A.J. Landau
The Dossier on Jon Land and Jeff Ayers
Leave No Trace
DOSSIER: Jon Land, you’ve said that thrillers are defined by “A hero going somewhere to get something to save someone.” The simplicity of that is wonderful for writers to ponder, so when you and Jeff Ayers first sat down to discuss what you wanted to do in LEAVE NO TRACE, did you do a mental reset to consider those thriller concepts before you come up with the plot, or does it just come natural now that you’ve written so many award-winning novels?
LAND: Great question right off the bat! What you’re getting is thrillers, at their heart and in their purest form, are quest stories. In tales of old, those quests were for buried treasure or objects of great power, like the Holy Grail or Golden Fleece. In his movies, Alfred Hitchcock called the object everyone was after the “MacGuffin.” Well, in LEAVE NO TRACE the villains already have the MacGuffin in the form of a superweapon that can help them transform the country. So the quest of the heroes is defined by the need to find and stop them. Right from the start of the book, Jeff and I knew America’s greatest symbols were going to come under attack, and that provided the structure for our heroes’ quest since they were charged with preventing further attacks by finding those responsible. So I wouldn’t call it a mental reset so much as figuring out how the pieces of the puzzle were going to ultimately fit together.
DOSSIER: Jon, a writer’s versatility is something that can help extend their career and find new readers. How challenging was it to transition, like you have, from writing cozy books in the Murder She Wrote series to writing an action thriller like LEAVE NO TRACE? I mean, you’ve written fifty books!
LAND: Wow, two great questions in a row and I’ve actually written over 60 books now! Writing six books in the Murder, She Wrote series was a great experience for me because I learned how to write in first person from the POV of an older woman. But if you do a deeper dive into my titles versus the others in the series, you’ll note that their structured like thrillers. When I got that gig, the first thing I did was go back and read the last few penned by my predecessor. I found them utterly unreadable—flat, dull, and boring in stark contrast to the TV show. So in those six books I made the series my own by applying the pacing, suspense and sense of imminent danger to the format. Whatever I write, and that includes all the narrative nonfiction, it’s all about grabbing the reader and not letting go. The rules don’t change from one genre to another; they just have to be applied differently.
DOSSIER: When and where do you write, and what kind of environment do you prefer? (Absolute silence/music playing/your hotel room at ThrillerFest?)
AYERS: I find writing in my home office works best, and I like to have instrumental music playing. If I’m answering emails, I will listen to pop music.
LAND: Total silence. No distractions whatsoever. It’s me, the computer, the story and nothing else. I write from the inside out, not the outside in, so I need to shut down as much as that outside world as possible.
DOSSIER: After breaking into the publishing industry and making a name for yourself doing book reviews with the Library Journal, what are two of the biggest lessons you learned either from what you read and reviewed, or something you learned directly from an author?
AYERS: The thriller community is friendly, generous, and supportive. It is surreal to meet authors I have enjoyed reading and call some of them friends.
DOSSIER: Being so involved with the International Thriller Writers organization as you have, especially ThrillerFest, what would you say to Jon Land to convince him to attend the next conference if, for some reason, he didn’t want to go? He’s never missed a single ThrilerFest since the beginning, so that’d be pretty epic.
AYERS: I have been attending since the first ThrillerFest in New York, and the one author I was looking forward to meeting was Jon Land. I have been reading his books since the late 80s, and his books were automatic for me to buy. I didn’t even have to look at the book summary. I saw his name, grabbed it, and went to the counter. If you had told me thirty years ago that I would be writing with Jon in the future, I would have thought you were nuts. That is the long answer: I have so much to thank ThrillerFest and the fantastic people I have met there for everything. If Jon were not going to come to the conference, I would go to his house and drag him to NYC.
DOSSIER: With the two of you co-writing LEAVE NO TRACE, who gets to sign the books and how do you decide? Do you arm wrestle for it? Rock-paper-scissors? If you haven’t seen the movie Step Brothers with Will Farrell and John C. Reilly, I highly recommend it as a way to study figuring out how to settle these kinds of issues. Who knows, before it’s all over, you guys might get a set of bunk beds to make room for more writing tables.
LAND: Ha-ha! We actually haven’t had to deal with that yet because our tour is still a few weeks away, as of this conversation. The good news is the fact that “A. J. Landau” is about as loosely kept a secret as it gets. If you go on Amazon, mine and Jeff’s name are right there—in fact, some early reviews on Goodreads have attributed the book to three authors because of the confusion over the three names! So the plan, as much as possible, is for both of us to sign. Otherwise, we’ll sign individually. I don’t think A. J. will mind that it will be in our own names instead of his, although I guess we’ll have to incorporate him somehow.
Oh, and by the way, a beloved major character from my most successful series ever makes a cameo appearance at the end of LEAVE NO TRACE and his nephew is a major character throughout. So I guess you could say we’re trying to have it both ways.
AYERS: I thought the books I was signing by myself would be as A.J. and leave off the Landau. Maybe we need to buy a stamp that says, A.J. Landau and ask for an inkpad at our events? I’m even open to arm wrestling.
Website: Jon Land | Jeff Ayers
Preorder Links: Amazon
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