Lincoln Child

Background

Lincoln Child was born on October 13, 1957, in Westport, Connecticut, to William Clark and Nancy Child. William was a professor and Nancy was an educator.

Education

Child graduated from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, with a major in English.

Career

Discovering a fascination for words, and their habit of turning up in so many books, he made his way to New York in the summer of 1979, intent on finding a job in publishing. He was lucky enough to secure a position as editorial assistant at St. Martin's Press. Over the next several years, he clawed his way up the editorial hierarchy, moving to assistant editor to associate editor before becoming a full editor in 1984.

While at St. Martin's, he was associated with the work of many authors, including that of James Herriot and M. M. Kaye. He edited well over a hundred books - with titles as diverse as The Notation of Western Music and Hitler's Rocket Sites but focused primarily on American and English popular fiction. Lincoln also assembled several collections of ghost and horror stories, beginning with the hardcover collections Dark Company (1984) and Dark Banquet (1985). Later, when he founded the company's mass-market horror division, he edited three more collections of ghost stories, Tales of the Dark 1-3.

In 1987, Lincoln left trade publishing to work at MetLife. In a rather sudden transition, he went from editing manuscripts, speaking at sales conferences, and wining/dining agents to doing highly technical programming and systems analysis. Though the switch might seem bizarre, Lincoln was a propeller-head from a very early age, and his extensive programming experience dates back to high school when he worked with DEC minis and the now-prehistoric IBM 1620, so antique it actually had an electric typewriter mounted into its front panel. Away from the world of publishing, Lincoln's own nascent interests in writing returned. While at MetLife, Relic was published, and within a few years, Lincoln had left the company to write full time and established a successful career as a freelance novelist, with such titles as Riptide, Reliquary, and Relic to his credit.

Coauthored by Child and Douglas Preston, the novel Relic involves strange killings in the New York Museum of Natural History. Visitors to the museum are being killed in the days preceding a large exhibition at the museum; their death is caused by someone or something that claws the flesh of its victims. Attempting to solve the murders are FBI Special Agent Pendergast, the New York police department, journalist Bill Smithback, and a host of others, including Margo Green, a graduate student, and Dr. Frock, an evolutionary theorist also intrigued by the murders.

Child's first literary success came with the publication of his edited anthologies Dark Banquet: A Feast of Twelve Great Ghost Stories, Dark Company: The Ten Greatest Ghost Stories, and the "Tales of the Dark" series of short stories. In Dark Company, Child selects such classic spine tinglers as "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Monkey's Paw," and "The Shadow out of Time."

Mount Dragon, also coauthored by Child and Preston, follows Brent Scopes and Charles Levine. Friends since childhood, Scopes and Levine followed different paths after graduating from college, Scopes going on to become head of a biochemical company called GeneDyne and Levine becoming a Harvard professor. GeneDyne is secretly working on genetic engineering, to which Levine is vehemently opposed. Guy Carson, an employee at GeneDyne's Mount Dragon facility, discovers that a coworker has been killed by a virus called the "X-FLU." Other events lead Carson to believe that GeneDyne is engaged in nefarious activity. Levine seeks out Carson, and the tale concludes, in the words of Booklist contributor William Beatty, leaving the reader "panting for Preston and Child's next yarn." A critic for Publishers Weekly added that "there's something here to attract - and satisfy - a diverse range of readers."

In 2002, Child debuted with the first novel he ever wrote by himself. The novel was called Utopia. Then, he wrote Death Match in 2004. These two novels were some great works that launched a new set of characters each time. When Child introduced the character of Dr. Jeremy Logan in Deep Storm in 2007, a Yale professor of medieval history and enigmalogist, the character’s role over the course of the series slowly increased with each book. He made an appearance in only one chapter in Deep Storm, becoming a supporting character in Terminal Freeze (2009), and finally became the main protagonist in The Third Gate (2012). Utopia, Deep Storm, and Terminal Freeze are some of his books that were New York Times bestsellers.

Achievements

• Lincoln child's major achievement is not only in his collaborative novels but also in his solo novels that have become New York Times bestsellers, some reaching the #1 position. Child's novel, Relic, was adapted for film, Paramount Pictures, 1997, and the film rights have been purchased for Riptide. Several of the author's books have been made into audiobooks, including The Ice Limit, Time Warner AudioBooks (New York, NY), 2000; Utopia, Books on Tape, 2003; Still Life with Crows, Books on Tape, 2003; Deathmatch, Blackstone Audiobooks, 2004; and Brimstone, Books on Tape, 2004.

Works

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  • Relic

    (Relic, a Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child thriller that ...)

    1995
  • Utopia

    (Fasten your seat belts - the white-knuckle thrills at Uto...)

    2002
  • Old Bones

    (Nora Kelly, a young curator at the Santa Fe Institute of ...)

    2019
  • Fever Dream

    (As he stalks his wife's traitors from Scotland to New Yor...)

    2010
  • Cemetery Dance

    (William Smithback, a New York Times reporter, and his wif...)

    2009
  • The Obsidian Chamber

    (After Pendergast is presumed dead from a supernatural enc...)

    2016
  • Crimson Shore

    (When a straightforward murder case spirals out of control...)

    2015
  • Crooked River

    (Dozens of identical blue shoes are found in the ocean off...)

  • The Third Gate

    (Under the direction of famed explorer Porter Stone, an ar...)

    2012
  • City of Endless Night

    (When Grace Ozmian, the beautiful and reckless daughter of...)

    2018
  • Blue Labyrinth

    (When a longtime enemy shows up dead on Pendergast's doors...)

    2014
  • Thunderhead

    (Archaeologist Nora Kelly is adrift in her career and her ...)

    1999
  • The Ice Limit

    (The largest known meteorite has been discovered, entombed...)

    2016
  • Lethal Velocity

    (Utopia is the brand-new frontier of theme parks, a fantas...)

    2016
  • The Wheel of Darkness

    (At a remote Tibetan monastery, FBI Special Agent Penderga...)

    2007
  • Reliquary

    (Hidden deep beneath Manhattan lies a warren of tunnels, s...)

    1997
  • Gideon's Corpse

    (A top nuclear scientist goes mad and takes an innocent fa...)

    2012
  • Deep Storm

    (On an oil platform in the middle of the North Atlantic, a...)

    2007
  • The Forgotten Room

    (An unexplainable tragedy has taken place in the sprawling...)

    2015
  • Terminal Freeze

    (Alaska's Federal Wilderness Zone is one of the most dange...)

    2009
  • Death Match

    (Lewis and Lindsay Thorpe were the perfect couple: young, ...)

    2004
  • Mount Dragon

    (Mount Dragon: an enigmatic research complex hidden in the...)

    1996
  • The Lost Island

    (Gideon Crew is a brilliant scientist, master thief - is l...)

    2014
  • The Cabinet of Curiosities

    (In an ancient tunnel underneath New York City, a charnel ...)

    2002
  • Verses for the Dead

    (After an overhaul of leadership at the FBI's New York fie...)

  • Full Wolf Moon

    (Legends, no matter how outlandish, are often grounded in ...)

    2017
  • Brimstone

    (A body is found in the attic of a fabulous Long Island es...)

    2004

Religion

In his religious affiliation, Lincoln Child is an Episcopalian.

Views

Quotations: "Even before I could write. Whenever my mother brought home a ream of lined paper, or my father produced an empty exam blue book, I looked on it as an invitation to completely fill the pages with lines, scribbles, and pictures."

“I could never lose you as a best friend because if I ever did I would have lost my best friend, my soul mate, my smile, my laugh, my everything.”

"For me, writing never gets easier. It's always hard work. It doesn't matter how many words you wrote the day before, or how many novels you've completed in the last decade: every day you start fresh again with that same blank page or that same blank screen."

"My first job out of college was as an editorial assistant in a New York publishing house. Being an editorial assistant is the purgatory would-be editors must endure before they can ascend the ladder and begin acquiring books on their own. I spent a year filing paperwork, writing copy, and typing rejection letters."

"I try to write about things, places, events, and phenomena I know about personally. That helps make the novels more genuine."

"The funny thing about writing is I think a lot of people assume that you're sitting in a garret with a quill pen for hour after hour."

"I can't listen to music while writing - any such distraction would have dreadful consequences."

"There are some writers I think who love to go around and visit bookstores and just interact."

"Writing on your own is, in a way, a very lonely profession. There's no one there to help you."

"The simplest explanation is most often the correct one."

Personality

Lincoln seemed to have acquired an interest in writing as early as second grade when he wrote a short story entitled Bumble the Elephant (now believed by scholars to be lost). Along with two dozen short stories composed during his youth, he wrote a science-fiction novel in tenth grade called Second Son of Daedalus and a shamelessly Tolkienesque fantasy in twelfth grade titled The Darkness to the North (left unfinished at 400 manuscript pages). Both are exquisitely embarrassing to read today and are kept under lock and key by the author.

Lincoln "quoth the raven" Child and Chaucer, a Triton Cockatoo passionately fond of reducing antique furniture to sawdust with his beak. There is some disagreement over who owns who. A dilettante by natural inclination, Lincoln's interests include: pre-1950s literature and poetry; post-1950s popular fiction; playing the piano, various MIDI instruments, and the 5-string banjo; English and American history; motorcycles; architecture; classical music, early jazz, blues, and R&B; exotic parrots; esoteric programming languages; mountain hiking; bow ties; Italian suits; fedoras; archaeology; and computer MMORPGs.

Interests

• piano, five-string banjo, architecture, history

• Writers

  John Keats

• Sport & Clubs

  mountain hiking, motorcycles

• Music & Bands

  Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert

Connections

Lincoln is a married man. His wife is Luz N. who he married in May of 1992. The couple is still happy together and has a daughter named Veronica Anne.

Father:

William Clark

Mother:

Nancy Child

Daughter:

Veronica Anne

Wife:

Luz N. Child

Brother:

Lee Child

collaborator:

Douglas Preston

References

• Author Lincoln Child's Official Website