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As host of CBS' "Late Late Show," Craig Ferguson already keeps nearly 2 million Americans up late five nights a week.
And with the publication last week of "Between the Bridge and the River" (Chronicle Books, $24.95), a serio-comic page-turner with overtones of magical realism - whose characters include a Scottish religious-TV host, psychiatrist Carl Jung and the illegitimate and unacknowledged son of Frank Sinatra - he might add some fans whose sets are usually turned off before midnight.
Ferguson's first novel may surprise those who haven't already seen past the "cheeky wee monkey" endearments to the thoughtful, complicated guy increasingly on display in his nightly monologues, but it's likely to be welcomed by those who have - or who, like Ferguson, are more likely to spend their late nights reading.
"I read fiction, I read literature, I read the Russians and I read American writers and Irish writers. Strangely enough, I tend to read blokes, I suppose. I do read a lot," he said in a phone interview.
"I end every day with a book," often reading after his son goes to bed, he said. "It's what I do, I guess, instead of hitting Bungalow 8 - I crack the spine of a book."
Ferguson isn't the first late-night talk-show host to write something longer than a monologue. Jay Leno's name is on several books, and the late Steve Allen, who hosted "The Tonight Show" from 1954 to `57, wrote more than 50. But Ferguson seems to have done it in spite of the TV gig, not because of it.
"I think of myself really as a writer, anyway," said Ferguson, 43, who wrote the screenplays for two of his movies. "I don't know that I even think of myself yet as a late-night talk-show host ... I'm at my worst when I think of myself."
"I wrote the bulk of it, maybe 80 percent of it ... before I got the job," he said. "Because to write a novel and do a show like this would be hard."
Nevertheless, he's already begun the second installment of what he envisions as a trilogy, "The Sphinx of the Mississippi," to feature some of the same characters but centering on "a romance between a catatonic stroke victim and a crow ... but it takes a long time to explain how they fell in love," he said.
Certainly longer than the average monologue.
"Between the Bridge and the River" - the title's meaning becomes clearer as the book goes along - began with a "crisis of faith," Ferguson said.
"I wrote it at a time when I was questioning a lot of things in my life. I was out of work, I was getting divorced, I didn't want to make movies anymore," he said. "For a long time I'd been an atheist, because I'd grown up in an atmosphere of sectarian violence," but he found himself re-examining his position on God, too.
"The whole book, I guess, is a stumbling toward an idea of God," he said. "It's the most honest thing I've ever done because I didn't edit myself."
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Ellen Gray: graye@phillynews.com
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(c) 2006, Philadelphia Daily News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.
