Tess Gerritsen, author

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

My next guest is Tess Garretson, a best selling author known for her thrillers, including her series about homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Iles that inspired the TNT show Rizzoli and Isles. Her latest book, I Know a Secret, was released this August. Thanks for coming in again.

Tess Gerritsen:

It's great to see you again.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I really enjoyed the opportunity to be a bystander to your career. I've seen now you and I have now talked. This is the third time on air and I knew you back when you were bringing your own books into the little bookstore in Falmouth. I know I told you this story before and I just remember thinking, wow, that is a hard working author. And I think that many authors are.

Tess Gerritsen:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And now you've really come to this place where you're well known within the television world and you've expanded into film. I mean this is the hallmark of a creative person, someone that just keeps evolving and evolving and evolving.

Tess Gerritsen:

Well, I think storytelling can go in multiple media. I happen to start off in books, but I realize that we all love stories, whether they're told to us on the radio or we watch them on movies or we read them in books and the elements of drama remain the same no matter what the medium.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I know that you told me that you're the reason you chose thrillers is because way back when you had this interesting interest in things that scared you.

Tess Gerritsen:

Yeah, yeah. And that was. I owe that to my mother because she loved horror films. She didn't understand English Very well. She was an immigrant from China, but she loved American horror films. So I grew up screaming in movie theaters. My little brother and I, we were taken to every scary movie. And I think I might have. I might have learned then that the height of entertainment was to frighten your audience. And I've been trying to do that ever since.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So how do you keep doing that year after year and book after book?

Tess Gerritsen:

Well, you know, I never run out of stories to tell. I think what I run out of is steam to keep going sometimes. So there's always ideas around me. And I find that for me, creativity is about combining things. It's about taking an element here and an element there, putting them together and saying, oh, my gosh. This creates something completely new and different. It's like a new chemical reaction action that nobody has ever tried before. So my antennae are always out. I'm watching the news, I'm reading multiple papers and magazines and thinking, let's take that idea. Let's bring this idea together and see what happens.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

The book that was released this August, I Know a Secret, talks about something that was widely known of in the 1980s. And I think we haven't really focused on that much for the last few decades.

Tess Gerritsen:

No, but the players, many of them,

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

are all still alive.

Tess Gerritsen:

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Talk to me about the book and where that came from.

Tess Gerritsen:

Well, what you're talking about is satanic ritual abuse. That was the term that was coined for that, or ritual sexual abuse. I think satanic ritual abuse is what usually people talk about. And it started in the 19. It was a. Something that started in the early 1980s where people began to have this idea that children were being abused by cults of Satanists in preschools, various sites. And one of the stories that came out that really brought it home to me was something that happened in my hometown of San Diego. It was a man named Daley Kiki. He was born with a congenital abnormality, so he looked a little funny, but he was a churchgoer. And when they wanted somebody to. To take care of the children for Sunday school, he volunteered. And then a couple of years later, one of the mothers went to the pastor and said, I think he's abusing my child. It turned out later on, people didn't know this, but she was severely mentally ill. There was something really wrong with her. And she had these wild fantasies that Mr. Ike was abusing her kid. So during the investigation, other parents were contacted and asked, has your child been abused by Mr. Akiki? And of course, you know. So when you ask A question that way, parents get paranoid. They began to talk to their children. They brought in prosecutors. There was this long investigation and the questioning of these children, who were then about 3 to 5 years old, was very suggestive. So before you knew it, these kids came up with these outrageous accusations. He killed a giraffe in front of us. He took us out into the ocean, he threw us in the water. You know, things that were impossible. And yet they went ahead with that prosecution. And that poor man spent, I believe, 30 months in jail awaiting trial. The trial was the longest and most expensive trial in the history of San Diego. And in the end, thank heavens, he was acquitted. But do you know the people who first realized he was innocent? The fellow prisoners in jail, they said this man didn't do these things. And luckily for him, he was protected in jail by these prisoners who recognized an innocent man. So he went. His, his life was practically ruined. But because of subsequent articles that showed how innocent he really was, this was truly a witch hunt. He was able to reclaim his life when he got out. And this same scenario was played out again and again in courtrooms around the country and around the world where there was this upswelling. All these psychologists were coming out and saying, oh yes, satanic ritual abuse is a real thing and it's happening all over the country and babies are being murdered. I remember in Maine, I talked to a psychologist who told me, Satanists are all around us, they're killing babies. She really, really believed it. So that was, you know, it was gripping the country and yet almost in every case it was just made up. It was, it was, it was trusting the memories or the imaginations of three year olds to convict people.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Why do you think that this was so possible that we were able to. And I'm sure that there were people who were abusing children. Yes, there always have been, sadly. But there were so many people who weren't and were accused. Like, what was the psychology of the time that enabled this to kind of come to the surface?

Tess Gerritsen:

Well, that's an interesting, you know, some analysts saying this was sort of the rise of religious fundamentalism. It was happening at the same time. And they were riding this wave because the wave of, oh my gosh, there are evil Satanists all around would help drive people to the church. So, I mean, it was, it was to their advantage. There were also a couple of, let's say, fraudulent psychologists who were making a lot of money pushing this whole theme. There was a, there was a book, I can't remember, I can't remember. Michelle remembers, I think was the title of the book written by a psychiatrist. And he began to make a lot of money about, you know, about the possibility that recovered memories were possible and began became a media sensation. So the more you saw it on television, the more you heard about it, the more you believed that there really were rings of Satanists all over this country who were sacrificing children.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

When did you know that the time was right to start working on your book? I know a secret about this topic. About this topic.

Tess Gerritsen:

Well, you know, I have a file, I call it the Ideas file, where I pull out clippings and I put them in this file. Maybe it's not the right time to write about them, but eventually it comes around and I think this Dale A Kiki case, I was following that since the late 90s and I had that in my folder. And it was always in the back of my mind, this is a story. What happened to those children? I mean, after you testify about somebody, maybe what if they did send somebody to jail for 20 years and all of a sudden 20 years later you're a grown up child and you think. I don't really think that happened. What would happen, you know, to these children? And what would happen to the man who's finally released from prison, an innocent man? So that was one of the themes I was playing with. And I blended it together in my usual way with other ideas. And that's where I know a secret came together which was about one of those ritual abuse cases and also one of those children who's now grown up. What if she has a secret that she doesn't want anybody to know about? So the story evolved from there. And also I also pulled in a lot of things about the symbolism of religious paintings because I was fascinated by that topic as well.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You also pulled in cinematography?

Tess Gerritsen:

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Has become an increasing interest of yours.

Tess Gerritsen:

Yes. My son and I made a horror film called Island Zero which was filmed entirely in Maine. It's now making the rounds of film festivals in the country. And I found that that community is so much fun and they're quirky and they're sweet. The horror film audience and I think of my own mother in that regard. They're really nice people. I mean, maybe they look a little scary, but they're really fun people. And I wanted to bring some aspect of horror filmmaking and the horror film audience into the story. I know that the book is starting to sound like what is this book about? Because it has all these different themes in it. But yeah, horror films have a Big role in this, in this book.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What was it like to go back and work with your son on something that you shared with your mother?

Tess Gerritsen:

You know, my son was already doing documentaries and he and I had had, we had this quirky idea of let's make a horror film together. And I don't think he ever actually thought it would happen until I showed him my script. And so it was, it was a family project and our primary objective was to have fun. But it turned out into a much bigger project than we realized and it became a feature film, a SAG production. And we, we ended up getting, you know, I think we ended up with a really wonderful 90 minute film which has been shown around the country now. But that little taste of filmmaking and, you know, collaboration with my son was, was so great. It was so much fun that we're making another film together. Now this is a documentary about a topic that we're both interested in. But I think that we're going to be continuing this collaboration, whether it's documentaries or whether it's narratives, because I think we both want to be storytellers. We just want to change our medium.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So what do you find the differences between doing a book and working on a television show and working on a script for film?

Tess Gerritsen:

Well, it's amazing how close, I mean, how similar writing a script is to writing a novel. They both have their difficulties, but in so many ways I think writing scripts is more fun. Writing a novel, you have a lot of narrative that you have to tell. You have to set the scene, you have to describe things. And in a film, it's very fast paced. I mean, you're going from a 400 page novel to a hundred page script. And that script is all told in dialogue. And your partner is in filmmaking is the actor. Because so much really depends on casting the right person. You cast the wrong person, the best script in the world is going to be destroyed. You cast the right person, even a flawed script will come out okay on film.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

As a writer, how much say do you have in that?

Tess Gerritsen:

Well, when we made Island Zero, we had, of course we had total control. We could decide who we wanted to cast. And we actually went through quite a few screen tests, which nowadays is done with, on your iPhone, you just get these videos and say, well, that person will work or that person won't work. So we had full control then. But then when you go to something like network television, that's somebody else making the decisions.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I think that you and I have talked about this before with Rizzoli and Isles. It's their translation of your book. And yet there's still some piece of you that's. That's kind of working on this process.

Tess Gerritsen:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What's that like to.

Tess Gerritsen:

It was.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It was a little.

Tess Gerritsen:

I mean, I guess it was a little disconcerting to see that my characters that I had so thoroughly pictured in my head looked very different on television. But I always say that writing books is like composing the original melody. And who knows what Hollywood will do with that, Whether they'll turn it into rap or whether they'll, you know, turn it into jazz. It's still an interpretation of the original melody. So after I became accustomed to seeing these two beautiful women play part play, the characters that in my books are not particularly beautiful, you know, I was able to make the transition. And there are things that TV does that they need to do that you don't do in books. Like, you know, they have to be more glamorous and they added humor, which was a really, really important part of the success of the TV series.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I know that when I. When I write for the magazines, I have the benefit of these photographers that work with me. So I don't have to create. I will create a visual sense in the piece that I write, but I don't have to do it to the extent that I would if it was just a straight up novel. As a novelist, you actually have to do all of it. You have to create the scene.

Tess Gerritsen:

Right. And you have to. You have to. You can't create until you've seen it in your head. And that's a large part of it is just visualization and knowing exactly what this house looks like or what this character looks like, and then being able to convey that to the reader. That's where all the work of novel writing comes in. I think that you can do that very shorthand with a film script.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So since you have to do this in your head as a novelist and put it down on paper and. And then you've now gone to a different medium entirely, which is filmmaking. Maybe not entirely, but now you have the opportunity to take what's in your head and actually translate it externally.

Tess Gerritsen:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What has that been like for you?

Tess Gerritsen:

You know, it's. In a way, it's frustrating because what you see in your head is never what you end up with in a film. When we were filming Island Zero, I had my idea, these settings, but we were. We were limited by reality. So we would drive around the mid coast and our producer did and would find things that she thought would be okay. But they were never exactly the way I wanted them to be. So if we had a bigger budget, maybe we could have created some of these settings. But, you know, you work with what you can pay for.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So what does your next project look like?

Tess Gerritsen:

Well, my son and I are making a documentary about the very, very long, centuries old relationship between humans and pigs. They say, why? Why are you making a movie about pigs? Well, I was in Turkey during Ramadan and having this craving for bacon, and I thought, why don't they eat? What is it about pigs that makes them unclean? Why, why did Jews and Muslims decide that they should not be eating pork? And that was a mystery for me. I wanted to know why. And then we have this old religious explanation that it's because of trichinosis that they saw the relationship between trichinosis and eating pork. But then I was reading a little bit into the history, and about 3,000, a little over 3,000 years ago, there's evidence of pork consumption in that area. And then somewhere in the next thousand years, it became forbidden. What happened during that period of time? Why did the pig suddenly fall out of favor? So it's a mystery we're tracking down. It's a historical and it's an archaeological mystery, a cultural mystery. And the more we look into it, the more complicated the story becomes. It's not trichinosis and probably wasn't trichinosis, because only a minority of people who get trichinosis actually get sick. And also you get sick from anthrax. You can get sick from, from being around sheep. So why didn't they ban the sheep? So that's the mystery we're tracking down. And we've already been interviewing archaeologists, we've interviewed a number of pig experts. We're going to England in October to talk to the world's best geneticists and pigs. And I think we're going to find out that it may have to do with climate change, particularly changes in the climate in that region between 3,000 and 2,000 years ago.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, play that out a little bit.

Tess Gerritsen:

Pigs need water. Pigs absolutely require lots of water. They can't sweat. So what happens when the area where you've been raising your pigs becomes a desert all of a sudden you are devoting precious resources to keeping your pigs alive. And is that the best way? Is that the best way to use your water? Maybe it became too expensive to keep pigs around. Maybe there was an alternate sense of source of protein that had just come in, like chickens. There's a lot of things that were happening around 3,000 years ago, including the massive collapse of Bronze Age civilization. So a lot of stuff was happening right around the time when it was decided that pigs are no longer supposed to be eating, eaten.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I think it's great fun that you could be sitting around in Turkey during Ramadan and be thinking, I'd like some bacon. And then somehow you've now managed to transition all the way across to, let's make a documentary about pigs and humans. I mean, the fact that you have such ability to work with the questions that arise is. It's great.

Tess Gerritsen:

Well, you know, it also helps that I, you know, I sit around my son and I go, you know, this is an interesting topic, but where should we go with this? And. And he gets excited, and then I get more excited. And so even though that. That's the core of our documentary, the story is much, much bigger than that. It's about the pig itself as an animal. And that's where he sort of took off and went running in one direction. And we found out this movie is. Is getting bigger and bigger. So it includes intelligence, it includes the feral swine problem, and it includes cultural attitudes various places around the world, towards this animal. There are tribes in Papua New guinea where they worship their pigs, and then there are pig owners here who think of them as their families and dress them up in pretty clothes and sleep with them. So you have this wide range of, oh, pigs are dirty. They're filthy too. I love my pig. And that it's. I think humans. Humans have either a positive, a really positive or really negative attitude towards pigs. It evokes emotions. This animal, which is, I think, probably the real story is the human story. The pigs are just kind of the inspiration for how people react to this one symbol.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

As you've been talking, I've been thinking about the. The Zookeeper's Wife, which I watched the movie and I read the book and I loved the movie also really loved the book. They're two completely different forms, from what I can tell. And what I loved about the book is something that you're describing, which is that it wasn't just one story about people that were helping Jewish citizens of Warsaw escape from the Nazis. It became about the animals. It became about the politics of the time, a little bit about art. And what you're describing as you're talking about your documentary and even some of the other things you've done is that you're pulling in these strands to create this really bigger picture of something.

Tess Gerritsen:

I think the best documentaries are not precisely what they start out to be. They always end up changing because the documentary affects the filmmaker. And I think that's what's happening with us as we delve deeper and deeper into this subject.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So if that's the case about this documentary, then how have your books changed you over the course of your life?

Tess Gerritsen:

Well, I think because I write crime novels, it may be that I am more focused on things that can go wrong. What's the worst that can happen? That's sort of my mantra as a storyteller, and I'm really good at imagining that. So as a mother, as a young mother, you know, you take your lectures, you see your kids off at the bus stop, and immediately your mind goes to, what's the worst that can happen to them today? And so I think, in a way, I live in a state of paranoia that the worst that can happen will happen, and then when it does, you're not surprised. So that may be the downside of writing in my genre, is knowing how bad the world can be and how bad fate can be.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yeah, I mean, as you were talking about I Know a Secret, and you were talking about ritual satanic abuse. I mean, the idea that when our children are out of our sight, someone could harm them in a very significant way that could then impact them for the rest of their lives. And I think that's a deeply held fear of parents.

Tess Gerritsen:

Yes. Yeah. And now that I'm a grandparent, it's doing. It's happening all over again, you know, and so that's the downside. But the upside of being a writer is that you're engaged in so many things all around you. It's part of your job to be aware of what's happening. And it's a little bit like being a journalist, I think. Journalists always have their antennae out. They go on vacation and, wow, there's a story coming out of that. So journalists and novelists, we see stories everywhere, and it makes the world a perennially interesting place.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Which is interesting because a lot of us think of writers as people who kind of hole up in their little caves and then don't come out until it's time for dinner. But.

Tess Gerritsen:

Well, that's true, too.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I think that's right. I think that when I talked to Linda Greenlaw about her writing, she fishes during the summer and she writes during the winter. So she's got an in and out presence. And I'm sure that something similar must be the case in your situation.

Tess Gerritsen:

That's. Well, it's. It's certainly true. If you have a deadline when, you know, I Have to turn this book in at a certain time. Then you kind of go into your cave and you're not seen again. But I. My philosophy as I've gotten older is time is short, life is short. And if you want to experience things, do it now while you still can walk. And I think that that feeds into the creativity. It's. I wouldn't be able to write the books I do if I didn't travel, if I didn't have multiple interests, if I wasn't reading crazy, you know, documentary books or, you know, watching crazy films. It's. It's just a matter of being. My husband calls me a sponge. And that's really what it is. It's about being a sponge and, and trying to take in all kinds of weird things because they'll end up in a book some way. Some way.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Is that also the value of something like a liberal arts education?

Tess Gerritsen:

Yes, absolutely. Even though I'm a medical doctor, my undergraduate was anthropology and I think anthropology, sociology. Those are two excellent undergraduate majors to prepare you for a wide variety of things. I use anthropology, I think quite a bit as a writer. I remember when I did a book called Gravity about the International Space Station. I went down to Johnson Space center and people go, what does that have to do with anthropology? Well, it's a way of identifying tribes. So you look at the tribes and you think, which tribe am I working with now? And the way I approached NASA, which is a civilian space agency, was to tell them that the bad guy in my book was not them. Even though they were a series of disasters, they did everything right and the villains were actually military, which is a different tribe. And that I think helped them feel that they could cooperate with, with me. So anytime you approach a new group of people, you understand what are their values, what do they care about? How will I not in any way overstep the bounds that they have established for themselves?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, I'm certain that you and I will have a chance to talk again because it seems like the things that are swirling about you are never ending. And it's a fascinating, fascinating thing to be in the present presence of. I've been speaking with Tess Garretson, who is a best selling author, known for her thrillers and most recently for her book I Know a Secret and also the movie that she did with her

Tess Gerritsen:

son called Island 0.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Island 0. And an upcoming documentary apparently about humans

Tess Gerritsen:

and pigs called Pig Called Pig.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Thank you so much for coming in today and thank you for all the things that you're doing to bring interesting ideas into our world.

Tess Gerritsen:

Thank you.