As with my pantser method of writing, how my series develop is also chaotic and undisciplined. 

The Doll Maker started out as a short story and at the outset was never intended to be a full-length novel.

While I was writing Tatterdemalion, the first entry in the Scott Carson series, in 2013, I saw I had a good character that could support a series. So I’d begun drafting out a novel entitled The Murder Machine, or about Carson’s and Buffalo Bill’s hunt for HH Holmes during the Chicago  Exposition of 1893. However I could never get the plot straight (pantser, remember?), which is why it’s been languishing half-finished for a decade.

Then years later, I began what was supposed to be a short story.

Yet, days after starting it, I realized immediately that The Doll Maker was paced like a novel. So I gave up on trying to make a short story or novella out of it and just did what came natural. I knocked out the first draft in about four months and it became the first follow-up to Tatterdemalion.

If the book had an inspiration, it actually came from Russia. By chance, I happened across a BBC article about a very disturbed Russian academic named Anatoly Moskvin. Moskvin went to local cemeteries and stole the bodies of newly-dead Russian girls, took them back to his apartment and made dolls out of them. He never actually killed anyone but he was obsessed with desecrating the corpses of girls and decorating his house with their bodies. Obviously that’s incredibly creepy and I thought a serial killer who murders little girls and turns them into dolls in late 19^th century New York would be a great throughline.

I thought then, and still do, that The Doll Maker would benefit from a mainstream audience, albeit one that enjoys a good historical thriller. After all, Caleb Carr’s The Alienist and The Angel of Darkness, which caused me to make the transition from science fiction to historical novels, were the first two novels to vault historical psychological thrillers onto the bestseller lists and I still hope to crack that demographic. I’ve recently gotten into the audiobook market and The Doll Maker’s audiobook version, a wonderful collaboration with narrator Marnie Sher, is the newest release.

When I write a novel, I don’t bother myself with trying to impart a specific message or to hope that my readers will get anything specific from any of them. They’ll get out of them what they will. But, on an abstract level, novel readers first and foremost just want a good, immersive story in which to get lost and I like to think I give them that.

When one starts a series, there are pros and cons. On the one hand, there’s something called “the sophomore jinx”, in which one follows up on a successful entry to a series with something that’s subpar. However, if you have a compelling storyline, and The Doll Maker has that, then you have an established character, or several, that you can bring back. Tatterdemalion, about the search for Jack the Ripper, has a surefire compelling storyline for many fans of historical thrillers and, as it’s still my longest novel (193,000+ words), we get a good, long first look at Scott Carson and the kind of young man he is.

The trick to writing a successful followup is to bring something new to the table in the plot, character delineation, etc.

We saw Carson as a 21 year-old in 1888 Whitechapel, a naïve academic clearly out of his depth, as was everyone on Buffalo Bill’s team. Then in The Doll Maker, we meet Carson again in 1889 Manhattan. It’s about five months later, he’s still licking his wounds and he quickly gets sucked into another murder investigation.

But, as with real people, compelling and nuanced characters like Scott Carson gradually reveal themselves to you. While writing Tatterdemalion, I never knew that Carson was a college dropout from Columbia but I discovered that while writing The Doll Maker. You learn about your fictional characters a bit at a time just like people you know in the real world. Surprise for the author, surprise for the reader. My long-term goals for it? For people to keep discovering and rediscovering it through its various mediums.

Tatterdemalion was only the fifth novel I’d ever completed but it was the one that changed my life.

It was my first historical thriller and it also taught me, through a brutal succession of five or six line edits, how to be a more effective copyeditor (the first draft was 251,000 words-long, meaning I’d chopped and shaved nearly 60,000 words from it, a novella’s worth of material). It’s what I do and there’s nothing special about me aside from the stories I tell. As the French poet once said, “My life be dull that my art be lively.”

My fiancée, Barbara Peters, suddenly passed away last September and she was my number one fan. She’d read every one of my novels until my last one, Hollywoodland, the third in the Carson series. And even then, I’d read her the chapters one at a time as they came off the printer. Tatterdemalion and the series never would’ve gotten written if it weren’t for Barbara. In the summer of 2012, I was sitting at the kitchen table, exactly where I am now as I write this, and I gave her the throughline for Tatterdemalion. Since I greatly respected her opinion, I asked her, “What do you think?” And she told me to run with it. So, yes, Caleb Carr inspired me to be a historical thriller author like him but it was Barbara who gave me the green light and told me to go for it.

And, even in the deepest pits of grief, my bereavement is somewhat leavened by my eternal gratitude to her for encouraging me to start what has turned into my most successful and longest-running series.

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