Hallo Douglas, hallo Lincoln. Thank's that you have taking the time to answer a few questions of Elements of Crime.

Douglas, your brother Richard is also a prominent writer. Was that also a reason for you to begin a career as an author and to finish the work in the museum?

I had always wanted to write. When my first book was published, entitled Dinosaurs in the Attic, I made enough money from it to live for a year without working. So I quit my job, moved from New York City to Santa Fe, and wrote for a year. It actually took me seven years before I was able to make more than a bare living from writing, but I stuck with it.

How did it come to the first meeting between you and Lincoln, how you have become acquainted?

I had been writing a column in the magazine Natural History, published by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where I worked. An editor from St. Martin's Press, who had been reading my pieces, called me up and asked if I wanted to write a history of the Museum. I said yes -- and that became my first book, Dinosaurs in the Attic. After the book was published, I gave the editor a tour of the Museum -- at midnight. I showed him all the best places in the Museum to which I had access--the dinosaur bone storage room, the collection of 30,000 rats in jars of alcohol, the whale eyeball collection, the preserved mastodon stomach with its last meal inside, and a lot of other unusual things. We ended up in the Hall of Late Dinosaurs around 2:00 a.m., with only the emergency lights on, the great black skeletons looming in the darkness around us--and the editor turned to me and said: "Doug, this is the scariest building in the world. Let's write a thriller set in here." And that was the birth of Relic. That editor, if you haven't guessed by now, was Lincoln Child. We both discovered we shared the same kind of sick, twisted view of the world. And that began our long and fruitful collaboration.

When was the idea to a series of Lieutenant Vincent D'Agosta and FBI Agent Pendergast born?

In the first draft of the opening chapters of Relic that I sent to Linc, there was no Agent Pendergast. Just two cops. Linc said to me: “Doug, these two cops are great but they’re essentially the same character. And we need a detective who is utterly different, a fish out of water.” So we decided to fold the two cops together, and that character became D’Agosta. As for the detective, I joked that maybe we needed an albino FBI agent from New Orleans. But somehow that joke became reality, and Pendergast sprang from our heads fully formed, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. Of course, he isn’t albino, just very pale.

How is the cooperation between you and Lincoln, because you live so far apart, more than 500 km?

First we settle on the central theme, the twist, the idea at the very center of the book. In our current book, it revolves around the mystery of Pendergast’s wife’s murder in Africa twelve years before. We write an outline together. The we each take a plot thread and write that, swapping our material and rewriting each other’s stuff. Of course, when Lincoln rewrites my material, it makes me furious, and so I rewrite his work, which makes him furious, and we go back and forth like that until the publisher rips the manuscript out of our hands. In the end, it’s a process that actually works.

If you’re working on a new novel, who writes which part of the story and who researched? How do you share it?

We both research and write. We divide things up according to preference and background knowledge. Linc usually writes about computers, codebreaking, and twisted serial killers. I am the expert on physics, paleontology, archaeology, cosmology, museums, and travel.

You worked for several years at the American Museum of Natural History. Anyone who has read the book “ Relic “ knows, that a lot of background knowledge was available. Was that the reason for you to write Relic, your first common book?

Yes. Having worked in the museum for 8 years, I was an expert in the place. It made for a marvelous setting for a thriller novel.

What does the future hold for you? In January 2011 in Germany appears "Fever – Schatten der Vergangenheit " from the Pendergast series? Are there any new solo works?

We have a major new series coming out. The first book is called Gideon’s Sword and it features a new series character called Gideon Crew. I can’t say any more about it, except to mention that we made a huge movie deal over the series with Paramount Pictures, so one day it should reach the silver screen.