Patty Vest: Welcome to Sagecast the podcast of Pomona College. I'm Patty Vest. Mark Wood: And I'm Mark Wood. Patty Vest: In these extraordinary times, we're coming to you from our various homes, as we all shelter in place. Mark Wood: This season on Sagecast, we're talking to Pomona faculty and alumni about the personal, professional and intellectual journeys that have brought them to where they are today. Patty Vest: Today our guest is New York Times best selling author, Douglas Preston, class of '78. Mark Wood: Welcome, Doug. Good to have you with us here in cyberspace. Doug Preston: Well, it's good to be talking some Pomona people from isolation. Mark Wood: How are you doing in these sort of strange, perilous times? Doug Preston: Well, you know, actually I'm not doing too badly. The wonderful thing about being a writer is that I work alone anyway. And writers kind of like to be alone. If you don't like to be alone, you're not going to be a good writer, I think. Doug Preston: So I'm just continuing with my life as usual, and I'm here in my little office in Santa Fe, New Mexico with my T-Rex skull behind me. You can't see it, but surrounded by books and no one comes into the office but me. So, I'm doing all right. Patty Vest: Following all public health guidelines. Doug Preston: I am. I am. Patty Vest: So, as they say, let's begin at the beginning. Can you tell us about how were you as a child? We hear that you and your, as your brother Richard says, the two of you pretty much terrorized your neighborhood. Is that true? Doug Preston: Well that's right. You know my brother is Richard Preston, who was class of '76 at Pomona. And we were the terrors of the neighborhood, I hate to ... We grew up in this extremely dull, boring suburb of Wellesley, Massachusetts. My mother taught at Wellesley College. And we grew up right next to the campus. And because we were faculty brats, we could run around on the campus and the campus police could kick us off the campus, but they couldn't really do anything about us because we were faculty kids. So we'd keep on, and we'd terrorize the place and oh, I don't know, we were really unpopular on the campus at Wellesley College. Doug Preston: When we got older, from 16, 15 or 16, we used to sneak into the Wellesley College mixers and try to tell everyone that we were freshmen at Harvard studying nuclear physics. We were immediately expelled but we were never successful at that gamut, but anyway, it was, we had a pretty wild childhood. Patty Vest: Not for a lack of effort, though. Good tries. Doug Preston: Yeah, that's right. My brother, Richard, he wrote The Hot Zone and number of other books about pandemics and epidemic disease and so forth. I mean, The Hot Zone was one of the grossest, most disgusting books I've ever read, and it's so funny because when we were at the dinner table, when we were little kids we used to tell disgusting stories. And my mother would get so upset, she'd say, "One more story like that and you're going to go and sit on the stairs." Doug Preston: And so, that was a challenge and we would tell a disgusting story about boogers or something like that and we'd have to go sit on the stairs. And my brother turned that into an incredibly lucrative career, telling disgusting stories. I done the same myself in my book, The Lost City of the Monkey God, that's pretty disgusting at the end as well. Mark Wood: So, how did you end up following Richard to Pomona? Doug Preston: Oh, well, you know ... How can I explain this? Well, my brother applied to college in 1972, I guess, or '71. And he, in high school he styled himself an anarchist. And so in his first round of college essays, the first line of his college essays became famous in our family. The first line was, "Frankly, I am an Anarchist." And then he proceeded to talk about burning down the banks and this and that. Doug Preston: And this was at the time when out at Isla Vista, the students really were burning the banks. He was absolutely rejected, decisively by every college he applied to, even though he was a brilliant student. They just did not want an anarchist on campus. Doug Preston: So, he got a talking to from everyone and so, the next round of applications, he applied to Pomona and wrote a nice essay. I don't know what he wrote, but it wasn't, it didn't begin, "I'm an anarchist." So he got in at Pomona and then he told me, "This is a great school. You should come too." So I applied and got in as well. Doug Preston: And I don't remember what my essay was about, but I'm not an anarchist. Patty Vest: That's what got you in, probably. Doug Preston: Yeah, I think I wrote some really dull essay about whatever, who knows? Patty Vest: Did you already know that you wanted to become a writer, or that you wanted to write when you came to Pomona? Doug Preston: I didn't. I didn't really have any idea what I wanted to do. Actually, I wanted to be a physicist or biologist. That's what I thought. And I started off as a biology major, and then I thought of majoring in physics and then math, and then I realized that I wasn't smart enough to be a physics major or a biology major. I just wasn't smart enough. The students in the class around me, if I worked like crazy, I could eek out a B plus or an A minus, I realized that not enough. Doug Preston: So I decided after taking all of these science classes, I decided I'd become a science journalist. And so then I took a bunch of English classes and really enjoyed English and graduated an English major, but having taken all these science classes, and that's where my writing career began. Then my first job out of Pomona was working for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where I edited their little throw away newspaper and wrote little articles about the museum and so forth. And that's where my science journalism career started. Mark Wood: So how did you get that job at the museum? And what impact did it have on you down the line? Doug Preston: Oh it was huge, it had a huge impact. My whole life was changed by that job. I worked for the museum for about eight or nine years. Well, you know, it was a very lowly job I applied for as a membership assistant, in the membership office. And the only reason they hired me and this is the truth, had nothing to do with my grades, my words, anything else. It had to do with the fact that I was editor of The Student Life, which was an eight page newspaper printed weekly in a certain format. And the membership office had an eight page newspaper printed weekly in the same format and nobody in the office knew how produce it. Doug Preston: So, they hired me so I could produce this newspaper, because they were going nuts trying to figure out how to produce it, print it, it was driving them nuts and they thought, "Oh my God, here's somebody who can help us print the damn newspaper." Doug Preston: So, nobody in my entire life has ever asked me for my transcript or my grades at Pomona. Even though I did very well. I didn't do as well as my brother, who graduated Summa Cum Laude, but I did okay. Doug Preston: But it was the newspaper background that got me the job. And the funny thing was, I had to take a typing test in order to get the job, and I failed the typing test. So the personnel office told the membership office that they couldn't hire me. It was against the rules. And the membership office had a fit because they couldn't find anyone else that could print the damn newspaper, and had a huge argument with the personnel office and I was hired, thank God. My starting salary was $9,000 a year. And I never felt richer than I did back in those days. Doug Preston: $200 a week paychecks or whatever it was. But- Mark Wood: Goes a long way in New York City, I'm sure, in those days. Doug Preston: Well it was, you know, there was a huge ... I grew up in Boston, outside of Boston. And going to Pomona, Southern California, it was a culture shock beyond all belief. I was completely, I felt like I had moved to [Ouagadougou 00:09:19]. I had no idea what was going on. Southern California was so different and wonderful in many ways and horrifying in other ways. And then I moved to New York, which is another terrific culture shock, because New York and Boston are totally different cities. Doug Preston: But anyway, it made my life interesting. Mark Wood: So how did those eight or nine years at the museum change your life? Doug Preston: Well, it was ... I started off writing these little throw away articles for the newsletter. And then, the editor of Natural History Magazine came to me and asked me if I would write a column in the magazine about the museum. And I thought, "Yes, of course. I'll do that." So I started writing this column. And some of the columns were devoted to events going on at the museum. But whenever there wasn't an event going on, I got write about whatever I felt like writing about. Doug Preston: And I discovered that that museum was full of the most incredible stories that you can imagine. The story of the Copper Man, the amazing mummy found in Chile. The story of the star of India. The story of the discovery of the T-Rex, the first discovery. The discovery of dinosaur eggs in outer Mongolia, expeditions all over the world in the 19th century. There was this incredible richness of stuff to write about, and because I was writing this column, I had access to all these things. Doug Preston: I'll give you one example. One day I came into my office, and my office stank. The stench was awful. It was like a mixture of moth balls and old beef jerky. I couldn't work. I came out. I was suffocating. And someone said to me, "Oh, right next to your office is the museum's mummy storage room. And once a year they unseal those cases and change the paradichlorobenzene crystals, which keep the mummies fresh." And that's what happens. The smell comes out. Doug Preston: So, I thought, "Oh my God, I've got to see this, man." So I managed to talk my way in to it. The anthropology department did not want to show it to me, because they had all these famous mummies that had been taken off display. They're not politically correct to show anymore. But they were of great scientific value and so they couldn't throw them out and they had not yet, NAGPRA had not come into effect so they were not yet required to send these human remains back to the tribes that they'd stolen them from. Doug Preston: So, I got to go into this room, and it was incredible. Thousands of mummies, not from Egypt, but from the New World. Many from South America and in the middle of the room, was this bright turquoise mummy, perfectly preserved. You could see his fingerprints. He was ... Patty Vest: Wow. Doug Preston: And this long beautiful braided hair. And he had around his waist a bag full stone tools and he was known as the Copper Man. And he had been found in the 19th century in a copper mine in Chile. And he was prehistoric miner from about five or six thousand years ago, who had been trapped in this little crawl space mining copper, just chiseling it out with his stone tools. Doug Preston: He hadn't been crushed, but what had happened was the ceiling had shifted and pinned him. And he'd been trapped there and he died and then, because it was in the Atacama desert of Chile, he'd been preserved perfectly by the copper salts. And in fact, he'd been turned bright turquoise with copper oxide. Doug Preston: And the story of this mummy was unbelievable. There was a huge lawsuit between the miner who rented the mine and the owner of the mine. The owner of the mine said, "No, I only rented you the ore in the mine, you can't have the people you find in it." So the miner broke off the toe of the mummy and had it assayed, and found it was two percent copper and said, "No, this mummy is copper ore." And lawsuits and everything else, and finally J.P. Morgan heard about this mummy, he paid $20,000 for it in the 19th century. They put it on display at the great Chicago exhibition of 1893. And it was so, the sensation that this mummy caused was so tremendous that the pavilion he was in was so filled with people that there was a stampede and the case was broken and people were falling on top of it and pushing each other off the side to try to look at the mummy. And on and on and on. And then eventually ... So that was just one of the stories I told. Doug Preston: And it turned out that there was a young man reading my column and one day he called me up and he identified himself as an editor at St. Martin's press. And he wondered if I would care to have lunch with him at the Russian Tea Room to discuss writing a book about the museum. Doug Preston: So I immediately rushed out to Goodwill and got a jacket so I could get in The Russian Room. And I showed up there and I was looking for this gray haired editor, this distinguished fellow, but there was a kid younger than I was, waving at me from the table in the back room. The worst table in the house. Doug Preston: And as I went back there, and it turned out that he was the editor from St. Martin's Press, a brilliant rising young editor, named Lincoln Child. And so he became the editor for my first book, a non-fiction book, called Dinosaurs in the Attic, which was the history of the museum, about how they collected all this stuff. Crazy stories, like the one I just told you about, the Copper Man. Doug Preston: And so one day, Lincoln said to me, Doug, I've done you the biggest the favor that anyone has ever done you in your life, I published your first book. And now I want you to do me a favor. I want you to give me a tour of all these weird places in the museum that nobody sees. Doug Preston: And I said, "Lincoln, I can't do that. I'm just a lowly employee. These are high security places." And he said, "Doug, you have to do it. I'm telling you, I've done you this favor, now you" ... So, I thought, "Okay, if we wait in my office until about 11:00 at night, we can go around the museum." And did have a key, a skeleton key, believe it or not, if you believe how terrible the situation was in the museum. Doug Preston: It opened up about a third of the doors in the museum. And two thirds wouldn't open. You could never know, you stick this key in a door and it would either open it or not open it. So I gave Lincoln this tour. And we ended up in the hall of late dinosaurs at 2:00 in the morning. All the lights are off, only the neon of the fluorescent lights in the ceiling were on, the emergency lights, totally crazy, scary scene. Doug Preston: And Lincoln turned to me and he said, "Doug, this is the scariest God damn building in the whole, we have got to write a thriller set in this building. You and me." I said, "Lincoln, I don't know anything about writing thrillers. I'm a non-fiction writer." I took myself very seriously. I was going to be a serious non-fiction writer. Doug Preston: And Lincoln said, "Doug, listen. I know how to write a thriller. We're going to team up." And so I wrote, we wrote together this book that we called, Relic. And it became a best seller, and was made into a movie and it turned out I really enjoyed writing these thrillers. Doug Preston: Relic is, it's not a literary, it's not great American novel or work of literature. It is about a brain eating monster trapped in the museum with a bunch of museum goers during a special exhibition. And he's hunting them down and killing them one by one. And I had so much fun killing the administrators and all the bureaucrats in the museum that I hated to deal with. Doug Preston: When the book was published, the director of the museum at the time, his name was Tom Nicholson, I saw him. He said to me, "Doug, I read that book of yours. And all I can say is, I'm sorry you don't still work at the museum so I could have the pleasure of firing your ass. That's a horrible book. A disgrace. How could you have written such a book?" Patty Vest: Oh my God. Doug Preston: And when the producers of the movie at Paramount Pictures wanted to film in the museum, they came to the new president of the museum Ellen Futter, and they asked her if they could film in the museum and offered a multimillion dollar fee, and she said, "Absolutely not. That's that terrible book. We hate that book. Children die in that book. How would you think we would ever want to film that book in our museum? Take your million dollars and get out." Doug Preston: So, the people at Paramount were very upset. And they went to the Field Museum in Chicago which is another great natural history museum. And they were only too happy to film at the Field Museum. So if you look at the movie, it takes place in the Field Museum, not the American museum, and I had to rewrite the script to figure out how the monster got to Chicago instead of New York. That was kind of difficult. Doug Preston: But anyway, so, I'm going on a little too long, but anyway, so that's how my time at the museum really changed my life, because since then, Lincoln and I have written, I think something like 30 books together. Patty Vest: Wow. Doug Preston: Or 28 books together. And almost every single one has been a New York Times bestseller. It has been an incredible run of success and fun. Mark Wood: We talked some years ago about some of this and as I remember, at first you didn't want to have your name on the book. Is that right? Doug Preston: No, I didn't. In fact, that's a terrible, that was awful what happened because I had a contract with Simon and Schuster. And my editor was the great Michael Korda. And I was having trouble with that because it was non-fiction book, very serious at the time, non-fiction book. And so, Lincoln and I were surreptitiously writing Relic. Doug Preston: And I said to Lincoln, Lincoln said, "Listen, I'm going to find you an agent for us." Because I didn't want my agent to handle the book. I didn't want anything to do with it. I thought, "Oh my God, if this book, if my name is associated with this book, there goes my Pulitzer Prize. They're going to, "Oh, he's just a thriller writer." Doug Preston: So, Lincoln told his agent that he'd hired, not to put my name on the book. Well the agent thought, "The hell with that. Preston's got a name for himself." A wee name, a little bitty name. So he put my name on the book and what did he do, but he showed it to Michael Korda, the manuscript. Doug Preston: So I got a call from Michael Korda. And he said, he was a very dry fellow. He said, "Doug, I have an incredible coincidence to report. There's another writer out there with your name circulating a manuscript about a brain eating monster in a museum. And I thought it was hilarious. I just wanted you to know that you've got some doppelganger out there with your name." Doug Preston: And of course, I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. And Michael said, "It is someone else, isn't it?" And I said, "Michael, wait a minute, let me explain." He said, "No, I don't want to hear an explanation. I want you to listen. I want you to listen on the phone for a second." So I listened. I heard this tremendous thump. And then he got back on the phone and he said, "Do you know what you've just heard?" I said, "No." He said, "You just heard your manuscript being thrown into my wastebasket. Now, stop this writing this ridiculous book and get back to the book you're supposed to be writing for me." Doug Preston: I was so mad I called up Lincoln and I yelled at him and I called the agent and I yelled at him. And I said, "Take my name off that book and I don't even want the money. Keep the damn money. I want nothing more to do with this book." Lincoln said, "Okay." And then three months later, Lincoln called me and said, "Well, Doug, our agent has sold the book." I said, "Not our agent, your agent." And Lincoln said, "Well don't you want to hear how much money he got for it?" I said, "I don't want to hear how much, I don't care. Keep the money. Wait, how much?" Doug Preston: He said, "$30,000." I said, "Oh, holy, wait a minute, hold on here. All right, put my name back on the manuscript and send me half the money." So that's what he did. Anyway, I was so poor, I was a starving writer and $15,000, half of that money was absolute fortune to me. So, that's how this got started. Patty Vest: How has your relationship with Lincoln evolved through the years? You've written close 30 books. How is it now? Doug Preston: Well, how's our relationship? Well, we are very close. We respect each other, but in many ways, it's like a bad marriage. Harping, sniping, irritating each other. He rewrites something I've written and that pisses me off. Or I do the same thing to him. And so there's a lot of friction there. Doug Preston: But somehow out of this friction arises, we both prevent or stop each other from our worst habits. Do you know what I mean? I mean the books are tight. They're tightly plotted, they're, I think because we both reject each other's bad habits and bad writing, and all the rest of it, and so they go through this purification process and the end result is really something I think better than we could do on our own. At least in terms of fiction. Doug Preston: Lincoln has a wonderful sense of fiction, of character, plot. And I also bring strengths to this partnership that are not his. And so as a result, we really, I think work well together. Mark Wood: So- Doug Preston: People like our books. In the beginning, the only person who seemed to be buying and reading my books was my mother. Mark Wood: So tell us about SPecial Agent Pendergast, how has he evolved? And does he still surprise you, after 20 novels? Doug Preston: Pendergast, that Lincoln and my first fight. So what happened was, Lincoln said to me, just we plotted the Relic, or the first few chapters, and then I wrote the first few chapters. And I sent them to Linc. And he called me up and he said, "Doug, these are great, I love these chapters in the museum, they're great except there's one problem." And I said, "What?" He said, "Well you've got these two cops, and Irish cop and an Italian cop. They're both working class, rough on the exterior, heart of gold inside," he said, "Doug, they're the same character." Doug Preston: And by this time I was already really pissed off. He said, "Doug what we need to do is fold those two cops together and make one character out of them. And then what we need is a detective, someone that no one's thought of before. Someone totally original. Blah, blah, blah." Doug Preston: Well I was so mad at this point, that I said very sarcastically, "Oh, we need a detective like an albino from New Orleans." Doug Preston: "Well you know, Doug, let's work with that." So, we started talking and in 15 minutes Pendergast was standing there in front of us. Now he's not albino, he's just very pale. He looks like a corpse. And he wears a black suit. And he's a man, a gentleman of the old south who is in New York City as an FBI agent, a fish out of water. And so anyway, so we came up with this character and honestly, I don't know where he came from. He was like Athena, a screaming fully formed from the head of Zeus. Doug Preston: And I don't even remember where his name came from. And in fact, we didn't know his first name until the fourth book of his that we'd written. And we realized, we don't know his first name. In fact, we don't know anything about this guy other than, we have his personality down. But his back story is complete mystery. Who is he? Doug Preston: So, we came up with the name for him and two middle initials and then years later, we figured out what those, one of those middle initials was. And now finally we figured out what the second one is. Patty Vest: Both you and Lincoln Child have also written books on your own. How do you decide whether an idea is one for collaboration or for solo? Doug Preston: That's a really good question. That is again, was a problem. At a certain point, I said to Lincoln, "I'd like to write a novel on my own. Just to see what it's like." And Lincoln was very upset. And he said, "You know, I feel like," God I shouldn't tell you this. He said, "I feel like a wife who is being cheated on. That's what it feels like." Doug Preston: God, he would hate me telling this. And I said, "Lincoln, I'm not. I'll just, I'll be writing on weekends." He said, "Yeah, that's like the husband who comes home to his wife and says well I'm just going to have my mistress on weekends. I don't like this idea at all." So Lincoln went out without me knowing and started writing his own novel. And then suddenly he'd written this novel and I was so mad. I said, "God damn it, you're the one who's cheating on me now." Patty Vest: He didn't even ask for permission. Doug Preston: Yeah, he didn't ask permission or anything. He just presented me with this novel that he'd written. And so I immediately rushed out and wrote my own solo novel and then we calmed down a little bit. We realized that our solo novels were different from our novels we wrote together, actually. They were kind of different. Mine are much more maybe techno oriented, technological. I'm not sure, scientific. Linc's were more, I'm not sure, also scientific in a way, but so I've written four or five books on my own and Lincoln has written four or five novels on his own. Doug Preston: I've written two non-fiction books on my own. One was The Monster of Florence, about a serial killer who murdered young lovers in the Tuscan Hills. I used to live in Florence, and wrote this book with a Florentine journalist. And then more recently, I wrote a book called The Lost City of the Monkey God, which is a non-fiction book. Doug Preston: So I write non-fiction. And I'm going to write another non-fiction book. I haven't quite decided yet. And I also have a writing career with the New Yorker magazine. I've written a number of articles for them over the last 20 years, all in non-fiction subjects, mostly archeology. Mark Wood: Let's talk about The Monster of Florence. You've, as a journalist, your research has sometimes taken you to some pretty dangerous places. And you wouldn't think Florence would be one of them, but you actually had some rather serious repercussions while you were trying to do that book, is that right? Doug Preston: Yeah, that's a story, the story of a non-fiction journalist who fell into his own story, and got into a lot of trouble. I got into tremendous trouble. Doug Preston: What happened was we moved to Florence, and I was going to write a novel, a thriller, set in Florence about the murder of an art historian. And I had to find out what the police did when they found a dead body. And so someone said to me, "Oh, you've got to talk to Mario Spezi, who does the crime beat for La Nazione, the local paper. He knows all about the cops. He knows more about the cops than even the cops do." Doug Preston: So, I went and I had coffee with Mario, he didn't speak English and my Italian at the time was not very good. I've since became fluent, but anyway, so he started telling me what that cops do when they find a dead body. It was very interesting. And then I asked him, "Well what are you working on?" And he said, "Well, I'm mostly known for the case of [foreign language 00:30:52]" Monster of Florence. And he said, "Surely you know about it." And I said, "I've never heard of it." Doug Preston: And so he started to tell me this story about this serial killer who was horrific, I mean he makes Jack the Ripper look like Mr. Rogers. This unbelievable story. One of the most awful story I have ever heard in my entire life regarding the annals of crime. Doug Preston: And when I went online, this was back in the year 2000, when the internet was fairly primitive. But I went online and I Googled monster of Florence in English, and got two hits. And they were both minor hits. I realized, "My God, this story has never been told in English." There are million hits in Italian, and some in French and some in German, because there were French and German victims. But nothing in English. So I said to Mario, "Let's write a book about the monster of Florence." And so that's what happened. Doug Preston: But Mario is a very famous journalist, has a very sharp pen and even sharper tongue. And he got on Italian television on the most popular show in Italian television, it was sort of like America's Most Wanted, but really popular in Italy, and he ridiculed the police investigation of the monster. Doug Preston: Now the monster killed young lovers in the Tuscan Hills between 1974 and 1985. He killed basically 14 people. Seven couples. And horrifically so. And I won't go into the details, you'll have to read the book. But he was never caught. And the investigation was continuing, even in the year 2000. In fact, the investigation is still open. It is the longest and most expensive criminal investigation in Italian history. Doug Preston: And so, anyway, so Mario goes on television and he ridicules not only the investigation, but he ridicules the commissioner, the Chief Inspector of Police, who is a Sicilian. And of course, the next thing that happens is the police are busting down the door to his apartment. They take his computer, they take all our research, our discs, everything. Mario was able to save our work because he stuffed a floppy disc down into his underwear and they didn't search him. Patty Vest: Oh my God. Mark Wood: Wow. Doug Preston: But then, I was absolutely terrified. I said, "Mario, they're going to arrest." And then they charged him with 26 felonies, but they wouldn't tell him what they were. Doug Preston: And Italy is, the criminal justice system in Italy is very screwed up. So they wouldn't tell him what they were, they were labeled A through Z. 26. I was terrified. I said, "Mario, they're going to come after me." He said, "Doug, don't worry, you're a best selling author in Italy. You're famous here." Because my novels have been translated into Italian. So I was kind of a minor, you know ... He said, "Don't worry, they're not going to touch you." Doug Preston: How wrong he was. Mark Wood: Famous last words. Doug Preston: One day I was, this is how the police arrest you in Italy. One day I was walking through the streets of Florence one morning getting my wife an espresso coffee to take back. And my cell phone rang and this voice speaking extremely officious Italian said, "Is this Douglas Preston? This Dr. Douglas Preston?" I said, "Yes it is." This is "Detective so and so, of the homicide, special homicide squad, Florentine Police. Were are you? We are coming to get you now. Where are you?" Doug Preston: I said, "Get out of here, bull shit." Excuse my language. "Well, that's, who is this?" And he said, "Mr. Preston, this is not a joke, we are coming to get you. It is [foreign language 00:34:55]. You must tell us where you are. If you don't and we have to find you, that would not be good, Mr. Preston. That would not be good at all." So I said, "Oh, my God," so I was in a back street, I thought, "I can't be arrested here." So I said, "Okay, I'll meet you in the Piazza della Signoria, which is the main piazza of Florence. In the spot where Savonarola was burned." Doug Preston: And he said, "I don't know where that is. I'll meet you in front of the statue of the David, in the Piazza della Signoria." So I mean, this is how things go in Italy. So we met in front of the statue of David. And I was hauled in for an interrogation in Italian, no translator, no lawyer present. And I was accused of heinous crimes, this interrogation went on for hours and hours. Doug Preston: I was accused of planting evidence, of interfering with an official police investigation. I was even accused of being an accessory to murder. And thank God my Italian was, at this point was fluent, because they are all these technical terms, like an accessory to murder and all this stuff that I understood. And they tape recorded me. They taped my, the played back my cell phone calls with Mario. And demanded to know what we were really talking about. Our phones had been tapped. Doug Preston: I swear my voice on their wiretap was clearer than on the original cell phone call. And anyway, so it was quite terrifying. And then they said that if I didn't confess to these crimes, there's no, by the way, fifth amendment in Italy where you know, they said, "If you don't confess to these crimes, we're going to charge you with the crime of [foreign language 00:36:44]." Which is reticence. Which means, you're not telling everything you know. That's a felony, a very serious felony in Italy. And all these other crimes. We're going to charge you with these crimes. Doug Preston: If you don't confess right here, right now. And I said, "I can't confess to crimes that I didn't do." And they said, "All right." So this judge, took out this huge book and blew the dust off it, I swear to God, opened it up and read out all the charges against me, which are being taken down by this stenographer. And by the way, the room was full of cops who interrogated me. Detectives, these are very high level detectives, captains and lieutenants. This was a huge high level case, okay. Doug Preston: I was really screwed. And so, anyway, so they said, "You're indicted now for these crimes indagato. And then, the judge said, "But we're going to lift the indictments to allow you to leave Italy. But they will be reinstated later." Well I took that to mean, get out of the country. So the next morning, I left Italy with my family. And then they came in and they arrested Mario. And they charged him with being the monster of Florence. Doug Preston: Yes. Mark Wood: Wow. Doug Preston: And so, he was thrown into Capanne prison, he was tortured, he was abused. It was the most horrific thing, and the committee to protect journalists came to the rescue. There's a credible organization and the PEN International, there was an international uproar about this. And the Italians were so embarrassed by it, that he was released three weeks later but it was terrible the experience he had in prison, just terrible. Doug Preston: But anyway, when bad things happen to a journalist, you get write a book about it. And that's kind of like, so I wrote about this whole story and much more. I wrote The Monster of Florence. Mark Wood: Do you ever get back to Italy? Is it possible for you to go back? Doug Preston: I was afraid to go back for a long time, but eventually, the indictments against me were dropped. I had to spend incredible amounts of money on a lawyer, who did nothing. But anyway, eventually all charges were dropped and I was able to go back. Doug Preston: I mean, love Italy. I love Italy. It's a beautiful country. The people are wonderful. But it has, the criminal justice system in Italy was set up by Mussolini in 1930. It's a Fascist system. And it was never changed. And it is totally powerful. If the state accuses you in Italy, you are screwed. Really the burden of proof is on you to prove your innocent, there's no rights of accused, of the accused in Italy. Doug Preston: And as a result, 50 percent of all murder convictions in Italy are reversed on appeal. 50 percent. Now in America, it's less than half a percent. It just shows you how completely, and those people who are accused, and then acquitted, have their lives ruined. I mean, one of these people was Amanda Knox, who by the way, was accused of murder by the same judge who interrogated me. Doug Preston: He was a very corrupt individual. And she was framed for murder just like Mario was framed for murder, and just like they accused me of being an accessory to murder. It's unbelievable. They accuse of that, and you're going down a rabbit hole that you're lucky to ever escape from. Patty Vest: How is Mario now? Doug Preston: While I'm very sorry to say he passed away. Patty Vest: Oh. Doug Preston: He passed away. He was really hounded into his grave, because the police, they kept bringing charge after charge against him. And he kept having to go to court and defend himself. He was impoverished. He had to go to court many times. He was constantly under indictments and every single time it was dismissed immediately by the judge. And yet the police who hated him, kept bringing these charges against him. And they literally impoverished him. And I think one of the reasons why he died was because of the stress of what they did to him. He also a very heavy smoker, which contributed mightily to it. Doug Preston: But he was a wonderful man. He was a journalist of the old school. He was one of those journalist that always had a cigarette hanging off his lip. Totally fearless. Totally courageous. He'd go into any situation and he'd ask any question. Doug Preston: We interviewed the man we thought was the monster of Florence. And he asked him, "Are you the monster of Florence?" I mean, I'm sitting there thinking, "Oh my God." And I can't repeat his answer because it would definitely be not appropriate for this podcast. But it was one of the most horrifying things I've ever heard. Patty Vest: Wow. Doug Preston: Scared the hell out me. Mark Wood: Wow. Now, let's talk about the other book you mentioned, the Lost City of the Monkey God. You wrote about your role in the discovery of this lost civilization in Honduras. How did you get involved in that and how dangerous was that? Doug Preston: Well that was a lot more dangerous than I thought it was going to be, actually. And in fact it's that again, it's impacted my life permanently. I was, 25 years ago, I was at Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California and I was interviewing a scientist named Ron [Blum 00:42:43], who was one of the world's experts on remote sensing from space. And I was doing a story for National Geographic about another, about a subject. Doug Preston: And he happened to let to slip, this guy Ron, happened to let slip that he was working moonlighting for a private individual looking for a lost city somewhere in the Americas, analyzing satellite imagery and radar imagery from space. Doug Preston: And I jumped all over that. I said, "Wait a minute, hold on." He said, "Oh my God, I shouldn't have that. I'm not supposed to say anything. I signed a non-disclosure agreement." I said, "Look, have this guy call me, please." So, I got a call from this guy Steve Elkins, who was a filmmaker. He's not an archeologist. But he did have an archeological background, an academic background in archeology, but he was a film maker. And he was looking for La Ciudad Blanca, the white city, sometimes referred to as the Lost City of the Monkey God. Which was a mythical legendary city somewhere in the Mosquitia mountains of Honduras, in one of the last scientifically unexplored places on earth. Doug Preston: And Ron Blum had identified in a valley, that was unexplored, which was named T-one, target one, had no name, had identified unnatural features below the rain forest canopy. Doug Preston: And this was in 1997. And so, I became fascinated with this story. And I became friends with Steve Elkins. And he wanted to mount an expedition into this valley. And it took him until 2012 in order to set up, raise the money and so forth. And in 2012, he raised a million dollars and he hired or engaged the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at the University of Houston, a very sophisticated operation which used LiDAR, a light detection in ranging, which is a powerful technology that can see through the jungle canopy and map what's on the ground below. Doug Preston: And so, Steve Elkins called me up and he said he's got this whole expedition planned, wanted me to go, and I thought, "Wow, this is incredible." But I was really doubtful of it. And I thought this would make a great story for the New Yorker magazine, but I'm not going to ask them yet because they're probably not going to find anything. And then I'll look like a fool in the New Yorker. So I didn't, I just went down there. Doug Preston: And so they brought this plane down, they spent three days flying over this valley at T one. The images came back, processed at Houston, downloaded into Honduras, where we were. And I couldn't believe my eyes when I looked at those images. My God, there was a lost city. Doug Preston: I mean, pyramids, plazas, roads, terracing. I mean, it was unbelievable. I was absolutely stunned. And so, that was in 2012. And so then in 2015, Steve again raised the money from a number of different sources and put together a joint Honduran American archeological expedition to explore this city on the ground. And it's in this area of the jungle that is some of the thickest jungle in the world, covering towering mountains. Some of these mountains are a mile high in a valley completely rimmed by mountains with only one source, one opening to get in there. Doug Preston: It was like a lost world. It literally was like that. The only way into this valley was by helicopter. So we had some British ex-SAS officers, jungle warfare specialists who organized this expedition, with the Honduran special forces and with the blessing of the president of the country and the military. And we went into this, we had this expedition, this nine day expedition. We explored this city that was completely buried in jungle. Doug Preston: We were so, the jungle was so thick that you could stand 10 feet from the pyramid and you couldn't see it. Literally, you could not see it. It was an incredible experience. But it turned out this was a very dangerous area. It was filled with poisonous snakes, Fer-de-lances, we saw every day, extremely poisonous snakes. That's a snake that's 600 times more venomous than a rattlesnake. If you are bitten, you are going to lose your life or if you don't lose your life, you're going to lose the limb that was bitten. Doug Preston: Anyway, and there's stories about that but the other problem with this valley was that it was hot zone of an incurable and horrific tropical disease called mucocutaneous Leishmaniasis. And two thirds of the expedition came down from this disease, including me. Doug Preston: It's a disease like Malaria except instead of being transmitted by mosquitoes, it's transmitted by sand flies. The bite of a sand fly injects this single celled parasite into your body. And the effects are absolutely horrific. I definitely do not recommend people listening to this podcast to google Leishmaniasis because you will see horrific things. It causes, it's a flesh rotting disease. And it takes the face. Your nose and your lips fall off. I mean it's just awful. Doug Preston: So we all got this and it's incurable, that's the other lovely thing about the disease. But as a journalist, if you're going to get a disease, you might as well get an interesting one, and this is an interesting disease. The oldest disease known on the planet, they found amber, baltic amber in which they found a sand fly, which had sucked the blood of a dinosaur. And in that blood, they found Leishmania parasites. Mark Wood: Wow. Doug Preston: Dinosaurs got Leishmaniasis. Reptiles get it. Many kinds of mammals get it. It's a very, it's a disease that affects a lot of different species. So, anyway. Mark Wood: So how are you? Doug Preston: Well, I'm good. I'm good. I was, we all got free treatment at the National Institutes of Health, at the part of the NIH that deals with infectious diseases. The director is Anthony Fauci. And I actually interviewed Anthony Fauci for my book. A very wonderful, humane and wise man. But they were very interested in this whole situation where all these expedition members had gotten Leishmaniasis in a short period of time and they wanted to study us. Doug Preston: So we all became enrolled in a very interesting Leishmaniasis study and they discovered very strange and wonderful things about the parasite that we had. It's a new species, apparently. One that's never been seen before. And it's of the worst possible variety. Thank you very much, nature. But they're very interested in studying it. So they're still working on it at the NIH and I just ran into some of the researchers a while ago, they're still studying it quite avidly and their big ... and one of them said, "Well, if you ever have another outbreak, come on back, because we want to take another biopsy from you." Doug Preston: I said, "Thank you, I really appreciate your interest." Patty Vest: If you would have known you would be dealing with this for the rest of your life, would you have gone to Honduras anyway? Doug Preston: You know, I would have. I would have. First of all, it was a great experience. Honduras is ... One of the things that my book really emphasizes is that Honduras is a beautiful country with a wonderfully warm, interesting and lovely people, and all we read about is murders and drug dealing in Honduras as if you can reduce an entire people to that kind of negative stereotyping. Doug Preston: One of the things I wanted to do with the book, the Lost City of the Monkey God was to show that this is a beautiful complex country like any other that has a lot to offer the world, an especially with the patrimony of the world. This new culture that we found which was not my Maya, but was influenced by the Maya, a very rich and vibrant culture about which we know very little. Doug Preston: But it's part of the people of Central America, of Honduras, come from two different traditions, one is Western civilization, Spanish, European tradition and the other is the indigenous tradition. These two have come together to create a unique culture. And we know all about the Spanish and European part of that history and we know so little about the indigenous part of that history because at the end of my book I talk a lot about the terrible pandemics that swept the New World in which 90 percent probably or more of indigenous people were killed by European diseases, that history was lost. Doug Preston: And so, the rediscovery of this culture, the richness of it, the sophistication of it, is something that is really important to bring out to the world. So, I know Honduras is a very troubled country, but you can't reduce the people to drug dealing and murdering. I mean that's just absolutely wrong. Doug Preston: So I tried in the book to show, I do show another side of that really beautiful and complex country. Mark Wood: Doug, we're running out of time, but I want to give you a chance to talk about something else that I know you care about. You're president of the Author's guild and you have done a lot of organizing work among writers, Authors United, to kind of fight back against some of the monopolizing influence of Amazon. Mark Wood: If readers want to support the authors they love to read and the new authors they hope to find, what should they do? Doug Preston: Well, thank you. Yes, I appreciate that question because I'm President of Author's Guild. Literary culture in this country has never been more endangered. And it's partly because people are reading fewer books. But they're still a lot of people who love books, who treasure literary culture out there, who are reading. It's really a larger issue of the devaluation of books and of literary culture by the dot com companies by companies like Amazon, and Google, by rampant piracy, the stealing of books by everyone. The illegal downloading of books and just the sense that, this whole information wants to be free philosophy. Doug Preston: There's no, how are writers supposed to make a living and write books if they can't earn a fair living from it? And that's what's happening right now in the last 10 years, full time writers in America have experienced a 42 percent decline in their income from writing. And the reason for this is companies like internet archives, or Google, Amazon, also, that have allowed piracy and the devaluation of creative content and sort of this whole idea that information should be free on the internet and blah, blah, blah, without considering that authors need to make a fair living, otherwise they're going to do something else. Doug Preston: And the people who are hurt most by this aren't best selling authors like me of course, I'm fine. It's the voices from underserved and overlooked communities, people with unpopular ideas, controversial ideas, struggling mid-list and debut authors, these are the authors whose voices are being stifled by what I call the censorship of the marketplace. Doug Preston: If they're not able to make a living writing books, they're going to stop writing. And they're going to do something else. And that's what a lot of them are doing. And so if you want to support writers, buy their books and read their books. That's all you have to do. Please don't steal their books. And I'm sure most of the people listening to this do not steal books. But just, and buy new books. If you can afford them. Don't buy used books and stuff. Of course it's fine to buy a used book, but if you really want to support that author, you love, buy the new book, because that's how they get a little tiny amount of royalties for it. Mark Wood: Great. All right well Doug, unfortunately, on that note, we're going to have to wrap this up. We promised you we wouldn't go over the hour, we have by one minute here. So we've been talking with author Doug Preston, class of 1978. This was fun. Thanks, Doug. Doug Preston: Well, thank you. I really appreciate the chance to spout off like this. Patty Vest: Thank you, Doug that was fun. Doug Preston: Okay. Patty Vest: And to all who stuck with us this far, thanks for listening to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College. Stay safe and until next time.