Harlan Coben

And you delivered.

What did your father do?

My father, by trade, was an attorney, but he was vice president of a, most of his life, he was vice president of a sort of commercial laundry business, the kind of place that went around at night and grabbed all the tablecloths from restaurants and cleaned them off and

brought them back the next day that was what he did most of the time uh well what he did at the age of 57 he lost his job and the company was sold and i think that was a you know a terrible thing you know men are so we're so defined unfortunately by our our jobs that i think that was very hard on him so that's why you said earlier that there was a sense of slight disappointment in their lives that it might have been better they might have done more

I think that's most people anyway.

I mean, my parents were both, they really were super intelligent.

Both of my brothers, this is Americanism, so I don't know if this will translate, were both sort of geniuses.

Both my older and younger brother, they were able to, they got into Yale as undergraduates, both graduated Harvard Law School.

Those are the two top schools in the country.

We take a standardized test called the SATs here.

Both had perfect SAT scores.

So I was like the idiot brother between these two

geniuses who were skipping grades and doing all of that.

And so everyone in my family, I was probably the dumbest person, and I put that in quotes to some degree, in my family.

Really, everyone was sort of an intellectual and very... With your parents, how did their intelligence manifest itself?

You know, I was thinking about this because yesterday you and I were with the Queen at the Queen's Reading Room event, which you've been so active in, and I've been active in, and literacy.

And so my parents were funny in the sense that, you know, today's parents, we teach our, we're always taught like we have to read to our kids all the time, and you have to make sure they have an hour of reading.

My parents never did any of that because they loved books and they taught us to read organically.

You know, parents back in those days, never for, I don't remember my father ever sitting me on his knee to read me a story, but they were surrounded by books.

They were not messy people, but their bedroom could best be described as the style is early American fire hazard because there was so many books just piled everywhere, teetering and every kind.