Bestselling author Jeroen Windmeijer puts Leiden on the map with his thrillers
Alumnus interview image: Martin Dijkstra
It’s only been six years since bestselling author Jeroen Windmeijer (56) decided to become a full-time writer. Since then, he’s put Leiden and the university on the map with his gripping thrillers. From his desk on the Rapenburg canal, he now travels the world with his steadily growing body of work.
Back in 2001, Windmeijer successfully defended his PhD on Ecuadorian street musicians. Visibly moved, his proud parents walked through the atrium of Leiden’s Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences when past and present collided. Their son had fought for his life in this very building 30 years earlier.
Jeroen was just five months old when meningitis struck. The doctors in Delft had all but given up on him (‘We’ll be preparing a casket by the end of the day’, one reportedly said), but, unwilling to give up hope and against the doctors’ orders, his parents rushed him to Building 5 at the Leiden Academic Hospital. ‘Every day, my mum secretly fed me Brinta porridge and lit a candle in the morning. At night, she dabbed Lourdes water on my forehead. She firmly believed the Virgin Mary had saved my life.’
Despite this, Catholicism wasn’t a major force in his childhood. ‘I grew up in Pijnacker during the tail-end of the religious divide. We had our own Catholic baker, butcher and grocer, and come winter, we had snowball fights with the Protestant kids.’ Religion was just a backdrop. ‘Church on Sunday morning and football in the afternoon. We didn’t even have a bible at home.’
His father was a German teacher at a secondary school in Delft and his mother earned pin money as a dressmaker but had her hands full juggling the family and the laundry of five sporty sons. ‘She scoured the newspapers for coupons – well worth it, seeing as we got through three loaves of bread and three kilos of potatoes a day.’ The brothers disappeared outdoors after school: fishing, jumping over ditches, playing football. ‘Safe and idyllic – not exactly juicy material for a novel.’
Popemobile
That safety extended to his secondary school, Stanislas College in Delft. His fourth-year class had just 15 students – a close-knit group of bookworms who’d attend lectures at Delft University of Technology for fun. ‘For our end-of-year list, we could pick 25 titles from the 60 books we’d already read.’
At 15, he began to pull away, leaving football, where he increasingly felt like the odd one out, and the Catholic church. ‘That was triggered by Pope John Paul II’s response to the 1982 assassination attempt. He said the Virgin Mary had deflected the bullets, but he spent the next few years in a bulletproof popemobile . I thought: if even the Pope is hedging his bets, how solid is this faith?’ A period of reflection followed, with Windmeijer taking up meditation and yoga. ‘The yoga teacher was Hindu but she also gave me a book about Jesus. She wasn’t dogmatic. I still meditate for three quarters of an hour every day.’
Sheltered yet free
After school, Jeroen moved to Amsterdam to study philosophy. ‘It was liberating: I could dress how I wanted without sideways glances.’ But while he shed the constraints of village life, he also missed its warmth.‘I hardly went out, didn’t drink or smoke, and led a solitary existence in my room. When visiting old classmates in Leiden it felt different: a city with a small-town feel. Sheltered yet free.’
After a gap year on a kibbutz and picking grapes in France, he chose to study Cultural Anthropology in Leiden, taking over a fellow grape picker’s room on Morsweg. He hit the ground running, joining the RCL football club and studying in the library from nine to five, before socialising with classmates at de Bak or the Augustinus canteen. His free time was spent at the dartboard at WW, on the Augustinus dancefloor, where he was a member for a short while, or on the pavement café at Meneer Jansen. ‘And of course, at LVC, the forerunner of Nobel. I found my people in the alternative scene.’
In the early 90s, he began dating the president of the Icthus Christian student association. He even joined the association and joined her in door-to-door evangelism – a humbling experience. ‘One time, on the Rapenburg, a student chucked a bucket of water on me from a first-floor window’, he remembers. “I’ll baptise you again”, he shouted. I had to laugh.’
His religious reawakening lasted about five years. While on field research in rural Bolivia, he lived with an indigenous community at 4,000 metres altitude. ‘I slept on straw mattresses in a storeroom and picked up my post in La Paz once a month. God was the only one I could speak Dutch with.’
He became godfather to his host family’s son, and at the boy’s christening witnessed an Italian priest chide the community for mixing Christianity with their traditional nature worship. ‘Pachamama is about reciprocity, about not taking more than can be given. I thought that it was beautiful but the priest thought otherwise and raged, “You’ll burn in hell”.’
Back in the Netherlands, Jeroen recounted the experience to a pastor, who, to his dismay, sided with the priest, as did some elders. Disillusioned, Windmeijer began his PhD at the Centre for Non-Western Studies in 1995.
Street musicians
What remained was an endless fascination with early Christianity and the New Testament. ‘There are always three books on my bedside table: a novel, a thriller and one on religion. All three also appear in my books.’ For his doctorate, he studied the street musicians from Otavalo in Ecuador who criss-crossed Western Europe. ‘Back then the 1990s, you could stay in one European country for three months, and then move to another. EU rules have made that impossible and you rarely see these colourful musicians now.’
He received his PhD in 2001 for his dissertation on ‘ethnicity as strategy’. It was republished three years later for a general audience as Poncho’s, panfluiten en paarden-staarten (Ponchos, pan pipes and ponytails). Writing for a living still felt out of reach, even though he wrote travel diaries. ‘Coming from a modest background played a role. Writers were gods on Olympus. I didn’t see myself among them.’
He worked at Kooyker bookshop – where he met his partner of 21 years and the mother of his daughter (born in 2006) – and later as a tour guide for the Djoser travel company in countries including Egypt, Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Venezuela. And he spent six years teaching Dutch as a second language, studied world religions and, after a one-year postdoctoral religious studies teacher training course, became a ‘non-religious religion and social studies teacher’ at Bonaventuracollege and Visser ’t Hooft Lyceum secondary schools in Leiden.
‘Why not set a thriller in Leiden?’
The breakthrough came when he read Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. ‘Why not set a thriller in Leiden? There’s no proof Peter is buried in Rome’, he thought. ‘What if he were laid to rest in our city instead?’ He began his research, found gaps in the research and came up with a main character, a lecturer at Leiden University, who uncovers a great secret together with a student. As in all his thrillers, others try to keep that secret at all costs, with deadly consequences. ‘But the murder is not the main strand of the story. That’s what sets my books apart from other thrillers.’
He works with military precision: three months of research, three months writing, three months for editing and three for design and printing. While one book nears publication, he’s already researching the next.
His first book, De bekentenissen van Petrus (St Peter’s Mystery), was published by Leiden’s Primavera Pers, and initially only sold at local bookshops De Kler and Kooyker. Within two weeks, a thousand copies had flown off the shelves and continued to do so. A bookseller at De Kler tipped off Harper Collins Holland, and Windmeijer’s international career took flight. Over the past decade, he’s written five trilogies: three set in Leiden and Delft, two in about Bolivia and Peru.
Jeroen Windmeijer’s books often imbue Leiden’s historic landmarks with a sense of mystery and are set against the backdrop of academic life. To date, over 350,000 copies have been sold and his religious thrillers – as he calls them – have been translated into more than five languages.
‘I was finally able to quit teaching six years ago. It’s great to work from a rented attic room on the Rapenburg, writing nine to five, enjoying the view of the stunning historic gardens. It’s like when I used to go to the library every day. I don’t wait for inspiration; I find it through disciplined work.’
Though not classed as literary fiction in the Netherlands, his work is viewed differently abroad. ‘In the UK, for instance, thrillers are given more literary credit. But I don’t lose sleep over that. I get inspiration from my contacts around the world. My inbox is full of emails telling me how my books have affected people. I also see that in the talks I give. I meet everyone from builders to nurses to Bible study groups and the theology professor who told me Dan Brown wants to smash sacred cows, whereas I want to dust them off with some unlikely insights.’
Lourdes
Will he ever put himself at the centre of a book? ‘I’m always there somewhere. My main characters are a bit like me: curious and conflict-avoidant people. Jan Willem Pijnacker, the main character in De Offers (The Sacrifices), is even a direct reference. But it’s true, I do keep an emotional distance. That may change in my new project, a road trip I’m going on to Lourdes, in search of the origins of that bottle of water that once saved my life, so the story goes. I still credit Leiden for that, but perhaps my dear late mother will change my mind.’
This article appears in the May edition of Leidraad alumni magazine.