Ellen Gray: 'Rizzoli & Isles' author Tess Gerritsen prefers to keep writing books

RIZZOLI & ISLES. 10 tonight, TNT.

WITH THE premiere tonight of TNT's "Rizzoli & Isles," Tess Gerritsen becomes the latest best-selling author to see her work adapted for television.

It's a club whose members include Stephen King (Syfy's "Haven" is just his latest TV project), Kathy Reichs (Fox's "Bones"), Candace Bushnell ("Sex and the City") and James Patterson ("Women's Murder Club"), to name a few.

Not to mention Richard Castle, the fictional title character of ABC's "Castle," who plays poker with Patterson and whose ghostwritten book, "Heat Wave," cracked the New York Times best-seller list last fall.

How did Gerritsen, who's been writing books for more than 20 years, react to that? "Maybe I should be fictionalized, then I'd do better," she said, laughing, during an interview in Philadelphia earlier this month.

As it is, her publisher is "thrilled," Gerritsen said, to have homicide detective Jane Rizzoli (Angie Harmon) and medical examiner Maura Isles (Sasha Alexander) introduced to an audience of millions of potential new readers.

"I think of all media, television is the most powerful when it comes to selling books," Gerritsen said. "Because when you have a feature film, yeah, there's a rush. But then after that month is over and the movie goes out of release, that's it."

A project like "Rizzoli & Isles" "is something you can't pursue. It's something that comes to you. . . . I like to call it fairy dust. And it happened without my having to do anything," after "a producer who'd been reading the books" optioned the books because he loved the characters.

Gerritsen, who's already written eight popular thrillers featuring Rizzoli and Isles - the latest, "Ice Cold," was published last month - plans to continue directing their lives on the printed page, leaving their TV personas to executive producer Janet Tamaro, whose credits include stints on "Bones" and "CSI: NY."

"I think of this as a parallel universe, the TV show and my books," Gerritsen said. "The important thing to me is that they have taken the basic personalities of these characters and have translated them very well."

Gerritsen's readers may recognize plot points in the show's first two episodes but are likely to notice differences in Rizzoli and Isles themselves - particularly in their relationship.

"In the books, it's wary. They don't really understand each other. They don't really necessarily like each other to begin with because they're such different women," Gerritsen said.

Over the course of the books, "they sort of become more attached to each other. . . . I think they put the bonding in quite a bit earlier in the series. They just jumped right into it."

In a phone interview last month, Harmon, who also played a homicide detective in ABC's "Women's Murder Club" - based on Patterson's best-sellers - insisted she looks exactly like the Rizzoli on the page.

"I love Jane, and I love playing her. A lot of the roles I've played through my career have been sort of minidress rehearsals for this one," she said.

Told that Harmon considers herself a dead ringer for the rumpled Rizzoli, Gerritsen laughed.

"Except for her looks," she said. "I think that she's got the character right down pat. At heart, she's a pretty aggressive person."

As for Alexander's Isles, "I think they've softened her up a little bit. They've made her less dark, certainly. In the books, Maura Isles is very dark, very moody, very troubled."

Indeed, the brilliant but socially awkward Isles of "Rizzoli & Isles" feels a bit like Emily Deschanel's character in "Bones," or even, I suggested to Gerritsen, like someone with a mild case of Asperger's syndrome.

"You know what is interesting about that? I created Maura Isles back in 2002 . . . and when Janet Tamaro . . . met with me for the second time, she looked at me and she said, 'Maura Isles has got Asperger's, doesn't she?' And I thought, 'Wow,' " said Gerritsen, adding: "The reason I think that's weird is because Maura Isles is really - I feel that she's me," noting that she sometimes feels the same "discomfort with other people."

Not that it shows.

"My husband, luckily, says, 'Now remember, you must always ask about people's children.' "

She laughed.

"So I have these little things that I remember, that I tick off in my head."

Like Isles, Gerritsen grew up on the West Coast and moved to New England. Both are doctors, but Gerritsen, who said she's known she wanted to write since she wrote her first novel at 7, hasn't practiced in 20 years, having stopped when her two sons were young because she and her husband, also a physician, were having trouble finding child care.

"Because my dad's Chinese-American, and they're very concrete, he said, 'There's no money to be made in literature.' So he told me to go into the sciences. And I was a good girl. And I did what Daddy said. And that's how I ended up being a doctor. But you know you just can't stamp out that desire to tell stories." *

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