscript, I was planning the New York Times bestseller party before I sent the first page to the first editor. By the time I finished Blown Away, my expectations for success were considerably, uh, lower. So honestly, no, I wasn’t expecting anything great from this. It was a nice little cop story, and I’d hoped to sell a few thousand copies, build from that. The book came out May 6, and three weeks later, Michaela e-mailed to say congratulations, you’re a national bestseller. I was absolutely shocked—as a beginning novelist, you really have no idea whether your own mother will like the book, let along thousands of strangers with choices on how to spend their entertainment dollar. But they did, and Blown Away went on to win “nation’s best debut mystery” honors from RT Book Reviews. Four publishers bought translation rights—Germany, China, Slovakia and Turkey. Cut to the Bone came out the following year to more applause. It turned out all right.
Q. And now you’re publishing the third in the series.
A. Torn Apart launches worldwide on July 6, 2010. I love this story and think readers will, too—it’s a splendid mix of murder, mayhem, romance and cop jokes. The five police officers who serve as my main protagonists—Emily Thompson, Annie Bates, Kendall Cross and Hercules Branch of the Naperville Police, and Martin Benedetti of the Sheriff’s Department—have laughed, loved, fought and bled together through two earlier books. My writing improved each time—endless rewrites and a sharp editor—and in this book, they’re at the top of their form.
Q. Do your characters seem real to you?
A. Yes. I have conversations with them all the time. In my head, of course; if we conversed aloud, big men with butterfly nets would come a-callin’.
Q. Is Emily based on a real police officer?
A. No. She’s a complete figment of my overcaffeinated brain. So are the others. Basing characters on real human beings limits what you can do with them in the books, so they’re entirely made up.
Q. Overcaffeinated? You like coffee, do you?
A. Nectar of the gods, my friend, nectar of the gods.
Q. Favorite Scotch?
A. What makes you think I drink alcohol?
Q. You’re a writer.
Q. Good point. Ten-year-old Ardbeg, which is smokier than a forest fire.
Q. I knew you were a Scotch man, I just knew—
A. Oh, shut up.
Q. Any movie possibilities?
A. Your lips to God’s ear, my friend! There was a flurry of interest when Blown Away came out, but nothing has reached the “I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille” stage. That’s typical for Hollywood—no interest for years, then bam comes the eye-popping offer. I like the sound of bam, so maybe mine will come soon.
Q. E-books? Audiobooks?
A. All my books are on Kindle; I’m working on audiobooks.
Q. What do you do when you’re not writing?
A. I’m chairman of Thrillerfest, the international thriller festival held every July in New York City. (www.thrillerfest.org) It’s part of my volunteer work with International Thriller Writers, a fabulous convocation of authors who promote the thriller business with the reading public, and help every author-member up the ladder of success, however we define that. I also belong to Mystery Writers of America and the Society of Midland Writers.
Q. Who are your writing influences?
A. All serious journalists, because they are gods—nobody else keeps an eye on the government officials and business leaders who rule our daily lives. In fiction, my influences were the “Franklin W. Dixon” who wrote the Hardy Boys (Dixon is a made-up byline for the many freelance authors who wrote the books for the series syndicator); Mickey Spillane; Robert B. Parker; and John Sandford.
Q. Who are your favorites now?
A. I read everything written by John Sandford and Lee Child. If they wrote the blurbs for the back of cereal boxes, I’d read them. But I have way too many favorite authors to list here.
Q. Do you read thrillers, or just write them?
A. I devour thrillers. They are the highest form of literature. Quit laughing; thrillers tell hard truths about life, they keep your attention till the very last word, and they’re chock-a-brim with a deep understanding of the human spirit. That’s the very definition of literature. Proust, Faulkner, Joyce and the other “literary” gods should write half as well as thriller authors.
Q. Thanks for joining us, Shane.
A. Delighted to be here, my friend. Will you stick around for coffee?