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Richard Dooling is a lawyer who lives in Omaha and commutes online to Bryan Cave, LLP, in St. Louis, where he specializes in developing web-based legal products. He is also the author of five books: Blue Streak (on swearing, speech codes, and other such matters) and four novels, the most recent of which is Bet Your Life (HarperCollins), an homage to noir classics such as Double Indemnity. Dooling is currently collaborating with Stephen King on a forthcoming television series, Kingdom Hospital. This interview was conducted via e-mail.

Let's start out by boldly going where most reviewers didn't. Bet Your Life is a detective story, but it's also more than that. It looks at death and damnation and the problem of belief in the modern world. Is this your most Catholic novel to date?

I begin every novel with the vow that I will not write about technology, Catholicism, or hell. As you know, I end up writing about all three. They just happen to be personal obsessions of mine. However, the next novel will not deal with any of them.

The most interesting character to me is someone who is stuck in the no man's land between Belief and Unbelief, Faith and Faithlessness. I'm capitalizing like a German, but it doesn't matter whether it's faith in a person or in God, or belief in science or whatever, it's the desperate in-between state that makes for interesting dramatic tension.

As for most Catholic novel to date? Mmm. Chapter 12 in White Man's Grave, where one of the protagonists goes to morning mass and confession for the first time in 40 years, is definitely my most Catholic chapter, but perhaps I might agree that in terms of direct references to Catholicism (as opposed to belief in the soul or Christianity), Bet Your Life has the most, simply because the main characters are all Catholics or fallen-away types.

What's you religious background?

Catholic. I wasn't educated by the Jesuits as much as I was raised by them. If they discover a Jesuit DNA someday, they will be able to just draw my blood and marvel at the 11 years of indoctrination I had and wonder if I can still hum a tune without considering man's place in the universe.

The interesting legal issue that this novel turns on is the sale of viaticals—where a third party buys the life insurance policy of a still-living but not-long-for-this-world individual at a fraction of the policy's value, and then collects when the original policy holder expires. Stepping outside your story for a minute, are viaticals a good idea?

Theoretically they are a good idea. The sensible solution to the problems inherent in what's called the "secondary market" for life insurance policies is for the companies themselves to offer what's called an Accelerated Benefits option. That way the issuer of the policy maintains control of the policy and the transactions associated with it. Otherwise, buying and selling what amounts to options on a person's life is, as one of the characters in Bet Your Life observes, "an engraved invitation to start a fraud farm."

Viaticals are legal and when closely regulated, probably a good idea, but Accelerated Benefits is a much better idea. Some companies offer this option already, and I believe the impetus came from the widespread viatical fraud that ambushed the companies in the 90s.

How long did Bet Your Life take to produce?

About six to nine months of writing and rewriting. I wanted to take a crack at a "pure story" and a noirish mystery, so I intentionally kept research to a minimum, as opposed to, say, a book like Brain Storm, which required months of research into neuroscience and the First Amendment, among other topics.

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January (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47