Tess Gerritsen

Tess Gerritsen, 54, is the bestselling author of The Mephisto Club. She tells Fanny Blake about giving up medicine to write, and her gory imagination…

I wrote my first book when I was seven. It was written on pieces of cloth that I sewed together and I still have it. But my father strongly encouraged my brother and me to become doctors. I was told that writing would be a really nice hobby to have while I was working as a doctor.

I was so stressed out at the end of each day working in the hospital that I escaped by reading romantic suspense novels. Because I was reading them, I began writing them.

I met my husband, Jacob, in medical school. We married and went to live in Hawaii where his family lived. It was very beautiful but I wasn't used to being on an island and needed wide open spaces. Eventually we moved to Maine, New England. When we had to reapply for our medical licences, I decided not to go through all that but to focus on my writing.

I'm very curious and I get inspiration from everywhere. I read the newspapers voraciously so I know what's going on in real crime. I pay attention to the strange stories people tell me. I read a lot of science and forensic journals.

I shy away from showing cruelty on the page. A lot of the violence in my books actually happens off stage. The police come on to the scene after the event has occurred.

My writing day starts at 9am with a cup of coffee in my office, which has a sea view. I always write on unlined typing paper and write the first draft in longhand, using cheap Bic pens. I try to write about four pages a day, which usually yields a first draft in six months. I don't plot ahead of time so I'm flying by the seat of my pants for the first draft. I type the next draft into the computer but by the time I've finished it, the project has changed many times.

I think of myself as a fairly logical, scientific and somewhat reserved person. Maura Isles, the Boston medical examiner who appears in five of my books, is me. Almost everything I use in describing her, from her taste in wine to her biographical data, is taken from my own family. Except I don't have a serial killer as a mother!

My other heroine, detective Jane Rizzoli, is the woman I'd like to be. She's brave, speaks her mind and is not afraid to jump in. I'm very hesitant and avoid confrontation at all costs. I have a high boiling point so people can say a lot of mean things to me before I get mad. Maybe it's because my father always said it's better to walk away from a fight.

My new novel The Bone Garden is different from anything I've written before. I was fascinated to discover that childbed fever was spread by 19th-century doctors who'd perform autopsies, then deliver a baby without washing their hands. Nobody understood germ theory. I wondered what it was like to be a doctor and patient back then. But since I write thrillers, I introduced a serial killer into the mix.

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