Doug

In this way, Pendergast just sprang out of our heads, fully formed, like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. The strange thing about Pendergast is that we don’t know him very well at all. We didn’t even know his first name for the first five years of our writing partnership. In a strange way, Pendergast created himself. He came into being in a completely different way than all the other characters we’ve created.

I’ll give you an example: Corrie Swanson, Pendergast’s sidekick in Still Life with Crows. First we picked her name. Then we gave her an age, eighteen, and a style, Goth. But we decided she wouldn’t be a typical Goth; she’d be a smart Goth. A non-drugged-out Goth. A misunderstood person who loved reading, father gone, mother an alcoholic, Corrie lived in a trailer in a tiny Midwestern town and prayed someday to get out. And so on and so forth. We made lists of what kind of music she listened to and even compiled a CD of her favorite tunes. We made lists of the books she’d read and diagrammed out all her friends and enemies at the local high school. We gave her a minor criminal record, undeserved, and a bad relationship with the local sheriff and his son.

We built her from scratch. We knew more about her than would ever go into a novel. We created her the way we created all the other characters in our novels.

Except Pendergast.

When we were done figuring out who Pendergast was, we never wrote him a backstory. We never gave him a family. We didn’t know where he went to school, what he did before becoming an FBI agent (beyond a few juicy rumors), what kind of books he read. Even though we knew exactly who he was as a character, we knew absolutely nothing about his history. No personal details.

This is, oddly enough, exactly how Pendergast would want it. He is a secretive soul, reticent, an enigma. He knew all these things, and that was enough. He would reveal them to us in time.

It was only after writing half a dozen books that we have begun to piece together his backstory. We learned his first name began with A in the third novel, and learned in the fourth what that A stood for. We still don’t know what his middle initials-X. L.-stand for. Some say L is for “Leng.” But we don’t know that for sure. Just the other day, Linc and I had an argument about that. I said it couldn’t be “Leng” for a number of obscure Talmudic reasons. Linc disagreed. E-mails went back and forth. And we still don’t know.

Linc

A few years ago, our audio publisher asked us to write up an interview with Pendergast… They thought that having us “interview” Pendergast in our own voices (and having René Auberjonois, the voice talent, “be” Pendergast) would make a nice extra for the audiobook version of Brimstone.

So Doug and I dutifully sat down and began work on the interview. We did this in the way we frequently work (and, in fact, the way the very piece you are reading was created): one of us will make a start, then lob the work-in-progress through the virtual ether to the other. In time, with enough back-and-forths, the work will grow, through accretion, into a lustrous pearl (or an inert lump, as the case may be).

As usual when it came to Pendergast, the interview basically wrote itself. Pendergast took the reins and led the conversation in his own direction. And when it was complete, Doug and I were quite surprised by some of the things he had revealed. In particular, I was struck by Pendergast’s lack of appreciation for our chronicling of his exploits. You would think every Johnson would appreciate his Boswell, but not Agent Pendergast. He was not only ungrateful, but he seemed to have a distinctly low opinion of our talents.

Although Pendergast’s disapproval of our efforts might be galling, the amount of enthusiasm and support our readers have shown has had precisely the opposite effect. We’re surprised and delighted by how vigorously people have taken our special Special Agent to their hearts. There are websites devoted to the most obscure Pendergast arcana; there are online forums in which readers recount (sometimes rather shockingly) their personal Pendergast fantasies (including one site called Pendergasms, which we shall not explore further in these pages). There are even Pendergast bumper stickers rumored to be seen in the wild!

Doug

Many people have asked us why Pendergast was cut from the movie version of The Relic, which was released by Paramount Pictures in 1997 and became a number one box office hit.

I remember well receiving a series of drafts of The Relic screenplay. In each successive draft, Pendergast’s role withered until, in the last one, he had vanished completely. I asked the producers why. I got various explanations, which boiled down to this: he was too complex, too eccentric, and too scene-stealing a character to be in a movie. The screenwriters were having a lot of trouble with his personality, voice, and manner. He was a character who had rarely, if ever, been seen before on the silver screen, and he was not a Hollywood “type.” They could not write him and they could not cast him. To Hollywood, he was “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” to borrow a phrase from Churchill. They couldn’t get a handle on him. On the other hand, Pendergast’s sidekick, Vincent D’Agosta, was very much a Hollywood type, the tough-talking Italian-American cop with a heart of gold. So D’Agosta became the star of the movie, played by Tom Sizemore, cast alongside Penelope Ann Miller as Margo Green, James Whitmore as Frock, and Linda Hunt as the museum’s feisty director.

Linc

One thing we’ve particularly enjoyed is doling out-in maddeningly small amounts-Pendergast’s backstory. Certain of our readers are desperate to learn more about him. And his natural reticence is the perfect foil for our scattering little hints and trace clues like gold dust throughout the stories.

What started as relatively uncoordinated and spontaneous asides has now morphed into a cohesive history, replete with certain mad and half-mad relations (Aloysius is not only the last of his line, but one of the few to be born compos mentis). We meet, or hear about, relatives of his-Great-Aunt Cornelia, Comstock Pendergast, Antoine Leng Pendergast-who have decidedly perverse and criminal minds. Even the Pendergast family mansion, the Maison de la Rochenoire, once a famous landmark on Dauphine Street in New Orleans, was ultimately burned to the ground by an angry mob.

Certainly the most memorable of Pendergast’s relatives to date has been his brother, Diogenes, who became the antihero of his own trilogy: Brimstone, Dance of Death, and Book of the Dead. (We had intended it to be a single book, but it basically “ran away” into something much bigger than we’d planned, not unlike the Castle Bravo thermonuclear test.) Diogenes first surfaces-if you can call it that-in our third Pendergast novel, Cabinet of Curiosities. I wrote a chapter in which Pendergast takes a mental journey through a purely intellectual reconstruction, a memory palace, of his childhood house. (Please don’t ask; read the book and you’ll understand what I mean.) As he walks down the upstairs corridor and passes his brother’s room, he observes that the door is locked and chained, and would always remain so. There was no reason for me to add this other than sheer perversity; I knew this tantalizing tidbit would set our readers frothing at the mouth. But as with so many things in our books, it essentially took on a life of its own. Once he’d trodden the boards, Diogenes refused to leave the stage; and we began adding increasingly frequent allusions to his dreadful past and shocking misdeeds. It wasn’t long until he demanded-and got-his own trilogy.