The Press Box - Covering March Madness and Novelist Harlan Coben

Episode Date: March 22, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker weigh in on this year’s NCAA basketball tournament. They discuss its appeal before breaking down the discrepancies between the men’s and women's tournaments (3:35). Then, novelist Harlan Coben stops by to discuss his Myron Bolitar series, the writing process, and his new novel 'Win' (23:30). Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Harlan Coben Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Emmy Award-winning producer, actor and comedian Larry Wilmore is back on the air, hosting a podcast where he weighs in on the issues of the week and interviews guests in the world of politics, entertainment, culture, sports, and beyond. Check out Larry Wilmore, Black on the Air on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David, on Friday, President Joe Biden fell on the stairs while attempting to board Air Force One. What I want to know is, how should the media come? cover Biden's stumble.

Oh my gosh. You remember a couple weeks ago we were talking about the start of the Biden presidency and we talked about immigration, possibly being the issue where he was going to be compared to his predecessor to the negative, right? I mean, like if he didn't, actually

it's kind of borne out to be exactly right. That if he didn't, you know, signal a giant change in that department then people were going to you know, really be on him for that. It turns out, maybe more importantly, though, that the Trumpism that they're trying to draw a direct line to Biden is their propensity to fall on camera while, well, I guess Trump was going down a ramp, right? Wasn't that his, he didn't fall. It was more of a more of a...

He's walking very, very slowly with mincing steps down a ramp. Mincing. It was a tipsy trot. Not that he was drunk, but he was kind of tipping. Yeah. Listen, it's enjoyable to watch. It's enjoyable to watch. I think what was most enjoyable at the Trump thing, though,

was that there was a lot of Trump supporters that were denying, and Trump himself, that were denying that it had happened, like as we were watching it or blaming weird things. And that was always the real joy of the Trump presidency is just denial of, you know, the truth that's right in front of your eyes. So, Alita, I think you and I have been on record pretty early and loudly saying that Joe Biden's health, and I guess his ability to climb, stairs is covered by that topic is absolutely fair game for me is i cannot think of i can think a few

things i'll put it this way more important than the health of the president of the united states i do remember a time when if there were like wacky clips of the president you would just have to wait to see like some funny clip show on television to see them again because i remember when we were in college remember there's that one with bill clinton and boris yeltsin just laughing like crazy that used to be it was kind of a pre-Twitter deal and I feel you'd only see it on TV like once a year and you'd be like wow why is bill Clinton laughing with Boris Yeltsin? Now by Friday afternoon we're just tired of the Biden clip like it watched it 900 times every joke had been made it was open I yearn for the days we could just save it for the clip show save it for

wacky presidential moments which airs at 3.30 on Saturday afternoon on you got to leave people wanting more. That's the big lesson here. Coming up on today's show, March Madness is here. How is a sports content machine changed in 2021? Plus novelist Harlan Coben stops by to talk about anti-heroes writing by hand and his

friendships with Chris Christie and David Foster Wallace. All that more on the press box. A part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here. I thought we should start with a segment today, David, about the way we consume the NCAA tournament.

K-A March Madness, which is playing on mute behind me as we talk. Looks like Gonzaga is just beaten Oklahoma by one point. March Madness as a media event predates the pointy-headed way. We all talk about quote-unquote content now, but at the risk of being pointy-headed, March Madness has got to be one of the most splendid content machines ever created in the history of mankind. And I mean that in a couple of ways. First off, we are now in the fourth day of nonstop games that overlap each other. And you know that thing on Netflix that we're now all at the mercy of where you're watching an episode of a show and it just auto plays the next episode?

I think the NCAA tournament might have invented auto play. And in fact, might have also invented binge watching where you, once you're in, you are in for hours and hours and hours more than you could have ever. anticipated when you started watching the thing. Right. No, I think that's right. It's got the, it's got the, the casual appeal. And I know this is like we're going to get into semantics and, and, and the evolution of words and stuff, but certainly the binge watch can now conode something

different maybe than at the first time you ever heard the phrase, right? Now it's just sort of like, it almost necessarily invokes the sort of, uh, minor cultural phenomenon that a show could have, right? It's like if you're binge watching, then probably your buddy's been watching and probably your mom's binge watching too, right? I mean, it's this whole thing. And, yeah, I mean, it's,

the NCAA tournament has always had that sort of appeal that, you know, everybody has the one buddy who doesn't hang out all the time, but anytime they can make like an excuse to have a formal drinks engagement with everybody, you know? It's isn't your everyday, you're everyday, hangout buddy, but the one who just likes throwing, likes getting plans together

always like organize like, hey, let's just all skip lunch and go have, go to the, go to the sports bar during, for March Madness. Let's get together and do this thing. It's always, it's just everybody has some attachment to it and has some, some, you know, the way that everybody views it is sort of unique and, and, and, and, but sort of like a monoculture

at the same time. Yeah, and I get it pre-dict. dates every definition of bench watching. Whatever definition of those two you pick, and I agree, they are very, they're sort of slightly distinct definitions. The NCAA tournament was both of those before we ever sort of said that idea out loud. People were just going to spend days and days and then weeks and weeks watching college basketball that they didn't know they wanted to watch. And the other thing about it is that I thought was so interesting today when I was thinking

about this is we're now in this whole thing of like, oh, God, David, gambling has come to sports. Finally, we have crossed this barrier and gambling is out on the open and we are gambling on football, gambling on basketball. It's illegal in all these states. You know what's always had gambling? The NCAA tournament in this semi-legal space. And it's actually the best kind of sports gambling because guess what? You don't have to know anything about the sport to gamble on Yeah, yeah, the NCAA bracket probably did more for sports betting in this country than anything else. It did. It's like Bill and Cousin Sal number two, NCA bracket number one.

Yeah, because anytime someone was like, we'd talk about the scourge of gambling or the scourge of sports betting. And then, you know, certainly there are downsides. But like everybody and their mom literally could point to the office pool and be just like, no, no, I think we're doing okay. I'm not sure that this is, I'm not sure that this is evidence of Satan walking the earth. Yeah. If you have like Cowboys minus four against the Eagles, you kind of have to have some knowledge coming in about what you're doing. I was showing my eight year old son, the NCAA bracket this week. This is the first year I've kind of brought him into this world.

I'm like, hey, okay, some of the teams have a number one next to them. That's the best team. And then the worst team, allegedly, in the bracket will have the 16. next to them. So a 1 is bigger than a 16 and a 2 is bigger than a 15 and on and on. He doesn't have to know anything about basketball. He doesn't have to know the rules of basketball to understand that you can pick these games and a certain game will be a surprising outcome and a certain game will be an unsurprising outcome. That's how simple it is. So as you say, it's the gateway drug to all gambling. And you can do it as soon as at least a

in this case, you're eight years old. Well, and the barrier for entry, this is basically what you just said, but the barrier for entry is not low, but it's comparatively low, right? Because you might not, your son, anybody grabbing a bracket might know absolutely nothing

about any of these teams. And, but the vast majority of sports fans, even people that watch basketball on a regular basis, know nothing about half of those teams, right? So, I mean, like, the number of people that are, like the Roger Sherman,

of the world are just like, you know, just a shrinkingly small number, right? And so, you know, you might have somebody that that is like, well, you know, I don't want to watch the game with Brian because he knows, you know, he knows Dallas Dallas players left and right and everything, you know, whatever. But like, you can go watch the, you can go watch some random NCAA game. You're starting at the same place. It's a great equalizer. It really is. And by the way, alleged sports writers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker, how many players could you name in the entire NCAA tournament, who were not players appearing on ringer NBA prospect list like that guy from Oklahoma State? I mean, can we have gotten to double digits if we took out our

alma maters? If we took out our alma mater, almost certainly not. The other thing about the NCAA tournament in terms of being a content spectacular is the pageantry aspect. Now, this year incredibly Loyola University of Chicago made the Sweet 16 again. And once again, they were accompanied by 101-year-old nun sister gene. Now, again, as we were just saying, if you don't know anything about basketball, if you don't understand why it's surprising or significant that Loyola Chicago would upset Illinois, I am going to point at the 101-year-old nun and team chaplain who is cheering her university on.

You immediately get that. Now, as the son of a preacher man, David, I had to draw your attention to this paragraph in Billy Witts' story in the New York Times. Quoting here, Sister Gene reached an agreement with the university last week to travel to Indianapolis, drawing on the biblical parable of an old woman in the gospel of Luke, who petitions a judge to grant her wishes until he eventually concedes, saying, let her do what she wants. Now, does Sister Jean's theology check out with you? I have no idea. I feel terrible about this.

I feel like you could have put just about anything after after gospel of Luke in that sentence. And I and I would have been no less perplexed than I am right now. Wow. So Sister Jean has stumped David Shoemaker on a matter of theology. I'm not even going to like look this up and pretend I know. I just have no idea. Wow. I thought you were a one seat in this bracket.

Turns out you're no more than a two. This is pretty amazing. Yeah. So there's that. And then there's also just the kind of all purpose page. tree, which gets hauled out this time of year. University of California, Santa Barbara, their mascot is the gauchos.

Again, my eight-year-old son finds that incredibly entertaining that they're the gauchos. There were one billion Oral Roberts University jokes after ORU made the Sweet 16 yesterday. Yeah. Now, I have done a just preemptive ban of any of those jokes from the Overwork

Twitter joke feature here because, really, even by David and I's low standards, they're not that funny. but anybody watching can understand why it's a big freaking deal or at least a really surprising deal that Oral Roberts has made the Sweet 16 and in the process beaten a team like Florida. They're like, what? Wait, what? What? That happened?

In Ohio State before that, that's a huge deal. Now, one draw David of the old tournament was amateurism. And there was this whole idea, right, that March Madness was. a supposedly pure pre-lapsarian kind of sporting event. I sound like Sister Gene there. This is the real stuff, not like that pro game and all that stuff. A few years ago,

players and media members began increasingly to say, that idea is bullshit. But what's interesting about 2021 is players specifically use the content machine of March Madness to get that message out. Yeah. the content machine is sort of what's working against, I mean, this is really obvious.

The content machine is what's at odds with the idea of amateurism. It's not the sport, it's not the players. It's, I mean, if you go back, I mean, you know this, but, you know, the history of not just amateurism, but the use of the term as a sort of cudgel is basically one about like, like, do I, like, you know, knowing the names of players, basically,

Right? I mean, there are times where in the early days of boxing, that was it. It's a, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not, it's not, it's got in the amateurism were out there with pitchforks or whatever. And now it's like, it's like, it's not just that this has gotten to be this very popular sport. The sport has not has changed, but, but not in, not any significant way. It's that there is this content. machine that is thirsty for human beings with names to fill time on a million different platforms. You know, we want to know not just the sister jeans. We want to know every player and we want them to have an identity. Day before the tournament started, Gio Baker, who was a guard from Rutgers, tweeted this. The NCAA owns my name, image, and likeness. Someone on music scholarship can profit from an album. Someone on academic scholarship can have a tutor service for people who say an athletic scholarship is enough, anything less than equal rights is never enough.

I am hashtag not NCAA property. That hashtag was seconded by players from Michigan and Iowa. There was a call to action from players featured on 15 of the 68 teams gathered in Indianapolis, quoting there, J. Brady Bacola of the LA Times. So it's this notion of, oh, great, you've created this incredible media event. Well, we as the players are going to plug right in and use all the, that hype you've created to get our message out. The other interesting part of this year's tournament, too, was the inequality between the tournaments, right? There's not just an NCAA

men's tournament. There's an NCAA women's tournament. Last Thursday, Stanford's performance coach, Ali Kirchner posted a photo to her Instagram showing the two weight rooms. There was a men's weight room in their bubble in Indiana, a women's weight room in their bubble in Texas. Now, the men's weight room looked kind of like a sports weight room that you'd expect from a big Oh, yeah. Multi-million dollar event. The women's weight room looked at like what happens when you check into the comfort in and you think, well, maybe I'll go get a workout.

And there's like, you go in and there's one treadmill and like two dumbbells. Yeah. And like, that's the weight room. Yeah, I was promised a weight room. And it's just amazing. There's like sanitized yoga mats. That's what they could come up with. And Kirsta wrote on Twitter, in a year defined by a fight for equality, this is a chance to have a conversation.

and get better. She was backed up on Twitter by several athletes. Then Sedona Price, Oregon Ducksford, got on Twitter and put up this TikTok video where she gave lie to the NCAA's explanation that, oh, this was just a space problem. We had a space problem. She flipped the camera around and showed there was all this space that was not being used for a weight room for the women's tournament. Steph Curry tweeted about that, our very own Shea Zerun.

Trano tweeted, this is whack as fuck. And then on Saturday, Sedona Price got back on Twitter and showed that, wow, all these weights had magically appeared. So the social media had put pressure on the NCAA. The NCAA's explanation, not surprisingly, as it always does, turned out to be bullshit. And that was another really, really interesting way that we took all this interest in the NCAA tournament and turned it around to a different cause. yeah well i mean it's i mean it's kudos i should not say this but kudos the nca for like admitting implicitly that they're so full of shit because the only by getting the weights there eventually there's no excuse they could have given uh that would have held any water after the weights

materialized like 15 minutes after the complaint started yeah and they were more talk about you know the covid testing was different for the men and the women they were playing in different kinds of arenas versus ballrooms, everything. I remember going to the NCAA tournament, the men's final four a couple years ago for Grantland. And this was when the amateur rhythm stuff was beginning to kick into high gear. And I just remember thinking like,

it's just so weird, this cognitive dissonance between we're all increasingly getting interested in this and then we're just making content about the basketball players. It's almost like this year that that cognitive dissonance has there's certainly cognitive dissonance, there's certainly inequality. That hasn't changed. But that some of that has been subsumed.

Is that the right word into the tweets about the NCAA tournament? So when you talk about Roger Sherman, right? You talk about like, look at this amazing thing that's happening on the basketball court. Look at Bob Huggins, the coach from West Virginia, and this incredible beard he has. Yeah. But then right next to those tweets are, hey, look at this NCAA bullshit right here. Look at this phony notion of,

of amateurism. Look at these players who are standing up for what they believe in. And I don't know, somehow it all feels more like a coherent whole, even if the ideas are diametrically opposed, than it did before. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that it's, this is, you know, we talk about the absence of monoculture a lot. And I think that, that the NCAA tournament is a, you know, maybe not a last gasp, but a last few gasps of that opportunity in the way that we know it. And I think that sort of, it broadens the perspective

of a lot of people watching, right? I mean, it's not just your basketball fan friends that are watching it. It's everybody's watching it. And I think that leads to more jokes about beards. And it also leads to fresh and honest shock when when situations of that sort of disparity arise.

Absolutely. So you wind up bringing in people who maybe haven't been in that fight on a day-to-day basis or haven't just been thinking about those fights on a day-to-day basis and bring them in and they come in and go, wait, what the hell is going on here? Why are those wait rooms so completely different? Why are there these just completely different visions and attention paid to men's sports versus women's sport? Why do players not control their rights?

to their likeness, you know, that kind of stuff. No, absolutely. All right, David, let's do the Overward Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to At the Pressbox Pod where they're always gratefully received. David, how about some Snyder cut jokes?

Yeah. On Thursday, the director, Zach Snyder unveiled his edit of the 2017 superhero movie he left before it was finished. Some very good jokes. League is so long and meandering and self indulgent, I have expected it to end with a recipe. And this was amazing. Someone

put a Giff of the Flash from the movie up on Twitter and wrote this. In Zach Snyder's Justice League, Barry Allen breaks a window by simply touching it. This is because Windows no longer supports Flash.

Thanks to Melissa Wiseman and Carol Stevenson for that. Yeah, that's, that is upper tier Twitter humor right there. Elsewhere, David, some free agency news from reporter Tom Pelliserro. Our Dallas Cowboys have agreed to terms with former Falcon safety, Keanu Neal.

It was an overword Twitter joke to write Keanu Leaves. Kianu Leaves. I look this up. Lots of Keanu Leaves jokes over the years, but most of them involved Keanu Reeves standing in front of a pile of leaves.

This is the first instance I can find it being about Keanu Neal, but still, overwork. Thanks to Kyle Madsen for your service. And finally, from the Department of Hollywood has no new ideas. We get this from the Hollywood Reporter. A Time to Kill sequel with Matthew McConaughey is in the works at HBO. A Time to Kill is going to have a sequel in the John Grisham expanded universe. Wow. People had some very funny titles for this sequel.

Another time to kill. A time two as in number two kill. B time to kill as opposed to A time to kill. A time to kill Mississippi drift. Enjoyed that one. And finally, a time to kill the Snyder cut. Thanks to Travis Worf Division. If you found a movie project more threadbare than the Snyder cut itself,

congrats. You made the overword Twitter joke of the week. In the notebook dump, David, we've got a different kind of writer interview today. We've got a thriller writer. Harlan Coben is the current holder of the airport bookstore championship belt. If you buy a Coburn novel for your flight, you will never, ever be disappointed. As the New York Times noted the other day, Coben has 75 million books in print. He has a 14 project deal at Netflix, which is, I didn't know you could have that many projects at the same time.

If you've never read Coben, he writes two kinds of books. He has standalone thrillers like Tell No One, which was a very good French movie a couple years ago. Coben also writes books featuring a sports agent named Myron Bolotar. It was kind of a stand-in for the author. His 33rd novel, which is called When Just Came Out, is about Wyn Lockwood, who is a supporting character from the Bolotar books. Now, Coben and I talked about the new book. We talked about the way he writes. We also talked about his friendships.

with Chris Christie and David Foster Wallace. He's a thriller writer that contains multitudes. Here's Harlan Cobin. All right, Harlan, for those who haven't read your Myron Bolotar books, what kind of crime fighter is Wynne Lockwood? Well, Myron is a sports agent, and Wynne is his financial guy. Wynne is extraordinarily rich, powerful, obnoxious, blonde-haired, patrician, blue-eyed.

You look at his face. you just want to punch him. But he's also sociopathic and extraordinarily dangerous, which makes him a fun guy to write it out. When you say, Rich, he is literally to the man are born. Yes, he is, you know, as I say, he came off the Mayflower with a silver spoon and a teetan already arranged. And he makes a joke about this in the book, but he actually does bear a certain resemblance to Bruce Wayne. Yeah, there is a, and I don't think I realize that when I cross. created Wynn, but there is a Batman-type element where he actually says Batman's superpower

is great wealth. That's really all Batman sort of has. And Wynne has that too. So Wynne is able to get the best training. He can take his private helicopter when he needs to get from New York to Philadelphia. He can take his private plane if he's going across the country. And so there is something to that. So on the subject of private planes, I would think as a novelist, part of your challenge is to get your characters from point A to point B. But when you have a character like Wynn who can just, you know, say, bring the private plane, get the Mibok to drive me around, do you worry about having to make things logistically challenging for him within a mystery?

Well, yeah, I mean, I've written 30-something books, so it's nice to not have that challenge. It's nice to have a character who doesn't have that sort of challenge. It was interesting. Wyn is probably my most anti-hero hero. So, you know, people say, well, he's kind of not nice. I'm like, yeah, I have 30 other books you can read where the hero is nice. So it's been sort of an interesting change. He's better.

A lot of my guys are ordinary guys in the extraordinary circumstance or women. If you've seen The Stranger on Netflix or Safe on Netflix or read any of the books, tell no one or whatever, win is different. When is really good with all of those things? So it was kind of fun to try it from a different perspective. He thinks of himself as being invulnerable. Is it hard to write for an invulnerable character? I don't know he knows he's invulnerable. He's certainly overconfident at times.

But he also has a great appreciation and will say, I'm not bulletproof. So he kind of gets it. He's very well prepared when he makes his attacks. But he also, I think, would make him a fun companion. or an interesting opinion, is he has self-awareness and he's completely open and honest. So he likes violence. He doesn't pretend, he isn't shy away from it, doesn't pretend otherwise. Someone described him as Batman mixed with Dexter. I don't know that's quite, I don't even quite that far. But I think that that sort of openness is refreshing and interesting for people to read about.

This is going to sound funny, but he reminded me a little bit of an editor. you know, when someone's telling him a story that goes on a little too long, he says, skip ahead. Yeah. Well, Wyn actually was doing that when I'm writing. So I'm writing from Wynne's viewpoint, and if some character is going on too long, Wynne just kind of cuts them off. No, no, I've heard enough.

So this is a manifestation of your internal editor kicking in and going, no, no, no, enough, okay, enough conversation. Let's get the plot moving again. Yeah, that's probably accurate. That's actually good. I have a couple questions about writing a book like this. You have when solving a mystery that stretches back several decades, and you have some chapters that end with a pretty conventional cliffhanger.

I'm going to reveal something to the reader in the last sentence, and it's going to make me, Brian Curtis, flip the page because I've got to find out what happens next. How many of those do you allow yourself in a book? Because they're very effective, but I would think at some point you just wear the reader out, You know, if you're, if you have the person hanging from their fingernails it at the end of every chapter. Well, I, listen, I try to make every sentence, frankly, part of every sentence a cliffhanger. I want you to keep reading. I want you to take wind to bed at 10 o'clock tonight and say, I'm going to read for 15 minutes.

And the next thing you know, it's four in the morning. That's my job. Well, if you're watching the TV shows on Netflix, that's also, you know, watching a stranger. I want you to binge it. That's the experience I want you to have. The real secret of doing that, however, is not to tease. That doesn't work. If you keep teasing people without giving them answers, that pisses them off.

It pisses me off. So I do give a lot of answers right away. Hopefully those answers make you even more engaged and maybe just take you one more step, you know, down that hole like Alice in the one, and looking glass for Alice Wonderland. So that's sort of really a technique. I think it's a real mistake when writers unfairly tease you or don't give you answers. A lot of times because they don't know them themselves. One of the promises that I've made when I started doing the TV series was I'm not going to end the season on a cliffhanger. I'm not going to not give you the answers to make you

watch season two. These shows are built to be only one season. It's not fair to have you stick around with me and not get the answer at the end. I just don't think that's fair. And the difference between a tease and an answer, a tease is like, I open the door and I saw something horrible and then cut off right there. That's a tease. If you do that, then we've got to pick up pretty fast with you seeing what's there. And it can't be, and I don't like when it's not something. I don't think it's fair to then be, oh, I was mistaken. It really was nothing. or so it all depends on the circumstance and situation. I mean, sometimes I can go to another scene if that's going on,

the door's opening. Someone else we know is trying to get there on time, so you can go to another character's viewpoint. But look, if I did it wrong, I guess I wouldn't be talking to you now. So everything is about, like anything else in life, it's all about a balance. You want to keep the suspense. But it has to be also come through genuinely caring about the person,

writing a fast-moving plot, I'm known for the plots and the twists, and I get that, and that's fair. If you don't care about these characters, if the emotion isn't real, it won't work. If you don't care about when or what he's trying to do, then I can have the most expensive car in the world. It doesn't have any gas. It's not going any place. So you have to stir the pulse, you have to stir the mind, but you really have to stir the hard. or it doesn't work. I noticed one other thing.

Occasionally you'll throw in a one sentence paragraph, and this is in Wynn's voice, that says, I say nothing. Character speaks to him, I say nothing. Now, the novelist Lee Child uses the I say nothing paragraph to great effect. Michael Crichton back in the day used it. Why is the I say nothing paragraph so useful? I don't know if it's useful or not.

It's just what naturally comes. I've been using that forever and ever. It's funny, you mentioned Lee Child. So a lot of people ask, Lee's a good, Lee's a close friend of mine, I love this stuff. We've been pals for a long time.

We've done book tours and book events together. And inevitably, we get the question, who would win a fight, win or reacher? And Lee always answers, reacher because reacher's bigger.

And I always answer, when, because win is richer. So you can decide between your, between yourselves, which one that is? Why people use a device, just a lot of times the character is saying nothing, and that's saying nothing is actually saying quite a bit.

Win versus Reach, that feels like two different political viewpoints playing themselves out with two different characters, right? The rich always win. They always come out on top at the end of the day. They manipulate society versus, hey, you can bulk yourself up into this powerful avenging vigilante and get your way. way. Yeah, it's kind of like when Marvel has those Thor versus Hulk episodes or whatever. I think I got to talk to Lee about this. I was going to say, there's your next Netflix series. Did I read

that Wynn was loosely based on someone you knew at Amherst in the 80s? Is that right? Yeah, you know, when I was starting to create the Myron Bolotar series, and this is the first book that's just Wynn. So if you've never read any of the other ones where we were a sidekick, you're not going be lost. I mean, people may have an extra enjoyment because they know who he is. But I purposely made this a new series for those who have never read. You'll like it, I hope. But he's based off my college roommate who had a name equally obnoxious to Windsor Hornlock with the third. He was blonde hair and blue eye and just wanted to punch him when you saw him. And before we would go out, very good looking. And before we'd go out to like a party when we were at college, you would look

in the mirror and go, it must suck to be ugly. So I sort of took my college roommate, who's still my best friend, by the way, and it was a strange relationship between us, because you would not have predicted that we would be friends. And I tweaked him a little bit and tinkered with him. My friend is very similar to win in that he has similar lines. He looks like win. He is a member of all of the right golf clubs. Very impressive, very good golfer. Can't fight his way out of a wet paper bag.

can you know couldn't fight his way to put paperback but he likes to use it because some people know it's him to get better tea times or reservations so it's been fun it must suck to be you that's almost going too far in a novel you almost have to dial back your friend a little bit to make it a little more

believable it's a great line though because you know he'd mean it that's the beauty of Wynne's cousin who is a big character in this book is named Patricia Lockwood now is that just a coincidence or is that a shout out to the poet and novelist Patricia Lockwood It actually is a coincidence.

I mean, it could be a shout out if she liked that, but no, that's a coincidence. I had the name Patricia in my head, and of course, Lockwood had already be the last name since I started writing when in 1993, I think, the first time I started to write that name. I wanted to ask you a few questions about your writing life. You have trouble writing at home, you told the New York Times, and you finished off a recent novel in the back of an Uber. Yeah. How exactly do you write a book in an Uber? Well, it was one of those, I was writing The Stranger, this is going back a few years, when Uber's were still kind of new.

And I live in New Jersey. I took one into New York City. So when you sit there, I have to justify the expense in my head. You know, I can't like sitting there going, well, you know, by the time I paid for parking in New York, and at the time I'll save, and I got to pay from the bridge crossing. And so I'm feeling guilty about it as I have, as I often do. And so I took out my pad. I do both.

I write by hand sometimes and write on the laptop, you know, or iPad, whatever I can write on. I write on. So I started to write some notes out and I wrote pretty well. And so for three weeks, I took Uber's wherever I went and sat in the back and wrote. You know, I can do it. If you give me some time, a white noise I like actually noise. So that doesn't bother me. It's not specifically talking to me.

You don't bother me. I actually find noisy environments, airports, or wherever, pretty good places to write because I'm forcing myself to shut out the outside. Yeah, well, that brings up the question is how do you convince the Uber driver not to talk to you because they can be kind of chatting. That's true. I must have gotten lucky or I give off a vibe of don't talk to me. I love this strategy because it kind of sounds like a 40s movie where Humphrey Bogart gets in the cab and hands a cabby 20 bucks and says drive as far as this will take me. You kind of finished a novel that way. It's sort of true. I just sort of made myself go into New York more often than I normally do.

So that's kind of how I did it. Now you mentioned writing longhand. Why do you like to write longhand? Well, I don't. I don't really like writing any way in particular. But there is definitely something freeing and childlike about hand to pen. It brings you back to your youth. But here's a couple reasons why I like it.

And why I recommend it if you're trying to write. in today's world. One is, again, that childlike thing. The second thing is, when you cross something out, you just cross it out. You still see it. When you delete something on a computer, it's gone forever. Sometimes I like to go back and see what I had crossed out. And the main reason I really like it is because what I do is I usually do five or ten pages at a time by hand.

And then I myself, because no one else could read that writing, including me half the time. I can't even read my writing, we'll put it on the computer or whatever. So my first draft, if you will, which is on the computer, is already my second draft. So because I'm making obviously changes. And sometimes I will scratch out notes. I'll have arrows pointing to things. I'll have, I'll forget. I'll leave verbs or whatever, just to keep moving as fast as I possibly can.

And when you say freeing, you mean you feel less constricted when you're writing on a page? You don't feel like you're filling. in a template or something like that, you're just letting your mind wander a little bit? Yeah, some days, again, some days I don't. Some days I'll draw a picture. Some days I'll draw arrows. Some days I will, my handwriting is really bad like most people's today. And I'll not be able to read every word that I write back.

And I'll just kind of, you know, that'll make me rethink the scene. And again, also the other beauty is I'll, let's say I'm doing that. I'll go, maybe I'll go outside the weather is nice and do it, or I will do it someplace that does not have an internet connection. Really, these devices are tremendously detrimental to being a writer, the phone, the internet, all those things, because you will use any excuse not to write. And so I used to like back in the days when I was first starting out,

finding coffee shops and places that did not have any kind of internet connection. free. Now that doesn't really exist. Every place, of course, you can have the internet. So anything that could force you to be less connected with the online world is probably good for your writing. 2005, you told Amherst magazine, I don't do serial killers. Why no serial killers? Well, I said it in 2005, and of course, every time I say, make a statement like that, I end up doing it. I also swore for many years, despite, you know, Wynn has probably been my most popular character as a son. sidekick throughout my entire career. And so I've had requests to do win books since whenever.

I've always resisted that urge saying, oh, I'm not going to do it. A sidekick is better as a sidekick. The reason why you love Wynn so much is because I'm not giving you that much win. So I resisted that urge until I decided here I have an idea that's going to work for Wynn. You know, it has stolen from your paintings and an heiress kidnapping and a high-rise and a really expensive penthouse apartment on the upper west side looking over central park. Well, whose world is this? It's Wynn's world.

Wynn should be the one to tell the story. So I make stupid statements like that, and then I walk them back. But in general, I don't like serial killer books or writing serial killers because I need my villains to have an interesting motive. At the end of these books, I want you to think what I have done much differently. If I was in that circumstance, can I see myself doing? what the bad guy did. And so I don't really relate well to serial killers. And thus, they don't really interest me.

Yeah, and it sort of constricts the plot, doesn't it? Because if it's a serial killer, the reason they killed him is because they're a serial killer. Well, it's easy. That's for sure. I don't know if it, you know, there's certainly, Thomas Harris did it brilliantly. I mean, Shane Stevens did it brilliantly. But there's only, I don't know there's that many ways to make it really,

without really giving the serial killer some type of motive or some new spin on it. Dexter did that 15 years ago, whenever that first came out as an interesting, unique way of doing. You also once said this, I could never write the dumb woman in jeopardy mystery. Now, people have made a lot of money off that particular kind of book. How did you come to your approach? Well, I had my first lead character who was female, a book called Just One Look. And I really was part of what inspires you can be something that you see done really poorly. So I was really tired of the dumb women in jeopardy novels, the one where the heroin is made to the point of, it's like she's naive to the point of being hit over the head with a rock.

It's like, you know, cheaters, a serial killer loose in the woods. I think I'll rent a secluded cabin, not tell anybody where I'm going, not have a phone line, and hang out my brown panties all day. I mean, please. I mean, in today's day, to try to write a novel like that, even back when I was writing, is insulting. So I tried to make the, a try anyway, to make the hero not do the, oh, why are they walking down the stairs when we know the bad guys down there type trope. So try to take those and stand them on their head and even make fun of them sometimes can lead you to having some really good ideas for novels. I had a writer once tell me that two events really changed the shape of thrillers. One was the fall of the Soviet Union because that just eliminated a whole traditional genre of bad guys.

And the other was the invention of the cell phone and then the smartphone because it made things really hard for writers. Because as readers were like, why don't they just look up the information they need or why don't they just call for help even if they're in that cabin in the woods? What is your approach to writing around or writing with smartphones? My approach is just to, it's the world you live in. I don't really, I get the complaint, but it's just the world you live in. So if I'm going out on a date with somebody, I'm married, so I'm not, but if somebody is going out on a date with somebody, they're going to Google their name. If they don't, that's unrealistic.

In the old days, it used to be that scene in every movie, in black and white movies, especially where you see the person desperately trying to reach somebody by the phone. And you'd be seeing the phone ringing and, oh, please pick up. But you can't do that nowadays. So you have to have a new challenge. And it brings up challenges and it brings up the opposite. I mean, it also makes it easier, right? So I don't have to spend an hour of him going to the library, looking up the microfeashe or whatever way we would have done it may be in the past.

It's just, in my case, it's not necessarily cutting-edge technology. It's reflecting reality. The flip side of that is people think that they know because they watch TV or whatever else, that it's easy for a detective. Oh, they just look at the DNA. Without giving anything away, there's a part at the end of the stranger where people said, oh, they would have been able to figure out that that body hadn't been buried or done.

They would have known it would have been done at 1 o'clock on a Tuesday. I'm like, if you think a buried body that they find weeks or months later, they can pinpoint the time of death within an hour or even within a day or a week. You're nuts. You're watching too much CSI. So it's both a challenge. You know, sometimes in real life cases, you look and you would never be able to get away with that in fiction. So that's the pros and the cons.

But whatever it is, I'm trying to live in the world that I'm living. Speaking of challenges and the world you're living in, would it be interesting for you to write a suspense novel that took place during COVID? Not yet. Maybe one day. I mean, I was writing Wynn when COVID hit. And since I do the present time and present day, I just moved it back and had to take place in 2019, met it in 2020. For several reasons. One is when COVID first hit, I just had a book out called The Boy from the Woods. Stranger had just been released on Netflix.

I was getting a really, a lot of nice messages saying, thank you for being an escape from being locked down a year ago. So I tell you, well, that's part of my job is not to, you know, make you relive things that are horrifying, to give you a kind of healthy outlet for all that. But the second reason was when I was writing Wynn and it was going to come out in March of this year and writing it in April, May or June of last year, who knew what we were going to be like in March of this year? That's the problem.

I certainly didn't know March of last year. If you remember we were first locking down, how scary the world was. I didn't know where we would be in June or August or October or now. And I don't know where we'll be four or five months from now. So in my case, I'm going to wait it out. I'm going to wait and see where we are before I try to write about it. And whether readers want to be dragged back into that world

or whether we'd rather just, as you say, be in the permanent escape and say, let's just be in a world where we didn't have to put on a mask to go solve a mystery. Right. To have the killer. Well, exactly. You know, we give a lot of long, complicated answers to try to make ourselves sound important. but a big part of what I try to do is entertain you.

I mean, that's, that's it. I want you to disappear into these stories. So I don't, you know, yes, we do it with violence often and murder and stuff like that. But I don't want to do something that's going to knock you out of that escape and be, and trigger, as they say, something that's not pleasant for you. I want you to really enjoy the ride. Got to ask you about a few of your friends before we go. You've known former New Jersey Governor Chris Chris Chris.

for almost half a century now. Will you tell our listeners how you two first met? On a little league field. I had been ill and came back to this little league team rather late. I think we were 10. So the first person, it was a little nerve-wracking. The team had been playing for a while. They all knew each other.

And I got there and the first person who came over and threw his arm around me and welcomed me and introduced me around was Chris Christie and his father. Bill Christie was our coach. So that's how we first met. And was he outgoing? Was he very much, if you couldn't predict, he would be a successful politician, I suppose, at that point. But did he have a politician's kind of manner about him? Oh, yeah. Yes. He was, like I say, he came up,

Hi, Harlan, nice to meet you. I'm Chris Christie. I mean, what 10-year-old does that? And make sure that I was comfortable in this environment. And he always was political. When we were seniors in high school, in fact, he was president of the student senior class, which he had been president of class most of the years. And I was actually president of the student council, though I think I practiced more what they claimed to practice,

and that is I was very hands-off in the sense that I did nothing. It looked really good on my college resume. I was elected. I wasn't very good at it. I didn't take it seriously as I should have probably. But yeah, so you would have known, I think, I don't think it would surprise anybody if you were, we were big class. Livingston High School that year had over 600 graduating in our graduating class. I think if you took a survey of which of who in our class would end up being a politician, I think Chris would have won running away.

Certainly I wouldn't have won. You wrote the New York Times that you guys had some profound disagreements about politics over the years. Did the last four years bring more of those out? Yeah. How do you handle them? Not well sometimes and well sometimes. I mean, it's like anything else. It's a long friendship with a lot of ups and downs as a lot of long friendships have.

And you see what happens tomorrow. You and David Foster Wallace were also at Amherst at the same time. What was your first impression of Wallace? David lived next door to me. I often tell the story. So I got into Amherst College is in a fairly intimidating place. Unlike my high school, it was very small. Four hundred kids a grade, and there are a lot of geniuses there. I got in because I played basketball. Plain and simple, I would not have made it without my basketball, which is not unusual to hear from somebody who went to college.

So I took an introduction political science class with David freshman year, not realizing quite then that David was the most intelligent person I would ever meet. And I had two brothers were geniuses, but David was just on a different level for most people that I know. So we, I wrote out my first paper. I worked pretty hard on it. I got a B minus. I was a little bummed. I'm walking back with David to the room. So David, what did you get? He goes in A. I'm like, kind of, you know, read it just to see what it's like and shyly. Let me read. I'm like, oh my God, how did I not fail? This paper is so much better than my dribble. I didn't realize I was walking with one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. So it was a little bit of a relief

when I realized that not everybody was like David Foster Walts. When he was still alive, did you guys read each other's books? We did. We got along very, very well. I remember one of our reunions. He graduated a year after me. At the time, I thought he was taking a year off for travel, but it ended up because of his health issues

that he took a year off. But my wife graduated in class, so we would go to each other's reunions. And I remember him saying to me when he was writing infinite chest, that didn't tell me the title of the time. He goes, I'm writing this really long book. I don't know how to end books. How do you know how to end a book?

It's like asking, you know, you always know how to end them. You have, you know, good ending. I'm not good with the endings. So we had a fun discussion looking back on there after the book came out. It was like, yeah, I guess you didn't have to end it. But it worked out pretty well. Oh, that is great. All right.

Since we're a sports website, I got to ask you about the basketball career before we go that you just mentioned. You were a power forward on the Amherst basketball team, I understand. Yes, they would have called me a number four, I guess, in today's world. A number four, yeah. Were you more of a Tom Chambers power ford or an Otis Thorpe power ford? Yeah, I was definitely more in the Charles Oakley School. There are two guys up front where all Americans and a thousand point career scored. They were seniors when I was a sophomore.

That was my best year at Amherst, our best year at Amherst. And my job was to get them the ball and cover the best person on the other team and hit people. and get maybe six points a game off offensive tippins and not shoot very much. And I played that role, I think, fairly well. You were a little bit of an enforcer type. Yes, I would like to think so anyway. I was sort of a weak enforcer. I'm not sure I ever really scared anybody or did anything,

but that was sort of my job was to get them the ball and to get the rebounds. And I love that. You know, that was, I was not a finesse player. This is not a link I've ever thought of, but power forward to suspense novelists. It makes a lot of sense. It really does. Yeah, well, you know, you got to enforce it. Somebody's got to pursue justice.

You know, somebody's got to make things right. They may not be the most talented player, but they got to go make things right. That sounds like a... That could work. A hero of a novel to make. Why not, Brian? We'll go with that. All right.

Harlan Cohen's new novel is When? It's available right now. Harlan, thanks so much for coming on the press box. Thank you. It's a pleasure. All right. It's time for David Chubaker Giss is the strained pun headline. Yeah.

Thursday's headline about the subject titles of presidential fundraising, please, was single white email. Today's headline comes from Kelly Hagenson, Jette White or Jettie White, sorry, either way there, and Brian Harrington. It's from the Associated Press. And David, it involves the aforementioned Sister Gene. Yes, Sister Gene was on hand when Loyola Chicago upset number one seed, Illinois. Illinois's going home Sister Jean is a nun What was the AP's

strained pun headline? I have no idea, but I appreciate all of the help you just gave me Nunn goodbye farewell Out We're crawling up to it here

Get thee to a nunnery This is the wrong team punchy for sister gene, don't you think? Is it is none what I'm working with here? Is it some, is it a none? None is it a J-S-N-N-N-is-N-is-N-is-in-the-head. None is in the headline, yes.

That is your pun-word. None. A million to, Illinois. Illinois's tournament is over. They are finished. Over and none? Over and done.

and done. We're right there now. None and done. None and done. None and done. None and done. None and done. That's good. There's a little bit of an issue that they lost in the second round of the tournament and one and done is kind of like you went to college for one year. Anyway, none and done. He is David Schuemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantus. We are back Thursday with more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.