‘Rizzoli & Isles’ author Tess Gerritsen to visit Lancaster for library fundraiser

If she wanted to, Tess Gerritsen could retire.

The internationally bestselling author of more than 30 novels has achieved a level of success few writers ever come close to reaching. Her medical suspense and thriller novels regularly top the fiction charts and have sold more than 40 million copies in 40 countries.

Her series of novels featuring homicide detective Jane Rizzoli and medical examiner Maura Isles inspired the hit television show “Rizzoli & Isles.” Starring Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander, the show aired on TNT for more than 100 episodes over seven seasons from 2010-16.

Sure, she could retire. But she won’t.

“I’ve been at this (for) 36 years, so I don’t know how to do anything else anymore,” says Gerritsen, 70, who began writing while on maternity leave from her job as a physician. “I suppose I’d be a really good short order cook. Obviously, I love this job because 32 books later, I’m still doing it. Anybody who’s been in this business a long time always has ideas lined up on the runway waiting to take off. It’s just a matter of whether you live long enough to get to all of them.”

Instead of retiring, she’ll write about retirees.

Her latest book “The Spy Coast” — the first of a new series called “The Martini Club” is about a group of retired CIA agents living in a small coastal Maine town. (A second book is already completed and, Gerritsen revealed, Amazon Studios bought the rights to an adaptation of “The Spy Coast.”)

The idea for the series, Gerritsen says, was inspired by a secret she discovered decades ago: the quiet coastal town of Camden, Maine, with the population of 5,000 that she and her husband relocated to from the West Coast was full of retired spies.

Gerritsen will talk about “The Spy Coast” during an interview with WITF’s Scott LaMar at her appearance at the Friends of the Public Libraries of Lancaster County’s fall author event at Calvary Church in Lancaster on Nov. 9. The annual event, which in recent years featured Robert Dugoni, David Baldacci and Adriana Trigiani, has taken place for more than 20 years and raised $146,000 for the public libraries in Lancaster.

“Gerritsen is really a master of detail and cliffhangers that keep you reading. That’s a thing that delights readers. She’s a darn good writer,” says Mary Ann Heltshe-Steinhauer, founder of the Friends of Public Libraries of Lancaster County. “A lot of our (audience) are the same ages as those characters, so I think ‘The Spy Coast’ will be popular. It will be a joyous event.”

When Gerritsen discovered her small town was full of former spies, her interest was piqued. When she asked around town about why retired agents might choose small-town Maine to live out their golden years, she heard several theories, from the agents valuing the average Mainer’s reputation for respecting the privacy of others to secret CIA safe houses in the area to Maine’s lack of nuclear targets.

Gerritsen says a few retired agents she now knows live on her small street. That, along with the idea that any number of her other neighbors might be spies or have other interesting secrets, sparked her storytelling urge.

“Here I am living in this town with all these gray-haired people in their 70s and beyond and I see them every day in the post office or the grocery store, and I don’t necessarily know if they were spies, but maybe they were and they look completely ordinary,” Gerritsen says.

Gerritsen, 70, says the ordinariness of retirees interested her.

“I’m getting old, too. As we age, people don’t look at us anymore. We become invisible,” says Gerritsen. “(The new series) is also an exploration of what it is to be retired and to know things that other people don’t know about you and to be underestimated.”

“The Spy Coast” takes place in coastal Maine, but it’s also an international novel with locations across the globe — many of which Gerritsen, a world traveler, had firsthand experience with.

But unlike other authors who’ve worked in the spy genre, like Graham Greene or John Le Carre who had personal experience with the world of espionage, Gerritsen had to do some research when it came time to write about the spies. And though, she says, she now knows some of the ex-spies in her neighborhood, she doesn’t ask them about their experiences.

“I must have read about four or five CIA memoirs just to find out about the stress of not being able to really know that your friendship is real. How can you ever have a genuine friendship outside of your circle of fellow agents? What are the deep emotional stresses of being in this business? I think that was what I was trying to do with ‘The Spy Coast,’ ” Gerritsen says.

That emotional and psychological aspect, Gerritsen felt, was more important for her to explore than getting caught up in trying to make the nitty gritty details of how professional spying works.

Gerritsen says she didn’t know “The Spy Coast” was going to turn into a series until she was nearing the end of writing the novel.

“I thought ‘well, why not? I love these people. I want to know what they do next,’ ” Gerritsen says. “That’s how a series gets started I think for most writers. They fall in love with their characters and think there are more stories to tell.”