Today Stephen J. Cannell is a best-selling novelist (“Hollywood Tough” and “The Viking Funeral”) and the Emmy Award-winning creator of numerous successful television series, including “The Rockford Files,” “Baretta,” “The Commish,” “Wiseguy” and “21 Jump Street.”

But at the age of 9, he could barely read.

“I was put back three times in school,” Cannell admits. “I had terrible difficulties reading. I still do.”

Cannell is dyslexic, a possibly congenital condition he shares with his oldest son.

“People don’t understand that dyslexia is just like having blue eyes. It’s something you’re born with. Scientists are now finding that dyslexics process words in a different part of their brain than others do. So there’s a big argument raging about whether we should retrain dyslexics so that they can be like everyone else. My argument is — should we have retrained Einstein, who was such a raging dyslexic that he flunked out of school . . . and had to paint his door red because he couldn’t even find his own house?”

Like Einstein, Cannell never let his dyslexia keep him from doing what he wanted, which was to write.
“Writing isn’t affected by dyslexia,” he explains. “Writing is download, not upload,4 like reading is. Yes, my spelling is atrocious, but these days I have people who will fix that for me.”

Perhaps the oddest thing about Cannell’s writing career is that he didn’t begin writing novels until 20 years after he’d made his mark in Hollywood — and become very, very rich.

“It was never about money,” he says. “I just loved to create. I don’t see writing — or creating a television series — as work. The way I look at it is, I get up every day and play in the sandbox of ideas. It’s just fun. The hardest part of the whole writing thing is the inevitable book tour. At the beginning that’s fun, too, because I stand up in front of a crowd of people and talk about me. But at the end of the tour, I am so bored by me!”

Cannell is on the road now in support of his newest best seller, “Runaway Heart.” Like his other suspense novels, “Runaway Heart” is about a lovable character who just can’t seem to stay out of trouble. In this case, the lovable character is windmill-tilting attorney Herman Stockmire, who is fighting so hard to save an endangered butterfly that he ignores the pains in his chest.

The butterfly problem soon takes a back seat to a much larger one as Herman and his attorney daughter Susan find themselves involved in a much more dangerous case. A biotech company named Gen-A-Tech has created a horrifying new species it plans to use as the soldiers of the future. And one of them decides it doesn’t like Herman.

“You have to like your own characters or it just doesn’t work,” Cannell says. “I really like Herman’s spirit, and I like his tragic flaws. He can’t see the difference between a good lawsuit and a bad one. He’s Don Quixote, and his poor daughter has to travel along with him, cleaning up the messes he leaves behind. But they’re both trying so hard to do the right thing.”

Stephen J. Cannell

What: The author discusses and signs “Runaway Heart”
Where: Poisoned Pen, 4014 N. Goldwater Blvd., Scottsdale
When: Noon Saturday
How much: Free
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