“Every time I finish a book, I think ‘That’s it—you’re out of ideas. You’ll have to get a real job now,’” says the American author Harlan Coben. “I’m like a boxer who finished the last round of a heavyweight fight—I can’t lift my arms, I can’t throw a punch and I think I’ll never fight again. But slowly, like a boxer, you rest a bit, then you see the new opponent or next challenge, and you start to get ready.”
The only fight visible today is between two fluffy little dogs play-wrestling on the carpet of Coben’s New York apartment (he divides his time between New York and Ridgewood, New Jersey). In the past, Coben was known for writing his novels away from home, often on the move, in Ubers or in coffee shops, to avoid the distractions of family life or procrastinating with jobs around the house, and to let the outside world into his books. But since the Covid pandemic he’s switched to writing from home, largely because he feels guilty if he leaves his “two little monsters” behind.
It doesn’t seem to have slowed productivity. Coben has written 35 novels, printed in 46 languages, which have sold more than 80 million copies worldwide. His latest, Nobody’s Fool, is a sequel of sorts to Fool Me Once, taking up the story of detective Sami Kierce, whose college days come back to haunt him. “Nobody’s Fool is one of my favourites,” says Coben. “It’s maybe funnier than some of my other books, but it packs a good gut-punch in the end.”
Many of Coben’s works have been adapted for the screen, including the 2006 French film Ne Le Dis A Personne (“Tell No One”) and TV series starring the likes of Joanna Lumley, Eddie Izzard, Ashley Walters, Richard Armitage and Michelle Keegan. In 2016 Coben founded a production company, Final Twist Productions. He currently has 11 popular thriller series on Netflix (Missing You, The Stranger, Safe…) with at least another four on the way. He’s also working on his first co-written book, a collaboration with Reese Witherspoon based on the actor’s initial idea, which is due out in October.
It was William Goldman’s 1974 conspiracy thriller Marathon Man that made him think, “‘Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to do this for a living?’ You could have put a gun to my head and I wouldn’t have been able to put Marathon Man down. And Philip Roth was my favourite writer growing up. He was a major influence.”
Coben likes to write about people who disappear. “Agatha Christie did murders. Sherlock Holmes did iconic cases. And I almost always do disappearances. I find them fascinating. What I love about them is there’s hope. If someone is dead, they’re dead. You can solve the crime and there’s justice. But we can’t really be made whole. But if a person is missing, you could be made whole.”
His books are hugely popular, like the work of his good friend from Amherst College Dan Brown (“I’m not even the bestselling author from my own college fraternity,” Coben jokes). But as with Brown, Coben’s novels are rarely found at the top of critics’ “Best Books” lists. He doesn’t seem bothered. “You can’t have everything,” he shrugs. “I have sales. How greedy can I be? Think how it would be if the writer who is selling a ton is whining about not getting the best reviews. It’s not something that keeps me up at night.”
He seems equally untroubled by the prospect of AI scraping his work and churning out Coben-esque thrillers in future. “There’s a Buddhist expression that we should tend the garden that we can reach—AI is a garden I can’t reach. I don’t think it’s going to happen—I haven’t seen anything close to it yet. I worry about AI in the grand scheme of the world, but AI writing my books? No, it’s not something I worry about now.”
What does keep him awake is whether he still has it in him to keep his readers up at night. “Being a bestselling writer is the greatest job in the world,” he says. “There are very few days where I don’t think how lucky I am that when someone walks into a bookstore, where there are thousands of books, and they’re going to pick up one of my books, and that they’ll take it to bed at night and say, ‘I’m only going to read for 10 minutes,’ and the next thing they know it’s four in the morning. I take that responsibility very seriously. If a reader is disappointed in my book, I’d be really upset.”
Nobody’s Fool by Harlan Coben was published in hardback by Century on 27th March (£22)
