Interview with author Robert Greer

By Patti Thorn, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published October 27, 2008 at 10:36 a.m.
Updated October 28, 2008 at 12:44 a.m.

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Photo by Javier Manzano / The Rocky

Author Robert Greer

A Dozen on Denver: Stories to celebrate the city at 150

We asked 11 authors to pick a decade in Denver's history and turn in 2,500 words of fiction set in the city. Each week we've featured a new story and an interview with the author. Today, look for a special section in print compiling all the stories, plus one additional piece: Heirlooms, by Robert Pogue Ziegler, the winner of our story contest.

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Rocky books editor Patti Thorn talks with Robert Greer, author of the popular CJ Floyd mysteries, about his contribution to A Dozen on Denver and his writing life.

You've written seven novels featuring CJ Floyd, a black bail bondsman who solves mysteries. Can you tell us what part of CJ's character you wanted to flesh out with this story?

I really wanted to deal with CJ's ability to integrate himself back into a mainstream society after his service in Vietnam, so I dealt with the angst that he has as he tries to reset himself in society. I wanted to also give him the opportunity to come up against someone who's had an experience similar to his.

In your story, you write that CJ's collection of license plates "said more about him than any of his other collections." Can you explain what you meant by that?

The license plates are something he's collected since he was a teenager; they go back to his love of cars and the enjoyment he had related to his experience around cars and hanging out at a gas station - a fictional gas station in Five Points, by the way - and being that sort of gasoline alley crow. So that's part of it. But the other thing about the license plates is that they're very, very difficult to find, and so, in my way of thinking, they show his tenacity, the fact that he'll spend months, if not years, trying to search out a plate . . . So that's what I try to say about him through the metaphor of the license plates.

You talk about urban renewal on Larimer Street in your story. Were you here at that time?

Most of that took place about four years before I came, so I didn't see much of it at all. So in truth (the story is) a product of both my imagination and research.

Let's talk about your career in general. You have degrees in dentistry, medicine, pathology and a master's in creative writing - an incredible achievement. Could you tell us how you eventually decided on pathology?

Some of it was choice, and some of it was happenstance. I was a chemistry, zoology and journalism major in college. I always had an interest in writing but didn't ever plan to sit above some drugstore and write the great American novel. I got out of college in 1965 and didn't know what I wanted to do. I wasn't going to do the journalism thing; I decided not to get a Ph.D. in microbiology, which is my favorite basic science discipline.

And so one day some friends and I were just sitting on campus and one guy says, "Well, I'm gonna apply to dental school," and I said, "Well, maybe I'll just do that, too." And I did . . . I was a dentist for a very brief period of time. And then I went to Boston University and medical school up there.

(But) I wanted to be a scientist . . . I sort of took this long path through all these disciplines to get (there). So I have a big research lab at CU at the Health Sciences Center and I do research, but it took a long time to get to where I could have been much earlier, I think.

People tend to think of scientists as left-brained, writers as right-brained. Do you find those two disciplines, science and writing, to be opposites?

I think they're much, much more similar than people think. Writing requires the rigid discipline that science requires, absolutely. I suspect a lot of people think that writers are Hemingwayesque, Gertrude Stein-like people who hang out in coffee shops, drink and talk politics and things like that - not that I do that very much, but I'm certain some writers do that. (But) to write a novel or a story requires a tremendous amount of discipline. It requires you having your seat in the chair, hours and hours of labor - very much like science requires. They also require some sense of vision. They absolutely both require imagination.

Can you elaborate on that?

A vision as to where you want to go with something. Here's an example: Our research group at CU was the first to discover the role of human papillomavirus in cancer of the mouth. Now, people had known that that virus - the same virus that causes warts - causes cervical cancer in women. But they hadn't extrapolated to figure out that, as we say in medicine, mucosa is mucosa, meaning that the tissue that lines your eye, your mouth, your gut is all the same. So you would expect that a virus that affects one of those sites could affect all of them. But we hadn't thought that out . . . You have to have a vision that allows you to think outside the parameters you've been given.

And that's also true of writing?

When you're writing a novel, things happen. If you're sitting there with a perfect outline and you think that's the way the novel is going to run, it almost never is going to turn out like that. Things are going to change, and you have to figure out how to retrofit and get back to where you want to go.

Speaking of that process, let's get back to CJ Floyd. Can you tell us how he came into being?

Well, I wanted to write about a black hero because I didn't think society as a whole had the kind of appreciation that I had for that kind of person. So that was my No. 1 goal. I (also) wanted to show someone who was carrying a tremendous amount of baggage - with CJ, the baggage is certainly the Vietnam war. And then I wanted to define a character who came from an urban environment that's not typical - a black character coming not off the mean streets of Detroit or New York but someone off of Denver's streets, which may not be quite as mean but certainly can have their own sense of meanness.

Were there things that surprised you as you developed CJ?

There were some things about him that I didn't quite understand I was going to have to deal with as much as I have. It may be related to a sort of male myopic. I didn't realize readers would be so interested in his love life. That really surprised me. As I moved through the novels, I would get fans who would say, "Well, what's gonna happen with CJ and Mavis?" - that's his girlfriend in the novels. "Are they gonna get married? Are they gonna break up?" And I'm going, "Are you kidding me? This isn't a romance novel." But that was shortsighted on my part. I didn't realize that people would want to know those things about this hero.

I can't let you go without asking how a busy doctor finds time to write novels.

I'm not so sure I'm busier than anyone else. I was married for 32 years. My wife died six years ago Sept. 1. I never met an obstacle in my life that I haven't been able to overcome, and the one thing I can't do is bring her back. It's the worst tragedy of my life. But Phyllis and I were very much alike. She was an architect. We weren't gregarious people who wanted to be out slapping hands with everyone every night. We both had a sense of being loners, and we never had children. And there's the key right there.

If you're gonna raise children to be productive members of society, that's a 20-hour-a-day job (laughs). Maybe you sleep four if you're lucky. So I always laugh when people say, "Well, where do you find the time?" And I look and I see they've got three kids with them. I go, "Are you kidding me? The question is, 'Where do YOU find the time?' "

* Robert Greer is the author of seven books in the CJ Floyd mystery series, two medical thrillers, a short story collection and his latest novel released this month, Blackbird, Farewell. He is a practicing surgical pathologist, research scientist and professor of medicine and pathology at the University of Colorado Denver Anschutz Medical Campus.

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