When Jeff Lindsay appears on Zoom, his face is plastered in front of a grainy black-and-white background image of an Old West schoolhouse. He’s not sure how it got there. “Maybe I was researching for a play or something,” says the 71-year-old crime writer, cutting what can only be described as a Santa Claus silhouette—white beard, wide shoulders, a laugh that lifts his chest. “But I have a thing for Americana in general.”
This might not be the first aesthetic that comes to mind when considering Lindsay’s work, but a quick survey backs it up. The author is best known as the creator of Dexter Morgan, the quippy serial killer with a conscience whose literary exploits were adapted into an acclaimed Showtime series in 2006. Beneath buckets of blood and sickle-sharp zingers, Lindsay’s Dexter novels carried an unmistakable attunement to Miami’s uniquely American dark heart.
In his pre-fame years, Lindsay wrote several experimental plays that followed American icons such as Paul Bunyan and Billy the Kid as they self-consciously made themselves into myths. His latest antihero, disguise-loving master thief Riley Wolfe, does plenty of globe-trotting, but at his core he’s a self-styled heartland Robin Hood who steals from the ultra-wealthy while sucking down cheap beer.
Part of Lindsay’s interest in toying with “American iconography and archetypes,” as he puts it, comes from a lifelong knack for “sniping from the sidelines.” Dexter, Wolfe, and Lindsay share an outsider sensibility that, to borrow the author’s own comparison, allows them to address their social environments with the same bewilderment Alexis de Tocqueville turned on American democracy in his Letters from America.
“I like having a hero who has the perspective to look at these bizarre people and the odd things they do,” he says, “and then take advantage of it.”
Of course, Lindsay’s also writing popcorn page-turners—that’s the fun of it. Four years after wrapping up the Dexter series with 2015’s Dexter Is Dead, Lindsay debuted Wolfe in Just Watch Me, a quick-witted caper in which the thief snatches Iran’s crown jewels. In December, Wolfe will return for his fourth adventure in The Fourth Rule (Dutton), which finds him plotting to steal the Rosetta Stone.
The loot may not be especially novel, but Lindsay sets the series apart with a secret weapon: Wolfe’s voice. It’s modeled after Lindsay’s late father, a WWII Marine who “spent two and a half years in the Navy hospital getting rebuilt after Iwo Jima,” only to turn around and pursue a career as an art professor. When Lindsay was a kid, his father would get together with a “wonderful generation” of fellow veterans and discuss paintings with the same gruffness they brought to their conversations about combat. “They would be sitting there with their scotch and going, ‘Look at the fucking colors in that goddamn thing!’ ” Lindsay says.
He wanted to find a similar tone for Wolfe—one of “aesthetic appreciation and understanding without all the academic accoutrements on it.” A prime example comes early in The Fourth Rule, when Wolfe wanders London galleries in a rare moment of pure leisure. “Maybe I’m so enthusiastic about art because I found out about it late. Maybe because I’d once fallen for an artist,” he muses. “I don’t know, that’s for the shrinks. I just know I love it.”
Love is another major concern in The Fourth Rule, distinguishing it from Wolfe’s fairly sexless early outings. Wolfe begins the novel putzing around the British Museum, brainstorming ways to snag fabled Nazi treasure from continental Europe. At an exhibition on German expressionist Otto Dix, he bumps into Caitlin O’Brian, a beautiful Irishwoman whom he wines, dines, and falls for almost immediately. After their whirlwind first date, Wolfe fails to get Caitlin’s phone number, so he retools his heist plans to keep him in London and increase his chances of seeing her again. All this despite the fact that he “doesn’t do” romance. “While you’re giggling, somebody else, whose idea of fun is to see how much blood you have inside you, is probably sneaking up behind you with an assegai,” as Wolfe puts it.
Despite his trepidations, however, Wolfe eventually lets his guard down enough to team up with Caitlin for his Rosetta-snagging scheme. Suffice it to say things don’t go well, with the book’s breakneck third act comprising the particulars.
All that fictional cynicism about romance doesn’t reflect Lindsay’s own feelings. For 37 years he’s been blissfully married to Hilary Hemingway—Ernest’s niece—whom he first met when both were kids in Key West, Fla. Hilary was friends with Lindsay’s younger sister, and while the couple were quick enemies—“I couldn’t stand to be in the same room as her,” he says—they reconnected and hit it off as adults in 1980s Los Angeles. At the time, Lindsay was in a jack-of-all-trades phase, performing stand-up comedy and playing in bands after receiving a master’s degree in theater direction and writing plays on the side. He credits Hemingway with getting him focused enough to become a professional. He recalls her telling him, “You know, you’re really talented. You’d be really good if you just did one thing for a while.”
The pair decided to become an artistic team—she was better with structure; his playwriting made him a dialogue whiz—and after a series of narrow misses as screenwriters, they tried their hand at novels. Their first copublication was 1995’s Dreamland, an autofictional UFO conspiracy thriller; a year earlier, Lindsay had adapted one of their screenplays into Tropical Depression, a detective yarn about a melancholy Florida cop. An omnivorous reader since childhood, Lindsay wasn’t especially set on crime fiction as his professional niche, but he was a lifelong fan of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee thrillers and couldn’t deny the genre’s commercial prospects. After the runaway success of 2004’s Darkly Dreaming Dexter, it became his bread and butter.
“It’s a kind of typecasting, which occasionally I’ve resented, but it’s put three kids through college and it’s paying the mortgage, so I really shouldn’t complain,” Lindsay says. “A lot of writer friends who are really good are struggling a lot, so I’m grateful. I accept my fate.”
When the subject turns to the act of writing itself, Lindsay’s similarly unfussy. For a longtime bestseller with a self-proclaimed interest in American iconography, Lindsay’s methods and ambitions are delightfully modest: he has a home office where he spends a couple hours writing each day, even if he ends up scrapping what he gets down. “It’s a job,” he says with a shrug. “If you don’t do it every day, eventually you lose it.” He’s also one of few writers who freely admits to reading his own reviews, and the one he’s most proud of—the “only one” he’s “truly proud of”—was a USA Today review that read, “Jeff Lindsay keeps getting better.”
“That’s a life goal,” Lindsay says. “That’s something I hold to and hope for. I want each book to be better in some way. If I succeed at that, I feel like I’ve succeeded in everything.”
