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A few years after Joe Ide made his own fictional detective famous, the mystery author now says he’s trying not to ruin the legend of another private eye. 

Ide is best known as the author of the IQ mysteries, a series of five books chronicling the story of Isiah Quintabe. The first book, IQ, was published in 2016 and was quickly followed by three more, as IQ emerged as a modern Sherlock Holmes, using observation and deduction to solve crimes, only in the liquor stores, junkyards and drug dens of South Central Los Angeles rather than Victorian London. 

The main character evolved as the world got messier, graduating from solving crimes in exchange for baked goods to tracking down gangs of white nationalists, as in the early pages of the fourth book, Hi Five. 

A group...had gathered on the front porch, in their teens or twenties, passing around a joint and drinking cans of Coors. Their uniform was the same as every other gang in the country: oversize shorts or jeans, gold chains, tats, shirts and caps with slogans on them. NO JEW WILL REPLACE ME. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. WHITE SUPREMACY IS REAL. 

It’s easy to find praise for the series New York Times calling the characters “wildly entertaining” and including Hi Five on its list of best thrillers of 2020. 

With the release of the fifth IQ book, Smoke, now scheduled for Feb. 23, Ide is shifting his focus to a different character. He’s writing a novel that adapts the old school noir detective Philip Marlowe for the world today. Marlowe, conceived in the 1930s by legendary crime writer Raymond Chandler, is the stereotypical hard-drinking, womanizing private eye made more famous by actors like Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum and Elliot Gould. 

Not that Ide needs the reminder. After dropping out of Hollywood to work on novels from home, Ide says he’s suddenly careful to try not to disappoint millions of fans. That’s not to mention an HBO Max pilot that aims to turn the IQ series into a TV show. 

“It's a new palette for me,” Ide told me of the Marlowe project during a recent phone call. “I have new characters, new situations and new environments. But it's the same process really, you know, getting up, making coffee and then working all day.”

[The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.]

How did you get started with the IQ series? 

The idea actually came out of desperation and fear. 

I was a screenwriter before I wrote IQ. And, you know, I was making decent living. I worked for all the major studios, and I was selling [scripts] and doing rewrites and all that, but nothing was getting made, always for one Hollywood reason or another. They kept falling out of development, and getting cut. And that’s how you keep score, and people always ask ‘What did you get made?’ 

I got so frustrated that I just couldn’t do it anymore, so I walked away. Nobody cared, but I walked away and I mucked around for a couple months. I was taking long, soulful walks with my dog and feeling sorry for myself. But I needed to figure out how to make a living for myself, and writing is my only marketable skill. I’m one of those guys that if you give him a screwdriver, I’ll just stab myself on the forehead.

So I figured I’d write a novel. 

Because it's my first book, I knew that it had to be better than good. You know, for a new writer, its really hard to sell a book in the first place. For the public to accept it, and put it on their radar takes a huge marketing effort by the publishing company. And they have to invest all those resources in you. 

I had the luxury of working full time because I put money away. The way I grew up, and my influence with Sherlock Holmes, they sort of came together as Sherlock in the hood. And I tell you, I didn't have any other ideas. I wasn’t choosing from a list. This was the only idea I had.

I found out right away that my mind for longform narrative prose just wasn't there. Screenwriting a whole different thing. So it took me a year just to learn how to write clear decent prose. And then it took me the next two years to develop my style and finish the book. So, yes. Fear and desperation and my idea, they all converged.

Wait a minute. Working as a Hollywood screenwriter is the kind of gig people move to California to do. I understand that you’re dealing with Hollywood and there's brutality to the business, but was there a moment where you decided you were totally done with it?  

Oh, yeah there was. I was sitting across the table from this table of studio executives. One of them had to be, I don't know, it seemed like 23 or 24 years old. 

We're talking about ideas and generally what they're looking for. He thought that Pretty Woman was a classic movie. I said, “That's it, man. If you think Pretty Woman is a classic, then I just don't want to be in this business. And I don't want to be pitching to somebody who's 23 years old. And never heard of David Lean, or Preston Sturges or anybody else.” And that was it.

I was already burned out, but that was the final straw.

It’s only been a few years since then and we’re talking about your fifth book. How does that writing process work in terms of discipline and focus? 

When I wrote the first IQ, I rediscovered my love of writing. I got that back over the process of writing IQ. 

It became such an intense and not unhappy experience. When it's the kind of work you're doing, where you're so into it, the rest of the world falls away. Yeah, you're not looking over your own shoulder, you're just into it. And I really loved it. Over the course of writing and rewriting that book, it became something of an obsession. 

I wake up in the morning and have three cups of coffee, and I go to work. 

I don't even think about it. It's just assumed. I work until about 1:00 in the afternoon. Then I take a break, come back around 4:00 for a couple more hours. And I have to do that. I have to do what I do that seven days a week, seven days. Yeah. And most of this is not extraordinary, by any means. I think most of the writers I know, they work seven days a week.

That's my life now. That's just how it goes. There's nothing romantic or glamorous about being a novel writer, right? 

I'm sitting there, you know, in front of my computer, my computer, and I'm wearing my pajamas. I got taco juice on my keyboard, and I’m usually talking to my dog. 

Do you consider yourself successful? Are you happy with your life now? 

Yeah, I'm pretty successful [laughs]. 

I don't think I would say that if I thought I had written just okay books, everyday books. I'm really trying hard to get better with every book. And, like, consciously do that, and make sharper observations and more difficult mysteries, and more difficult dilemmas for the characters. And to work harder on the writing itself. I ask myself, is that the best sentence you can come up with? “Really, that simile? Come on!” 

I’m using the thesaurus maybe ten or 15 times on every page. I’m trying to sharpen, and get more focus. I’m doing that consciously, and it’s part of the process now, and that part is really satisfying. I'm successful in my own eyes. I'm pretty happy on both scores. 

I think there's this false dichotomy between writing for your audience and writing for yourself. 

Writing for yourself just means that you write what you want, the way you want. But writing for your audience means communicating what you've written in the clearest and most entertaining way as possible. That's my obligation to the reader. And so that sort of frees me from thinking, “Well, does the audience want this or audience want that?” I don’t know in the first place.

I heard you’re writing a Philip Marlowe story on behalf of Raymond Chandler’s estate. What’s going on there? 

That was out of the blue. Raymond Chandler’s estate went through my agent and said, “Would Joe do a contemporary novel?” And, of course, I said, Yes. 

Then I realized after I signed the contract that there’s a possibility here that I could disappoint millions of people around the world. 

The writing part is not daunting. I can only do what I do. And I cannot anticipate what the state wants or what the public wants out of a new Marlowe. So I'm just writing the book. 

I'm trying to keep his attitude, his brashness, his sarcasm, and things in his offices on Hollywood Boulevard where the original Philip Marlowe at his office, those kinds of things. But he's an entirely new guy. 

Chandler had this thing with Marlowe where he was either doing a case in glamorous Hollywood, or he was doing it down in the dumps. And so my story goes back and forth between those two environments. I want to contrast him both with the rich, and how he feels about that compared to home with all kinds of locks on the door. 

I have a rough draft, I'm going to have to rewrite it, I don't know, five or 10 more times. And then I'll submit it. It's supposed to come out in spring of 2022. 

You talk about IQ, who is the updated version of the classic mystery character and a detective. And then Marlowe, who is a different version of that. I’m curious to what extent that old noir movies come into play. Have you been kind of watching any of those?

Yeah, I've been watching all the different Marlowe movies. Humphrey Bogart is referenced a lot in the book. This version of Marlowe is an old film buff. There’s going to be all kinds of references, and I’m going to reference the movies a lot in this book, including the old Marlowe movies. There’s a scene where he’s watching To Have and Have Not. 

Is there any indication your IQ work is going to be picked up for a movie or TV show? 

It was optioned early in the process. The producer is Chuck Lorre’s company. They produce the Batman movies, among a bunch of others. I thought it would just die there, because they're such a big company with such a big slate. 

I was surprised how interested they were in the project, and how respectful they've been, you know, in terms of the books. Since then, they've had a pilot written, and they've had almost deals. Everything just takes so long. With a pandemic, it takes even longer, but they just they just set it up at HBO Max. 

But getting a pilot actually made is still a long way away. They have to have a pilot. they've written a pilot, which I like very much. And then they have to have a back-up pilot. I don't even know what that means. And then they have to have four scripts that the studio likes, and then they can shoot the pilot. It’s like, “Wow,” right? So I'm not holding my breath. 

Well are you watching anything that you’re enjoying? I saw one interview where you mentioned Babylon Berlin.

I’m watching a Danish series called Borgen. I'm loving that series. I'm loving the character and the intricacies of Danish politics. And then, I haven't started it but I intend to read Ivy Pachoda’s new book These Women. Her book Wonder Valley knocked me out. 

I don't I don't read much when I'm writing. But that's next.

How much of watching Borgen is just an escape from the politics in the U.S. right now?

Man, I try to escape the atmosphere in the United States as frequently as I can. I don't read the newspaper anymore. Really. I just look at the headlines to see what atrocious thing has happened. And then I move on.

What's the next part of your day?

I'm gonna end this call and go write.  

Ide’s fifth book, Smoke, is available for pre-order now, shipping Feb. 23. His fourth book, Hi Five, is available in paperback starting Jan. 26. The hardcover version is available now .

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