He's been called the thinking person's Robert Ludlum and a cross between Patricia Cornwell and John D. McDonald. An author, according to People magazine, who excels at writing books that grip the imagination. But the high point of Ridley Pearson's career so far may be a toss-up between jamming on stage with rock legend Bruce Springsteen, enjoying a very public embrace from actress Jamie Lee Curtis, and the time one of his books helped solve a real-life murder case.

For a Riverside boy who spent most of his twenties playing rhythm guitar in a Providence-based bar band, life in his forties has turned out to be better than fiction. Since his novels deal with subjects like kidnapping and arson, this is probably a good thing. "I call my stuff aerobic fiction," he says, "because I hope to get your heart pounding and get you turning pages."

Sipping a cup of Earl Grey in New York's Lowell Hotel, thousands of miles from the Seattle setting where Police Sergeant Lou Boldt and criminal psychologist Daphne Matthews, two of his most popular recurring characters, solve various crimes, Pearson looks relaxed, even relieved. "You just saved me $2,500," he confesses to his visitor, since their date cut short a visit to Barneys where his willowy blonde wife Marcelle had her eye on a sheepskin coat.

Back in Idaho, where the Pearsons and their eleven-month-old daughter Paige live in a house that looks out over alfalfa fields and mountains, he could probably buy a couple of prize-winning sheep for the same amount. Heck, with ten bestsellers under his belt (and an eleventh due out this summer), he could probably afford the whole herd.

Pearson is quick to point out that what he writes are suspense thrillers, not mysteries. "A true mystery is a first person, single point of view novel that asks who done it. My stuff is third person, multiple point of view that asks who will prevail," he explains. "Halfway through the book, we know who done it. Now, can we get him and stop him before he does it again?"

Whatever you call them, they're keeping people across the country awake well past their bedtimes, creating enough sleepless energy to power a small hydroelectric dam. Recently, a woman in her sixties wrote to say he'd excited her sexually and made her cry – all in the same book. "I love that stuff." Pearson admits, "especially when you hear somebody cried at the end of your book or felt so sorry for a character that they have to write and find out what really happened."

For the past twelve years, Pearson has come up with a steady stream of plots as twisty as a snake charmer's sidekick. More often than not, they're inspired by actual events or breakthroughs in technology. The germ for Chain of Evidence, for instance, sprang from articles about using castration to cure sex offenders and splicing chromosomes to correct antisocial behavior. No Witnesses, an earlier book, was inspired by an ATM-delivered kidnapping-ransom story that ran in the British press in the early nineties, when Pearson was a Raymond Chandler Fulbright scholar (awarded to writers of "emerging reputation") at Oxford University.

Research for Beyond Recognition, his current bestseller, took him from top-secret government labs that test high temperature accelerants to an annual explosives convention held every summer outside Lake Havasu, Arizona, and attended by diehard pyrotechnics fans who range from family fireworks dynasties like Long Island's Gruccis to renegade Southern rocketeers in pickup trucks.

"One guy I interviewed drove up in this robin's-egg-blue van, all rusted out. I mean, we've all passed these things on the highway a million times, limping along. He opens up the back and it's illegal to transport any kind of explosives – and it's packed with solid-core rocket fuel in PVC pipes. There must have been ~5o of these rockets, all made in this guy's basement, and he'd been traveling through five states!" Pearson laughs. "All it takes is a spark, and you don't want to be passing him at the time."

Like his literary hero John D. McDonald, whose sixty-five novels reflect American culture from the fifties through the eighties, Ridley Pearson's books often mirror issues of the day, using an edge-of-your-seat format that takes readers along for the ride even if they'd rather be dozing. (He's also a fan of James Ellroy and Carl Hiaasen, the former for his noirish recreation of forties-style settings and dialogue, the latter for making him laugh out loud.)

Much of his research is done on-line, although he, his two part-time assistants and a network of friends constantly scour newspapers and magazines for tantalizing tidbits that could become yet another new project. One of three current works-in-progress, in fact, originated with a recent item in the Sunday Times Magazine that he's reluctant to discuss yet. "I'd hate to see the movie before I even write the book," he explains wryly.

His ease with forensics and scientific detail may stem from early ambitions to be a doctor: A premed student at Kansas University (later studying music theory at Brown), he dropped out during freshman year to lend moral support to his prep school roommate from the Pomfret School in Connecticut, who was stricken with Hodgkin's disease. His gift for bringing characters to life comes from imagining himself as every character in every scene.

"Being a fiction writer is really like being an actor, because if you're going to write convincingly it has to sound right and play right. The only way that works is to emotionally and technically act out and see the scene you're in," he points out.

"There's no better job in the world, because when I sit down at that computer I'm the world's best forensics expert, if that's what I'm writing about that day. Or I'm some crazed psycho running down a dark alley. Or I'm a gorgeous woman looking to find a man that night. Whatever! But I'm all of those things, every day. How can you beat that?"

While growing up in Riverside attending local schools and having oniongrass fights in neighborhood woods Pearson's favorite reading material was a series of biographies about American heroes like George Washington. "Little white books with big print; he remembers, which led to a lifelong love affair with books and libraries in general and the Perrot Library in Old Greenwich in particular. "Walking into that place used to just glaze my eyes," he says. "That was the magic kingdom to me, where there were all these stories. And thank goodness my parents are huge readers and took us there a lot."

The youngest of three siblings – and part of a mob of fifteen happily compatible cousins – his childhood was filled with all the advantages that Greenwich has to offer: hanging out at the Riverside Yacht Club, roaming around Tod's Point. His father Bob Pearson, who spent thirty-three years in public relations at Shell Oil before switching to freelance writing, has helped edit at least eight out of ten of his son's books. His mother Betsy Pearson is an accomplished painter who organized annual arts fairs and mini-Olympics in their yard; the kind of mom other kids probably wished they had.

Fast forward to his twenties, when the older Pearsons noticed a certain late night pallor in their musician son and treated him to a Florida vacation. There, lounging under palm trees, he stumbled across John D. McDonald's Travis McGee series and after reading one, got the urge to try writing crime story scripts for television.

Over the next several years, he kept on trying, with encouragement from a few pivotal mentors. While still in Providence, he showed some of his work to Stan Silverman, who'd been the head writer on "Sea Hunt; a show Pearson loved as a child. "Kid, there's some talent here, but you don't know what you're doing. But if I hold your hand and lead you through this, you may figure it out," Silverman told him.

After moving to Sun Valley, he played music at night and submitted articles to trade magazines by day but continued to spend as much time as he could on scripts, as well as what eventually became Whiteout, his first book. His father showed the manuscript to Greenwich writer Helen Bennett, who passed it along to literary agent Franklin Heller.

Not only did Heller agree to represent him, his protege relates gratefully, but the former television director also had the grace to ultimately bow out of the game after six years or so, when the books began selling in larger numbers than he could handle. "He was a lovely man, and sorely missed, Pearson says of Heller, who died last year.

Whiteout took so long to finish (over two years) and was rejected by so many publishers (twenty-three) that his second book, Never Look Back, came out first. So he was achingly primed when the editor at St Martin's Press, after calling to discuss corrections, declared there were only two problems. "Wow, I bought this whole legal pad and I don't even need it!," Pearson thought happily to himself. "Then the guy told me the problems were the premise and the ending. So I started all over again and wrote it another three times. In its entirety. Seven hundred pages."

Even today he's the kind of perfectionist who goes through several drafts before he's satisfied with the results. Perhaps consequently, he sees book tours as a means of expanding his already hefty national audience. "It's not about the money those people might bring you; it's just you want as many people as possible to read it after you've made all this effort. It's like, see what I did! What do you think?"

On average, he takes about fourteen months to finish a book, working six days a week up to ten hours a day. He's up at 6 a.m., writes for at least six hours straight, takes a break for lunch, then spends the afternoon writing some more, or editing, or outlining new projects. This may not be the secret of his success (he has at least one novelist friend who works all night), but his schedule does reflect a certain obsessive Protestant work ethic he attributes to his Greenwich and prep school background.

"Pomfret is why I can be a writer; it was so much harder than any college course I took, even at Brown. And the discipline they taught you – it wasn't strap-the-back-of-your-hand discipline, it was a mental discipline to get your work done. It's the only reason I can sit down at six in the morning at a blank screen, while all my friends are out playing golf, and work."

Well, not quite all. As Pearson tells it, Stephen King called him on the Fourth of July a few years ago to make sure he wasn't the only writer in the universe glued to his computer keyboard. "My office phone rang, and I answered it, and there was this guy laughing at the other end. 'I just knew you'd be working on the Fourth, because I am, too!'" Pearson laughs. "Because nobody in their right minds would be working on the Fourth of July but Stephen and me."

Since 1992 he and King, along with humorist Dave Barry, novelist Amy Tan and sportswriter Mitch Albom, have moonlighted as the Rockbottom Remainders, a literary garage band named after the unsold leftovers of a book's print run. They've appeared on "Good Morning America" and at ABA (American Booksellers Association) conventions around the country, raising more than $2oo,ooo for Literacy Volunteers of America and other charities. Mostly, though, they just have fun playing rock classics from the sixties, with the peak of their career coming the night Bruce Springsteen sat in with them for an encore of "Gloria" at the Hollywood Palladium.

"He wouldn't know my name for anything," Pearson says, when asked if he and the Boss jam regularly now, "but he hung out with Steve and Dave after we got off stage. He was a real gentleman, a really nice guy."

Music is still a big part of his life, though he long ago switched from the acoustic rhythm guitar of his New England youth to playing bass, not just for the Rockbottom Remainders but also for a local band called the Sensational Toast Points. Which is how he met Marcelle: She hosted a dinner for them one night before a gig.

Married for close to two years, the pair have considered moving East to be closer to the publishing world. But Idaho's open scenery, friendly people and peace-and-quiet quotient make it ideal for finishing new books like The Pied Piper, which comes out this year and deals with babynapping. (A subject the Pearsons find more alarming than usual since daughter Paige was born.)

"Unfortunately, or probably fortunately, I started it before we were even pregnant," he says, "which tells you how long it took to write."

So far, all but one of his books have been optioned at least briefly for movie rights, including three that feature his characters Lou Boldt and Daphne Matthews. Boosted by actress Jamie Lee Curtis, they were sold to HBO a few years back. Although HBO recently dropped the project, one of the three is now under development elsewhere, and Pearson is confident we'll be seeing Curtis on screen as criminal psychologist Matthews sometime soon [web page note: no longer current information].

Her interest was sparked by The Angel Maker, one of his earlier books that a friend gave her. Not long after she finished it, Pearson's phone rang and a voice said, "Hi, this is Jamie Lee Curtis." At first he thought it was his sister having some fun at his expense; today, his relationship with Curtis has evolved to what he terms "business phone pals." He's even had dinner with Jamie Lee and her actor husband Christopher Guest at their house in L.A. one of those nights when life seemed particularly swell, especially afterwards, when the star drove him back to his hotel.

"I was getting out of the car, and there were all these people gathered outside the hotel, and she said no, wait! Don't get out of the car! Then she jumped out and ran around and threw the door open – and, of course, the minute she came around, all the people in the hotel saw her. And she gives me this big hug and a kiss, and everybody's looking at me like, whoa, who is this guy? She didn't have to do that; he adds humbly, "She just did it to give me a little rush."

Jamie Lee Curtis would be great as Daphne Matthews, he thinks. "She's bright, she's intelligent, and more beautiful in person than she is even on the screen." And if that's a case of art imitating life, or at least fiction, the reverse also holds true: Several years ago, when he got a chance to meet Sergeant Don Cameron, a senior Seattle homicide cop he'd long admired, he was flabbergasted to find himself face-to-face with the real-life incarnation of Sergeant Lou Boldt.

"I'd written the character for four-and-a-half, five years by that point and had an image of him in my head. And I walked through the door and go, my God, it's Lou Boldt personified!" At the end of the interview, apologizing for stumbling all over himself, he confessed to Cameron that he'd written a series of books with this character and that Cameron was Boldt in the flesh. The sergeant had a twinkle in his eyes as he replied, "I've read every one, Ridley. And I know I'm Lou Boldt."

The introduction to Seattle's top cop came via a prosecuting attorney in rural Skagit County, Washington, who'd used one of Pearson's books to help solve a true-life murder case. In Undercurrents the point of entry for a fictional corpse found in Puget Sound is determined by analyzing local tides and currents – and after spotting Dr. Alyn Duxbury's name on the book's acknowledgement page, the lawyer called the University of Washington oceanographer to see if he could do the same analysis for the body of an actual murdered woman. The resulting expert testimony convicted the woman's husband of murder, not once but twice.

"They got him for thirty years," remarks the author, who regularly gets admiring e-mail and letters from cops and FBI agents, along with occasional kudos from players on the other team. A few years back, when the New York Daily News printed a list of John Gotti favorite authors, Ridley Pearson's name was on it.

"I've been told by people who know, that I'm read a lot in prisons," he admits. And while helping cell-bound crime bosses pass their time is an unexpected perk, seeing his novels translated to the big screen would be another. But it's not his ultimate goal. "My real dream is to get the next book done, make you stay up late, make your heart pound, and make you want to read more."

He wouldn't want to do anything else.