Jonathan Kellerman is the best selling author of the Alex Delaware mystery thriller series and like his fictional hero he is a child psychologist. He is a clinical professor of psychology at USC Dornsife and clinical professor of pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine.
Kellerman was born in New York City and moved to Los Angeles with his family as a child in 1959. His father was an aerospace engineer, inventor, and published poet. His mother was a dancer and office manager. Kellerman enjoyed writing at an early age, winning contests at school and writing other kids’ essays for them. Later, while attending UCLA, he taught guitar and worked as a journalist, cartoonist and editor for the student paper. At 21, he won a Goldwyn Literary Prize for an unpublished novel and acquired an agent, but he continued to pursue a career in medicine. He would publish Psychological Aspects of Childhood Cancer (1980) and Helping the Fearful Child (1981), based on his work at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles in their psychosocial program (a Division of Hematology-Oncology), a program that he founded. Savage Spawn: Reflections on Violent Children (1999), is one of his later nonfiction works.
In 1974, as a graduate student in psychology, Kellerman recounts how he was driving to work at Children’s Hospital, where he was interning at the time, when he saw a sign in the window of an antique store on Sunset Boulevard. It read, “Going Out of Business, Books Cheap.” He bought a copy of Ross Macdonald’s The Underground Man for a dime. He said he had an epiphany and thought “This is what I want to do, write crime novels.” Kellerman said he had always wrote “compulsively from a very young age. It was always just something I loved to do.” (USCDornslife)
He began writing novels seriously but it would be nearly 10 years before his first fiction book, When the Bough Breaks (1985), was published. This was his first Alex Delaware novel. It became an instant bestseller and he has written a new book in the series virtually every year for the past 40 years. Despite the initial success of the book, Kellerman continued to work fulltime as a clinical psychologist, writing late at night in the garage while his family was sleeping. In 1990, with five best sellers “under his belt”, he gave up his successful psychology practice and concentrated on his writing career full time. When asked about the difference between writing and psychology Kellerman said, “As a psychologist I was interested in developing predictive rules about human behavior. As a novelist I’m interested in people who transgress those rules, which is why I enjoy writing crime novels.”
Jonathan has written over 45 novels. He has written two mystery novels – Double Homicide and Capital Crimes – with his wife, successful novelist Faye Kellerman. He has also co-written seven novels (so far) with his son, Jesse Kellerman.
