Photo by An Le
Safe stars: Marc Warren, Amanda Abbington, Harlan Coben, Michael C Hall and Hannah Jane Arterton
Amanda Abbington in Netflix drama Safe, which is set in Britain
married Coben’s mother Corky in the early 1950s – is the middle son of three brothers. He is named Harlan, or Chaim, for his paternal grandfather, who died before he was born. He has early memories, as a little boy, of huge Passover events with more than 100 people, made up of the “patriarchs” – a group of five or six close friends of his maternal grandfather and their extended families. The “giant” seder used to take place at Goldman’s Hotel in New Jersey, now a very fancy and spacious establishment called the Wilshire. From the way he tells it, almost everyone in his family either studied law or became lawyers. Both his older and younger brothers attended Harvard Law School, although they became successful businessmen, and law was his original destiny, too. “I had applied to, and was accepted by, Chicago University Law School. But my grandfather said he needed someone to help him in the travel business, and he knew I wanted to write, so he said: ‘Why don’t you defer your place for a year?’” The year became two years and
first time – with that other dedicated Fulham fan, Pointless presenter (and now novelist) Richard Osman. The three had a great time, not least because Fulham, unusually, won that day by 5–0, prompting Coben to suggest the club should pay to have him flown over more often if his presence resulted in that kind of score. “I’ve never seen two guys so happy, they were kid-like in their joy,” notes Coben. He speaks of himself as “a very practical person” building his dream of writing in small, but realisable, steps. At first, he says, he wanted to get published. Having done that, he tried to get another published. “I never dreamed that you could make a living as a novelist” – though, with 32 books under his belt, including Win, he surely has little left to prove. “I would achieve an ambition in small ways. Could I be on the bestseller list? Could I be number one on the bestseller list? My goals were always incremental, enjoying the moment I was at.” His writing routine, he says, “is not to have a routine. Before Covid, I would
eventually Coben stayed for eight years in the family business, never went to law school, but had a good time travelling the world on behalf of Club ABC Tours, setting up specialised trips for the company’s clients. Among the places Coben travelled was the UK, for which he plainly has a particular affection: at least one of his books has a London setting and he also speaks fondly of Manchester, where filming is currently taking place for the Netflix version of his book Stay Close, whose starry cast includes Eddie Izzard, Cush Jumbo, James Nesbitt and Sarah Parish. If not for Covid, he says, he would have been in Manchester during the filming; as it is, he has to content himself with viewing the rushes remotely. He has another reason for his Anglophilia: his younger brother, Craig, has lived in London for 20 years and is a fanatical Fulham football fan. Coben last spent serious time with him four years ago to celebrate Craig’s 50th birthday. The pair marked the occasion with a birthday visit to a home match at Craven Cottage, together – for the
Richard Armitage as Adam Price in The Stranger is approached by a woman (Hannah John-Kamen)
leave the house a lot, and go to a coffee shop to write, or the library, or even the back of an Uber. These days, I have to go to different rooms in my house”. But he has a new writing colleague, one of his four children, Charlotte, who has written episodes of The Stranger for the Netflix series based on his novel, and who, he says, is “very funny”. His other adult children are “more science-y”, perhaps taking after their mother, who is a paediatrician. Future Coben plans include a companion to his stand-alone novel, The Boy From The Woods, a book in which he deliberately left unexplored the wild child origins of his main protagonist. And we may even, he says, see a televised version of Myron Bolitar – though nothing is set in stone. If that happens, however, casting for Windsor Horne Lockwood III, the quintessential patrician Yankee, is going to be fun. I’m thinking Eddie Redmayne with a New England drawl. Harlan Coben – the man behind Safe, The Stranger, The Woods and The Five – is back with a new mystery series. The Innocent premieres on 30 April
Siobhan Finneran, Dervla Kirwan, Harlan Coben, Hannah John-Kamen and Jennifer Saunders LIFE jewishnews.co.uk 11