Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child became my favorite authors when I started reading Relic, a horror thriller set in the American Museum of Natural History. Douglas Preston worked at the Museum as a writer and editor from 1978 to 1985 and the rich details about the inner workings of the museum appealed to me. He began a series of novels that would focus on a very unusual protagonist, Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast.
Douglas Preston was born in Cambridge, MA in 1956. He attended Pomona College and after exploring the sciences he chose English literature as his area of study. After working at the museum for eight years, he wrote a non-fiction book, Dinosaurs in the Attic. It was that book that led to his introduction and subsequent collaboration with Lincoln Child, the publisher of his book at the St. Martin press. His first book Relic, made into a movie in 1997, was the beginning of a successful series of ten additional novels, Cold Vengeance, the latest, just released in August 2011.
Lincoln Child was born in Westport, CT, and attended Carleton College with a minor in English. His first post-college post was at St. Martin’s Press, where he became a senior editor in 1984. He left publishing in 1987 to pursue a career at MetLife in computer programming and analysis, and in doing so began to pursue writing. . After the publication of Relic in 1995, he began writing full time.
The experiences of both authors in college and career can be felt in the detailed background they give to both the characters and their stories. Throughout the series they have introduced somewhat fantastic concepts, a serum to prevent aging or a drug that causes a metamorphosis, but they have done it in a plausible way.
They have developed their characters throughout the series, many reappearing in later novels where they were first introduced, and their continued growth and development is not ignored in favor of the main character. But it’s that main character, Aloysius Pendergast, and his loyal friend, New York Police Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta, that brings me back to his novels. Special Agent Pendergast is one of the most entertaining characters I have met in years. His experience as a member of a wealthy, but strange, New Orleans family that includes charletons and serial killers, is an ever-developing delight.
His methods are as eccentric as his family and include a bit of disguise, Tibetan meditation, Chongg Ran, psychological manipulation, and sheer brilliance. It is a charming enigma, whose history and background are slowly uncovered throughout the series. While he started out almost as a superhero in his incredible abilities, it is in the latest Preston and Childs series, Helen’s trilogy, you can see the character as a man, who lost his wife ten years earlier, and his subsequent discovery of a cover-up, it creates cracks in that unflappable exterior.
