Being Famous

I had a dystopian nightmare. A group of us were creeping around dark alleys avoiding the authorities. The group's leader was a woman whose face was wrapped in tape with small star cut-outs. She unwrapped the tape just as the bad guys had us cornered. The sun had tanned her face in little star-shaped spots. "You have to be the one now," she said, and wrapped the tape around my face. I took off running as the authorities came and shot her.

As you can easily imagine, I was not keen to assume a role whose logical end was violent death. As soon as I was alone I began to think better of it. I peeled the tape off before it could mark my face with stars. I woke up with an enormous feeling of relief.

It was a dream about fame.

It seems to me that fame is something unpleasant to experience. My subconscious is telling me this in my sleep. You're thinking, sour grapes. But consider the truly famous. They have the same troubles that all the rest of us have, only they have them in front of everybody. Their illnesses, their failed relationships, even their cellulite appears on the front page of supermarket tabloids. Strangers feel free to insult them, even to offer them physical violence. They die with needles sticking in their arms.

Believe it or not, I was sort of famous once. A little bit famous. I didn't like it. People think it's okay to take potshots at you. You offer your work to the public, and folks you've never heard of sneeringly tell you it's no good. I'm ill-suited for that sort of life. I know, I know, you're going to tell me I should develop a thick skin. But for what? There's no money in it, not for most writers, and no respect either, anymore. I don't need to write. The people who really love me love me whether I'm writing or not. I used to have seventy fans eager to read my books, but sixty-five of them are dead and gone.

Is this an announcement that I'm quitting? Not precisely. I'm going to finish Bucker Dudley and publish it as a paperback to give to the Lambertville Free Public Library, as well as a small number of friends, nieces, and cousins. See what a cool cover I made for it. Also I'm going to continue to write this column, just to amuse myself. But as for wooing New York publishing, never again. Fame, shmame. I'll be perfectly happy to live and die in obscurity. Don't look for me on a panel at Bouchercon.

New York publishing isn't what it was thirty years ago, anyway. The meals those editors used to buy me! The handsome waiters! All I got from my last editor was a cup of bitter coffee.

© 2014 Kate Gallison

Coming Back to Life

I always liked to talk books with Tom when he worked at Murder Ink® on the Upper West Side, the best mystery bookstore in the City, Tom the most knowledgeable Mystery Man in the City. Then he went and wrote six well-published Thriller/Mysteries in his spare time. He has another six, he explains, ready to go.

Robert Knightly

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This is a story with a moral. It’s the story of a writer, well-known and respected, who fell by the wayside for several years before being granted a surprising reprieve. Once upon a time, he was a bookseller at a famous mystery bookstore, and he wrote six novels in six years that were published to general acclaim. He had many fans and admirers, and even Hollywood came calling, making a film of one of his works and optioning two others. Then, at the height of his popularity, this writer did something peculiar: he stopped. He didn’t stop writing, mind you; he merely stopped publishing. Why he did that, and what happened to turn his fortunes around, are the subjects of the tale.

I happen to know a great deal about it, because the writer in question was I. My last published novel, Scavenger, appeared in 2000, and since then many changes have taken place—in my life and in the publishing industry.

First, my life. You’ve heard of the “one-two punch” that sends a boxer to the canvas? Well, I received five punches in a row, and I was staggered. I worked for two years on a really ambitious thriller to follow Scavenger, but I picked the wrong subject, the then-unknown abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. I knew about it beforehand, from an investigative reporter friend who was working on the story in Connecticut long before it became public knowledge. I handed the manuscript to my agent just as the worldwide headlines arrived. Oops! My prophetic thriller was instantly Yesterday’s News, and no one would touch it. Two years down the drain. (First punch.) I lost my mother in 2003 and my sister a year later (second and third punches), and for a while I wasn’t able to write anything. In 2006, Murder Ink®, the bookstore where I worked for many years, closed its doors forever, so I was suddenly unemployed. (Four.) Then I parted ways with my agent of fifteen years. (Down for the count.)

I spent the next three years sitting around my Greenwich Village apartment in a bathrobe. I continued to write novel after novel, a grand total of four, but I didn’t show them to anyone. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself.

Then something wonderful happened. S. J. Rozan, my writer friend who lives near me, yanked me out of my house one day and dragged me, kicking and screaming, to a meeting of her writing group. I’d always sworn to eschew any sort of reading/commenting group situation, so this was the last thing I needed--or so I thought. But once I got there and saw how these people worked, how they helped and encouraged one another, I was hooked. I liked their company, but if I wanted to join them, I’d have to bring samples of my own work-in-progress. So I started writing in earnest again, and soon I was writing a new novel, A Penny For The Hangman. We met every two weeks, and I got involved in their work as well as my own. Next thing you know, I had a completed manuscript, and the group told me that it was time for me to go out and find a new agent.

I was lucky; I found one immediately. She knew my work and liked A Penny For The Hangman, so she took me on and began sending it around. But I’d been away for a long time, and I was unaware of the dramatic changes in our industry. Everyone I ever worked with was gone, and the new, young editors at the reconfigured publishing houses (now known as the “Big Six”) had never heard of me. Fact: A writer in his fifties who hasn’t published in years is actually in a worse position than a new kid starting out with a clean slate. Who knew?

The manuscript made the rounds for two years and racked up an impressive number of rejections from editors who obviously didn’t even look at it. And why should they? It isn’t just the industry that’s different—the really seismic change of the last decade is in the book-buying public. My thriller doesn’t have teenage vampires or shape shifters or ultra-right-wing Special Ops agents, and there isn’t a single “shade of grey” in sight, let alone fifty. What on earth was I thinking?!! I was out of step with the new reality, and I was beginning to despair, bracing myself to slink off to the sidelines once more.

Then, a few weeks ago, my agent informed me that Alibi, a new Random House line of electronic-only books, was interested in acquiring the rights. Somebody actually wanted it! But I soon learned that these “e-book only” imprints have come under a lot of fire, and with good reason. For starters, there’s no book—merely a concatenation of electronic impulses that you download to a reading device. How the hell do you bind that in Moroccan leather or autograph it in bookstores? And while they offered national advertising and the cachet of a major house, they also offered co-op contracts(!) and no advances(!!). I would never agree to those terms, so where did I fit into this?

Did I mention my new agent? And my writer friends? These two life-saving entities came to my rescue. My agent went to work, hammering out a “classic” deal with Random House, and my writer friends encouraged me to take a chance, to step out into the void where no writer has gone before. E-books are uncharted territory, they told me, the new frontier in publishing, and somebody has to be Neil Armstrong! And while you’re at it, they added, start a website (I did) and a blog (ditto) and bring back all your out-of-print titles as ebooks (double ditto). Thanks to them, I’m published again, and it feels like I’m coming back to life. Which is exactly what I’m doing.

The moral of the story: Writers need one another, and we need agents. We’re entering a brave new world of publishing, and—thanks to my agent and my writer friends—I’m in the first launch. I don’t know what I’m about to discover, but the view from here is lovely.

If you’re in my predicament, learn from my experience. Take chances. Get out of the bathrobe, get out of the house. Join a writing group. Find a good agent. And always be willing to help your fellow writers, because they’re always willing to help you.

Tom Savage

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Tom Savage is the author of four suspense novels: Precipice, Valentine, The Inheritance, and Scavenger. He also wrote two detective novels under the name T. J. Phillips, Dance of the Mongoose and Woman in the Dark. His short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and anthologies edited by Lawrence Block, Harlan Coben, and Michael Connelly. His bestselling novel, Valentine, was made into a Warner Bros. film. Raised in the Virgin Islands, he lives in New York City, where he worked for many years at Murder Ink, the world’s first mystery bookstore. His new novel, A Penny For The Hangman, will be published by Random House Alibi in 2014.

Open Pores

I introduced myself to Tom at the 1992 MWA Edgar Awards Dinner. I’d read Dark Maze and believed it the best crime novel of the year, so I brought it to the dinner for Tom’s autograph. It got the Edgar and I made a friend. Ten years later, Tom was in L.A. waiting to be discovered when he persuaded his buddy, the late David Mills, to buy our pilot script, ‘The System,’ for Aaron Spelling-TV Productions. That got us two free weekends in Hollywood working with Mills in his trailer on the set of his then ill-starred ‘King Pins,’ a gory Mexican cartel melodrama, as we revised and blackboarded our script. Spelling flew us from NYC to the Coast First Class. On arrival, the agent Tom had arranged as our representation said words to us I’ll never forget. “You’re hot in this town,” she said.

In the end, NBC passed on filming our opus, and flew us back home—Coach. We’d cooled.

Robert Knightly

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Thus begins a fog-bound Thursday in the life of Yours Truly, mystery writer of yore:

I awake, scratch myself, consider the merits of shaving (or not), drink up the newspapers and a pot of coffee, wonder where I might find a spot of cash, decide who among the people in my head are quick or dead, and wonder about a cryptic e-mail.

A decade ago, my place in the demimonde of crime literature, as I prefer to call the noble genre, still flickered, if weakly. Two decades ago, I established myself in that world on the wonderful April evening of ’92, when I collected an Edgar Allan Poe Award. Now in the year 2013, you have likely never heard of me. My last crime novel, Grief Street, was released in 1997. Its forerunners—Sea of Green, Dark Maze, Thrown-Away Child, Drown All the Dogs, and Devil’s Heaven—have been promoted to Glory, to employ the Salvation Army eulogy. There are two ways of looking at this: negatively, or positively. Which is to say, Nothing recedes like success—or, To everything there is a season.

My comrades in the writing dodge—scriveners like me, whose claims to fame are now mainly down the drain—frequently blame publishers for their plight. (To be sure, publishers deserve a measure of ill repute. As a species, they are unlovely, possessing all the imagination, romance, and élan of—pigeons. Yet they are not so beautiful against the sky.) But just as often, and to their great credit, my comrades recognize a time to move on.

A few of us, having moved on and aged with some degree of grace, harbor the hope of one more of life’s rewards before we croak—perhaps one more book that we may set upon the brag shelf. Such is how it is with me.

Presently, I compose essays for a daily online journal of literature, music, and politics—the Berlin-based CulturMag. My usual dateline is “New York, near America,” and my stuff usually involves the absurd behavior of a fading empire. I am a foreign correspondent in my own country. Besides this, I slowly labor toward completion of Lovers & Corpses, which I think of as a novel with murder. The book involves a minimum of shaving, what my German colleagues call Gesäß aus Eisen (buttocks of iron), and a number of choices regarding who shall live to tell a tale and who shall die trying—and more importantly, why.

The tale concerns a burned-out cop who evolved as a burned-out journalist. Since I came within inches of becoming a cop as a young man, I am able to imagine myself as the former character. And having spent several decades in American corporate media, I know whereof I speak as regards the latter.

Should Lovers and Corpses sound rather downbeat, I hasten to add my happiness on discovering that I retain the Writer’s Soul: still, I have need of fiction’s ingredients—a cast of characters, a ripping plot, an alter ego—to sort through the chapters of my own true life.

Good cops, good journalists, and good writers walk around with their pores open. That way, everything gets under the skin. Most people don’t like feeling itchy all the time; as mentioned, though, I scratch a lot. In true life, things much stranger than fiction will occur. This very drab Thursday morning, for instance, I opened an e-mail message under the subject line, “GET BACK TO ME ASAP.” It reads, word for mangled word—(and I swear, I am not making this up):

…Someone you call a friend wants you dead by any means and the person have spent a lot of money on this. The person also came to us and told me that he want you dead and he provided us with your name, picture, and other necessary informations we needed about you. So I sent my boys to track you down and they have carried out the necessary investigation needed for the operation on you, and they have done that but I told them not to kill you that I will like to contact you and see if your life is important to you or not since their findings show that you are innocent…

If Lovers & Corpses ever sees the light of a publication day, and should you be willing to plunk down twenty-five dollars or so for your very own copy, you will recognize the foregoing as an excerpt from a larger fulmination of menace.

And know that beyond the obvious grift, the e-mailer’s lie could be a truth somewhere in time.

Thomas Adcock

Jumping Off the Merry-Go-Round

Kenneth Wishnia teaches writing, literature and other deviant forms of thought at Suffolk Community College in Brentwood, Long Island, where he is an Associate Professor of English.His first novel, 23 Shades of Black, was nominated for the Edgar and the Anthony Awards and made Booklist’s Best First Mystery list, and was followed by four other novels, including Soft Money, which Library Journal listed as one of the Best Mysteries of the Year, and Red House, which was a Washington Post Book World “Rave” Book of the Year in 2002. His short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Murder in Vegas, Queens Noir, and elsewhere.

My career trajectory has landed me on more “Retooling in Mid-Career” panels than I’d care to mention. At Bouchercon 2010, I was on a panel with the cheery title of “Deathwatch: Keeping a Series Going or Knowing When to Stop,” which was held at 8:30 AM, no less. (Fortunately Parnell Hall was there to lift our spirits with one of his signature comical ditties.)

This is a provocative subject, considering that I published five novels in six years in my Edgar-nominated series before I jumped off the book-a-year merry-go-round to start working on a Jewish-themed historical thriller that took me nearly seven years to research and write (The Fifth Servant, Morrow 2010). And don’t be fooled by the “five novels in six years” line, either. It took me 15 years to write those books.

But I have no interest in plowing the same field again, even though, at nearly every reading or book event that I do for The Fifth Servant, someone asks me when the sequel is coming out. Well, there is no sequel. Why not? Because it would suck. (That’s a technical term we writers use.) Because I put absolutely everything I had into this one book, and I would just be watering down the recipe if I tried to stretch it to another book. I wish some others would do the same.

I have to admit that, although I respect and admire and--yes--envy my friends and colleagues who have made the transition to writing full time, the recent work of some mighty famous big shots has disappointed me. Several recent titles by big-ticket authors (no names, please) have started out fabulously--because after all, they were written by masters of the craft--before petering out with run-of-the-mill or paint-by-numbers second halfs. And I’m beginning to ask why I should be expected to spend time and money reading a book that the author hasn’t thrown him/herself into utterly and completely.

The answer, of course, is that the system of commercial publication thrives on such production habits.

No disrespect to the folks who are paying their rent by writing yet another installment in a series that, as one writer admitted to me, will not outlive her. I’d love to be paying my rent by full-time writing, too. But since Suffolk Community College is paying my rent (you know, the day job), even though it takes up a great deal of my time, it has also allowed me to write whatever I want, to leap into the unknown, and to risk being called a fool for trying something different. And thanks to that, I’ve grown tremendously as a writer. I’d rather write a handful of books that will still be read in a hundred years than a string of commercial hits that might make me rich, but will soon be forgotten.

Perhaps it’s fortunate that I feel this way, since I’ve been forced into this position by fate and my own missteps when I was younger and much more naïve about the business of publishing. But at this point I wouldn’t give it up for anything.

Which is good, since I appear to have no choice.

--Kenneth Wishnia