Preston and Child is the writing duo of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child. The authors have been working together since 1985, when Lincoln, who worked as an editor at St. Martin’s Press, edited Douglas’s book, Dinosaurs in the Attic (1986). Lincoln had visited the American Museum of Natural History and decided to commission a book about it. He hired the museum’s employee Douglas Preston to write it, and they became friends.
They began writing together in the years that followed when Douglas proposed a murder mystery, which they set in a natural history museum. Their first book, Relic, was published in 1995. Soon after, Relic was adapted into a successful feature film. They have been writing together ever since.
Preston and Child’s most successful collaboration is their Agent Pendergast series, although they have written several standalone thrillers as well as the Gideon Crew and Nora Kelly series.
The pair say that their writing process has evolved over the years. “These days we tend to work up a detailed outline together, passing it back and forth via the cloud until we’re happy with it. Then we assign sequences, or related sets of chapters, to each author. The other author later revises these chapters. That way, we tend to get four hands on just about every word.”
The two hope to go on writing books together even though they both have written books on their own. “Speaking for myself, I hope to go on writing joint books as long as I can put finger to keyboard. They’re a great deal of fun. And we’ve built up a joint universe of characters, places, and events I wouldn’t ever want to abandon,” Lincoln said on their website. Douglas answered, “I love writing the Pendergast books and working with Lincoln, who is a most excellent writing partner. I’ve learned a lot from him. It’s also rewarding to write a solo novel. We like variety in our writing lives. We both have a mortal fear of falling into a rut, of churning out the same books. We want to continually surprise our readers with something different.”
