BOOKS
HARLAN GLOBETROTTER
With somewhere north of 75 million books in print – in 45 languages – Harlan Coben is one of the masters of the mystery novel, and a high-profile deal with Netflix has spread his thrilling tales further still. “I want to be suspenseful; I want to keep you up all night,” he tells Pat Carty.
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PORTRAIT: CLAUDIO MARINESCO arlan Coben is no stranger to a winning character. Just take basketball player, turned sports agent, turned problem solver, Myron Bolitar, and his pal Windsor Horne Lockwood III (or just Win), a billionaire who “helps out” law enforcement. Win is a sort of Bruce Wayne figure, if Wayne spent his downtime meditating, playing golf and indulging his other penchant for Korean martial arts. We can now add Wilde, the star of Coben’s latest, The Match, to that number. He was found living in the woods as a young boy, never claimed, and grew up to combine a soldier’s training with those hard-earned skills he picked up in the forest. I put it to Coben that coming up with a pitch like that must have been a ‘Eureka!’ punchthe-air moment? “Yes, and no!” replies the author with a grin. “You’re always doubting yourself and second guessing, especially with a new character that you’re going to write for more than one book. I knew when I wrote the first one that I was not going to give his origin story, so there would be at least two. I was taking a hike in the woods, which I’m not a big fan of – here’s a tree, here’s another tree, it’s hot and it’s sweaty. I saw a little five-year-old boy walking on a parallel path. What if that kid came out of the woods right now and said he always lived here, always fended for himself, and didn’t remember his parents? And now, 30 years later, as The Match opens, he’s across the street from his biological father.” Though he says he always planned at least two books, he did wrap things up
“SOME PEOPLE ARE VERY ANAL AND WANT TO READ A SERIES IN ORDER, AND THERE IS A JOY TO THAT.” 34
fairly neatly at the end of the first Wilde adventure, 2020’s The Boy From The Woods. Were bets being hedged in case nobody bought it? Coben has a good laugh at the frankly ridiculous notion that a book with his name on the front of it wouldn’t sell. “I think every book should stand on its own,” he reasonably asserts. “Some people are very anal and want to read a series in order, and there is a joy to that. The first book or two of the Myron Bolitar series are, however, a little creaky, so I always tell people to start with the third one. I try to make every novel and every TV series stand on its own. When I do a series with Netflix, I always make sure that the ending is finished. Now, maybe I’ll do a season two sometime, but not because I gave you a cliffhanger at the end of season one. I don’t think that’s really fair.” There is exposition in The Match, so a reader can indeed enjoy it as a standalone novel without having to read the first one. Is it tricky to get the balance right when it comes to this sort of filling in? “You have to give the same amount of backstory you would probably be giving even if they hadn’t read it before,” says Coben. “Now to some people, that may be a little bit repetitive, but probably most people kind of enjoy hearing a paragraph or two about something
