J.T. Ellison on The Lost Key and Writing Collaboratively

J.T. Ellison is the best-selling author of  twelve novels, including the Lt. Taylor Jackson series, which features the award-winning novel The Cold Room, and the A Brit in the FBI series, with Catherine Coulter. We asked J.T. what it was like to collaborate with another author.
There is something so incredibly exciting about the birth of a new book. The Lost Key, the second Nicholas Drummond thriller, is out September 30. Drummond has been asked to join the FBI, and has agreed to leave Scotland Yard and come to America. The book opens on his first day of work at the New York Field Office. He’s a newly minted agent, having just gone through rigorous training and graduated with honors from the FBI Academy in Quantico. And sitting in his small cubicle in the New York Field Office, he’s wondering, what, exactly, he’s done.
When Catherine Coulter approached me about cowriting the Drummond novels, and I agreed, I hung up the phone in a state of shock. I was both thrilled and slightly terrified at the thought of working with another author to write a novel.
We writers are solitary beasts, despite what it seems on Facebook and Twitter. We need quiet time, careful reflection, hours lying on the couch or rocking on a porch letting the voices talk to us. How to do that when there are two brains, on opposite sides of the country? Two sets of imaginations, two sets of vocabularies, two sets of voices chattering in two very different minds?
Communication. Communication is key. Catherine and I talk multiple times a day. We email, we call. We get together in person several times a year. And in so doing, we are constantly taking the temperature of our story, and our characters. Does this fit here? Should we move that there? Things are lagging a bit here—let’s have a fight in the apartment—no, let’s make it the garage.
Little by little, piece by piece, we built the first Drummond/Caine adventure, The Final Cut, into a wonderfully fun and exciting book about a criminal mastermind who steals the Koh-i-Noor diamond from the once-in-a-lifetime special Crown Jewels exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, an impossible task to all but our villain.
We had so much fun with the story, as a matter of fact, that when it came time to plot The Lost Key, we wanted to try something bigger, more audacious, and also grounded in history—a treasure hunt of sorts, for a key lost for decades, and the sacrifices made by the people who were tasked with keeping it hidden.
Drummond and his FBI partner, Michaela Caine, are front and center again, working the murder of a man killed on Wall Street—an investigation that eventually leads them well beyond murder, into a hunt for a missing World War I U-boat containing a stash of gold bullion. All they have to go on are the dead man’s last words: the key is in the lock.
As our dual writers’ brains cooked, the story became larger than life, sweeping through time, crossing borders (Scotland, anyone?), touching upon real historical figures like Madame Curie and Kaiser Wilhelm. It was a blast to write, and there’s nothing better than having fun with a manuscript.
I hope The Lost Key is as much fun to read as it was to write! We’ve started work on the next Drummond/Caine adventure, too—so there’s more to come.
The Lost Key is on sale now.