“WALLFLOWER”: Q&A WITH WILLIAM BAYER:
Q. You’ve been quoted as saying you don’t like writing series character novels. Why this aversion, and if this really is your view, how do you explain your authoring the Janek series?
A. First you should know that there is fierce pressure from publishers upon crime fiction writers to develop a series character that readers will fall in love with and thus gobble up any book in which the “beloved” character reappears. This, we are told is the route to fame and fortune. Some writers have no trouble doing this, often, in my opinion, with mixed results. There are interesting characters who change and mature over the course of a series, and others who remain boringly the same. Most series don’t catch on, and the ones that do seem to go on forever with cleverly reminiscent titles. There’s also this feeling I have that writers try to make their series characters interesting by forcing eccentricities upon them . Thus you might get a dwarf private eye with autistic tendencies...or whatever. Also I often I find that even when the first book in a series is really good, it’s usually followed by a severe fall-off in quality. As to Janek, I never set out to make him a series character. Though I’d introduced him in Peregrine, and fully developed him in Switch, I didn’t expect to feature him in other books. So when I did decide to write more Janeks, I made a conscious decision to make the books as different as I could. As to why I employed him again, it was the success of the Janek TV movies that changed my mind. They were popular, people liked the character (I felt that Richard Crenna was perfectly cast as Janek), and so I decided to try another Janek. In the end I wrote only two more, Wallflower, and the final one, Mirror Maze. Meanwhile, there were seven Janek movies.
Q. Yet even though the wallflower case and the switched heads case are very different, and the wallflower case is far more personal because Janek’s beloved god-daughter is murdered, there is more linking the books than just having the same main character.
A. Yes, because in Wallflower there are several references to the switched heads case, and to the fact that a book was written about it and a mini-series was broadcast. This was my way of integrating the successful TV mini-series based on Switch (titled Doubletake) and to explain the transformation of Janek from a respected detective into a star detective, a man who has become a legend in the NYPD. I wanted him to carry the burden of having solved a great case. It was something akin to the burden I felt after writing a best-selling novel and then having a highly successful miniseries broadcast on CBS. Also I felt there was no point in writing another Janek if the new case was going to be some sort of ho-hum homicide, or a case that in any way resembled switched heads. I felt I needed a case that would be very different, but also in its own way as complex and “great,” something truly unique.
Q. At first it seems as if the book is going to be about a serial murders case. Then it turns into something else. Was this your original plan?
A. Oh, yes! I decided to take that route because I was getting very tired of reading serial murder novels. Thomas Harris did a really superb job with his, and I didn’t see any point in re-working that much over-worked territory. So I took an opposite approach, even indulging in a little light mockery of the famous FBI criminal profiling methodology...which, I should add, I respect. In Wallflower, Janek and Aaron go to FBI headquarters for a briefing on what the FBI is calling “The Happy Families Murders.” While there they get a briefing which Janek quickly recognizes is a self-aggrandizing snow-job. Plus he picks up on things about the so-called happy families case that signal that it could be something quite different than the FBI believes. I thought it would be really interesting to have two NYPD guys take on the whole FBI apparatus, and have it turn out that they’re right. In fact, it’s not “happy families” murders, it’s “wallflower” murders. To my mind, you see, something as unique as the wallflower killer is a lot more interesting than another inscrutable serial murderer.
Q. Do you consider your character, Dr. Beverly Archer, the most evil shrink in crime fiction?
A. Not at all! That crown surely belongs on the head of Harris’ brilliant cannibalistic Dr. Hannibal Lecter. I’m not even sure I consider Bev Archer evil in the pure sense of the word. She’s certainly psychotic, but I tried to make her understandable by delving into her background. Her murders, remember, are committed by her murderer-by-proxy, Diana Proctor, to avenge past humiliations. Diana is Beverly’s “tool,” her creature. Bev makes a plan, waits for years for the right criminal psychopath to come along, finds Diana at the mental hospital where she works, treats her, dominates her, and turns her into her avenging angel...or devil. Beverly conceives of the murders, she has her motives, and then she compels Diana to carry them out and to bring her back a trophy each time. And of course it’s those trophies that prove to be her undoing.
Q. There’s another shrink in the novel. What is this thing you have for weird shrinks?
A. Actually there are two other shrinks: Dr. Monika Daskai, whom Janek meets in Venice, falls in love with, and who plays a major role helping him recover the memory of the very brief glimpse he had of Bev’s trophies just before Diana stabbed him. And also Dr. David Chun, the forensic psychiatrist Janek meets at FBI headquarters, whom he subsequently visits at Harvard, and who offers a nihilistic vision of the killings. Even though Dr. Chun plays a relatively small role, I think he’s an interesting and quite healthy character. But the real contrast is between the deeply insane Dr. Archer and the very healthy Dr. Daskai. They are opposite in every respect. So, you see, not all my shrinks are weird!
Q. Was it frightening to enter into Dr. Archer’s mind, as you do in the chapter titled “Wallflower?”
A. When I wrote that chapter I definitely felt the insanity. The chapters that deal with Archer’s craziness, the opening, the “mama” chapters and “wallflower” are where I deviate from Janek’s story. These are many things in these chapters he couldn’t possibly know, and thus can only infer. As such they constitute a second level of narration which hopefully enriches the main story line -- Janek’s investigation. I found these chapters frightening to write, and even now find them frightening to reread.
Q. Are the humiliations that Archer avenges really so horrible?
A. Not at face value, no, but in her deranged mind they were horrible indeed, the subject of obsession. With an ego is fragile as hers, distorted by her very selfish and glamorous mother, she takes humiliating experiences which you or I might consider just part of the unpleasantness one faces as one grows up and come to know the world, as wounds which can only be healed by the violent death and mutilation of the perpetrators. This is her sickness which Janek must uncover, and which he must understand in depth in order to force a resolution to his case.
Q. Why do so many of your killers seem to come from Cleveland?