Murder by the Book
The Night Job
Robert Greer Does Double Duty as Doctor and Writer
by
Natalie Jacobson McCracken
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Robert Greer (SDM’74, GRS’89) |
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“I’ve pretty much done what I wanted to do in my life,” says Robert Greer. A specialist in oral, head, and neck pathology, he’s a professor at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and director of the private Western States Regional and Maxillofacial Pathology Laboratory.
Then there’s his night job. Greer (SDM’74, GRS’89) is author of a collection of short stories and five crime novels that have hit some leading best-seller lists. Another novel is due out in October, and a seventh is under contract; there’s serious talk of movies.
He majored in both zoology and journalism at the University of Miami, in Ohio, although he wasn’t thinking about becoming a science journalist. “I was planning to do what I’m doing now,” he says — that is, parallel careers in science and writing. “But I had to wait to come back to the literary stuff because of course you can’t set up much of a medical career if you’re bouncing back and forth.” So he launched his career as pathologist and teacher, and fourteen years after earning a Doctor of Science and two advanced certificates at the Goldman School of Dental Medicine (he’d received a Doctor of Dental Surgery at Howard University in 1969), he spent a sabbatical year earning a master’s degree in BU’s Creative Writing Program. “Other schools I applied to said, ‘Come on, you’re a doctor; you can’t do this,’” he says. But Boston University accepted him. Program director “Leslie Epstein took someone who had, you might call it, raw talent, admitted me, and figured out how to make me a better writer.”
The year over, he returned to the University of Colorado and kept writing. First came short stories, and in 1996 The Devil’s Hatband, his first C. J. Floyd mystery. C.J. is a black bail bondsman and occasional bounty hunter, irascible, high-minded, and tough, with a touch of cowboy, his beloved mount being a 1957 Bel Air. “C.J.’s not me,” Greer says, although admitting to certain similarities: for openers, they both live in Denver, are knowledgeable jazz enthusiasts, and collect license plates and Western memorabilia. Readers will note more basic similarities: C.J. is intelligent, perceptive, and witty, none of which he could be were his creator not the same. The Devil’s Hatband was followed by The Devil’s Red Nickel and then The Devil’s Backbone; they introduce a distinctive world of individuals and forces: the owners and denizens of a family-run Denver soul food restaurant, doo-wop and 1960s payola, overwrought environmentalists, and precious preservationists, along with the unscrupulous businessmen, inner city punks, and mobsters typical of mysteries.
“Then I needed a break,” Greer says. He turned to medical thrillers, which even his publisher’s releases sometimes describe as science fiction. “But they’re not,” he says. “In my lab, we’re looking at an enzyme’s role in causing cells to undergo the change associated with cancer. But it could play other roles as well.” Limited Time, published in 2000, is based on an enzyme’s real potential to boost athletic ability and even extend youth and life. Next came Isolation and Other Stories (their settings ranging as far from Denver as South Boston), followed by Heat Shock, another Colorado-based medical thriller, which begins with the effect of radiation on living creatures, in this case, fighting cocks. The result, he says, is not unlike what would happen in a nuclear attack: those who survive and their descendants would be protected from another attack.
How does Greer manage two simultaneous careers? “I’m disciplined. And I’m not interested in golf or movies or a lot of those other things.” Not that he thinks his choice is more worthy. “Society has made writing important,” he says. “Well, writing to me is no more important than your golf game or watching football. It’s just what I like doing.”
Still, behind his engaging characters and good yarns, there’s a message: “You can’t let medicine get out of control, but it’s more global than that. You can’t let environmentalism get out of control; you can’t let athletes get out of control. You have to moderate your enthusiasm before it takes you where you don’t want to go.”
His first five novels are being reissued as trade paperbacks, while he finishes the next, happy to be back writing a C.J. mystery. It’s harder work now; his wife died in 2002, “the first thing in my life I couldn’t control,” he says. But he guarantees Resurrecting Langston Blue will be completed in time for October publication “because the publisher says it has to be.” Another C.J. book is contracted, and more will follow. “It’s what I enjoy.”
And so do readers, who will welcome the return of C.J. mysteries. Although C.J. plays small roles in the two medical mysteries, Greer says, “some people were really upset when I wrote them instead of more C.J. books; I got nasty e-mails. He has a real fan base.”
C.J. fans can thank Leslie Epstein, who “took a chance on me,” as Greer says, and admitted him, an established oral pathologist with some undergraduate journalism experience, to the Creative Writing Program. And Epstein remembers why. “I sensed on first meeting Robert that he was an exceptional man. And there was something in even his early prose that made me think he was going to be an exceptional writer, too — something in the play of wit and sharp intelligence and feeling for character. I wasn’t wrong, was I?”
