THE PHIL 'N' BILL SHOW
by William G. Tapply and Philip R. Craig

PHILIP R. CRAIG: In 1989, when I got my first copy of my novel A BEAUTIFUL PLACE TO DIE, I found some kind words on the back cover written by somebody named William G. Tapply.

WILLIAM G. TAPPLY: When Scribner's (then my publisher) sent me the bound galley of a book by some guy named Philip R. Craig, I thought, "Oh, jeez. Just what we need. Another damn book." The publisher, of course, wanted me to write a laudatory blurb. Well, I figured I'd look at the first page and toss it aside. To my surprise -- and pleasure -- I just kept reading that book. The man could write and he could plot, and best of all, his main character did a lot of fishing. My kind of guy. So I wrote a blurb, and it ended up on the back cover of A BEAUTIFUL PLACE TO DIE. That made me happy. Then I sort of forgot about it.

PHIL: My wife and I immediately read a couple of Tapply's books and found that we could also say kind words about them. Several weeks later, at a party at Kate's Mystery Books in Cambridge, someone identified a tall guy across the room as Bill Tapply and I went over and thanked him for his generous remarks. He said I was welcome.

BILL: I said more than that. I told Phil that I rarely wrote blurbs, and when I did, it was because I meant it. I wasn't being generous. I was being honest. Actually, what I mainly remember about that first meeting at Kate's was what a sweetheart Phil's wife, Shirley, was.

PHIL: Months later at a Bouchercon conference I was having a beer when Bill walked by the bar. I hailed him and we talked. We discovered that we had books and fishing in common.

BILL: That was in Omaha. We were both there alone, and we gravitated to each other. I learned that Phil was a devout surf caster, and I confessed that I was a fanatic fly fishermen. We decided we liked each other anyway. We sat together in the plane on the way home and talked about Hemingway the whole way.

PHIL: Over the next few years we became friends. As inside jokes, we began to refer fleetingly to one another's characters in our books.

BILL: I don't know which of us did that first. Phil, I think. It was fun. If one of his characters needed a lawyer, Phil's narrator, J.W. Jackson, would suggest he call Brady Coyne, my narrator. If Brady wanted to do some saltwater fishing, he'd call J.W. Neither of our characters actually did anything in the other guy's books. But they lived in the same fictional world. It got me to thinking . . .

PHIL: One evening over supper a couple of years ago Bill said, "Hey, maybe we should write a book together. I think it might be fun." I thought so too.

BILL: As I remember it, the idea evolved over several years. Phil and I often ended up on panels together at bookstores and in libraries as we tried to publicize our respective books. We had fun doing that. We made a good team -- at least, we thought so. We called ourselves (in private) The Phil 'n' Bill Show. Phil has the same off-kilter sense of humor I do, and we share the same politics and the same taste in literature, not to mention our love of fishing and the sea. I remember now and then somebody in an audience would wonder if we planned to collaborate on a book. The idea sort of grew on us. It was during one of those long summer weekends when Vicki and I descended upon Phil and Shirl's house on the Vineyard for some fishing and clamming and beaching when we began to consider the idea more seriously.

PHIL: In about half an hour we'd agreed about the principal elements of what turned out to be FIRST LIGHT.

BILL: It really didn't take much longer than that. Well, our conversation was undoubtedly fueled by Phil's incomparable martinis and the relaxed atmosphere of the Vineyard in the summer and Shirl's and Vicki's kibitzing. I think what got our imaginations going was the idea of my visiting Phil in the fall and fishing with him in the famous Martha's Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby. If we could do it, so could Brady and J.W. All we needed was a mystery for our two guys to solve.

PHIL: So that's what we did. We decided that JW would invite Brady down for a week of Derby fishing on the Vineyard, where, between sessions on the beach, Brady would also spend some time helping a dying client tidy up her estate. The client's 200 acres of prime Vineyard oceanfront land was the subject of intense interest both to her two grown -- and rather obnoxious -- children and to two powerful organizations: a nature conservation group and an organization that built golf courses.

BILL: In retrospect, this sounds pretty easy. In fact, I recall that we batted around a lot of ideas. We knew it would be logical for Brady and J.W. to fish together. Phil and I had been mentioning it in our books for years, so the Derby was a natural. But finding the kind of plot that would logically draw both guys into a mystery and give each of them separate things to do took a lot of trial and error. Lots of error, as I remember it, both before we started actually writing, and also as we went along. So we started with the idea that a dying old lady's priceless Vineyard property would be a logical focus for competition and a good source of conflict.

PHIL: Meanwhile, because I like to have two stories going on in my books, we had JW reluctantly agree to sacrifice some of his fishing time to help a husband try to trace the whereabouts of his missing wife. That gave both Brady and JW plenty to do in their spare time and created several possibilities for future evil doings, even though we weren't sure yet just what they'd be.

BILL: We did know that J.W.'s case and Brady's mission would eventually come together in our story. Otherwise, all we really knew for sure was that Brady and J.W. would do some fishing. We came up with our title -- FIRST LIGHT -- very early on. We visualized a climactic scene happening just at the crack of dawn. It's a magical, spooky time on a deserted Vineyard beach, and, of course, the best time of day to be fishing.

PHIL: One of the first things we agreed to was that we'd write the chapters alternately, each in the first-person voice of our own narrator --

BILL: -- sort of like we're doing here in this article --

PHIL: Right. And we agreed that neither of us would even think of altering the voice of the other guy's narrator.

BILL: One of the challenges of collaborating with another writer is finding a consistent voice that belongs to both. Several years ago, I collaborated on a novel with another writer, and while it turned out pretty good, the two of us agonized over every word and phrase. I didn't want to go through that again, and I don't think Phil wanted to do it ever. Besides, we thought our fans would prefer us to keep our own characters and their distinctive narrative voices. Taking turns with the chapters allowed us to write a genuine "J.W. Jackson/Brady Coyne Mystery." Each character had the chance to report on events, to give a different perspective or interpretation, even to comment on the other guy. Brady and J.W. get along well, as Phil and I do, but they (and we) do tend to tease each other. We did have a lot of discussion and debate on what we wrote. Not just the content and story of it, but everything. I found it enlightening to have Phil scrutinize my prose, and I have no doubt that he found my queries challenging as well as meddlesome. We did a lot of back-and-forth on characters, how they'd appear, how they'd speak, what motivated them, what their backgrounds were. Phil's knowledge of Vineyard topography and geography and history helped me a lot.

PHIL: We agreed that JW, being a Vineyard resident, would narrate chapter one, giving background to the story. So I did that, writing my chapter from here on the island and emailing it to Bill up in Pepperell. He then had Brady narrate chapter two and emailed that to me. And that's how we wrote the book, emailing chapters back and forth and figuring out the plot as we went.

BILL: Each of Phil's chapters led me someplace, and my job was to pick it up from there, figuring out what Brady would be doing next. I think this back- and-forth process sparked ideas for both of us. At times it felt like driving a car at night without headlights. We knew where we were, but what was around the bend was pretty foggy. I often sent my chapter to Phil with no idea where we were headed. But that was okay. Now it was his problem, and I'd just wait to see where he took it. Naturally, we ended up with a story that was quite different from what we started with. It surprised us. I suspect that it will surprise our readers, too.

PHIL: We had Brady (a sad case in the view of both JW and his wife, Zee, since Brady was currently womanless) meet Molly Wood, an attractive women friend of Zee's, who makes a date with Brady but then fails to keep it.

BILL: Brady doesn't see himself as a "sad case," exactly. He was married once, after all. He likes his independence, but sometimes he does get lonely. He knows it's a matter of hooking up with the right woman, and he's always game to meet a new one. Usually the new ones don't work out. So when Molly Wood failed to meet him for dinner, he just figured he'd been stood up by a woman again. Such is life. J.W.'s wife, Zee, couldn't believe her friend would do that. It didn't take J.W. and Brady long to deduce that something had happened to Molly.

PHIL: We didn't know who disappeared Molly Wood, or why, but it got us -- and our guys -- working on the problem between their fishing trips on the far shores of the Vineyard. The search for this woman eventually tied in with the missing woman JW had been looking for all along, of course, and our heroes began to realize that someone evil was walking on the blessed isle, although they didn't know who it was.

BILL: That's the mystery and the source of suspense. Who's killing unattached female visitors to Martha's Vineyard, and why, and how is he disposing of their bodies, and can J.W. Jackson and Brady Coyne stop him before he kills again?

PHIL: While we told this tale we tried to paint a realistic picture of the Vineyard during the annual October Derby frenzy and of some of the characters who pour down to the island in search of bluefish and striped bass.

BILL: Yes, there is quite a bit of fishing in FIRST LIGHT. But it's all connected to the central mystery plot, and we think it works. Shirl and Vicki both read the manuscript and gave us the tough criticism that we depend on them for. We're delighted that Scribner's is going to publish our book. We've even started thinking about doing a sequel.

PHIL: We don't have a story yet . . .

BILL: No, but we've got a title. SECOND SIGHT. Get it? FIRST LIGHT, SECOND SIGHT??

PHIL: I'm thinking of some kind of soothsayer or fortune teller. Someone who claims she can predict the future. The Vineyard is full of these types nowadays.

BILL: Maybe there's a charismatic guru who seduces vulnerable young people and uses them for his own Machiavellian purposes . . .

PHIL: If we don't watch out, we'll have a series. THIRD NIGHT?

BILL: Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

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