When Ridley Pearson was a little boy, he wanted to work for an insurance company.
It's not that young Ridley had a passion for actuarial tables or a desire to sell term life insurance to his classmates. He reasoned, rather coolly for a lad who had never read "Double Indemnity," that people at insurance companies knew how to commit perfect crimes.
Alas, he never realized his dream. After supporting himself as a musician, Mr. Pearson settled on writing thrillers, dark novels that draw on his strong thirst for odd bits of criminal knowledge.
Here are just a few of the tricks of the trade Mr. Pearson gleefully researched for his 10th book, "No Witnesses" (Hyperion, $22.95), about a food-tampering and extortion case:
* How to slip a particularly virulent strain of cholera into a soup can.
* How to collect blackmail money via ATM machines.
* How to subdue quickly a private security guard with nothing but a tree branch and a very sharp implement. (You don't want to know.)
"I'm a surrogate criminal," he says happily, over eel in a Baltimore sushi restaurant, a rather brave meal for someone well-versed in virtually every form of food contamination.
One critic has wondered if Mr. Pearson might be the "thinking person's Robert Ludlum," while Stephen King proclaimed him a "killer combination of Patricia Cornwell and John D. MacDonald."
A slender man with glasses and hair the color of cornflakes, Mr. Pearson looks like a slightly hipper version of the insurance agent he once yearned to be. Except for his lapel pin, which appears to be the Seattle space needle on top of a bloody dagger.
"Yes, it is!" he says, explaining it's a memento from a recent convention of mystery writers and mystery fans.
But Mr. Pearson prefers not to be pigeonholed as a mystery writer. Nothing against the genre, he says, but he likes to think that his books are a little meatier than traditional whodunits.
"I think they give the reader something a little more complex, six hours of pleasure instead of three," he says. "They're not only whodunits, but howdunits and whydunits and whatdunits."
In the same vein, Mr. Pearson differentiates between "real" serial killers and the prolific killer in "No Witnesses." His killer has a goal in mind, Mr. Pearson explains, and will stop killing eventually.
Instead, the serial aspect in "No Witnesses" is provided by homicide detective Lou Boldt and police psychologist Daphne Matthews, recurring characters in Mr. Pearson's work. Worried he might weary of them, he has used the duo in only three books. If he grows tired of them, Mr. Pearson reasons, readers will, too.
But one reader who has taken a sharp interest in Daphne Matthews is actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who has a house near Mr. Pearson's home in the Sun Valley area of Idaho. She wants to be Daphne on film. The writer is keen to see a movie version, if only because even bad movies tend to bring new readers into a writer's fold.
The book business, it turns out, is harder than the insurance business might have been. Mr. Pearson estimates he works 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week. Thanks to his subject matter, nightmares are common.
His hard work has brought success -- "I'm at the upper end of the lower end of bestsellerdom," he says. Previous books have made the best seller's list; "No Witnesses," according to a recent Publishers Weekly, is close to breaking into the top 15.
But success has meant more work: His publisher would like a book every year. Mr. Pearson manages to produce one every 18 months. Even as he tours on behalf of the new book, he is carrying the dozens of index cards that form the spine of his next one (plot strictly embargoed, for fear someone will hijack it.)
When he isn't writing, he still plays music and is the bass player with the Rock Bottom Remainders, alongside literary luminaries Stephen King, Dave Barry, Amy Tan and Barbara Kingsolver. (Playing to their strengths, the band members have written a book about their experience, but have not released a compact disc.)
His other passion, as detailed in a recent Dave Barry column, is climbing trees in a harness that, in Mr. Barry's words, "looks like an enormous green athletic supporter."
"You get them by mail order, from a man in Oregon," Mr. Pearson elaborates. "It costs $750 for a basic model, and then there are other features. But it could save your life, so it's worth it. Climbing trees is wonderful. It's like being 10 years old again."
Three years ago, he enjoyed a break from his routine when he became the first American to win a Fulbright endowed by Raymond Chandler's estate. At Oxford University's Wadham College, where some of Chandler's letters are kept, Mr. Pearson researched books and developed a passion for afternoon tea. (Lou Boldt, who shares a history of stomach problems with Mr. Pearson, is a tea aficionado in coffee-rich Seattle.)
While at Oxford, he read a newspaper account of an extortion scheme involving a baby-food manufacturer. Threatened with tampering, the company deposited money in a bank account as instructed. Police assumed it would be easy to catch the blackmailer.
They hadn't counted on a criminal who would withdraw his money from ATM machines in dribs and drabs. To catch the thief, police had to slow down the computer, giving them the precious seconds needed to arrive at the machine before the transaction was completed. "No Witnesses" took off from this starting point -- but went much further.
Yet even as Mr. Pearson rips his stories from the headlines, he sometimes seems to be running ahead of the news. "No Witnesses," set in Seattle, was taking shape on his computer well before tainted meat killed three and sickened hundreds of others in the Pacific Northwest.
He recalls: "I told myself, 'I'm on the right book.' "
Recently, Mr. Pearson noticed a newspaper article about a slow-down in ATM services in New Jersey. Public reports blamed a computer glitch. Mr. Pearson cut out the article and sent it to his publisher, with a note: "Don't count on it."
But he doesn't worry about inspiring an aspiring miscreant. For one thing, he's been told by law enforcement officials that anything he can imagine has already been done.
For another, he figures his criminally inclined fans are already incarcerated, having failed to find the healthy outlet he discovered. "But I think," he adds, "that my books are probably very well read in prison."