“Tod says that I went off to college and dumped a bunch of Robert B. Parker novels in his bedroom and that inspired him to be a writer,” says Lee, who put himself through college as a journalist writing for The Los Angeles Times Syndicate, Newsweek, Starlog and “anybody who would pay me.” It was a way to learn, he says. “If I admired an author or a screenwriter or a producer, I’d just call them and do a story about them.
Tod recalls reading Lee’s magazine stories at the local B. Dalton bookstore and, bursting with pride, wishing someone, anyone, would ask if he knew the author of the piece. “There was something about seeing your name in print that I found really appealing,” says Tod, but the desire to tell stories had always been there.
“And I went down there and I did it,” says Lee, who suggests that his mother liked the arrangement. “She started going on vacations and leaving me all her notebooks, saying, ‘Here’s the column,’ and I really resented the hell out of her because she was getting paid for my work. “My first novel was published when I was 18 years old,” says Lee, who describes its genre as being about tough guys, big guns, beautiful women and plenty of explosions. “They were like the male equivalent of the Harlequin romance. … You could find them at your finer 7-11s and Safeways around the country.”
“Tod and I write with obviously very similar senses of humor, very similar attitudes about the world, about politics about everything. But we write very differently,” says Lee, who sees his conmen and thieves are generally good people — which is true of “Malibu Burning” thief Danny Cole. “Tod is a far more dense, literary writer than I am. I’m more of a fast-food, mainstream writer. I want my writing to disappear.
Tod replies, “In your books, you want to bring order to chaos, where when I’m writing, I want to write about someone getting away with it. Whatever ‘it’ is, I want to see someone get away with it.”“That’s one thing that you and I share is that we don’t tend to have violence just for the sake of violence,” says Tod, who describes an epiphany he had while watching a violent cable show during the writing of “Gangsterland,” the first book in the trilogy.
Though he says he doesn’t write heroes, Tod created the character Kristy Levine, an FBI agent fighting cancer, to honor a devoted reader with whom he’d been corresponding online for more than two decades; after being diagnosed with cancer, the reader, Kristy Cade, had asked if he’d write a character fighting the disease — and, crucially, was bald from chemo. Tod did, introducing the character in the short story “Mazel.