COMMERCIAL APPEAL
OCTOBER 1, 1999
A Turn toward Fresh Thrills:
Medical novelist finds change the best tonic for career.
By Peggy Burch

The door behind her was still closing as Lee-Ann's hand closed around the ice pick in her bag. A heartbeat later, her feet thudding on the stairs, she closed in.

Hearing the urgency in Lee-Ann's approach, Greta Dunn turned and looked up. Without hesitating, Lee-Ann brought the ice pick down in a looping overhand stroke…

It's shortly after 8 Monday morning, and the author of the mayhem above is standing beside an overhead projector in a classroom full of medical students, using blue, red, green and black markers on the classroom board to illustrate what he's saying about cells. Occasionally he writes helpful notes, such as "zonula occludens" or "junctional complex." He's Dr. Donaldson, professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the University of Tennessee, Memphis.

He's also D.J. Donaldson, author of the Andy Broussard/Kit Franklyn mystery series. Broussard is a medical examiner, Franklyn is a criminal psychologist, and they figure out the causes of gruesome deaths in New Orleans under titles including Cajun Nights, Blood on the Bayou, No Mardi Gras for the Dead, Louisiana Fever, New Orleans Requiem and Sleeping With the Crawfish.

And now he's Don Donaldson, writer of the medical thriller, Do No Harm, available this month in a paperback Jove Book, from The Berkley Publishing Group division of Penguin Putnam.

The switch to writing thrillers is a meditated step in the career Donaldson is plotting. He's not content with his small corner stall in the mystery market.

"There have never been more talented writers in the mystery field than there are now," he says. "At some mystery conventions there's one writer for every five fans."

The editor of Detecting Women pointed out in the second edition of the reader's guide to mystery series written by women that 200 new titles came out in 1993 and another 200 came out in 1994. The second edition included 558 authors and 3,595 series titles.

"There are paraplegic detectives, quilting mysteries, dry cleaning mysteries," Donaldson says wearily.

The field of medical thrillers, where such writers as Robin Cook, Tess Gerritsen and Michael Palmer operate, is less populated.

"Number one, not many people can do it," Donaldson says.

His agent, Nancy Yost, of Lowenstein Associates in Manhattan, says not many people have writing and storytelling skills and a working grasp of current biotechnology.

"A lot of good nonfiction writers can address biotechnology issues, but seeing them applied in a real-person situation makes the theoretical come alive. You think, 'Oh my God, this could happen' ", Yost said

Berkley Publishing clearly thinks Donaldson has pulled it off, his agent says. "They're publishing (Do No Harm) in a lead position with national advertising and spots on 1,600 radio stations."

"The scientific information is really exceptional and it's a gripping story as well," said Natalee Rosenstein, senior executive editor at Berkley. "We have high hopes for it."

The protagonist of Do No Harm is a pediatric resident at a Memphis Hospital who's trying desperately to diagnose the cause of her 5-year old nephew's sudden paralysis when the story begins. She can't, and she and the boy's mother turn to a New Orleans based surgeon who has had remarkable success with such cases, but who is evasive about how his miracle surgery works. His young patients suffer various strange side effects, and as the resident pursues the medical clues she finds a treacherous pattern in the surgeon's wake. A hired goon who's a master of disguises and a maniacally jealous nurse help to litter the novel's landscape with dead bodies.

The way Donaldson's doctors work and the way people die or respond to medical treatment and drugs in his stories get great reviews from the audience that's potentially his toughest: other doctors.

"I've been there for autopsies and I'm pretty familiar with the medical part of what he writes about," said Dr. Louis Boxer, ardent Broussard/Franklyn fan and Philadelphia anesthesiologist. "The stories and settings he recreates bring to life not only life on the bayou but life in the dissecting room…When he talks about a lot of the drugs and how they affect the body, he's very true to the facts."

"There's one thing about Don Donaldson," said Dr. Hugh Berryman, Memphis forensic anthropologist: "When he writes a book, he goes to extreme effort to make sure it's accurate, and not only the science of it, but the sights and sounds and odors."

One of Berryman's cases involving a skeleton that required identification after it turned up in a Memphis backyard supplied the opening scene in one of Donaldson's mysteries.

"The lady, the owner of that property, was clearing some shrubs and weeds and discovered that she had had company for a number of years," Berryman said, recalling how the real-life remains were discovered. The lot number on a tube of toothpaste in a pocket of clothing helped him date the death.

Donaldson used some of those details in No Mardi Gras for the Dead and gave his first copy of that book to a librarian at UT-Memphis for a display. The next day, she told the author, "That was Bernice's body."

What the librarian meant was that the skeleton had been found by her aunt and co-worker, Bernice Richardson, when a landscaper was clearing her yard with a small tractor. Richardson says she was in the house that November day in 1986 when the workman called out to her that he'd found a skull, and she immediately called the police.

"You're not supposed to use coincidences in books because it makes them unbelievable, but life is full of them," Donaldson said. "The first person in Memphis who read the book knew the person the book was about."

Donaldson makes use of medical resources surrounding him at his day job. "I draw unmercifully on my colleagues," he says, a statement he repeats in his Do No Harm acknowledgements. For instance, since his heroine was a third-year pediatric resident, Donaldson followed Dr. Ginger Coreil's path around Le Bonheur Children's Medical Center during her third-year residency.

And not many fiction writers can say, as Donaldson can, "there's a guy just down the hall working on brain stem cells."

Dr. Dennis Steindler is among researchers who have isolated adult brain stem cells, grown them in the laboratory and prompted them to mature into cell types that constitute the human brain. Their work was reported this year in the journal Experimental Neurology. Steindler invented the term brain marrow, and permitted one of Donaldson's characters to coin the phrase in the novel. "Steindler read the book and approved," Donaldson says.

During his mystery-writing days, Donaldson asked Memphis homicide detectives to take him along on a murder investigation. "I went to a really great one," he says. They arrived on the scene after a 3 a.m. call, and found a man on the floor in a pool of blood with his throat severely cut and a knife beside him. A woman in the house was taken down to the police station and questioned, but the case finally was judged a suicide. Donaldson illustrates professional detachment deftly when he says of the victim, "When the people came to take him away to the morgue, he was stuck to the floor in his blood. I held the bag of his belongings while they got him up. Then on the way down to the station, we stopped at McDonald's…"

He has made regular visits to the forensics center to watch autopsies, which help provide details in his books.

Do No Harm, he says, apparently without intending a pun, is "on the cutting edge of science. It's pushed just a little, but not so far as to be science fiction."

Donaldson, 59, grew up in Ohio and went to the University of Toledo for his undergraduate degree. He earned his PhD in human anatomy at Tulane University and the five years of graduate school in New Orleans along with his many subsequent visits inspire the bayou-rich settings in his mystery series.

Donaldson decided to start writing in his mid-40's because, he says, "Life wasn't exciting anymore. From that day to this it's been a passion because it's so hard."

He says his wife, June, provides useful advice, especially with emotional aspects of his work-" I'll write a scene and she'll say, '' I don't feel it'." His mother also works on his behalf. "She goes to all the bookstores and if she sees my books with the spine out, she pushes the other books back and turns mine face out. That's her job."

Donaldson said his second medical thriller, which he's called Conceptus, is already being considered by the publisher. And it's unlikely that he will return to telling tales of his mystery-solving crime team. "I did it for 10 years. If I had to guess, I'd say that's it," he said of the six Broussard/Franklyn books.

"That's what scared me," said Boxer, the anesthesiologist in Philadelphia, when he heard "D.J." had written a medical thriller. He'll miss the old series characters.

"I like Kit Franklyn the best," Boxer said of Donaldson's fictional psychologist. "She's really an endearing character. She's trying to make her way in the world of men and she has a great mentor who's taken her under his wing in Andrew Broussard."