FINALIST Shelf Unbound: You’ve lived in Paris and Frankfurt, and these places are part of your novels. What other research or experience went into creating these stories? Pearce: I like to hang stories on things I know well, in which I’ve had some experience. That’s not to say I’ve been stalked by killers or kidnapped and thrown into a root cellar, but I’ve spent a lot of time in Europe and I’m especially at home in Paris, where my wife and I live for part of each year. As a result, writing about Paris, Frankfurt, or Munich is like writing about Sarasota, our permanent home. Of course, imagination plays a big part as well. I have visited almost every major site I’ve written about, sometimes several times. I walk through them at different times of day and imagine how they might change if, for example, I set the action in the early morning instead of late afternoon, or in the Marais instead of Montparnasse. I take a lot of pictures, and I’ve become good friends with Google Earth for those places I can’t easily visit or have to leave before I’ve thought through all the possibilities.
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Shelf Unbound: Eddie Grant is a great character. How did you go about creating him? Pearce: Thank you. Eddie is full of contradictions. He’s confident but at the same time has an abundance of self-doubt. I wanted to create a character who should have everything he could ever want, but whose perfect life is derailed by something over which he has no control, in this case something that was part of his father’s military service 60 years before. He’s rich, but his fortune really doesn’t matter to him. He’s loved by the perfect woman but can’t handle it and spurns her (don’t panic; he rectifies that). He falls into bed with the wrong woman, who turns out to be totally unlike his first image of her, or so he thinks. In other words, he’s like most of us—screwed up, incomplete, unhappy at least some of the time. It’s odd, but to me Eddie wasn’t the most appealing character in Treasure of Saint-Lazare. Most of the men I talked to were attracted to Jen, the bad girl. Aurélie appeared almost too perfect, but she turns out to have a depth of character that surprised me.