Monster (Alex Delaware Series #13) by Jonathan Kellerman

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The Barnes & Noble Review
In 1998, Jonathan Kellerman took a brief detour from the main line of his career and published an excellent, non-series novel called Billy Straight. This month, he returns to familiar fictional territory with Monster, his 15th novel in 15 years and the 13th to feature child psychologist Alex Delaware.

Delaware, who first appeared in 1984's Edgar Award-winning When the Bough Breaks, has, over time, become more and more disengaged from his primary profession. These days, he offers counseling and therapy to a limited number of individuals (one of whom is that eponymous runaway Billy Straight), and continues to serve as an expert witness in child custody cases. Mostly, though, his time and energy are taken up by his role as consulting psychologist to the Los Angeles Police Department. By now, he has virtually been partnered with the LAPD's controversial, openly gay homicide detective, Milo Sturgis.

In Monster, Milo solicits Alex's help on a brutal, particularly frustrating case. Claire Argent, a 39-year-old psychologist, has been murdered, mutilated, and dumped in the trunk of her Buick Regal. There were no witnesses to the killing, and there are currently no suspects. In the months prior to her death, Claire had worked at the aptly named Starkweather Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Attempts to connect Claire's murder to her place of employment prove futile for a couple of reasons. First, her death occurred in the "outside world," beyond the reach of Starkweather's inmates. Second, her death bore striking similarities to an earlier murder, which was manifestly unconnected to Starkweather Hospital and its inhabitants.

Just as Milo and Alex turn their attention away from Starkweather, an inexplicable event takes place. Heidi Ott, a staff technician and former associate of Claire Argent's, recounts a bizarre "conversation" with imprisoned mass murderer Ardis Peake, a man who was nicknamed "Monster" by the tabloid press and who had been a particular source of interest to Claire Argent. According to Heidi Ott, Ardis, who is severely schizophrenic, has recently spoken for the first time in years, uttering cryptic phrases that seem to allude both to Claire's murder and to the subsequent murders of a pair of homeless derelicts. In the face of this questionable "evidence," Starkweather Hospital once again becomes the focus of intense police scrutiny.

Ultimately, in a manner deliberately reminiscent of classic psychoanalysis, Alex finds the answers to a complex puzzle in the distant, unresolved past. In Claire Argent's case, the past contains a traumatic secret: an act of family violence that provides essential clues to her character, her aspirations, her intense fascination with Ardis Peake, and his homicidal history. Ardis, of course, is inextricably bound to his own past, to a single night of violence in which he earned his nickname by butchering an entire family. As Alex investigates that long-forgotten massacre, he begins to discern the outline of another, hidden figure, a figure who may have played a role in those earlier killings, and who just might provide the link between past and present events. The search for that elusive figure eventually becomes the dramatic centerpiece of this intricately constructed novel.

Monster, incidentally, is dedicated "To the Memory of Kenneth Millar," who was better known to mystery readers as Ross Macdonald, creator of the classic Lew Archer series, books which were themselves heavily influenced by psychoanalysis, and in which the unresolved past invariably leaves its mark on the present. In his own, very different fashion, Kellerman takes the Macdonald tradition and carries it forward, giving us, in Monster, an absorbing mystery that has much to say about the human capacity for cruelty, and about the fundamental importance of discovering -- and confronting -- the demons of the past.

As always, Kellerman brings his own clinical experience to bear on the subject at hand, and the result -- in addition to its many other virtues -- is a compelling portrait of the harsh realities of mental illness. The scenes in Starkweather Hospital -- with its sad, shuffling population of damaged, overmedicated zombies -- are simultaneously moving and frightening. Through an uncommon combination of empathy and narrative expertise, Kellerman shows us the visible face of madness, and it's not a pretty sight. But it is a powerful one, and it gives this book an added dimension, a level of reality that very few novels -- in or out of the mystery genre -- ever manage to achieve.

--Bill Sheehan

From the Publisher

How can a nonfunctional psychotic locked up in a supposedly secure institution for homicidal madmen predict brutal murders in the outside world? This is the enigma that Dr. Alex Delaware and Detective Milo Sturgis must penetrate in order to stop these horrific killings. First, a marginal actor is found dead in a car trunk, sawn in half. Months later, a psychologist at Starkweather Hospital for the Criminally Insane is discovered murdered and mutilated in a tantalizingly similar way. Dr. Claire Argent had been working caringly with Ardis Peake, a subnormal mental patient locked up for decades after annihilating his mother and the ranching family that rescued him from homelessness. When reports of Peake's incoherent rambling begin to make frightening sense as predictions of yet more murders, Alex and Milo are drawn into a web of family secrets, vengeance, and manipulation--both inside Starkweather and on the L.A. streets, where death, drugs, and sex are marketed as commodities. The climactic discovery they make as they race to save new victims gives fresh and terrifying meaning to the concept of true monstrosity.

Rocky Mountain News

Kellerman delivers....Get ready to sleep with the lights on....Get ready to be horrified...and perversely intrigued.

Baltimore Sun

Unsettling and thrilling...Right from the start of Monster, Jonathan Kellerman does everything right.

People - Pam Lambert

Monsteris a surprising and complex story of festering evil...a tale that snakes its way to a stunningly dramatic conclusion.

Publishers Weekly

In top form in his latest mystery featuring L.A. forensic psychologist Alex Delaware (who had a bit part in the author's previous novel, Billy Straight), Kellerman devises a deviously twisted, contemporary tale that draws pulsing suspense from the ageless relationship between madness and evil. Delaware teams up with his pal Milo Sturgis, of LAPD Homicide, to track the murderer of Claire Argent, a young doctor who worked at Starkweather Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Argent's badly mutilated body connects her death to the unsolved murder of a young, aspiring actor whose body had been sawed in half. Kellerman masterfully strews the trail of the investigation with crumbs, challenging his heroes (and readers) to distinguish promising clues from red herrings. Argent, who recently left a prime research job to work at Starkweather, led an extremely isolated life that had nothing in common with that of the murdered actor. The Starkweather staff is reticent and unhelpful until a young aide reveals that the doctor had been spending time with an inmate known as the Monster, a mentally deficient man who had been convicted of murdering and mutilating a young family 15 years earlier. Kellerman focuses on Delaware and Sturgis as they probe the hospital's milieu, the Monster's crime, the doctor's troubled and puzzling history and additional murders. A tense climax in the hills above L.A. brings together all the tautly woven threads as Kellerman delivers another chilling look into the dark corners of the human psyche. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Yet more madmen: When a psychotic at the Starkweather Hospital for the Criminally Insane starts predicting murders, Dr. Alex Delaware and Detective Milo Sturgis must turn to him for clues. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Read an Excerpt

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

With his heart-stopping latest Alex Delaware/Milo Sturgis procedural, Monster, Jonathan Kellerman proves himself the master of the psychological thriller once again. Thriller editor Andrew LeCount spoke with Kellerman about his guaranteed blockbuster, his fascination with the dark recesses of the human psyche, the notorious Charlie Starkweather, and Kellerman's fondness for French bulldogs. Enjoy what the very charming Kellerman had to say.

B&N.com: You were once quoted saying "you feel comfortable writing about places that you know." Makes sense. Does that mean you got to know an actual facility for the criminally insane in preparation for Monster?

Jonathan Kellerman: Oh yes. [laughs]

B&N.com: How much time did you spend...

JK: Well, very little but it was enough. I'm kind of on touchy ground here because I really can't talk about the name of the place, but let's just say that I did have access to a state hospital for the criminally insane, a place for men -- and women to some extent, but mostly men -- who are deemed too dangerous for the maximum-security prison system. I would give a talk on writing to a group of them and then would get access -- limited access -- but quite enough to the facility. Of course, I am trained as a psychologist so I've had some experience in psychiatric wards, so it really wasn't that different from other wards, but I knew that the people here were considered very very dangerous.

B&N.com: Did the "Monster" of the title -- Ardis Peake, or the idea behind Ardis Peake -- spring from an actual person that you met in that facility?

JK: No. Like most novelists, I really enjoy making stuff up. This is a difficult concept for normal people to understand, that we writers have warped minds. People always assume that we're mutating reality. You draw from your experiences, certainly, but when it comes to characters, I really enjoy making them up. I generally outline the books, and I have a pretty good idea -- at least I think I do -- when I start where the story's going, although I often change it. I have a general notion about the characters, but they're somewhat sketchy when I outline. When I sit down to write the characters, they take shape almost as if they're being born in a petri dish.

B&N.com: Your plots are generally rather involved so I'd think you'd certainly need to know beforehand where the plot was going.

JK: Exactly. When I was a failed writer I felt that one of my problems was weakness of plot, so I began to overcompensate. When I got published with When the Bough Breaks in 1985 it had a lot of plot, and that became expected of me to some extent, so each time I write a book I have to throw in lots of plot. The challenge is to make the plot complex without being complicated so people can follow it easily enough. And I'm just not smart enough to do that without outlining.

B&N.com: Well, with the success you've achieved I wouldn't suggest changing now.

JK: Outlining gives you the illusion of knowing what you're doing. The funny thing is, often I'll finish a book, go back, and look at the outline and see that it's totally different. But I think writing an outline just gives me a sense of control. But you change things -- as you're writing, the guy you thought was going to be a bad guy turns out to be a good guy and vice versa. It's such a cliché, I'm sure you've heard this from tons of other writers, but the characters do start talking to you; it's almost as if they assume their own will.

B&N.com: You named the hospital Starkweather -- after Charlie Starkweather, I presume?

JK: Yeah. [laughs] I figured somebody might catch on. Faye and I are always looking for in-jokes; we've always done puns. Faye had a minstrel in her novel The Quality of Mercy called Augusto Tune, and I think I had a manic depressive in Bad Love called Richard Moody. So we're always playing around with words; it's part of what's fun about writing.

B&N.com: Does Charlie Starkweather hold any other significance for you?

JK: No, I just like the ring of the word. I remember Charlie; I followed his exploits. He was doing his thing when I was a kid, and he was pretty scary to me because I was a child and this maniac and his girlfriend were driving cross-country killing people. He stuck in my mind. People ask where I get the names; they pretty much just spring into my head -- hopefully I'm not stealing someone's real name. You never know. I had a family named Jones in Devil's Waltz. How could you get more ambiguous than that? But some guy wrote me, "Oh, my name is Jones!" What are you gonna do?

B&N.com: Just make sure you've got that little disclaimer in the front of the book, I guess.

JK: Yeah, really. You never know; that's why I like to write fiction.

B&N.com: There's always someone who's going to take it too seriously.

JK: I don't think Joseph Wambaugh's doing any more nonfiction because every time he wrote nonfiction he got sued. It cost him a lot a money; he always won, but it was a hassle.

B&N.com: Fiction is a much safer form of writing, I suppose.

JK: Hopefully -- you never know in this litigious society.

B&N.com: The number of lawyers out there -- my brother is in the legal profession so I complain to him about that all the time.

JK: My son is a junior in college and he's going through grad school panic figuring out what to do. "Maybe," he says, "I'll take the LSAT." I said, "Oh, we don't need another lawyer."

B&N.com: I was an English major and like so many of my English-major friends who didn't want to teach, the one obvious fallback is law school.

JK: Exactly. It's often kind of like a trash can. I even thought a lot about it. I got my Ph.D. when I was very, very young, and I figured maybe I'll go to law school and use both degrees; I'll be very marketable with a Ph.D. and a law degree, and then -- I was already married -- I picked up these law books and I said, "No more school...better get a job."

B&N.com: Let's talk about where the ideas for your novels spring from. I know you said you like to make things up, but do the cases that Milo and Alex investigate at all resemble experiences that you've faced while working as a psychologist?

JK: It's hard to say where an idea for a book comes from. I've written a lot of books, and they've come from many different places. I wrote a novel called Private Eyes; the whole book was centered around the first line: "A therapist's work is never over." That grew from my experience retiring from psychology and realizing I always have an obligation to my patients. Other books came from reading an article in a medical magazine -- it's generally a combination of factors; it's generally an idea and a concept that then takes shape with characters. The specific crimes I just make up, really. It's pretty easy to make up crimes. I mean, nowadays reality is much stranger than fiction. That's the problem writing fiction. You think you're so cute, then the real stuff is so much weirder. But with fiction you can go into the depth that no one else can. Even movies -- they're just a superficial treatment compared to the way a novelist can get into someone's head and bring thoughts to life, so we love making this stuff up. I enjoy exploring not so much the whodunit, but also the whydunit -- trying to understand why people are doing these crazy things.

B&N.com: And you certainly explore that "why" aspect in Monster. You do a great job entering the mindset of the killer in an attempt to uncover why he's so demented.

JK: Monster grew out of two places. As a psychologist, I've written a lot about mental illness, but I've never really gotten into the essence of madness in its extreme, and I thought it was time to do that after a dozen or so novels. Also, I've always wanted to write a novel set in a hospital for the criminally insane. So those two things had been percolating around in my head for several years, and finally I got a good story to go with it.

B&N.com: I noticed you dedicated Monster to the memory of Kenneth Millar -- a.k.a Ross MacDonald.

JK: Ross MacDonald was a big influence on me. I was a struggling writer for many years due to lots of reasons. One of my problems was finding a voice. I just couldn't figure out what I wanted to write about. Then I worked as a psychologist for many years and I came upon Ross MacDonald's novels; I think I began with The Underground Man -- I read them all, thought he was a fantastic writer. I really hadn't read a lot of mysteries since Agatha Christie in high school, but this was a whole other level because he was so literary and he had so much style. But the thing that I took from him personally was that here was a guy writing about psychopathology in southern California, and I said, "Boing! This is what I can do; this is what I know about!" By that time I had accrued a lot of interesting experiences working in a hospital; I'd seen a lot of the raw side of life, so he really helped to give me a voice. I feel very indebted to him because I think without reading his novels I might not have had a career as a novelist.

B&N.com: One of MacDonald's signature themes was the unresolved past influencing the future.

JK: Which is very much what you'd expect from a psychologist. Ross MacDonald was not a shrink, but he got a Ph.D. in English and his dissertation was on Freud, so I like to think of him as a closet shrink. Many writers of his generation were involved in Freudian psychology -- his novel The Chill is the ultimate Oedipal-Freudian novel. He's just a great writer and that whole notion of the past coming back to haunt the present very much rang true with me and that is a theme that I tend to explore.

B&N.com: What inspired you to write thriller/mystery fiction in the first place?

JK: After discovering Ross MacDonald, I then immersed myself in the whole body of California hard-boiled fiction -- I read Chandler, Hammett, Horace McCoy, David Goodis, Jonathan Latimer -- I really read tons of these books; I'd become addicted to them and they really spoke to me. Then I said, "You know, I live in California, this really speaks to me, and perhaps I, as a psychologist, can bring to bear a certain specialized knowledge." Another source of inspiration is Joe Wambaugh, who I admire immensely and who caused me to think: This guy was a cop and he's able to integrate his special body of knowledge -- perhaps I could do the same. And that's what really led me to write this type of novel, as well as encountering some nasty things that shocked me and made me want to try to come to grips with them. Writing, of course, is a great way to do that.

B&N.com: Talk a little bit about the similarities between you and Alex Delaware.

JK: There are obviously some similarities: We're both in the same field. When I started we were about the same age, but he's aged much more slowly. [laughs] We don't age him in real time -- who wants to read about 50-year-old guy? He's more physically fit and he gets into a lot more trouble. My wife says she prefers me -- she thinks I have a better sense of humor, that I'm a synthesis of Milo and Alex; Milo is the outlet for my wise-guy sense of humor. I admire Alex in that he's a forthright guy. People have accused him of being a goody two-shoes, but at the time I wrote him I was rebelling against a prevailing cliché of the early '80s: the antihero. I wrote my first novel in '81, so I thought I was revolutionary. I thought it'd be interesting to write about a guy who wasn't a drunken philanderer who also was concerned with justice. Other differences: I'm happily married; I have kids; Delaware lives in the hills, I live on flat land; he will never get married because if he was married he couldn't get into trouble. It's like me taken to the extreme, perhaps. There are some people who meet me who say, "Gee, when I hear you talk it sounds like Delaware," but I think, you know, we have to draw distinctions between reality and fantasy.

B&N.com: Do you own a French bulldog like Alex and Robin?

JK: I do. By the ninth Delaware novel, Bad Love, I said,"You know, Delaware needs a dog." It would be a human thing for him to have a dog, I thought. I've always had dogs, and these Frenchies are so bizarre, they really have to be exploited. I've owned a couple of them -- the one that Spike is modeled after unfortunately died -- his name was Bear. I have another one now named Archie; his full name is Lew Archer, P.I. [laughs], after Ross MacDonald's famous character, of course. Archie's been with me for eight years. I have three different types of dog, but French bulldogs are just cute. The problem with giving your character a dog is you have to keep bringing 'em in -- but I thought since Delaware doesn't have kids he needed something else to nurture. Of course, as that's evolved, Spike doesn't really like Delaware and hangs around with Robin, which is typical for those dogs.

B&N.com: What went into your decision to make Milo a gay character?

JK: The context is that I had written many novels and had never been published. I won a writing prize when I was 21 at college and then proceeded to fail for about 13 or 14 years. Finally, when I sat down to write When the Bough Breaks -- or what became When the Bough Breaks -- I really said I was going to outline this; this is going to be my last shot at making it as a novelist. So I really put a lot into it. I realized I was going to write a crime novel with a shrink, but I said, "There has to be a cop here because it's a crime novel," and I just don't like those books where the amateur does it all -- it's just not realistic. So I had to have a cop and I said, once again, "It's so boring, just another homicide cop. What can I do to make him a little different?" At the time, I happened to have several gay friends who were engaged in professions where supposedly there were no gay people, and the LAPD had no openly gay cops at that time -- they may now, but certainly not a lot. And I thought that would lend him a certain sense of interest and expand his character, and it would create a certain tension that would enlarge the character. Plus I thought it would be kind of neat to write about a guy who was gay but it didn't matter.

B&N.com: How do gay people react to Milo?

JK: It's been really fascinating. In the beginning I'd get lots of letters from gay people that would say, "Oh thank you, thank you! I love crime novels but they're so homophobic..." and I still get some of that. And then it kind of segued into how can Kellerman as a straight man presume to write about the gay community? But that's so narrow to me -- otherwise I could write only about 50-year-old white Jewish guys. That's silly. I got a review from a British gay magazine a couple years ago that said, "If Delaware were really such a good shrink he'd know he's really in love with Milo." [laughs] It's funny the way people react. But I ignore all of that stuff. I just write the characters; they're my buddies, and I love them both, and they're just a lot of fun to write about.

B&N.com: The fact that Milo is gay also offers an explanation as to why he's always out to prove himself, why his drive is so unrelenting.

JK: Exactly. He's got to be an outsider. No matter what he does, he's going to be alienated and he's going to be an outsider. It was revolutionary because there were no other gay series characters in fiction, except David Brandstetter, who was written by Joe Hansen, who himself was gay, but those really didn't achieve a wide circulation. But I pay less attention to it now because I think it's less of an issue -- it's just who he is, and if bringing it out fits with the story, fine; if it doesn't, we don't say much about it.

B&N.com: I have to ask: What's next?

JK: I have another Delaware book finished called Dr. Death -- it's coming out a year from now. I think I have to do a final edit; my editor tells me it's basically done. I can't say anything about it because it's a full year off, but my agent thinks it's my best book -- and he's not a butt kisser. He tells me the truth. He thinks it's my best book, and he says it's really great that on your 15th or 16th novel you're doing your best work. I can't judge -- my wife likes it, too, and she's pretty smart. I'm about halfway through another Delaware book, too; it's sitting about a foot in front of me. I'm just gonna keep doing 'em as long as people buy 'em.

B&N.com: I was reading the advance galley of Monster on the subway the other day when a woman came up to me and asked, "Is it a Delaware?"

JK: [laughs] Yeah, people hunger for that character. It's really funny because here I was this failed writer who thought of this character and wrote this book and people bought it...it's just very strange. You hear about people like Chandler, who hated Marlowe, and Conan Doyle came to hate Sherlock Holmes, but I really don't. I love writing the Delaware novels and I hope to continue -- if a non-Delaware idea comes to me that is really fresh and is worth doing I will do it. But mostly I like doing them, so I'm glad people are looking forward to it and I hope they go out and buy it. [laughs]

B&N.com: Your recent nonfiction work, Savage Spawn, delves into the mystery behind young children who commit acts of unspeakable violence. What is your take on the recent outbreak of violence in America's schools?

JK: I think, basically, that this is nothing new. As you go back in history, there's always been a small segment of violent kids. What I think is different now is access to really bad weapons. Fifty years ago it would have been a schoolyard stabbing, maybe a zip gun -- I mean, I took my kids to see "West Side Story" a couple of years ago. It was laughable because the gang guys were so harmless, but in its day it was pretty au courant. I mean they romanticize it with song and dance, but that's how gang guys were. But the weaponry that's now accessible -- the explosives -- to kids is what's the difference. And I can understand why adults would want guns for protection, but when it comes to kids.... We know kids drive without a license, we restrict them from drinking, why is that a ten-year-old is allowed to get hold of a gun? I know as a psychologist that children are not fully formed, and they're not rational, and they're not able to deal with that kind of stuff. It's something that we need to deal with.

B&N.com: Thank you for answering our questions today.

JK: My pleasure.

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