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By the Book

John Sandford: By the Book

John SandfordCredit...Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

The author, most recently, of the Virgil Flowers novel “Holy Ghost” devotes specific spots to reading: “I like a good light, a good chair and a good book more than anything I can think of, except my wife.”

What books are on your nightstand?

The last (but one) of the Bernie Gunther novels by Philip Kerr. They brought me the closest of any books, including nonfiction histories, to understanding Germany during the Hitler years. The last Bernie Gunther novel will be published next April — Kerr died this past spring — and I’m eagerly looking forward to it.

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

I like books that are both historically and technically aware. I treasured the “Flashman” novels by George MacDonald Fraser, Derek Robinson’s novels about the British flying corps in World War I — “The Goshawk Squadron” is a minor masterpiece — and as a sometime Civil War buff, “Killer Angels” by Michael Shaara, which shows an astonishing depth of research. As a card-carrying liberal, I even have a sneaking soft spot for Newt Gingrich’s alternative Civil War histories, though I draw the line at his politics. I dislike much of the current strain of war thrillers, because I regard most of the heroes as murderous psychopaths; I have too much respect for the American military to accept that portrayal. I read so much that I actually have had dedicated reading chairs for most of my life. I like a good light, a good chair and a good book more than anything I can think of, except my wife, Michele.

What’s your favorite book of all time?

An impossible question. If you put a gun to my head — say a .40-caliber Walther PPQ, or maybe a .45 ACP Colt Gold Cup — I’d say “The Once and Future King,” by T. H. White.

Which books got you hooked on crime fiction?

I can’t remember. I began reading “boy detective” novels when I was a child and never stopped. Later, starting in high school, I read all of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels and all of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels, which are about as different as you can get. Ross Thomas was my favorite — he really taught me, in detail, how to write thrillers. Right now I probably read 50 or so crime thrillers a year. I’m still hooked.

Who’s your favorite fictional detective? And the best villain?

I’m a fanboy. There would be several candidates for each. Right now, I’d favor James Lee Burke’s Robicheaux, although Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch is right up there. When I was teaching myself to write thrillers, I closely studied Sara Paretsky’s detective V. I. Warshawski. My main character in the Prey series, Lucas Davenport, even though he’s male, carries a good deal of Warshawski’s literary genetics. Favorite villain is Hannibal Lecter.

What makes for a good thriller?

Intelligence and velocity.

What kinds of stories are you drawn to? And what do you steer clear of?

I read all the time. Every day. Both fiction and nonfiction. My longtime editor at Putnam, Neil Nyren, has said that readers want to feel secure in the hands of the author. My interpretation of that, and what I look for, is the author’s ability to induce that reading trance in which you live the story. That requires both a good tale and a facility with language. I can usually tell if that’s going to happen in a novel within the first page or two. There is one famous best-selling thriller author — I won’t name him — who tells good stories, but his bumbling language drives me crazy and I can’t read him. There’s another one who writes well, but whose portrayals of personal relationships seem stuck in middle school, and I can’t read her, either. If the first two pages of a novel pull me in, I’ll usually buy it, even if it turns out, in the end, to suck. I’ll no longer buy a novel with “Girl” in the title (though I’ve bought several in the past) nor will I buy novels that I’ve never heard of, but make the best-seller lists on the strength of a movie.

What books might we be surprised to find on your shelves?

I was an American history and literature major in college and have always had a deep interest in history, particularly in art history. I have about 1,500 books on painting and photography and even wrote an art book one time, published by Rizzoli under my real name, John Camp, on the American watercolorist John Stuart Ingle. I also have a large collection of books on Bible-era archaeology, and for 15 years sponsored and also worked as a digger and photographer at a major archaeological dig in Israel. The Tel Rehov dig focused on the 10th century B.C., the time of David and Solomon, at the very beginnings of proper history.

Who is your favorite overlooked or underappreciated writer?

He’s probably not overlooked, because a lot of serious people read his books, and Don Winslow does make the Times best-seller list, but he should go to No. 1 every time out. He doesn’t. He’s one of the best contemporary American writers of any kind.

What kind of reader were you as a child?

When I was a kindergartner at All Saints School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, the nuns one day marched us out to the public library’s bookmobile and I was issued a library card. I never looked back. In the summer between my eighth and ninth grades, the library had a summer reading program, and I read more books than anyone in the city — 126 of them, in June, July and August. Mostly thrillers. That was the experience that made me into a writer.

Favorite childhood literary character or hero?

Can’t really think of any. I do remember not liking either Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, first, because they were always being shoved down my throat, and second, because they lived the same life as I was living, and I wanted to escape it. I was screwing around on rafts on the Cedar River and Prairie and Indian creeks, fishing for catfish, running a trapline, doing field work — corn detasseling, a rite of passage for Iowa teenagers — and weeding gardens. And I wanted to be a rocker. I wanted to be Elvis. I never got there.

What’s the best book you ever received as a gift?

Here’s an odd one. Probably “On Thermonuclear War,” by Herman Kahn, not so much for what it said as for the ways that the arguments were made. That you could subject even the unthinkable to analysis. That served me well as a reporter, when you’d be looking into some complicated situation, and you’d have to step outside yourself to discover what was really going on. The book was very expensive at the time, and I was in college with no money, and it was given to me as a gift by the woman I would later marry. (She knew I was reading it a few pages at a time in a local bookstore.)

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

I don’t know, but I suspect it’d have to come with a massive amount of Chapstick. Oh. Wait: How about “The Cat in the Hat?” You know, where the Cat in the Hat and Thing One and Thing Two wreck the house? Of course, in that book, the cat put everything right at the end. Don’t see that happening.

What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

There are inconsequential books that I stop reading all the time, bad thrillers, and I put them down, but there’s always another good thriller coming along, so I tend not to remember the bad ones. The most consequential book I ever put down was “Darkness Visible,” by William Styron, because it filled me with recognition and fear.

If you were to write something besides thrillers, what would you write?

Art history. I have an idea for a book that would look at American art from the end of the 19th century through the 1920s — specifically, the people around Robert Henri. I would like to work through what happened to American painters when they got hit by European modernism after the Armory show. I believe a whole native strain of modernism was submerged and lost to that impact. I think it might have developed more along the lines that German artists took between the beginning of World War I and the end of the Weimar Republic.

Whom would you choose to write your life story?

Somebody unconstrained by the truth, who could tell the shocking, yet always vivid story of the famous women I’ve slept with, of whom there are none. So … Bill Clinton? He’s been on the best-seller lists with a thriller, he could do it.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

Charles Baudelaire (“Les Fleurs du mal”), Frida Kahlo (for her diary) and Robert Hughes (for his several books of cultural criticism). If he were still alive, I’d allow Hilton Kramer to stand out on the lawn and shout in through an open window from time to time, as long as he didn’t do it too often. And I wouldn’t feed him.

What book do you think everybody should read before they die?

“Heart of Darkness” — but only with some backgrounding.

What do you plan to read next?

Bob Woodward’s “Fear.” I’ll be reading it tonight.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 6 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: John Sandford. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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