Robert Crais

• Born: June 20, 1953
• Place of Birth: Independence, Louisiana

TYPES OF PLOT: Hard-boiled; private investigator; police procedural

PRINCIPAL SERIES: Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, 1987-; Carol Starkey, 2000-

Contribution

Before Robert Crais turned to detective fiction in the late 1980s, he had for more than a decade enjoyed a lucrative career as one of network television’s premiere scriptwriters, developing scripts for top-rated crime shows, most prominently L.A. Law (1986-1994), Hill Street Blues (1981-1987), Baretta (1975-1978), Cagney and Lacey (1982-1988), and Miami Vice (1984-1989). That long and successful association helped shape the elements of Crais’s signature narratives: snappy dialogue, hip characters, fast-paced storytelling, ingenious plot twists, and sustained momentum toward a dramatic shoot-out/showdown. In addition, Crais’s long background in the Hollywood environment gives his prose a postmodern edge as he alludes to a wide range of classic films, television, and popular music. From , Crais mastered a prose line that is economic and clean of ornamentation, and from , he adopted a dark vision of a morally bankrupt universe in which nobility, trust, and compassion are rare.

However, it was Crais’s love of the hard-boiled detective fiction of and that influenced the creation of Elvis Cole, who solves crimes as much with relentless investigation and hard evidence as with intuitive perceptions and a sixth sense about character. A solitary moral agent in an otherwise seamy and mercenary universe, Cole sees himself as the protector of the vulnerable, particularly imperiled women and lost children. Unlike Chandler and Hammett, Crais renders modern Los Angeles, despite its criminal excesses, with keen compassion, respecting its diversity, its energy, its hard neon beauty, its cheesy glitz, and its unrelenting cool.

Biography

Robert Kyle Crais grew up near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in a blue-collar family made up largely of Gulf Coast oil refinery engineers and beat police officers. An avid reader as a child, he purchased at the age of fifteen a used copy of Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister (1949), in which a distraught woman from Kansas approaches Philip Marlowe to help find her brother. The hard-edged prose style entranced the young Crais, and he decided that he would be a writer. While supporting himself through a series of menial jobs and attempting college, he produced homemade comic books, amateur films, and even short fiction, for which he received scores of rejection letters. Crais decided he needed to head West to achieve whatever writing success he could. In 1976, he arrived in Hollywood and found work almost immediately writing for television—ironic as he did not own a television at the time and learned scriptwriting by watching department store televisions and studying sample scripts. Eventually, he worked on landmark law-and-order series, including Baretta, Cagney and Lacey, and Hill Street Blues; a script developed for the latter was nominated for an Emmy.

Given his childhood dream of being a novelist, Crais grew uncomfortable with the collaborative dynamic of television production. It was the sudden death of his father in 1985 that ultimately convinced Crais to try novel writing. His mother, long dependent on his father, was suddenly left vulnerable, a complex dilemma that Crais would treat fictionally in his first novel, The Monkey’s Raincoat (1987), which introduced private investigator Elvis Cole, who helps a distraught wife in her thirties find her husband and son who disappeared after her husband, an out-of-work Hollywood agent, got involved with loan sharks and drug kingpins. The novel—an homage to classic Chandler (Cole speaks in a pitch-perfect hard-boiled first person) and part of the renaissance in noir fiction initiated by and —found immediate success, unusual in that it was published in paperback without major fanfare. It was recognized with numerous Best First Mystery Novel nominations and won the Macavity Award. Over the next ten years, Crais produced six new Cole titles, dissecting the decadent lifestyles of the entertainment industry, the corruption and moral indifference of the police department, the unrelenting pressure of gang violence and organized crime, and the mayhem of street drug trafficking and the skin trade.

With each title, Crais earned more success, becoming something of a celebrity himself. There was some criticism of his formulaic plots and his preference for action over character—both reminiscent of series television—as well as his disinclination to probe the interior life of his central characters. Despite the presumed intimacy of first-person narration, Elvis Cole remained an inaccessible character known more for quirky habits and smart-alecky banter. It was the publication of L.A. Requiem (1999) that changed that perception. This groundbreaking work marked a new maturity. It was far more sophisticated in its structure, having multiple points of view, and explored for the first time not only the interior psychology of Elvis Cole but also the long and troubling background of Cole’s sidekick Joe Pike, who until this novel had been a shadowy, if eccentric presence.

In Demolition Angel (2000), Crais introduced a new series centering on Carol Starkey, a bomb squad detective/technician. That permitted Crais to examine a classic premise of noir fiction—the sudden intrusion of violence—and the complex psychology of lives spent on the edge, anticipating death, brutal and messy, as part of every working day. In a later title, Crais brought Elvis Cole and Carol Starkey together in The Forgotten Man (2005), involving an investigation of the homicide of an unidentified indigent in a rundown hotel, who claimed shortly before he died that he was Cole’s estranged father. Crais has written nonseries novels, most prominently Hostage (2001), a taut psychological thriller (later a major film) about a hostage negotiator whose family is taken hostage during a standoff involving the family of a bookkeeper for a mob boss. Crais continues to develop Elvis Cole, and unlike other long-running serials that succumb to parody or improbabilities, the plots and the character development have become more intricate, and Elvis Cole, who began the series as a kind of Peter Pan figure, emerged as a nuanced and psychologically compelling adult.

Crais's Elvis Cole and Joe Pike series continued with various award-winning novels. The Last Detective (2003) was an Audie Award finalist, The Forgotten Man (2005) was a Shamus Award nominee, and The Watchman (2007) received the Barry Award and the Mystery Ink Gumshoe Award for Best Thriller. Further novels in the series include The Sentry (2011), The Promise (2015), A Dangerous Man (2019), and Racing the Light (2022). He also wrote a stand-alone work, Suspect (2013), that received the 2020 Barry Award for Best Mystery or Crime Novel of the Decade.

Analysis

Early in the Elvis Cole series, Robert Crais’s dedication to the craft and vision of classic hard-boiled detective-fiction writers is apparent. Cole maintains a private code of integrity and genuine compassion within a Southern California rank with corruption, deceit, violence, and greed. For all his edgy swagger, his hip cynicism, and his violent cunning, Cole espouses a romantic code that values friendship, particularly to his enigmatic partner Joe Pike, and duty as a kind of moral authenticity maintained against a universe of cutthroat mercenaries and unrelieved pretense. Like the classic hard-boiled detectives, Cole finds his greatest calling—and his deepest professional reward—in rescuing beautiful damsels in distress and lost or kidnapped children. Cole has little interest in puzzling out the psychology of the criminal mind and a crime’s motives and rationales but rather accepts as a given that fallible people—Crais’s preferred adjective is “lost”—are capable of committing evil. World-weary, Cole refuses to concede. The associations that Crais makes between Cole and childhood, through references to Peter Pan and characters from familiar children’s books, cartoon classics, and Disney films, suggest that Cole’s unshakeable faith in fundamental values stems from a childlike faith in the ability to triumph over a world of corrupt adults. As the series developed, Crais has allowed Cole to evolve from a hip outsider with an engaging cynicism to a complex character who comes to accept as emotionally necessary the fragile bond to significant others, not only Joe Pike but also to a Louisiana lawyer and part-time television personality named Lucy Chenier, who joined the series in Voodoo River (1995).

In the Carol Starkey series, Crais investigates the darkest implications of Cole’s problematic moral vision. If Cole, amid a chaotic world busy with crime, is cool, calm, and together (as suggested by his Eastern rituals), Starkey is fragmented, troubled, and coming apart. She is not a private investigator. As a police officer, she must exist within the harrowing reality of mayhem. As a bomb squad detective, she is involved in disarming devices and, therefore, plunged into criminal activity. She is constantly aware of crime and its consequences because of the scars that she bears, the ghastly cross-stitching on her body that is the result of her own brush with death. Her considerable struggles with private demons—most notably her troubling dreams, her alcohol abuse, and her testy aloofness—suggest a kind of anti-Cole. Whereas with Cole, the truth, finally revealed, heals, with Starkey, the truth hurts, the very message left at a bombing site by the serial bomber in Demolition Angel.

The Monkey’s Raincoat

In the first book of the series, The Monkey’s Raincoat (1987), Elvis Cole helps Ellen Lang track down her missing son and husband, a hapless talent agent who has become involved in a vast underworld of drug running to help continue his Hollywood lifestyle. The private investigator is first defined to readers through the title of the work itself. Inspired by a haiku by (“Winter downpour / Even the monkey/ needs a raincoat”), it suggests Cole’s function as a protector, both to Ellen and to her young son. First, Ellen’s son, Perry, then Ellen herself are kidnapped as part of a negotiation for two missing kilograms of prime cocaine. As Cole investigates, he affirms a classic theme of noir fiction: how strikingly ordinary people can get involved in nefarious actions and tangled in criminal activity. However, the far larger moral narrative here is the gradual evolution of Ellen out of dependency and midlife confusion into confidence and self-assertion; she will be the one to shoot the syndicate boss who threatens her son. This moral evolution is guided by Cole, who, along the way, becomes her lover. In the end, after Cole and Joe Pike stage a sophisticated paramilitary raid on the drug lord’s compound to rescue Ellen, she uncovers a difficult truth about her dead husband—how desperately he had tried to protect his son from the drug runners—that completes her moral maturation.

L.A. Requiem

By positioning the shadowy Joe Pike at the center of L.A. Requiem, Crais virtually reinvented the Elvis Cole series at the point where, after a half dozen titles, its formula was starting to wear. Pike asks Cole to help him find a missing woman, a powerful Latino community leader’s daughter, who is subsequently found shot dead along a jogging path. As the dead woman’s past romantic ties to Pike surface, Crais departs from the restricting structural device of first person to explore not only Pike’s difficult childhood but also his brief stint as an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department twelve years earlier. Pike had been suspected of killing his partner during the arrest of a pedophile when his partner threatened the child molester with vigilante-style punishment. When the missing woman’s death is linked to a series of killings and a witness places Pike at the scene, the police, who still hold a grudge against Pike, are quite willing to pin the killings on him. Cole, who drops his characteristic flip humor in this case, must examine the value of friendship and the cost of betrayal and reacquaint himself with the necessary element of sacrifice in any relationship and the difficult trick of trust. Without sacrificing the hard edge of a detective thriller, the narrative expands the genre’s scope by investigating the damage done by secrets and ultimately how criminal investigations, even the most diligent, lead to resolution but seldom to understanding.

Demolition Angel

Published on the heels of the critical success of L.A. Requiem, Demolition Angel continued that novel’s exploration of the implosive nature of the past, the dark power of secrets, and the difficult act of self-forgiveness. Ironically, given the on-the-spot nature of Carol Starkey’s detective duties defusing live bombs, she is lost in the past, haunted by her lover’s death nearly three years earlier. That struggle—to make peace with her own history and to accept her scarred self—is the centerpiece narrative. A disgruntled bomb squad detective tries to rig an explosive to kill another detective, who is sleeping with his wife, by mimicking the modus operandi (MO) of a serial bomber who, as it turns out, takes umbrage in having his work amateurishly copied. The real bomber, a monomaniac who yearns to be listed among the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI’s) Most Wanted, comes to Los Angeles to set things right. However, for Starkey, the investigation into the serial bomber (she comes to communicate with him through an Internet chat room in chilling exchanges that recall Hannibal Lechter and Clarice Starling) is as much an investigation into herself and her past via her growing interest in a rogue FBI agent, Pell, whose sight had been permanently damaged by one of the serial bomber’s earliest devices and who now vows revenge. In the end, a violent confrontation with the bomber costs Pell his sight entirely; dependent and vulnerable, he accepts Starkey’s invitation to move in with her. The closing scene is not the typical procedural resolution: Starkey and Pell make love in the dark, and the blind Pell quietly tells Starkey, “You’re beautiful.” It is a complicated, psychologically compelling resolution that marks Crais as a novelist interested in the subtle evolution of character rather than as a former television scriptwriter interested in the flashy spectacle of action.

Principal Series Characters:

• Elvis Cole is a wisecracking, straight-talking West Hollywood private investigator in his thirties said to resemble Kevin Costner, Moe Howard, and Errol Flynn. A Vietnam War veteran with Ranger training and a former security guard, he lives with a cantankerous cat and has a fondness for loud Hawaiian shirts, cooking, classic rock, Disney memorabilia, and his 1966 yellow Corvette. His physical and mental prowess (he is unafraid of violent confrontation) is honed by his practice of the Eastern arts of hatha yoga and tai chi.
• Joe Pike is Cole’s muscle and his closest friend, an enigmatic presence and a victim of childhood abuse. Formerly a Force Reconnaissance Marine in Vietnam and a Los Angeles police officer with an inscrutable quietness and a compelling code of integrity, Pike is now a mercenary with an extensive résumé in paramilitary covert operations. A vegetarian who never smiles, Pike listens to the Doors and always wears massive pilot sunglasses. He is tattooed with red arrows along his deltoids to signify his credo: Never Back Up. He shadows with predatory skills and kills without hesitation.
• Carol Starkey is a tough, street-hardened detective in the Los Angeles Police Department Criminal Conspiracy section whose assignment is bomb squad investigations. Currently, under the care of therapists, she is haunted by the death of her partner and lover at an explosion site at which she herself was horrifically scarred—indeed, she thinks of herself as a sort of Frankenstein, put back together and returned from the dead. She wrestles with vivid and violent nightmares and copes through a self-destructive regimen of junk food, prescription ulcer medicine, and gin.

Bibliography

Anderson, Patrick. The Triumph of the Thriller: How Cops, Crooks, and Cannibals Captured Popular Fiction. Random House, 2007.

Berk, Albie. Robert Crais: Best Reading Order--with Summaries & Checklist. Albie Berk, 2018.

Crais, Robert. "Awards and Recognitions." Robert Crais, www.robertcrais.com/awards.htm. Accessed 20 Aug. 2024.

Jones, Louise. “From Cop TV to Mystery Maestro.” Publishers Weekly 250, no. 10, 10 Mar. 2003, p. 49.

Marling, William. Hard-boiled Fiction. Case Western Reserve University. www.cwru.edu/artsci/engl/marling/hardboiled.

Panck, LeRoy Lad. “Robert Crais.” New Hard-Boiled Writers, 1970s-1990s. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000.

Philips, Gene D. Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir. University of Kentucky Press, 2000.