The man who invented the medical mystery genre

I read my first Robin Cook as a Class 10 student and I was hooked. For a while, inspired by Laurie Montgomery and Jack Stapleton, the co-workers who become a couple while solving various medical mysteries, I considered a career as a forensic pathologist. Six months down the line, I lost my heart to Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead and Howard Roark, ultimately choosing to apply for a course in architecture. But my love for medical thrillers – and Robin Cook - didn’t wane. And over the course of a few summers, I read my way through many of his books.

The man who invented the medical thriller genre – beginning with Year of the Intern and then going on to the super-successful Coma – is a polymath: a surgeon of ophthalmology, a former Navy submarine officer, an internet entrepreneur, film producer, amateur Egyptologist, tennis player, skier, and biker. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Cook grew up in Woodside, Queens and in Leonia, New Jersey. In 1969, after his surgical residency training, he became an aquanaut, a submarine doctor, with the US Navy’s SEALAB programme. Cook wrote his first novel, Year of the Intern, while serving aboard the Polaris-type submarine USS Kamehameha.

With all the TV shows he had seen and all the books he had read about medicine suggesting that everything was fine in the medical arena – when it clearly wasn’t – Cook thought someone should write a book and make a TV series or a movie that “showed medicine with its warts, so to speak”.

In an interview with Medscape, an online platform for medical news and expert perspectives, he spoke about being disturbed when he got to medical school and saw it was quite different from what had been presented in books and on film. “I said, ‘Someday, I’m gonna write a book that’s true!’ That was the origin of why I ended up doing what I’m doing,” he said.

Cook’s first novel, which follows a young intern through the year when he trains to become a doctor even as the process threatens to “destroy him as a human being”, set the tone for the trajectory his writing career as a specialist of medical thrillers.

After his discharge from the navy, Cook undertook a second residency – in ophthalmology – at Harvard Medical School. But he had been bitten by the writing bug. Stung by the failure of his first novel, he sat himself down with a pile of best selling novels, including Jaws, to figure out the “how to write a blockbuster” formula. He also turned to Seven Days in May and Eric Ambler’s spy novels to help him crack the code.

That led to his breakthrough novel Coma, which took everyone on a thrilling journey through the dark underbelly of the health care industry. His publisher, Little Brown, gave the author a $10,000 advance.

The story of Susan Wheeler, a third-year medical student working as a trainee at Boston Memorial Hospital, and how she investigates the case of two patients who mysteriously go into comas immediately after their operations due to complications from anaesthesia was a smashing success that put his career into high gear. Coma spent a long time on the New York Times Best Seller list, reaching #6 in the fiction category. The New York Times Book Review said it was 1977’s “number one thriller of the year”, and the novel made it to The New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year list. In 1978, Michael Crichton adapted it for the big screen and it was made into a two-part television mini series in 2012.

Next, Cook wrote Sphinx (1979), about Erica Baron, a young Egyptologist investigating the mysteries of an ancient Egyptian statue in Cairo. When it failed to do well, he returned to the medical thriller formula. In Brain (1981), “Two doctors place their lives in jeopardy to find out why a young woman died on the operating table — and had her brain secretly removed.”

The author never stepped back from the formula. By now he was clear that one of his recurrent themes would be to “decry the intrusion of business in medicine”. Cook went on to write 37 worldwide best sellers and sold more than 400 million books that put the spotlight on real-world issues such as organ donation and transplantation, fertility treatment, in vitro fertilisation, genetic engineering, managed care, medical tourism, research funding, drug research, and medical malpractice. His medical mystery-thrillers changed public perception. Prior to Coma, medicine and doctors were put on the proverbial pedestal; after the thriller, there were serious questions and multiple queries about doctors and patient care.

The author chose to write these books as they gave him “an opportunity to get the public interested in things about medicine that they didn’t seem to know about. I believe my books are actually teaching people.”

From leukaemia to plagues, genetic research to psychotropic drugs, Cook’s bestsellers have definitely prompted readers to think more deeply about medical issues. Consider the plot lines of his books:

Fever (1982): Charles Martel is a brilliant cancer researcher who discovers that his own daughter is the victim of leukaemia. The cause: a chemical plant conspiracy that not only promises to kill her, but will destroy him as a doctor and a man if he tries to fight it.

Outbreak (1987): Murder and intrigue reach epidemic proportions when a devastating plague sweeps the country. Dr Marissa Blumenthal of the Atlanta Centers for Disease Control investigates — and soon uncovers the medical world’s deadliest secret.

Mutation (1989): At the forefront of surrogate parenting and genetic research, this is the explosive tale of a brilliant doctor who sought to create the son of his dreams - and invented a living nightmare.

Acceptable Risk (1995): Congressional staffer Kinnard Flannigan and Kimberly Stewart investigate the potentially dangerous side effects of a new psychotropic drug about to be approved by the FDA and find themselves up against a terrifying conspiracy of greed, intrigue, and murder.

Toxin (1998): Aided by his ex-wife, Dr Kim Regis pursues a trail of deadly evidence, uncovering complicity and guilt stretching from the slaughterhouse floor to the corporate boardroom. Racing against time before more are poisoned, the two come face-to-face with the shocking and elusive truth.

Intervention (2009): New York City medical detective Jack Stapleton investigates the promises - and deadly risks - of alternative medicine and is led deep into the heart of a religious conspiracy.

Pandemic (2018): When an unidentified, seemingly healthy young woman collapses suddenly on the New York City subway and dies upon reaching the hospital, her case is an eerie reminder for veteran medical examiner Jack Stapleton of the 1918 flu pandemic.

Borrowing from “today’s fears and tomorrow’s headlines”, Cook knows why his books are so popular: “The main reason is, we all realise we are at risk. We’re all going to be patients sometime... You can write about great white sharks or haunted houses, and you can say I’m not going into the ocean or I’m not going in haunted houses, but you can’t say you’re not going to go into a hospital.”

Cook believes writing about medical issues is a good way for the reading public to learn about the problems of medical care, ethics and research. “I actually think that fiction is more powerful than non-fiction in issues like this. If you write a [non-fiction] book on pandemics or pandemic preparedness, who reads it?”

In his recent books, Cook brought to life pandemics, which had been erased from human memory before Covid. Outbreak, Contagion, and Pandemic were inspired by the 1918 influenza outbreak, which claimed the lives of an estimated 50 million people across the world.

As a result, when Covid hit, he was not surprised. “In fact, I’ve been worried about this for 40 years,” he said, adding that a lot of other people had been worried about this, “including one of the recurrent characters in my books. His name is Jack Stapleton”.

So what’s Cooking next? Bellevue, the story of a first-year resident who experiences life-shattering visions that “reveal the truth behind some of the greatest medical advances in the history of medicine”.

Earlier this month, the author announced that he would be partnering with Euro Gang Entertainment on two new projects for film and TV: Bellevue, a film based on his forthcoming novel, and a medical procedural series starring Jack Stapleton and Laurie Montgomery.

For fans worldwide, Cook’s work is clearly just what the doctor ordered!

Teja Lele is an independent editor and writes on books, travel and lifestyle.