Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child are a highly successful writing duo known for their collaborative works in the thriller genre, particularly their celebrated series featuring Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast. Since their partnership began with the novel *Relic* in 1995, they have developed a unique writing process that combines their individual talents with a shared vision, resulting in richly layered narratives. Both authors draw from a wide range of knowledge, particularly in science and technology, which they integrate into their storytelling, creating engaging techno-thrillers that explore complex themes and character dynamics.
Preston, who has a background in English literature and museum work, and Child, who transitioned from editing to writing, have produced numerous novels together, including both the Pendergast series and the Gideon Crew series. Their works often feature recurring characters and intertwining plots that span multiple books, building a cohesive mythology that enhances the reader's experience. The duo has embraced literary influences from classic authors like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe, infusing their narratives with classic imagery and suspense.
As of 2023, their collaborative efforts show no signs of slowing down, with the Pendergast series continuing to captivate audiences. Their ability to craft intricate plots filled with psychological depth has earned them a dedicated fanbase and set a standard for collaborative writing in the genre.
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
- Born: October 13, 1957
- Place of Birth: Westport, Connecticut
TYPES OF PLOT: Expert sleuth; psychological; thriller
PRINCIPAL SERIES: Special Agent Pendergast, 1995-2023; Gideon Crew, 2011-2018
Contribution
Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have written myriad books as a team and are enjoying great success. Their perfection of the collaboratory process inspires other aspiring collaborators, mainly because each author also writes individually. Although these solo novels have some of the trademark action and suspense of the collaborations, there does not seem to be as much richness and layering as when the two minds are applied to a project. Preston has explained that phenomenon by saying that their minds just happen to be “twisted” in the same way. That may be the case, but the two men still experience differences and disagreements while working on a project.
Preston and Child bring ideas and suggestions for books to the table and collaborate on projects that appeal to them equally strongly. Preston’s The Codex (2004) and Child’s Utopia (2002) were both projects rejected by the other partner. After a thorough discussion of concepts, Child makes a chapter outline. Preston takes the outline and writes the book. Child edits and rewrites. Then, Preston takes that draft and works through it again. This is the pattern the two of them have followed since the beginning of their partnership.
During their collaboration, Preston and Child are creating a mythology based on character exchanges within their various novels. William Smithback, in addition to the Pendergast books, is also a character in Thunderhead (1999). A character in The Ice Limit (2000) also appears in Book of the Dead (2006). Interesting characters reappear from novel to novel in both series and nonseries novels. Like Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast, Preston and Child have a great fund of general knowledge and many special interests to draw on for their books. They can write with authority about many subjects and have practical experience in most areas of science and technology. This special knowledge results in the production of some outstanding techno-thrillers grounded in detective fiction. Working in classic imagery and plot, the two men are strongly influenced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Biography
Douglas J. Preston was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1956 and grew up in Wellesley. Douglas and his two brothers, Richard and David, lived a rough-and-tumble boy’s life, losing fingertips and teeth with joyous abandon and entertaining various friends and neighbors. Douglas attended Pomona College in Claremont, California, and studied many subjects before settling on a major in English literature. After graduation, Preston worked with the Museum of Natural History in New York City as editor, writer, and director of special events. He also freelanced, writing articles about the museum's progress, and taught writing at Princeton.
Luckily, he gave in to an invitation to write about the museum in Dinosaurs in the Attic: An Excursion into the American Museum of Natural History (1985). The invitation to write was extended by a young editor at St. Martin’s Press named Lincoln Child. Preston took Child for a midnight museum tour, and that experience became the basis for Relic (1995). In 1986, Preston moved to Santa Fe, where, after some time, he wrote Cities of Gold: A Journey Across the American Southwest in Pursuit of Coronado (1992) and became interested in the history and legends of the Southwest. Preston later moved to the coast of Maine. He and his wife, Christine, have three children. Like Agent Pendergast, Preston claims kinship with a number of famous and infamous relatives.
Lincoln B. Child was born in Westport, Connecticut, in 1957. Although his family moved away before he reached his first birthday, he still regards it as his hometown. He became interested in writing early on and majored in English in college. After graduation, he secured a job as an editorial assistant at St. Martin’s Press, where he worked his way up to full editor. He worked on over a hundred books and collected several anthologies of ghost tales that more or less established a horror division at the press. In 1987, Child left St. Martin’s and went to work doing highly technical computer jobs. After Relic was a success, he quit his job. He settled in New Jersey with his wife and daughter. A list of his interests would parallel those of Agent Pendergast—probably because Lincoln firmly believes in that bit of writer’s advice to write about what one knows.
By the twenty-first century, Preston and Child had written twenty-one novels in the Agent Pendergast series. The twenty-first, The Cabinet of Dr. Leng, was published in 2023. All indications point to the authors having no intent to end the series in the near future. The Gideon Crew series was added to the authors’ joint catalog in the early 2010s. Five novels are in the series, the most recent being The Pharaoh Key, published in 2018. The authors have also written eight stand-alone novels and seven young adult books.
Analysis
Neither Douglas Preston nor Lincoln Child likes to categorize their work. They feel that literature is too “genericized” already and that they need to enjoy what they write and try to introduce readers to new jobs, places, and disciplines. Their novels combine so many elements and influences that they are nearly impossible to classify.
In Relic, Preston and Child introduced the notion of a museum as a bizarre microcosm of the world at large. Given the erudition of the New York Natural Museum of History, the nature of its exhibits, its labyrinthine passages, and its scientific equipment, the potential for a tale of horror and mad scientists as in the 1953 film House of Wax not only existed but also virtually begged to be brought to life. At the same time that Preston and Child were thinking about a museum mystery, a Holmesian figure presented himself to the authors as the special agent Aloysius Pendergast. According to Preston and Child, he sprang, Athena-like, fully formed into their minds. Within the Diogenes trilogy (Brimstone, 2004; Dance of Death, 2005; and Book of the Dead, 2006), there seems to be a Sherlock Holmes/Moriarty—Holmes/Mycroft reference at work. The rivalry between Special Agent Pendergast and his criminal brother, Diogenes Pendergast, is so intense that readers begin to think about their own familial relationships. Diogenes Pendergast is an evil literary character who reminds readers that several criminal masterminds like Diogenes have existed in real life.
Although the authors have suggested that The Cabinet of Curiosities (2002), a Pendergast novel, could be considered a nonseries novel, in actuality, it is Still Life with Crows (2003) that might fit in that category, as it takes place in the Midwest and away from New York and the museum. Relic and its successor, Reliquary (1997), are related, a fact denoted by the titles: A reliquary is a place or thing designed to hold and protect relics, and what is a museum but a very large reliquary? In that sense, a cabinet of curiosities—holding a collection of rare and valuable things as it does—is also a reliquary. In some of the books, the museum is never far away from the characters' consciousness, and in others, the scene changes and becomes worldwide, offering the solution of one riddle while presenting the detective with another in the style of Dan Brown’s books about ancient mysteries. The mysteries of Preston and Child are, however, not that ancient, even if they sometimes seem to be. Their books are immediate life-or-death mysteries on behalf of characters that readers have come to know and like.
Preston and Child have developed complex plots in which they leave the actions of one character to begin another chapter dealing with the progress of a different character whose actions seem to have nothing to do with the plot. In this way, the suspense is advanced, only to come to a jarring halt when a dead end appears, or a promising lead fails to pay off. Nothing is ever simple in a Preston and Child book, and a psychological element begins to surface as the book develops.
Relic
Without a doubt, the major character of Relic is the museum in all its aspects: as a building, an organization, and an institution. Shirley Jackson used the device of place as character to devastating advantage in The Haunting of Hill House (1959), and so have Preston and Child in Relic. From the first murder, the whole impetus of the book becomes an imperative to save the museum.
The coincidence of the emergence of a monster with the creation of the new Superstition exhibit is so stunning in its visual, emotional, and intellectual content and so technically cutting-edge in its presentation that it is literally calculated to shock museum patrons into reaching for their checkbooks to help fund the museum. While touring the museum and seeing the behind-the-scenes work that goes into mounting new exhibits and keeping the institution meaningful and vital to a changing society, the readers also learn some unfortunate truths about the personalities involved. Even doctors of various sciences, the best and brightest of their kind, are not above cheap, petty competition for grants to back up or extend their own research interests, and in most cases, those research projects have less to do with improving the world than they do with advancing the career and reputation of the individual. The combined talents of Smithback, Margo Green, Agent Pendergast, and Vincent D’Agosto are required to catch the monster. Although Pendergast plays a small role, he did capture some attention in this book, and D’Agosto and Smithback made their own impressions. Green returns to the museum in later books.
The Cabinet of Curiosities
The Cabinet of Curiosities, part of the Pendergast series, focuses on gruesome discoveries in the basement of a New York building that once housed a collection of curiosities. In this work, Preston and Child unravel more of the mystery surrounding the Pendergast family. Special Agent Pendergast seems to be the oddball in the family, a lawman in a family in which criminal lunacy is prevalent. He entered his profession because of his need to combat his family, especially his younger brother, Diogenes.
In this novel, the demolition of an old building opens an underground charnel house: catacombs where the skeletons of numerous young people from the beginning of the twentieth century are found. Readers are reminded that the Museum of Natural History is also a charnel house where the remains of both animal and human dead are kept and exhibited. The concepts of the museum, the charnel house, and the cabinet of curiosities all relate to the mysterious mansion on Riverside Drive, which houses a cabinet of curiosities. Still, the cabinet is only one of many. The entire mansion is an extended cabinet of curiosities and a charnel house, entombing a living person in the house for nearly a hundred years. The extension of the museum metaphor throughout this work is a brilliant concept on the part of the authors.
Thunderhead
In Thunderhead, a nonseries novel, Nora Kelly is leading an expedition in search of the origins of the Anasazi, and journalist Bill Smithback is traveling along to record her findings. In later novels, both of these characters are absorbed into the museum framework of the Pendergast series. One of the most outstanding aspects of Preston and Child's novels is the research that goes into their work. Preston has written several New Yorker articles on the subject and has followed some of the trails and passages that Kelly and Smithback travel in the work. In Preston and Child's works, there is almost always a breathtaking array of facts illuminated by these two men's imaginations.
Principal Series Characters:
- Aloysius Pendergast is a mysterious Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent originally from New Orleans who suddenly appears on the scene knowing more than he should know and refusing to take no for an answer. Tall, extremely thin, but muscular, he has whitish blond hair, pale blue eyes, and an extremely pale complexion that makes him easily noticed. He always wears well-tailored, black wool suits. His fund of general knowledge is no less than encyclopedic, and his ability to disguise himself is phenomenal. He possesses an undeniable charisma that appeals to most of the characters with whom he comes in contact. Still, he is vulnerable and haunted by the mental and emotional instability that is his legacy from both sides of his family.
- Vincent D’Agosto is a dedicated police officer. A hard worker, he has total belief and faith in Pendergast, even though that faith costs him a relationship with a woman who is extremely important to him. Vincent is middle-aged and is just getting back into shape after a period of letting himself go physically. For a while, he left police work to write detective novels, but he is reestablishing himself in police work. He is a good person; he is a good police officer and detective.
- Bill Smithback, a writer-journalist, is a perpetually loose cannon. If there is somewhere he should not be, he will be there. If there is a wrong time to approach a subject, Smithback will find it. He is brash, abrasive, and somewhat uncouth but still possesses a kind of naïve charm. However, expensive Italian suits cannot make a silk purse of a sow’s ear, and Smithback has a way to go before he becomes generally acceptable. He is, though, thoroughly dedicated and devoted to Pendergast. Smithback seems to be nearly killed every time he appears in a book.
Bibliography
“The Official Website of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child - Books.” Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, www.prestonchild.com/books/chronology. Accessed 2 Aug. 2024.
“Preston and Child: The Most Productive Writing Team in Fiction.” CrimeReads, 23 Mar. 2022, crimereads.com/preston-and-child-the-most-productive-writing-team-in-fiction. Accessed 2 Aug. 2024.
Preston, Douglas, and Lincoln Child. The Book of the Dead. New York: Warner Books, 2006.
Preston, Douglas, and Lincoln Child. “Duo Keeps the Suspense Building.” Interview by Jeff Ayers. Writer, vol. 119, no. 7, July 2006, pp. 18-22.
Preston, Douglas, and Lincoln Child. “PW Talks with Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child: The Joys of Fictional Collaboration.” Interview by Leonard Picker. Publishers Weekly, vol. 253, no. 10, 15 May 2006, p. 46.
Stableford, Brian. “Introduction.” In Cyclopedia of Literary Places, edited by Kent Rasmussen. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2003.