Harlan Coben

The first one was this story of this, it was autobiographical, but this tour guide, and I made it into a romance as well.

It was so pretentious and pompous and self-absorbed, I'm embarrassed about it, but it's still someplace.

And then I started to write what I love, which I call, again, we call it what I write, I guess, mystery or crime fiction.

I prefer the term suspense, but I would call it the novel of immersion.

That book that you take on vacation,

And you don't even want to leave your hotel room because you have to know what happened to these characters.

Or you go to bed at 10 o'clock or 11 o'clock at night and you think, I'm just going to read for 10 minutes.

And it's 4 in the morning and you're still reading.

I love that feeling as a reader.

And the fact that as a writer I sometimes give that to people really thrills me.

It's the reason I love to do what I do.

And so those were the kind of books I started to try to write.

Right away.

And so these first four books were not published?

First three were not published, yeah.

So my first book was accepted when I was 26 years old.

And that was?

Play Dead, it was called.

And you just sent it in via an agent or?

I had, no, I sent it, I actually had sent it to someone who had gone to Amherst College a few years ahead of me.