Harlan Coben has written at least 35 novels and has a lucrative 14-series production deal with Netflix. Photo / Getty Images
The bestselling author is a self-made New Jersey boy who now rules Netflix. He talks about his friend Dan Brown and meeting Queen Camilla.
Summer has finally arrived in New York. The weather is hot and sticky as I reach the Dakota, opposite Central Park. The spires and turrets of the neogothic apartment block, where John Lennon used to live, give it the air of a haunted mansion. I am early, but tell security I have an appointment with Harlan Coben and am ushered through the black, wrought-iron gates.
Suddenly Coben shoots past in T-shirt and sneakers, with his Havanese dogs, Winslow and Lazlo, in tow, hoping for a quick stroll in Central Park before our interview. They are small, while he is tall and muscular, as befits a former college basketball player. So is his recurring character Myron Bolitar, a sports agent and former basketball pro from New Jersey who solves crimes. “Join me,” Coben says, smiling warmly, and we cross into Strawberry Fields.
He could not have scripted our meeting better. Someone is singing Imagine in the distance. Dave, a former hippie who organises the buskers’ strict, one-hour time slots, says, “Hi Harlan,” and they fist-bump. A violent, climactic scene in Think Twice, his new Myron Bolitar mystery, unfolds in this very spot. Coben shows me the tree near the memorial to Lennon where a person in his novel gets shot.
We return to find Dave scribbling in a yellow notepad. On Coben’s advice he is writing his memoirs. “Just think of the most fascinating story of your life and write that story,” Coben told him. “A three, four-page essay is how you start.” Coben compares his own craft to diamond mining. The first draft is an “ugly grey rock”. By the second, third and fourth draft, “that’s when I start to shine the diamond, cut it and make it look like something you want to wear”.
He has written at least 35 novels. We decide to count them at his flat, but forget. He thinks he has sold 80 million copies — and that number is only rising now that he is also the King of Netflix. He has a lucrative 14-series production deal with Netflix (eight are available to watch now, one is currently in production and he acts as executive producer on all of them) — and the latest adaptation of one of his books for the streamer, Fool Me Once, shot to No 1 and has had nearly 100 million viewers.
The handsome, wood-panelled, high-ceilinged Dakota apartment, with modernist furniture and tall windows overlooking the park, is a testament to his success. He has another gothic, gingerbread family house in New Jersey, his home state (a Scooby-Doo house, my children would call it).
Coben, 62, often writes in cafés and delis, occasionally on planes and once, for a three-week stint, in the back of an Uber. He says he gets easily distracted at home and the white noise helps. Although he publishes a novel a year, the process doesn’t get any easier. “Think Twice is the hardest book I’ve written,” he says.
He invented Myron more than 30 years ago. The surname, Bolitar, came from “putting symbols and letters together”. Sometimes Coben calls his characters “xxy” and then asks fans to donate to charities in exchange for having a character named after them. These charities often involve children’s health because his wife is a paediatrician. They have four adult children and he thinks Myron would envy his settled domestic life.
But there is a lot of “wish fulfilment” in his depiction of Myron, whom he describes as a “faster, stronger, funny” version of himself. Coben wants readers to care about his characters as much as his fast, intricate plot twists. Myron’s parents, unlike his own, are still alive. “His relationship with them is what I imagined I would have with my parents had they had the chance to age and grow older.”
There is an emotional scene in his new novel, in which Myron’s dad is threatened by a mobster. “Sometimes I get over-sentimental, but tough. It’s my therapy,” Coben explains. He remembers his father, a lawyer who died of a heart attack aged 59 in 1988, “working out his taxes at the kitchen table, getting nervous. That stays with you, doesn’t it?” He says “the best part about having money is not worrying about money”, and admires Bruce Springsteen, another self-made boy from the New Jersey sticks.
The setting for several of his Netflix dramas has been transferred to Britain. Coben’s brother has lived here for 25 years and supports Fulham. “He’s the world’s biggest football fan, which means he knows suffering.” Coben’s UK mysteries are mostly filmed in the north, with stellar actors such as Richard Armitage (The Stranger) and Joanna Lumley (Fool Me Once). In Stay Close, Blackpool replaced the boardwalk and casinos of Atlantic City. It seemed to fit.
Myron has never been portrayed on television because Coben has been living with the character so long. He has a very specific image of him, which an actor might get wrong. “What about the guy who makes all that Italian food?” I ask, thinking about Coben’s round designer glasses and bald pate. “Stanley Tucci?” he replies immediately. “Yeah, big fan, but he’s a little smaller” (an understatement). I am not the first person to make the comparison.
These days Coben also rubs shoulders with royalty. He met Queen Camilla at a literary reception in March at Clarence House and will be at Hampton Court on June 8 for the Queen’s Reading Room Festival.
It was Lumley who tipped him off that Camilla was a hoot. “No one’s funnier or more down to earth,” she told him. He found the Queen “ridiculously charming and gracious”.
Coben counts Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, who was also at Clarence House, among his literary heroes, along with Elmore Leonard (Get Shorty) and Roald Dahl. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a childhood favourite. “It was meticulously suspenseful, but what I remember most about the book was thinking, ‘God, I want that child to get a gold ticket.’ That’s the very best storytelling.”
One of his oldest friends is the writer Dan Brown, his fraternity brother at Amherst College, Massachusetts. Coben was the first to be successful and wrote a blurb for the cover of The Da Vinci Code. “I was one of the first people to read it. It was a cultural touchstone, like no novel in our lifetime.” He recalls walking into Barnes & Noble and finding Brown’s book was No 1, while his own was second. “A full year later I had a new book out. Dan’s was still No 1. Mine was No 2.”
I prick up my ears at the mention of fraternities. Several of Coben’s thrillers have disturbing hazing scenes. He tells me nothing untoward took place at Amherst, but in a New York Times Father’s Day tribute Coben referred to a “particularly debauched frat party” that took place in his freshman year. “I was struck by a strange realisation. This was the first time I’d woken up sick without my father present,” he wrote.
In fact, Coben’s daughter Charlotte, 30, often scripts the Netflix scenes featuring children and young adults. For instance, she dreamt up an incident with a decapitated alpaca in The Stranger. They collaborate brilliantly, but don’t write together. Sometimes they fight. “It’s still the father dynamic,” he admits. Now engaged and living in Queens, she recently branched out with Dead Hot, her own Amazon show.
Contemporary references come thick and fast in his plots. I tell him I spotted, in random order, a Julian Assange-style exposé, a version of the Sackler family opioid scandal, references to #MeToo, the debate about calling prostitutes sex workers, the fashion for veneers and, in his new novel, the emergence of a property tycoon who stiffs small contractors (surely Donald Trump).
“My novels and my shows take place right now,” he replies. “OK, so what is the world right now? I try to use anything I see as a way to make the story new and fresh.” The plot of Think Twice hinges on the fact that there are fewer serial killers today because, he says, “it’s impossible to get away with. There are a million CCTV cameras, so my challenge is, ‘How do I find a new way of doing it?’”
Coben prefers to use present-day events to shape his narratives, rather than to hammer the reader with his political views. But, he adds: “I think the general problem is extremism. I believe in the horseshoe effect, that the far right and the far left start to bend and become one another. Both are extraordinarily dangerous.”
He starts to laugh, though, thinking about the Stormy Daniels hush money case against Trump. “I couldn’t use that story because it’s too crazy. That’s the problem with reality. If I were to write a novel where a presidential candidate is being tried for paying off a porn star and the name of the first witness is Pecker, my editor would say, ‘This needs a rewrite.’”
Think Twice by Harlan Coben (Cornerstone) is on sale now.
Written by: Sarah Baxter
© The Times of London
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