For “The Big Empty,” the 20th book in Robert Crais‘ Elvis Cole and Joe Pike series, Crais returned to an idea he’d been circling off and on for years.
“For a long time now, I’ve had this notion I wanted to put Elvis into what is, for him, an untenable position,” Crais says. “Where he’s trapped between his loyalty to a client and his personal loyalty toward truth and justice and doing the right thing.
“Finally, I knew the story that would get me there, and that’s all I was concentrating on, really,” he says.
“You know, detectives, by nature, uncover secrets,” Crais continues. “So people who write about detectives think about these things. What kind of secrets are there? And what are the worst?
“And it seems to me that nothing is more frightening than the secrets our loved ones keep from us, the shadows they hide,” he says. “The big surprises from people that are completely unexpected.”
“The Big Empty” opens with a standalone prologue in which teenager Anya seems to have vanished as her mother Sadie arrives late to pick her up at a skatepark in a remote northwest part of the San Fernando Valley.
Then Cole is hired by young online influencer Traci Beller to reinvestigate the unsolved disappearance of her father 10 years earlier when she was 13. He’s not optimistic there’s much new to find there, but as he pokes around that same corner of the Valley, the strings Cole pulls start to unravel a conspiracy of silence.
It’s a dark tale that leaves the reader unsure whether Cole and his friend and partner Joe Pike will make it back to the light. That contrast between the sunshine and blue skies of Los Angeles and the evil that looms in the dark places Cole and “The Big Empty” firmly in the tradition of L.A. noir private detectives.
“I think it’s unavoidable,” Crais says when asked if he considers Cole and Pike part of the hardboiled fictional landscape that stretches from his contemporary Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch back to Ross Macdonald‘s Lew Archer, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and other private eyes present and past.
“Look, they’re all heroes,” he says. “They’re damaged, they’re dinged up. They’re different from those heroes written 70, 80 years ago. But the roots are there.
“All of us, I certainly, read those books coming up as I grew up. They had an enormous impact on me. So Elvis is just the latest version of them. He’s my version of them.”
And the sunshine and blue skies that Cole cruises beneath in his bright yellow ’66 Corvette convertible? That only adds to the tension of those dark deeds lying just out of his reach, Crais adds.
“One of the things that makes Los Angeles and Southern California such a great setting for crime fiction is because of the juxtaposition of light and dark,” he says.
“The notion that in that bright overbaked sunscape there’s bad things happening in the shadows, and bad things happen to good people and detectives like Elvis Cole, it’s fun to watch these guys expose the darkness to light.”
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Crais talked about what it felt like to finish his 20th Cole and Pike novel, the physical and emotional tolls he put Cole through in this book, how he knows the endings of his books before he begins them, and more.
Q: Twenty books is a nice round number. Did that enter your mind as you wrote?
A: I was aware that it would be the 20th book in the series, which is an emotional milestone, right? But it was just a fun thing to think about as I wrote. You never know what you’re going to get ’til you get there. Meaning, you conceive a book, you write a book, but you can’t predict how people will react to it.
But an awful lot of people are saying that this is my best book yet, and some people are saying it’s my darkest book yet. I don’t know if those two things go together but maybe they do.
Q: You mentioned that the general concept for this book was something you’ve thought about for a while now. Tell me more about what you came to here.
A: My characters, the theme I have with both characters since the very first book, ‘Monkey’s Raincoat,’ is always move forward, right? It’s more obvious with Joe. That’s his philosophy. But it’s in Elvis Cole’s philosophy, too. And I really put Elvis through the ringer in this book, physically and emotionally. I wanted to test Elvis and see how he comes out through the other side.
It’s also about the loss of innocence, manifested by Traci Beller, the young woman who is Elvis’s client. She’s this 23-year-old influencer, ‘The Baker Next Door,’ who’s famous for making muffins on the internet. And Elvis likes her. Ten years before this, her dad went to work one day and he never came home. Everyone told (Traci and her mother) the same thing. When a man disappears like this it’s simply because he left you. And Traci has never believed it.
Now that she’s financially successful she has the wherewithal to hire Elvis Cole to take another stab at finding her dad, and that gets us to the grist of the piece. Because sometimes things are better left unfound. The story is about how Elvis and Traci, and the other women in this story, Sadie and her daughter Anya, persevere and survive the story.
Q: A lot of crime stories are black and white. The detective goes out to find just for those who deserve it and punishment for those who deserve that. Here it becomes really gray for Elvis. What was it like to write in the gray?
A: It is challenging and that’s the appeal. As I said, the untenable position Elvis finds himself in is founded on grayness. Elvis has a personal code, right and wrong, and one of the things he’s lived by is that he does his best for his clients and he protects them at all costs. And he finds himself in a position in ‘The Big Empty’ where he’s not sure he can do that.
That is what appealed to me about this in its conception. Can he save everyone in this story? It’s an awful place for him to be in, because his loyalty is to Traci but then he uncovers things that demand a different kind of justice and he has to pay a price to get there.
Q: Elvis takes a heck of a beating in this book. Is this one of the worst physical beatings he’s gone through?
A: Hands and away. Listen, he’s taken a couple of lumps in the past, but this is the worst. This is his biggest test, again, on every level. It’s like an obstacle course he has to navigate.
Q: He also experiences some tough losses of people who he tries to protect but in the end can’t.
A: There’s a lot of loss there. By that time, Joe’s in the book, and Joe’s part of this, but this is all indicative of the evil at play there. It forces Elvis’s hand. He has to do something to stop this, to end the evil. Even if he has to breach the loyalty he feels toward his client and even maybe himself. He has to sacrifice something to solve this case.
Q: Joe, of course, keeps moving forward. But he loves Joe and has great empathy for some of the characters in this. What is he experiencing in ‘The Big Empty’?
A: Well, the characters all lose something in this book. Of course, the one thing above all other things that Joe Pike doesn’t want to lose is Elvis Cole. Elvis is his one true friend. The difference between them is that I think Joe is more, not comfortable with darkness, but less affected by darkness than Elvis. Joe’s made peace with the darkness. It is simply another obstacle he must move forward through and he approaches it that way.
Q: At the end of the book, Elvis watches from out of earshot as two people have a long overdue conversation on his deck. How do you know when you’ve nailed the ending?
A: Well, most of my books I know before I begin writing the book. I mean, there can be small changes that come to me. If I get a better idea along the way I’m happy to change. But I knew how I wanted this book to end. It’s in that last paragraph. I knew that this book had to end with [these two characters] meeting because they share something no other two human beings on the planet share.
I wanted them to meet and I wanted them to talk, but I knew what they had to say to each other we couldn’t hear. It was only for them, because they were going to say things that no other human being could imagine saying.
Elvis lets them go outside but he stays inside because he’s me there. He knows this a moment only for them. It’s not his place to share it. And I wanted that to be the ending all the way through the writing of the book. Elvis has a part to play, but they’re the true heroes for surviving this thing.
Robert Crais book events
Thursday, Jan.16: Warwick’s Bookstore, 7812 Girard Ave., La Jolla, at 7:30 p.m.
Friday, Jan. 17: A Slice of Literary Orange, Laguna Hills Community Center, 25555 Alicia Pkwy., Laguna Hills, at 6:30 p.m.
Saturday, Jan. 18: Book Carnival, 348 S Tustin St., Orange, at 2 p.m.
Thursday, Jan. 30: Diesel, A Bookstore, 225 26th St. Suite 33, Santa Monica, at 6:30 p.m.