He’s one of the world’s most influential crime novelists, whose books have been turned into a slew of television adaptations.
Now, with his new show Fool Me Once premiering on Netflix on New Year’s Day, Harlan Coben says there’s one key ingredient behind his global popularity – a good, unexpected twist.
“If you don’t like twists and turns, I’m not your guy,” the writer – who has been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 80m books – says.
“For every twist that ends up in my stories, I probably thought of 10 others that I cut out. I really enjoy playing with your expectations, and I think you’ll see a lot of bombs and twists dropping at the end of this new series too. The last one is a real gut punch.”
Fool Me Once, based on the novel of the same name, stars Michelle Keegan, Richard Armitage and Joanna Lumley. The eight-part series follows Maya Stern (Keegan), who is trying to come to terms with the brutal murder of her husband, Joe (Armitage). But when Joe mysteriously appears on her “nanny-cam”, Maya is left questioning everything and sets out to investigate the truth.
Though Coben is American and his books are based in the US, the show is a British production set in the UK, like numerous other Coben TV series including Safe, The Strangerand Stay Close.
In fact, he says, Fool Me Once “almost works better as a British adaptation. The class distinction between Michelle Keegan’s character and Joanna Lumley’s (the latter plays Joe’s mother) really worked.
“In the American version, yes Maya came from a different background than Joe, but in the UK you have that class thing that we don’t have as much in America. It made for some really cool scenes.”
Coben, who also created the 2016 British crime drama show The Five, says he found himself drawn to the UK – because of his creative team here and the fact that his brother has lived in London since 1995.
“I also think there’s something that really seems to work in the hybrid of the American and the British that we put together [in the shows],” he says. “If you don’t hear the accents, some might say this is a British show and some might say it’s American.”
Coben is the first writer to win an Edgar award, a Shamus award and an Anthony award together. In 2018, he signed a five-year contract with Netflix for 14 of his novels to be developed into Netflix original series or films, with him serving as executive producer on all projects. Last year, Netflix extended the deal for another four years.
He says he believes his stories work for television because of their compelling plots, their early twists and – importantly – their heart. “I think the same thing that makes you turn pages in a book makes you binge TV episodes. It’s sort of a new thing with streaming services, where you keep hitting that next button.
“When Fool Me Once [the novel] was released, I’d say: ‘I hope you take it to bed at 11 o’clock at night and think I’m only going to read for 15 minutes, and the next thing you know, you’re turning pages at four in the morning and your eyes are blurry and all that.’”
One theme he likes to play with, Coben says, is that of missing people. They give his stories emotional depth. “I like hope. If somebody’s missing, you’re solving the crime, you can get justice; it’s an interesting puzzle. There’s always the chance that you can be made whole again. But if that person is dead and gone, that’s the way it is. So in a sense, I really often write about hope, which can be the coolest thing in the world.”
How does he come up with his elaborate, rollercoaster storylines? “There’s actually much more memoir in these stories than I realised. I often quote Flaubert, who said: ‘Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.’
“My life is sort of a placid pool and very calm. But I always think: ‘what if?’ Hitchcock put the ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances, and that’s sort of what I do as well.”
Fool Me Once, he says, came to him “through several things. I had met a woman – the very first female combat helicopter pilot – who flew missions in the Middle East, and thought ‘that would be a really interesting character’. At the same time, friends of mine were using spy cams to watch their nannies and kids, and so I combined the two.”
Though Coben has more adaptations in the pipeline, he says he continues to guard against writing novels with television in mind. “I think it’s the kiss of death to try to write a book thinking about an adaptation, actually,” he says. “They’re very different, and you must keep that in mind.”
