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Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

Novelist Jonathan Kellerman

March 29, 2011 by Scott Timberg

AFTER many years as a child psychologist, and more than a decade of rejection slips for his literary endeavors, Jonathan Kellerman discovered a Ross MacDonald novel at a going-out-of-business sale.

Photo by Blake Little

That was about 30 years ago, and this week, Kellerman publishes the latest in his series of Alex Delaware crime thrillers. This one, Mystery, starts with the leveling of an old hotel in Beverly Hills and ventures into Internet prostitution and a whole nasty cast of characters.

I have an interview with Kellerman in today’s LA Times in which he talks about his early years, his struggle to get published, his new book, how he stays so productive, and a family that includes authors Faye Kellerman and Aliza and Jesse Kellerman.

Kellerman pere was pleasantly suprised by his success, saying that the movies he likes don’t make money. “I don’t have commercial tastes.”

The author also has a beautifully illustrated coffee-table book, With Strings Attached, on his other passion: vintage guitars. He’s played since he was a teenager, and these days concentrates mostly on classical guitar, especially Bach.

Finally, several people I spoke to called Jesse Kellerman, a playwright and thriller writer of a more explicitly literary bent than his parents, the most talented of the bunch. Jesse, who is in his early 30s and lives in San Diego, said he gets tired of these comparisons. “But if I didn’t want to listen to them,” he told me, “I would have gone to law school.”

Filed Under: books, Los Angeles, noir, west coast

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

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