Internationally bestselling author Tess Gerritsen sat down with Shakefire to talk about TNT's upcoming drama series, Rizzoli & Isles, which is based upon her series of medical suspense novels. She discusses what it's like to be both a doctor and a writer along with the transition from book to TV.

Shakefire: Tell us about the two main characters of the series?

Tess Gerritsen: The TV show features two women who were from my books. The first one is detective Jane Rizzoli, a homicide detective from Boston. She showed up in my book The Surgeon for the very first time. She was supposed to be a minor character and she was not particularly likeable in that first book. She is rash, aggressive and works harder than the guy and really is trying to fit in with an all male homicide squad and is having too much success with that. That first story, she was actually supposed to die. Again, she wasn’t a major character. By the time I got to the end, when she was supposed to get killed in the cellar by the serial killer, I had grown attached to her. I kinda began to understand who she was and why she was the way she was. She so interesting and I wanted to see her in a second book. So she survived that attack and went on to star in the next book called The Apprentice. And The Apprentice is the book that the pilot episode is based on.

Maura Isles is the other character. She’s a medical examiner. She started off as a minor character and she showed up first in The Apprentice. Again, I never really thought she would move in and become one of the co-stars. I was fascinated by her. I put a lot of myself into that character so she kinda grew on me as well. In the process of eight total books these two women have become friends and because of their jobs, they’re thrown together a lot during the investigations. I think it was that partnership that attracted the producers to make a TV show.

SF: How different is the show when compared to the book.

TG: Well you know, the pilot is very close to the plot of The Apprentice. The characters are in large part very much like the characters I imagined. Jane Rizzoli is still brash and aggressive and smart, and Maura is still cool, logical and kinda introverted. So they’re opposites of the spectrum. I like that contrast between the two women and that shows up in the TV show. What is different about it is their physical characteristics aren’t the same. In the books, Jane is described as being quite ordinary looking, and now she’s Angie Harmon. Maura Isles is a brunette, a kinda mysterious character and now she’s the blonde Sasha Alexander.

SF: Most drama series have some sort of male lead or support. Yours has two women.

TG: As it turns out, this show is unique in that the creator of the characters is a woman, me. The executive producer who writes the episodes and is in charge of all the episodes is a woman, Janet Tamaro. And the two leads are women. I don’t know of very many TV shows that start from the ground up all female, all the way to the top. That’s unusual.

SF: Were you at all involved in the creation of the show?

TG: No, no. The head writer is Janet Tamaro. She’s also the executive producer. She has pretty much done the translation of the books to the TV show and she’s made some changes. I think they’re probably necessary changes. Things that worked in books, introspective passages; they just don’t work on the screen. She’s made it funnier. She has a very wicked sense of humor. So what you see on the show is it’s as dark as the books but it’s also funnier. It’s that great combination of scary and funny so you’ll scream and laugh at the same time.

SF: Have the producers and such asked for any of your input?

TG: Yeah, they do. I know Janet pretty well and she’s emailed me and called me a couple of times saying we’re at this point in the script and trying to come up with a good cause of death. So I was able to give them one for episode three. It’s a secret, haha, but I came up with one.

SF: Have you ever visited the set before or met the cast?

TG: Yeah, I was there for the pilot episode filming and that was overwhelming. You know, I sit alone in my office by myself, writing at my own little desk and then you go to a movie set and there are like 75 people running around doing everything. You just think, “What are they all doing here?” It’s so full of commotion and it’s so busy and they work so many long hours. I remember telling the locations director, I said “You know, the next time this country invades a foreign country, they should call Hollywood.” And she said, “We would be much better organized. We had Hollywood do it!”

SF: None of your other work has been made into a film or TV series, correct?

TG: I’ve had two outright sales for feature film but they never got out of development, and that’s how it usually happens. I think one of my books was also optioned for television but that option ran out. So this is the first one that’s made it all the way.

SF: You must be quite happy about that.

TG: Oh I’m absolutely thrilled. This is so much fun. I’m also really, really happy it’s a TV series as opposed to a feature film strangely enough because I think that the audience builds around the characters rather than building around the story. Once they want to know more about these characters they’ll want to go back and look at the books, which is the source of where they come from.

SF: So you think a lot of people are going to go back to your earlier books now that the show is taking off?

TG: I hope so. All the books are getting re-released in paperback with Rizzoli & Isles on the corner so they’ll know which ones are part of the series. I’m just hoping that it’ll be like True Blood, where they go back and want to go back and see where the story started off.

SF: Why did you decide to persue your writing career?

TG: Yeah, my dad would probably ask that question too, haha. When I was 7 years old I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I wrote my first novel when I was 7. I told my dad I wanted to go to journalism school and work as a writer. He said, being a Chinese-American father, there’s no money to be made in writing, that you’ll never make a living at that you better do something in the sciences. So I ended up going to medical school. Then after I finished and was working as a doctor I never stopped wanting to be a writer so I got maternity leave when my kids were born and wrote my first novel. After I got published a couple of times I thought, “That’s it; I am a writer.” So I left medicine and went to full time writing and it’s actually been surprisingly successful. I lucked out on that. Writing is a lot like acting. Few people make it and they make it big. The vast majority don’t. I just feel lucky that I was one of the few.

SF: What does your dad say now with all your success?

TG: Well unfortunately my dad died before he could see this. My mother is very, very pleased and proud, but I wish he was around because he would see that the little girl who was telling stories knew exactly what she wanted to do. I couldn’t have gotten this far I think if I had not been to medical school. I think that medical details are what set my books apart. So in the long run, it all worked out fine.

SF: How does your medical expertise influence your writing?

TG: Well it certainly has an influence on my writing with Maura’s scenes. She uses a lot of science. She uses a lot of medicine in making her diagnosis and I think that there’s something about having gone through medical training that makes you approach a problem little differently. We have a very systematic way of making a diagnosis, eliminating things left and right, and that’s the way she thinks. So that’s where the medical training came in handy and also it helps to know how exactly do people die and how can I portray it semi-realistically.