Background in Crime Reporting Shapes Iowa Native John Sandford’s Thrillers

PHOTO: BEOWULF SHEEHAN “I like a good light, a good chair, and a good book more than anything I can think of, except my wife,” author John Sandford once told The New York Times.

John Roswell Camp (66BA, 71MA) likes to keep busy. Better known by the pen name John Sandford, the prolific writer is set to release Toxic Prey, the 34th novel in the crime-thriller series Prey, in early April. He is also the bestselling author of the Virgil Flowers novels, the Kidd novels, and several standalone books.

Sandford’s latest installment follows father-and-daughter detective team Lucas and Letty Davenport as they rush to find a missing infectious disease expert before one of his creations becomes a planet-threatening bioweapon.

A Cedar Rapids native, the author recently spoke to Iowa Magazine about his new novel from his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

You have a background in journalism. What inspired you to make the jump to novel writing?

I’ve been a devoted fan of thriller fiction for my entire life, ever since I was a child, so there’s that. But money was a major factor. In 1986, I won a Pulitzer [St. Paul Pioneer Press], and the newspaper I was working for gave me a raise, but I had two children and a wife who all wanted to go to college, and that just was not going to make it. So, I decided I had to have another income stream somewhere. I really liked journalism. I was a lifelong reporter, and I just kind of assumed until I ran into the money crunch that that’s what I’d do until I retired.

But I spent three or four years teaching myself to be a thriller writer. I wrote a couple that did not sell, and they didn’t sell because they were basically not very good. And then the third book sold. And then the fourth book sold about the same time—I wrote two books almost on top of each other. And the financial rewards were large enough that I just decided to leave journalism and devote myself to writing fiction.

When it comes to writing crime thrillers, how do you go about gathering research and inspiration, especially considering that the genre can be dark and difficult at times?

It can be dark, but on the other hand, I was a general assignment reporter in Miami for 20 years and also in southeast Missouri for a brief time. I did a lot of crime coverage. You get familiar with dead bodies and blood, and cops and how they do their paperwork. And what comes from that experience are the technical and visual details: the way cops talk, or at least the way they talked in Miami; those kinds of background elements that really have to be there.

But not so much the inspiration. What I actually do is sit down and talk to my wife, who was a screenwriter and a reporter. We talk about what I might do and what things might come up. And then we figure out what the next book is going to be.

How do you stay invested when you stick with a series, character, or story for an extended period?

There’s a good deal of calculation involved. A series sells better than individual books because people get invested in the character. They enjoy following him as he goes through his life. My main character in the Prey series is named Lucas Davenport, and Lucas has gotten older as he’s gone through. He started out in his 40s, and now he’s looking at 60. So, I have to handle that aging, but people get caught up with it because they’re aging. If a book comes out once a year, they’re one year older when they get it, and Davenport is going through some of the same changes that they’re going through.