Fame & Fortune: Thriller author Harlan Coben He sleeps well by keeping you up nights
Page | 1 | 2 | 3 |

Bankrate: Did you immediately gravitate to mysteries?

Coben: No, not really. I gravitated to anything that was suspenseful. You can call them whatever you want -- some people call my stories suburban novels, novels of neighborhood, novels of family -- whatever you want to call them, I just gravitated toward anything that would grip me. My favorite author is probably Philip Roth, who I don't write anything like.

Bankrate: What were your favorites as a child?

Coben: I don't really look at books too much as influences or anything else; they're almost like life signposts. I remember reading "A Wrinkle in Time;" I remember reading the Narnia series. I remember, when I was 15 or 16, my dad gave me William Goldman's "Marathon Man." I've become friendly with Bill Goldman, and it was one of my great joys to tell him, and he said, "Why? Why that book?" We had like a half-hour discussion about why I loved that book so much. That was really cool.

Bankrate: Were you a jock?

Coben: I got to play collegiate basketball at Amherst, Division III, which is hardly Myron's level. I played every position, but mostly forward. I was sort of the hit man. Maurice Lucas. Not much finesse but I could get the job done. I started from my sophomore year on.

Bankrate: How did you do with handling money as a kid?

Coben: My wife and I both were raised to be extraordinarly cheap. I still am to this day. It's not like I spend a lot of the money that I'm lucky enough to be making. I have a real conservative streak. We're both savers. The thing that money has given us really is the sleeping-at-night aspect of financial security. We're getting used to buying things, but it's the idea that we don't have to go to sleep worrying about the mortgage payment and things. We live well within our means, and that's how I prefer it. We've never been financially well-off until the last few years, and it's been interesting. We both were raised with the true value of money. My wife came from a family of seven kids whose father was originally an assistant football coach at Columbia, so he wasn't making any money. Then he started working for Merrill Lynch and started making some money. And my family, too. My grandparents on my father's side didn't even speak English; my grandfather was a house painter and they lived in a three-family building and my dad had absolutely nothing growing up. We were both raised very, very tight with money.