The Rock Bottom Remainders played their last gig recently, and the guy on bass guitar knew it would be a heartbreaker. Still, Ridley Pearson was typically upbeat.

“We spent 20 years having a great time and raising $2 million for charity. It was such a labor of love.”

When talking about work, family, friends ― even his adopted city of St. Louis ― most everything seems to be a labor of love for Pearson.

His default mode is optimistic, says his friend Jim Bogart, development manager for the St. Louis County Library Foundation: “I’ve never seen his dark side, but I did see him in pain last year when he had rotator cuff surgery. Even in agony he was his usual upbeat self.”

Pearson moved to St. Louis about 12 years ago, and at 59, his star has never been higher. He may not be planning encores with the band of Remainders, but that’s because he’s so busy, he says.

He’s also basking in the afterglow of the Tony Awards for “Peter and the Starcatcher” (based on his and humorist Dave Barry’s book), counting increased sales for his Kingdom Keepers series, starting a new children’s trilogy with Barry and keeping tabs on the progress of two possible movies (both “Peter” and “Risk Agent” have been optioned and assigned screenwriters).

“His popularity is the highest it’s been,” Bogart says.

Pearson’s a writer first and foremost, but he’s actually a good musician, too, says Byrds founder Roger McGuinn.

McGuinn, who has played with the Remainders, told the Associated Press, “They’re not as bad as they claim to be,” and particularly praised Pearson along with keyboardist Mitch Albom (“Tuesdays With Morrie”) and guitarist Greg Iles (“24 Hours”).

The group, as famous as any mediocre band of popular authors could possibly be, has joked that it plays rock music as well as “Metallica writes novels.” Their groupies, they say, are librarians who love cats. The last official gig was for those groupies at the American Library Association meeting in Anaheim, Calif.

Pearson, who has played guitar since age 5 and once was in a country-western band, was a published suspense writer when a media escort asked if he wanted to start a band with other authors. Pearson didn’t personally know most of them, “the literary gods of America,” he says.

The quirky, casually changing Remainders has included Stephen King; Barbara Kingsolver; Amy Tan; Matt Groening; Scott Turow; the lit agent Kathi Kamen Goldmark (who recently died of cancer); her husband, Sam Barry, and others. It may have started as a lark, but ended up affecting Pearson’s career.

Talking from his home last week, Pearson notes that he isn’t big on networking, but becoming friends with Dave Barry allowed him to ask, “‘Hey, man, would you write this with me?’”

Their “Peter and the Starcatchers,” a book about how Peter Pan met Captain Hook, was followed by more novels. This year an adaptation hit the Broadway stage, winning five Tonys.

When the Tony nominations came out in May, Pearson leapt for joy. He responded to an email query that the play “resembles the book in that it roughly follows the plot and has all the same characters ― but what (playwright) Rick Elice has done is reinvent it all, and the two directors have realized his words and story into this constantly moving, uproariously funny two hours of magic. You leave the theater enchanted, and that is the most anyone (especially the authors) could ever ask for.”

Pearson declares he would have burned the theater down if Christian Borle hadn’t won best featured actor for playing Black Stache (the theater survived).

Just this month, the novelists’ notes accompany the annotated script by Elice for the book “Peter and the Starcatcher” (yes, “Starcatcher” went single to the stage).

Pearson also has written “The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer,” a prequel to Stephen King’s series, and adapted his book for television. So his accidental band “radically changed my career.”

Pearson’s newest novel, “The Risk Agent,” his 42nd work, takes him back, though.

“In a lot of ways it’s been a fun project because I started out writing espionage. In a way that’s what I’ve returned to.”

Set in Shanghai, “Risk Agent” introduces two protagonists whom Pearson struggles to give equal time.

One character, John Knox, is an American who worked in Iraq, runs an import-export business, and needs money to help support his disabled brother. The other is Grace Chu, a Chinese forensic accountant who has seen a bit of the Western world. Both have skills needed to solve the kidnapping of a Chinese man working with a U.S. company. Future books in the series will travel to different countries. Next up, Amsterdam.

Pearson and his wife, Marcelle, got to know Shanghai while living there for a year with their daughters, Paige, now 15, and Storey, now 13. Storey was born in China and adopted by the Pearsons, but of the four family members, she felt the least comfortable in Shanghai.

Strangers thought she could speak Chinese and would question her about why she was with the Westerners: “She was always being put on the spot,” Pearson says. “She got tired of it.”

But otherwise, Pearson loved moving in 2008 to a temporary home: “The Chinese culture is family-centric. They are so devoted to family, country, education.”

Teaching creative writing to university students, he found they worked three times as hard as Americans. And if he ever opened a map on the street, a stranger would insist on walking the family to where they needed to go.

The Chinese “are just happy,” he says. “That was a refreshing change we didn’t expect, and Marcelle and I are both world travelers.”

Living in a traditional lane house rather than a compound for foreigners, Pearson said they “were thrown from day one into an amazing world.” Leaving his office and heading down a crowded street for lunch was like walking into a Ridley Scott movie.

The family returned to St. Louis in 2009, and except for the declining number of flights at Lambert Field (“I wish American Airlines would add routes. God bless Southwest Airlines”), Pearson seems as satisfied as he was when he and his wife talked to the Post-Dispatch’s Deb Peterson.

Marcelle Pearson, an alumna of the Principia school, where she volunteers, said in February 2001, “It’s been wonderful for us here. The people in this community are so warm.”

Almost 12 years after moving from Idaho, Ridley Pearson remains enthusiastic: “We live in such a great place. You can get anywhere in 20 minutes, but you have everything ― smart, fun people, professional sports, great theater, opera, a first-rate university.”

He has served on the county library foundation’s board (now an honorary member), given and helped raise money (he and Barry get credit for the Florissant Valley branch’s teen area) and for eight years he has also supported the local chapter of the nonprofit America Scores, which teaches urban kids both poetry and soccer.

Pearson “puts a high value on reading and literacy,” says Bogart of the county library.

A national study recently showed that America Scores raises kids’ reading levels, Pearson says, counting another blessing.

“It’s just so cool. It’s just such a positive program.”

By Jane Henderson

(St. Louis Post-Dispatch)

(MCT Information Services)