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Mooney lives just outside of Boston with his wife and son where he is at work on the second novel in his Darby McCormick series, THE SECRET FRIEND (2008). Okay, phew. Now we're done with the back-of-the-book, on-the-dust-jacket stuff. I was born and raised in Lynn, Massachusetts. After attending St. John's Preparatory High School in Danvers, I went to college at the University of New Hampshire in Durham and tried to study, of all things, computer science. I was awful at it, just awful. I took Calculus and a basic computer programming language, studied hard, and even with the help of friends and a tutor, I flunked both classes. My mother was an accountant and my father an engineer for General Electric so I thought I'd inherited their math gene. I guess it skips a generation. I switched my major to English with an emphasis on creative writing. That was where I briefly met with writer and professor Tom Williams. He was sick at the time, so I didn't get to know him that well, but I knew he'd taught one of my favorite authors, John Irving, and I heard he helped Stephen King get published. King dedicated his book, Nightmares and Dreamscapes, to Tom Williams. This felt like the right place to be. After graduating from UNH, I applied to the college's Master of Arts program to study fiction but was denied. My writing professor, who was also on the board, told me my writing wasn't very good—which hurt but at the same time somewhat surprised me since I had won the campus's creative writing contest that year. The professor told me it didn't matter. My writing, he said, just wasn't very good. So I enrolled in the master's program at Boston's Northeastern University and studied technical writing. I didn't write too much during that time; I was wondering if my writing professor was correct in his assessment of my skills. Truth be told, I was probably having a pity party. Cake, optional. After graduating, I accepted a job in downtown Boston and got to work on an idea of a novel I'd started back in college. I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew I needed to write the story. It took two years to finish. The novel was called Deeper Into Black. It took me another two years to find an agent. Nobody wanted it. Then within the span of one week, I got calls from three agents saying they wanted to represent it. I flew to New York the next week and interviewed all three. One agent, Pam Bernstein, immediately stuck out from the others. Pam was the only one who said the novel had problems. She was completely honest. She didn't say I was brilliant, that I was going to be the next big thing. She said she liked the story and that it needed work but since she wasn't an editor she couldn't tell me how to fix it. After the book was turned down by a few publishers—it needed a lot of work—my agent suggested I work with an independent editor by the name of Richard Marek, who, before going into business for himself, discovered Robert Ludlum and edited The Silence of the Lambs—one of my favorite books. That book really had a tremendous impact on me—the characters, the subject matter, the writing, everything was just done brilliantly. It's the only book besides The Shining I read in one sitting. Marek and I worked on Deeper Into Black, which eventually became DEVIANT WAYS. My agent sold it a week later to Pocket Books. DEVIANT WAYS (2000) was followed by WORLD WITHOUT END (2001) and REMEMBERING SARAH (2004), which was nominated for a Barry Award and the Mystery Writers of America's prestigious Edgar Award for Best Novel. My latest book is THE MISSING; the first in a series featuring Darby McCormick. For reasons I don't quite understand, THE MISSING took a long time to write. But all of that time and hard work didn't go to waste. I plotted out all the novels and figured out different ideas to bring in two of my favorite characters from DEVIANT WAYS—Jack Casey and Malcolm Fletcher.  
INTERVIEWS The Rap Sheet: The Dark Side of Mooney by Ali Karim (March 2007) Penguin UK interviews CM for The Missing (February 2007) The Memory Game: Shots eZine speaks with CM (March 2004) BookReporter.com interviews CM on Deviant Ways (January 2002)
JUST IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING...
 What do you do when you're not writing?
I lead a very boring life. I read a lot of forensic stuff, a lot of nonfiction. I work out. I taught a creative writing class at Harvard, which was very satisfying. I don't watch much TV anymore, but I don't miss Lost, Family Guy or Nip/Tuck. I spend as much time as I can with my family and friends. I've become addicted recently to computer Scrabble. I'm a horrible speller.
Where do you get your ideas?
The shower, mostly. And walking. That's the God's honest truth. Sometimes I'll be watching TV or reading a newspaper or magazine and an idea—or maybe just a piece of an idea—will just pop into my head. Most of the time, the idea just comes out of nowhere. Case in point: the idea for REMEMBERING SARAH came when I was living in Nashua, New Hampshire. I was driving home from work one day during the winter and was passing by Roby Park, located about a mile or so from my house. I saw these kids going up the hill with their sleds and heard a voice whisper, "Sarah's not coming down that hill." That's it. The rest of the story grew from that. I know people think there's some mysterious mental store where all us writers pluck our ideas from, but honest to God, they just pop into my head. For each of the books, I'll include a section on how—or where—the idea originated (look for the INSPIRATION section on each individual book page).
How long does it take you to write a book?
From start to finish, in the past it's taken around two years. Sounds like a long time—and it is—but understand in those two years, I'm doing several drafts, and several edits, of the book. Now I'm on a yearly schedule—which keeps not only my publisher happy but everybody else, too.
How many hours a day to you write?
It varies. My goal each day is 5 to 8 pages. When I start a book, producing those pages can be tough. I write a lot, throw out lot, start again, write a lot, throw it out again. That's my process. Then for some reason the book always opens up and I have that "Ah-ha" moment where I understand where I'm going.
Do you outline?
If by outline you mean do I sit down and write each chapter along with what that chapter will contain, the answer is no. I don't outline like that simply because I have no idea what the story's going to be about until I sit down and start to write. I'll always know how the book begins—I'll know the opening scene—and I usually have a very clear idea about how it's going to end. That's it. Outlining spoils the stuff in the middle—the fun stuff. What writers call "the happy accidents." To help out my editor and agent, I do a two to three page synopsis of what I think the book is going to be about; that way, we can discuss it. The feedback I get, especially from my editor, is helpful.
And is it true you write outside on a porch?
Completely, absolutely true. I sit in a chair and balance my laptop on top of an old writer's board, light up a cigar, drink some bourbon, find the hole in the paper—or in this case, the laptop screen. Then I get lost and have a blast. The fresh air helps me think. When it gets cold, I bring out the space heater. Hey, whatever works, you know?
What made you decide to become a writer?
That's the question I most often get asked next to "Where do you get your ideas?" (Answer: Costco). Answering the "why" is much easier than trying to answer the "where." (Nobody knows where ideas come from, honest.) Every weekend afternoon, Boston's Channel 56 played Creature Double Feature—two black-and-white horror movies from the thirties and forties. The scarier movies played on Saturday nights when my parents went out to get a breather from the kids. When my Irish Catholic grandmother babysat me, Creature Double Feature was strictly off-limits ("Those movies will rot your brain," she always liked to say.) But when my father's mother, Claire, the cool grandmother, babysat, we'd watch the movie together. On one particular Saturday night, in between a movie whose name I have since long forgotten, I saw a trailer for something called The Shining. To this day, I remember sitting straight up and skin prickling when the elevator doors opened and the blood come spilling into the hotel lobby. I remember forgetting to breathe when Jack Nicholson, axe in hand, limped his way through the snow, screaming his son's name. I remembered being terrified. When my parents came home, I ran upstairs. "Dad, can you take me to see a movie called The Shining?" (I made sure I pulled my father off to the side and asked him the question out of earshot of my mother, who, naturally, would automatically say no to such a sensible question.) "That's rated R," he said. "I've seen rated R movies before. And besides, I'm almost 13, which is only five years away from 18." Impressed by my math skills, or maybe he just wanted to get to bed (it was date night, after all), my father said he'd think about it after he saw the movie next weekend with Mom. When they came back home, I was waiting for my parents in the kitchen. "There's no way in hell you're seeing that movie," my mother said. Since my father had involved my mother in the decision making process, I was prepared for this reaction and came up with a compromise. Since they wouldn't let me see the movie, how about letting me read the book? (A school friend had told me the movie was based on a book. My friend's mother had the read the book but wouldn't let her son read it—too scary, she said.) I wore down my parents, who agreed to let me check out the book from the library. I read the book in one sitting and well into the night; by the time I finished, not only was I terrified, I knew what I wanted to be a writer. I've been writing ever since.
Are any of your characters based on real-life people?
Basing characters on people you know is not only sloppy, it could get you sued. If anything, I'm drawn to personality traits. My wife, for example, is very headstrong; hardly anything rattles her. I like that aspect of her personality, so I applied it to the character of Jess Sullivan in REMEMBERING SARAH. But is Jess based on my wife? Absolutely not.
Do you have a favorite book?
It's like asking "Which one of your kids is your favorite?" I know it sounds like the typical stock answer, but it's true. Each book represents a different part of my life. Writing DEVIANT WAYS was a long road—five years—and the book in which I learned how to write. WORLD WITHOUT END represents everything I could do in a book—and everything I don't want to do again. REMEMBERING SARAH was the hardest, and most frustrating novel I've written and the book that has, at least at the moment, paid the most dividends in terms of reader response, critical praise and industry recognition. The book I just finished, THE MISSING, I think is the best thing I've written—and the scariest.
What writer or writers influenced you?
My biggest influence was Stephen King. I devoured all of his stuff growing up, and I'd write a lot of these really awful horror stories (fortunately, I burned them all). James Lee Burke was also a big influence, as was Dennis Lehane—Mystic River is one of the best novels I've read in a long, long time. I enjoy Michael Connelly. He's such a quiet writer. It takes me two paragraphs to say what he can say in one or two lines. I've also become a big fan of John Connolly's books. If you're not reading his Charlie Parker series, then you're missing out on one of the best writers around.
What books do you like to read?
As weird as it sounds, I generally don't read thrillers. Part of the problem is knowing the tricks; the other part is, in my opinion, there aren't a lot of good thrillers out there. The writers I read consistently are Stephen King, James Lee Burke, Michael Connelly, John Connolly, and Dennis Lehane. George Pelecanos, I think, is a genius. Harlan Coben's books I always read on vacation. They're fun, keep you glued to your seat, and they're funny. |
