Reviews and recommendations are unbiased and products are independently selected. Postmedia may earn an affiliate commission from purchases made through links on this page.
Los Angeles was still under assault from wildfires the week that an eagerly awaited new thriller from Robert Crais saw publication. The Big Empty was the 20th novel featuring the exploits of wisecracking L.A. private eye Elvis Cole and his formidable but introspective partner Joe Pike — but there would be no big sendoff, no big book-signing tour. The real world was now intruding horrifically.
Crais, whose novels have brought the contemporary landscape of Los Angeles and its environs to raw and vivid life for readers around the world, was resigned to what was happening. After all, he and his family had been forced out of their San Fernando Valley home for a couple of nights because of menacing flames.
“We weren’t affected by those big fires in Pacific Palisades and Pasadena,” he says now. “We were sort of at the midpoint between them. But other smaller fires were popping up, some dangerously close, and when that happened we were given an evacuation order. Those fires were dealt with by fire fighters and their equipment, and we were allowed to return home on the third day. We were very fortunate. So many other people were not.”
The Big Empty
Robert Crais
Putnam
Yet some of those “other people” still showed up for a signing that almost didn’t happen — in another neighbourhood under siege. Crais found it an unforgettable experience.
His original book launch had become a non-starter. “It was in one of the evacuation zones from the Palisades fire, so that had to be cancelled.” But what of plans for a subsequent signing at a book shop dangerously near blazes in the east? Although aware that it would be seriously impacted, the owners wanted it to go ahead. So there Crais was — signing copies as smoke drifted ominously through the area.
“Even people who had lost their homes came,” the 71-year-old author says. “I was shocked and surprised — their stories were so moving. They said that they just needed a distraction from it it all, so they came for the signing.”
The Big Empty is a taut and disturbing novel that sends Elvis and Joe into very dark places when they reopen an investigation into a baffling decade-old disappearance. It’s already high on bestseller lists, and naturally that pleases Crais. But he won’t forget that book-signing afternoon on the edge of danger. “To know that people were anxious to get it and read it . . . ..” His voice trails off.
It’s not the first time Crais has been touched by the loyalty of his readers. Six years ago, they were there for him after unexpected coronary artery surgery left him freshly aware of his mortality and wondering whether he would ever write again. “The love shown by readers and reviewers has left me overwhelmed and humbled,” he recently wrote on Facebook. “Thank you all.”
“Even people who had lost their homes came. I was shocked and surprised — their stories were so moving. They said that they just needed a distraction from it all, so they came for the signing.”
The Big Empty has a deceptively cosy beginning. Traci Beller, aged 23, has become a social media phenomenon because of her sunny personality and skill at concocting muffin recipes. But she remains haunted by the disappearance of the father she loved a decade previously. Over the protests of handlers obsessed with micromanaging her burgeoning career, she hires Elvis Cole to find the truth about the dad who went to work one morning and never came home.
What initially seems a routine “missing persons” assignment turns into a nightmare that at one point sees Elvis almost beaten to death. But, perhaps more seriously, it places his own moral compass under assault.
“Elvis has always had extreme loyalties,” Crais says. “His personal code has always been driven by loyalty to his clients. And he has a very strong sense of right and wrong. He has a personal code of honour, a personal belief system. But with this book I wanted to put him in a place where he would basically be more conflicted than ever before.”
Crais had long wanted to put his likable extrovert hero through a moral wringer. He may write crime thrillers but he sees them as novels of character as well: for example, in addition to communicating the infectious personality of Traci the Muffin Girl, he also probes the troubled psychologies of a mother and daughter who are unhappily dragged into Elvis’s investigation and contribute further to the dilemma he ultimately faces.
“I wanted to put Elvis Cole in an untenable situation — no matter what he chooses to do, someone is going to be hurt, He is placed in a position where there is no good justice for everyone — at least no good outcome.”
Crais is on the phone from his Los Angeles home, and if he sounds like he’s taking the plight of his fictional hero personally, it’s understandable. Elvis and Joe made their first appearance in 1987 in The Monkey’s Raincoat, a novel that established Crais, a former script writer for classic TV shows like Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law, as a major figure in crime fiction. So Crais figures he owes a lot to these two guys. For nearly four decades they have been with him every day.
“They are my life’s work. Even when I’m writing about other characters in one of my stand-alone novels, Elvis and Joe have always been there, always in the back of my mind. Even when I’m between books, they’re still with me like shadows behind the plants in my office. They’re my normal. They’ll always be with me. They can’t not be with me.”
So Elvis and Joe were there during those dark days when he was suddenly blindsided by an immediate need for quadruple bypass surgery that would leave him fearing for his career.
“The thing about my coronary artery disease was that I didn’t know I had it. One day I was fine and the next day surgeons were telling me I needed a bypass. It was shocking. I’d always been physically fit and hiking four or five miles every day, yet suddenly, according to the doctors, I was on the edge of a major heart attack and would be dead in two months.”
Crais is fine now and back to the long hikes. But during a long period of post-surgery recovery, he kept wondering whether he’d still be alive a few months down the road — and if his writing career was over.
“I couldn’t stay in the moment of writing. I was too distracted. I had to force it back. I couldn’t hold a thought, I couldn’t focus. I was still filled with doubts.”
But as he struggled on, the elusive focus took hold. Elvis and Joe were beckoning — and returned to life and back into bookstores when Racing The Light was published to unanimously favourable reviews in 2022.
Now with the arrival of The Big Empty, Crais has a greater sense of how he made it through the darkness
“Writing is what I do,” he says simply. I’ve been doing it every day my entire adult life. So I guess I had no choice. Ultimately it was the thing that kept me going, kept me motivated and finally made me able to get back in the groove.”