Q&A With Jon Land 

I am excited and delighted about doing this Q&A with USA Today Bestselling author of over 55 mystery thriller novels Jon Land! Jon is also one half of the other half of the pen name A.J. Landau with the other half being Jeff Ayers. The novels they’ve written together are Leave No Trace, which came out in 2024, and the ones coming out this year are Leave No Trace in Paperback & Cold Burn! I know I can’t wait to read them! 

Q: Jon, would you like to give a brief description of your novels and where your ideas for these stories come from? What drew you into writing mystery thrillers?

A: My ideas, the general concepts for my thrillers, come from everywhere. I’m always looking for the next Big Bad Thing that can threaten a whole lot of people. To provide an example, let’s look at COLD BURN. My writing partner in that series Jeff Ayers, the other half of A.J. Landau, brainstormed ideas for the book and there was a story we both had seen about the notion of finding the frozen remains of a prehistoric woolly mammoth. That got me—well, us in this case, thinking. Some research revealed theories that these animals were wiped out by a pandemic that got loose thanks to the retreat of glaciers even back then. So, we thought, what if a frozen wooly mammoth did thaw out and whatever killed it thawed out with it, a microbe so deadly that it could lead to the extinction of life on Earth. See, the greatest two words for a thriller writer are “What if?” That’s where everything begins and that’s what carries the story from beginning to end. The other notion that’s important to me when conceiving the Big Bad Thing is to ask, could this really happen? If it’s scary enough, us thriller writers can find a way to back up what we’re doing scientifically. Again, COLD BURN is a great example because we consulted several experts on microbiology and what we ended up settling came primarily from their suggestions. It’s a matter of telling them, “This is what we want to do. Tell us how to make it credible.” This all goes back to Robert Louis Stevenson who famously said, “It doesn’t matter to me if you believe what I’m writing is real. All that matters to me is that you do disbelieve it.” That led to the phrase “the suspension of disbelief” and thriller writers haven’t looked back since.

Q: Congratulations on all your novels being on the USA Today Bestsellers List! What’s it like knowing your novels are USA Today Bestsellers? It must feel so amazing & surreal!

A: Truthfully, in my entire career I’ve only been on the USA Today bestseller list twice and the New York Times list once for a single week in 2004. I used to be obsessed with lists like that, but I’ve gotten more jaded and more realistic about how hard it is to make either one. I pay just as much attention to the various bestseller lists curated by Amazon that are specific to that site. My last two nonfiction books, WHITE ROBES AND BROKEN BADGES and JUSTICE NEVER RESTS have been #1 Amazon bestsellers in multiple categories. Some might say “Big Deal” or “So what?” I’ll tell you why it’s a big deal—there are over 40 million books now available on Amazon and only a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of them ever make #1 in anything. So, you might say I’ve adjusted my expectations based on the realities of the marketplace. Becoming a bigger bestselling author than I currently remain a major goal for me, but if that’s all that drives and motivates you as a writer, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. I started my career writing mass market originals, old-school paperbacks that received great distribution across the country. And I’d get calls and letters (no email back then!) from people congratulating me for being #1 in Denver or #3 in Los Angeles or #10 in Chicago. I never got tired of hearing news like that, but the truth was I was a bestseller in all those cities and dozens more because my publisher paid to put me there and that’s no different than you used to walk into Barnes and Noble and see a bunch of books that were steeply discounted to boost sales and pretty much guarantee the books would make the Times and USA Today lists. But you know what? Publishers were paying for that placement and discounting too!

Q: Jeff told me how great it is co-writing with you! Would you say that’s your experience writing with him under the A.J. Landau name? What is your advice for anyone wanting to write another novel with someone else?

A: That has been my experience, because we complement each other perfectly. He’s a brilliant researcher, conceptual writer, and editor. I’m the storyteller who needs a writing partner who’ll listen to the latest crazy idea I came up with in the middle of the night—hey, good thing Jeff’s on the West Coast and I’m on the East, because I could call him late and he’s still awake! We plot everything out together, but it’s left to me to mix up the stew, and he to help me add whatever is needed to make the recipe better. And that would be my advice for anyone considering a collaboration. If you have the same strengths, it won’t work. You need to complement each other the way Jeff and I do. And you need to be able to get along and put your ego aside. Jeff and I are an example of a collaboration that’s organic and just about perfect. But I’ve been involved in another that’s a nightmare because my collaborator thought he knew everything and would seldom budge. It was work-for-hire, so I had to placate him, but I’ll never work like that again. It’s like, don’t micromanage me. You’re hiring me to write a book with or for you because I’ve done this over 60 times and kind of know what I’m doing. So, get out of my way and let me do it.

Q: Jeff also told me in our Q&A that you are currently working on a huge project right now, which is why you can’t write the sequel to Cold Burn. Can you reveal any details about the book you are writing now? I know I will keep an eye out on it! 

A: There are several. I’ve transitioned largely into the field of ghostwriting and have come to embrace it far more than I’ve ever expected.  What I’ve learned through my long career now is that I love to write and everything that goes with it. What I’m writing doesn’t matter as much as I’m able to keep doing it. And moving into the ghostwriting space has been like a fresh shot of adrenaline into my career, both creatively and from a business sense. But I took on so much work, it left me unable to continue this series with Jeff, at least for the present.

Q: You live in Providence Rhode Island. Rhode Island is one of many places I would love to see one of these days. Could you please describe your favorite places in Rhode Island as though they were scenes you would write in your books?

A: I wrote scenes set in Rhode Island early in my career but have mostly gotten away from that. You go where the story takes you. In my case, that was to the Middle East for my Ben Kamal and Danielle Barnea series and to Texas for my Texas Ranger Caitlin Strong series. Now, I have found ways to weave Rhode Island even into those series. In STRONG RAIN FALLING, Caitlin Strong is visiting Providence’s own Brown University with her surrogate son Dylan. Then gunmen come gunning for her at this Providence-centric summer event called Waterfire. At a book signing, the founder of Waterfire, Barnaby Evans, came up to me, introduced himself, and thanked me for staging a gunfight in the middle of his event! When Caitlin’s being interrogated about the shoot-out by Providence detectives, one of them remarks that she killed more men in five minutes than all the cops combined in Rhode Island for the entire previous year. Her response. “I’m a Texas Ranger, sir. Just another day at the office.” That was fun to write!

Q: What makes the perfect mystery thriller in your opinion? Your advice might help future mystery authors write their stories!

A: I used to tell a great story. Now I say telling a great story that feels like it was written only for the person reading it. But what is a great story? Well, the great John D. MacDonald, creator of Travis MaGee, defined it as “Stuff happens to people the reader cares about.” The stuff is the plot and the people we care about are the characters. But for a thriller to be perfect, we need every chapter to start with a hook and end with a cliffhanger. And above everything else it must be masterfully paced to the point where you absolutely can’t put it down. When someone tells me they read my book in one sitting without stopping, well, that’s just the greatest compliment I can get. The key is to create engaging characters the reader falls in love with and routes through the entire duration of the journey the book takes them on. If the reader doesn’t care about the characters, nothing else matters and you fail as a writer. That’s Stephen King’s greatest strength, the reason why he’s still at it after a half century writing. He still has the passion for storytelling and creating characters the reader can’t help but root for. Nobody’s better at the “stuff” than he is, but that’s because we care about his characters so much.