H.U. Sky, Private Eye
The Success of a Mystery, the Mystery of a Success
By David Heilbroner
It looked as if a serial killer had been at work. Or worse, a spree
killer on a world-class rampage. The innocent victims lay in piles, scattered
around the room with a carelessness that indicated the most ruthless indifference
to the heartache and struggle that had brought them there. And yet their
outward appearance showed surprisingly little violent intent. Their spines
were uncracked. A few wore jackets that were still crisp. These were just
jettisoned souls, throwaways at the end of the line. The only indicia of
motive for the killings showed on the large green signs the killer had
left hanging from the acoustic tile ceiling. The sign left no doubt about
the cold-blooded calculus that accounted for such carnage: REMAINDERED
BOOKS: $1.
Peter Lance, LA'71, makes a painfully close fit for what the FBI might
call the thriller-victim profile. Like countless writers turning out mystery
or suspense novels who harbor dreams of million-dollar advances, the best-seller
list, and fat film deals, Lance thought he had the game figured.
In 1986, Lance left ABC News, where he'd been logging 100,000 miles
a year on the road, and was in the midst of a divorce. His goal then, as
he tells me, was simple: "What can I do where I can live in one town,
make this kind of money, and not sell heroin?"
He moved to Hollywood and in a few years racked up writing credits for
the likes of Wiseguy and Miami Vice. Thinking he was ready for the final
career break into novels, Lance brought all his mass-market savvy to bear.
He began with a seemingly perfect thriller protagonist: macho firefighter
Eddie Burke, a man with a "chip on his shoulder the size of a Buick."
And who can hate a firefighter? Especially one sensitive enough to risk
his life for a crack baby by page five. Next, he threw in lots of graphic
sex (four scenes of sadomasochistic thrills by page twenty) and spiked
the incendiary mix with enough arson jargon for the most avid Tom Clancy
technophile. Last came the unstoppable archarsonist "Superman"
and beautiful heiress Dr. Caroline Drexel.
In two intense months during the summer of 1995, he cranked out First
Degree Burn, a book based on a screenplay Lance had written not long before.
Like so many hopefuls, Lance felt ready to go mano a mano with the big
players: Grisham, Turow, King, Koontz, Cornwall.
And why not? There are only three dozen or so such literary superstars
and in the fundamentally democratic world of publishing, anyone is free
to try and join their ranks. All you need is time and a typewriter.
Then came Lance's reality check. Although the TV scriptsmith-turned-novelist
got an agent from the powerhouse International Creative Management, the
best deal he could swing as a first-time author was a disappointing $8,000
advance from Berkley Publishing Group. There wouldn't even be a hardcover
edition.
But Lance persisted. Reasoning that a publisher with such a small stake
in an unknown couldn't be relied upon to hawk his work properly, Lance
ponied up $40,000 of his own cash in hopes of buying his way out of the
writers' shark tank. He launched a Web site, mailed hundreds of complimentary
copies, bagged bookstore owners for signings, hired a $100-a-day assistant,
and hit up every literary celebrity he'd ever met for a promotional blurb.
Result? Nine months later, Lance at least has shipped his first printing
of 55,000 books to the stores. But with royalties at fifty cents a copy,
he'll still be well in the red even if no books are returned. And worst
of all, try to find someone (apart from firefighters whom Lance targeted
with advertising and promotional signings) who's even heard of the book.
Yet despite stories like Lance's, the thriller field still beckons to
those with literary and financial aspirations. For the most talented, the
money is astronomical. Author Patricia Daniels Cornwall, to give just one
example, recently earned $17 million for three as-yet-unwritten books featuring
her heroine Kay Scarpetta.
Making the prospect more alluring, if more frustrating, writing a successful
thriller in the detective, horror, and psychological suspense genres looks
easy enough. Just pick up one of those best-seller "airplane"
books off the newsstand rack. With wafer-thin characters, predictably overheated
plots, and a veneer of techno-speak for authenticity, it seems anybody
with enough drive could be the next face on the Barnes & Noble carrying
bag.
Of course, anybody who's actually tried writing a thriller (this writer
included) knows better. With 52,000 new titles coming out every year and
hundreds of frustrated "literary" writers deciding to sell out
and try their hand at a pageturner, it's a crowded field, to say the least.
Even entrants like Peter Lance, with a legal, journalistic, and Hollywood
background, don't earn anything close to minimum wage from wary publishers.
It's all the more amazing, then, that over the years four writers from
the Northeastern faculty and student body have made it past the initial
hurdles to publish multiple thrillers. Three of them-Robert Parker, Marissa
Piesman, and Kate Flora-have written complete mystery series. Professor
Gary Goshgarian is poised to sell his fourth stand-alone thriller, arguably
an even more difficult task. By any measure the number of N.U. names in
the field is unexpectedly high.
And as the police-procedural novel cliché goes: This is their
story.
There is no mystery about who heads the list here. At sixty-four, Robert
Parker has published twenty-eight novels. He has enjoyed a best-seller
a year for the past fourteen years, fully qualifying him for coveted brand-name
status, the publishing-world equivalent of Hollywood stardom. His works
have been serialized for television and sold in dozens of countries, and
he makes a hobby out of negotiating Hollywood film deals. Parker, a distinctive
figure with his beer belly, black strip mustache, and tough-guy jowls,
is recognized on the street in virtually every city in the country. He
declines to make public the current advance he receives from his publisher,
but a rough calculation indicates that his per-book take exceeds the total
income he would have made to date had he kept teaching English literature
at Northeastern.
I meet Parker in his Victorian home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which
is undergoing its third renovation. Pearl the Wonder Dog joins us in the
crimson-walled comfort of Parker's new office. Parker is a big man and
his voice resonates with a pleasing overtone of gravel, the kind of voice
you expect to find in a good film noir detective.
Despite his reputation as the inheritor of the Raymond Chandler hard-boiled
tradition, Parker immediately makes clear that he dislikes being categorized
as a genre writer. "The difference between me and William Faulkner
is not that he didn't write thrillers and I do," he says. "It's
that he had a greater imagination than I do. Duke Ellington said, 'There's
two kinds of music: good and bad.' I am inclined to think the same thing
about writing." He pauses for a moment. "I'm trying for good.
Faulkner managed great."
Parker-who spends his "life in T-shirts and sweatpants"-is
as plainspoken about his successful existence as he is about virtually
everything else. In this way, at least, he bears an uncanny resemblance
to his most famous recurring lead character, the tart-tongued detective
known simply as Spenser. Parker and Spenser both enjoy prosaic interests-Parker
insists that he has almost no writer friends and likes few things more
than to watch the ball game at night. Both men own a "wonder dog"
named Pearl; both maintain long-standing love relationships with a witty,
challenging woman of their dreams (Parker's wife, Joan, was recently named
one of Boston's fifty "most intriguing women" by Boston magazine);
and both pepper their conversation with apposite but unexpected quotes
from the likes of W. H. Auden and Simon Schama. Yet, despite the autobiographical
component and the literary references, Parker retains a fundamentally unromantic
view of his chosen art form.
"It's very mechanical: I write 300-page books. Page 300-'a shot
rang out and they all fell dead,' " he says without a hint of irony.
I laugh and Parker repeats himself to let me know he's not kidding. "I
write 5 pages a day and just keep writing the story until it's page 300
and then it's done."
Okay, but what of all that authentic black dialogue from his long-running
character Hawk and the colorful cast of underworld characters who seem
to have crawled right out of the Boston gutters? Doesn't he at least spend
hours in the field researching them?
"I make it all up. Anything I have to leave the office to write
about, I don't." Again, this is no joke. "I hate research. For
Hawk's dialogue [which has been praised as dead-accurate street argot],
I just play around with the verb 'to be.' "
But surely some of the firearms and boxing details that regularly appear
in his books come from outside the office. ExEnglish professor that
he is, Parker can't resist an apropos quote:
"You know Henry James's line, 'It's not so much what experience
you have as what you make of it.' For boxing, I used to watch the Saturday-night
fights on Gillette's Cavalcade of Sports. I also grew up in a rough neighborhood
and I had fistfights. You have one punch in the nose and you know all you
need to know about getting hit. You hear one shot fired in anger and you
know all you need to know about getting shot at. [Parker served in Korea.]
If you've been scared then you know enough about fear."
Artist that he is, Parker does harbor one romantic view of his craft,
a belief that shows itself almost despite his relentlessly matter-of-fact
posturing: "The least significant thing about a writer, it seems to
me, is his experience. The most significant thing about a writer is, of
course, the inaccessible thing, his imagination. You can write a great
book with very little experience. You can't write anything but a passable
book with no imagination."
Still, Parker is quick to downplay his own abilities. "I write
with my hands. I go like this"-he wiggles his fingers over the computer
keyboard-"and it comes out. It's an imaginative craft-slash-art. It's
not an intellectual pursuit."
Intellectual or not, Parker had no trouble breaking into the publishing
scene. At age thirty-eight, having secured a post at Northeastern, where
he taught among other things a course called the "Novel of Violence,"
Parker started living out his lifelong dream of writing fiction. He spent
two years on his first novel, The Godwulf Manuscript. He sent it to Houghton
Mifflin with a letter asking whether they might be interested in publishing
the work.
"They sent me a letter three weeks later saying, yes, they would,
and they sent me a $2,000 advance. They printed about 5,000, sold it, and
that was the end of that."
Well, not quite. Parker sold the next book and the next and the next.
Sales, while by no means extraordinary, steadily grew, as did his reputation
as the latest in the Chandler line of succession. And for a professor making
$10,000 a year, the money didn't hurt.
Finally, in 1978, Parker escaped the publishing purgatory known as midlist
status. His eighth book, Promised Land, won an Edgar Allan Poe award for
best novel from Mystery Writers of America. With the help of a new agent,
he also got a (for those times) whopping $150,000 advance for three books
at Doubleday. The moment had come to quit teaching.
"I had a kid in college and everybody was jumpy about my leaving."
Parker gestures around his newly renovated office. "Obviously it turned
out to be the right thing to do."
And things kept improving. In 1982, Parker's book Valediction hit the
New York Times's national best-seller list, a place of distinction where
he has appeared every year since. He is a millionaire many times over now,
with a twelve-acre country estate in Concord, Massachusetts, to which he
and his wife retreat.
Meanwhile, his fingers maintain a steady outpouring of new books. The
latest, Sudden Mischief, was published in March, but of course there's
another in the works, not to mention a deal with the A&E Television
Networks to film a series based on Parker's newest serial sleuth, Jesse
Stone.
I ask Parker, who seems to embody so many of the dreams of aspiring
writers, what he could possibly hope for now.
"I'd just like to keep doing it," he says without any visible
swagger. "It's like 'Swinging Birches' by Robert Frost. 'Let no fate
misunderstand me, snatch me away too soon. Earth's the best place for love,
I know nowhere else it's likely to go better.' "
Parker is surely right when he claims that most writers already know
all they need to know about fear and pain and violence to write a great
novel. But every now and then, real life offers experiences that naturally
translate into the stuff of high drama.
Gary Goshgarian, an N.U. professor of English, took what might be seen
as the more direct route to writing thrillers. In the eighties, he had
watched the rise of his friend and former colleague Parker, and thought
that if one professor could break into the mainstream, there might be room
for two. Goshgarian was also lucky enough to have been through an extraordinary
personal adventure. During a summer vacation in the 1980s, Goshgarian went
on a diving expedition off the island of Majorca, Spain. Like so many protagonists
of thrillers, Goshgarian hadn't come looking for anything more exciting
than a few souvenirs.
"It was a very deep-channeled port where the Roman and Phoenician
ships would take refuge," he tells me. "We were in shallow water
off the back side of Majorca where we found a wreck with a lot of ballast
stones and some pottery on it, the ancient equivalent of broken Coke bottles.
It was absolutely flat terrain, with no dips you can hide in, no coral
as in the Caribbean.
"While we were down there, a speedboat went by, saw our bubbles,
saw our rubber raft and our red-and-white flag, indicating clearly there's
somebody diving below. They came charging across our bubbles with two pendant
anchors on chains that were calculated to gaff. And we're talking about
a cigarette boat, the kind of powerful craft that race dope from Miami
to islands in the Caribbean."
Even now, Goshgarian reddens as he describes the events that ensued.
"They were coming at us very, very fast and then they turned around
and came back at us. We'd been down there for over an hour when this started,
and we're almost out of oxygen and the diaphragm is going like this"-he
thumps his chest-"and you're on the red line in the gauge.
"We spread out so our bubbles would rise far enough apart. Still,
the boat went over us maybe fifteen, twenty times dragging these anchors
and we couldn't hide under anything. Finally, we shot up and he was going
overhead and we were facing right into the sunset, right into the blazing
sun at four or five o'clock in the afternoon. We were gasping for air in
a panic and the sun was very bright and, thank God, eventually he turned
and all I could see was a very long, low boat speeding away."
Once back on Majorca, Goshgarian did some investigating. "The boat
turned out to be owned by a lawyer who had a hot antiquities operation
on the weekends. He and some Swiss connection would fly this stuff back
to museums all over Europe. They didn't want anybody else poaching."
The life-and-death experience formed the basis for Goshgarian's first
novel, Atlantis Fire. "I moved it to Greece and the archaeology essentially
connects Plato's Atlantis legend to Minoan Crete. It took two years to
write while teaching full time. I think they printed 7,500 copies, which
sold out."
Goshgarian, who had watched Parker publish fourteen books before making
the List, knew he wasn't off to a bad start. But between raising children
and updating textbooks, it took Goshgarian four more years and a number
of drafts before completing his second novel, The Stone Circle, a supernatural
thriller with another archaeological theme. For a moment, the prospect
for Book Number Two looked bright.
"In 1989, I finished Stone Circle. Jack Nicholson apparently heard
about it and his agent said that he hadn't done anything in horror since
The Shining and wanted to do my book. We sent them a manuscript, which
they kept for six months.
"Then horror fiction peaked," Goshgarian recalls darkly. "All
of the Stephen King wanna-bes were having their manuscripts sent back.
All those who had been published-with the exception of the brand names-had
a seventy-five percent return rate, which was staggering."
Making matters worse, The Stone Circle ranks as anything but a tossed-off
work of fiction. The book is a stylishly written, intelligent thriller
with a clever overlay of the supernatural. In a publicity blurb, Robert
Parker went so far as to call it "a masterpiece."
Notwithstanding the success of Atlantis Fire, Goshgarian found himself
out of luck with every publisher. "It had gotten turned down everywhere
and all for the same reasons," he laments. " 'Nicely written,
real page-turner but we're not doing horror.'
"I was braiding a noose, ready to put it over the rafters in the
garage. I mean, to have publishers say, 'This thing really sucks so we're
not going to do it,' would at least have been gratifying, if in a perverse
way. But to have said, 'We like it and we're not going to do it because
the market won't bear it'-it was heartbreaking."
Of course, it wasn't long before Nicholson's people called with more
bad news. Jack opted to do Wolf, and so The Stone Circle went into a desk
drawer.
But with the almost masochistic perseverance that marks successful writers,
Goshgarian set to work on another thriller. This book, eventually titled
Rough Beast, was bought by noted publisher Donald I. Fine, who managed
to sell 8,000 copies.
Shortly afterward, Goshgarian experienced one of those delicious moments
of publishing irony. Fine himself came around asking, "Any other books
you've got in the works?"
"Fine was one of the guys who originally turned down Stone Circle,"
Goshgarian remembers. "So I first showed him a murder mystery called
Swansong I was working on. I sent it to him, and he said, 'I don't mean
to pigeonhole you, but I'm going to pigeonhole you. What else do you have
in the thriller genre?' I told him about Stone Circle again and he said,
'I remember that.' And I reminded him this isn't science horror, this is
horror horror, supernatural. He said, 'Send it back.' "
Stone Circle was published last year to highly complimentary reviews.
And while it missed making the best-seller list, Goshgarian feels his career
momentum building. His latest book, Elixir, builds on the premise of an
anti-aging compound gone awry, a subject with immense inherent appeal.
When we meet in his Northeastern office, Goshgarian tells me he has received
a grant to write full time and that he is almost through the first draft.
With the optimism that marks every writer in the throes of composition,
he can't resist adding, "I think this is going to be the one to break
out."
If you talk with enough writers, however, you quickly learn that the
dream of breaking out is not what keeps literary hopefuls returning to
the word processor day after day, year after year. There exist only a handful
of writers like Parker, stars who make the process of cranking out best-sellers
look annoyingly easy.
Kate Flora, L'76, has a series of four detective novels to her name.
But unlike Robert Parker's or even Gary Goshgarian's successes, Kate Flora's
story resembles the more typical tale of slender rewards-even after more
than a decade of hard work in obscurity.
Flora greets me in the large modern home in Concord, Massachusetts,
where she lives with her husband and two teenage sons. Despite the evident
comfort of the setting-due in part to her husband's partnership at a powerhouse
law firm-Kate Flora is self-deprecating about her skills and her status
as series writer.
"You have to remember that I am the role model for the unpublished
author," she tells me, letting out one of her warm, almost motherly,
laughs. "I was ten years in the unpublished writer's corner-eight
years before I sold a book and two more before it came out. Ten years of
rejection. Imagine that."
Kate Flora is blonde and fresh-faced in a way that hints at her astonishingly
wholesome background-astonishing, that is, for someone who spends every
free hour hashing out the details of death, deception, and detection. Flora
grew up with two sisters and a brother on a farm in Maine. Her mother wrote
a gardening column for the local newspaper and managed to fill every member
of the family with literary aspirations.
"All of us grew up wanting to become writers," Flora says
as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "But, you see,
my mother was an incredible role model. Because everything that I've experienced-trying
to carve out the time, trying to discipline your life, trying to hold an
idea in your head while the cats are fighting and the kids are screaming
and the house is burning down because the stove's on fire-my mother had
modeled this for me."
But dreaming of literary success was one thing. Actually becoming a
full-time writer of books seemed, if not foolhardy, at least feckless.
"I was raised to be very responsible and thrifty," she says.
"And responsible, thrifty people don't cast their careers to the wind
to go be writers. It takes braver people than I am. I had to have money
in the bank and a safety net."
And so Flora waited. Revolutionary child of the '60s, she went to Northeastern
law school hoping to change the world. Realist of the '70s, she quickly
discovered that the law isn't always the most satisfying vehicle for effecting
social change.
"Shortly before my second son was born, I was driving around in
a car one day and I realized that I was using all of my emotional energy
for other people's fights and other people's lives and other people's issues."
At the time, Flora had left her job at the Massachusetts State House and
joined a small private practice. The most active case on her calendar involved
defective paint applied to a client's tennis court. In a moment of revelation,
Flora made the jump to her lifelong goal of writing.
"That case was beautifully representative of how I was spending
my time. It's one thing to be the gladiator, to go forth and spend your
life's energy trying to improve the lot of welfare mothers or trying to
collect child support from deadbeat dads or protect abused children, all
of which I was doing when I was doing government work. But when you've
got two people who ought to be able to sit down and work it out and they
can't, and you're getting paid to go argue for them, and using this tremendous
amount of energy in a totally irrational system that doesn't even work
very well-why do all that for some small end? When people really ought
to be just whacked upside the head and told to go talk."
Flora, then thirty-four years old, suddenly felt the financial safety
net in place and knew that the only thing left was to buy the computer
and get to work.
Lots of frustrated lawyers have Flora's dream. Hardly any have the perseverance
to work for a decade, writing eight full-length novels, without ever seeing
a dime in pay or a single word in print. It was a long, lonely period of
apprenticeship. The worst part, Flora says, was lending manuscripts to
friends only to find out they felt too afraid to read the thing for fear
of hating it and even more embarrassed to give it back unread. "I'm
still getting manuscripts back from ten years ago," she says.
Given the outward serenity of Kate Flora's life, mystery might seem
an unlikely genre. The personal, ruminative novels of Annie Dillard or
Anna Quindlen come more naturally to mind. But Flora says that mystery
writing actually turned out to be a perfect starting place for a novice
without much initial confidence.
"If you are uncertain where you're going to go as a writer, or
even whether you can write at all, genre fiction offers a framework, a
formula. You can tinker with that formula as you get braver, you can break
the rules, push the envelope, but in the beginning it gives you some kind
of a skeleton on which to hang the story you want to tell."
And as Flora wrote, she found an even deeper connection to the genre.
"Probably for the same reason I'm a lawyer: I'm very curious about
good and evil, about what makes people go off the rail, about what makes
things go wrong. Just as I might have become a lawyer because I wanted
to make events go right, in mystery stories one thing you get to do is
to tie matters up and restore order to the world."
And, of course, there's the added benefit of controlling reality, something
most lawyers only dream of. "There are ways in which people think
of lawyers as very powerful in society. But we often feel very unpowerful
to make things work the way we want. What could be better than to simply
retreat to your room and write them the way you want them?"
When Flora finally sold a book in 1992-in fact, a three-book deal for
her Thea Kozak series-she received a disappointing $7,000 advance for each
work. Not that Kozak isn't a character well-suited to the '90s marketplace.
Blonde, attractive, and regularly digressing into food issues ("I'd
had my chocolate doughnut, that ought to be enough for any girl"),
Kozak maintains a career as an educational consultant while trying to manage
a long-distance relationship with a darkly alluring Maine state trooper
named Andre. And while Kozak's past may be littered with bodies, she still
emanates much of Flora's own clean-cut freshness. Throughout her adventures,
Thea Kozak seems as much a helpmeet and shoulder to cry on as she does
a detective drawn to the darker recesses of the human psyche.
Getting her first three books simultaneously accepted for publication
at first felt far more important to Flora than any financial reward. But
when the next two Kozak book deals didn't bring a penny more in advances,
Flora decided that validation might not be everything after all. And so
she tried a more aggressive approach to selling her work. She shelved Kozak
and changed her nom de plume to her maiden name, Katharine Clark. With
a new agent, Flora managed a literary rebirth. A new publisher bought Steal
Away for $75,000. The book is due out this fall, simultaneously with a
new Thea Kozak work under the name Kate Flora.
After fourteen years, Flora sees her literary future as just beginning.
"I'm fourteen books into this, I'm just getting a feel for how I might
be as a writer somewhere down the road. Imagine being fourteen years into
a career and thinking, 'This is the beginning and this is wonderful.' "
Some people, like Parker, are born thriller writers. Others, like Flora
and Goshgarian, achieve thriller writing. A few have thriller writing thrust
upon them. One such is Marissa Piesman, L'77, now six novels into a series
featuring the sometimes kooky, always acerbic, crack mystery solver Nina
Fischman.
With her rapid-fire, joke-peppered speech and incongruously sedate job
at the New York Attorney General's Office supervising co-op housing, Piesman
isn't easily categorized. And if there is no other detective quite like
Piesman's Nina Fischman, it's because Piesman's background was the model
on which Fischman was constructed.
Piesman comes from an immigrant Jewish family in New York's South Bronx
and, perhaps because of those ethnic roots, a Woody Allenesque tone pervades
her work. "My father was an ex-communist who was very ambivalent about
doing business," Piesman tells me. "But that's what people did
after the war. He was in the tchotchke business and periodically went bankrupt.
He ended up making those small gilt easels that you put little pictures
in on your coffee table."
Piesman remembers her blue-collar neighborhood as something of a lower-middle-class
backwater. "I don't think there was any other kid in my entire high
school class who had a parent who went to college." But it wasn't
just education that distinguished the Piesman home. "My mother is
probably the only person in zip code 10472 who was ever in psychoanalysis,"
Piesman says through an easy, voluble laugh. "She sort of worshipped
at the altar of psychoanalysis. She still does-she's eighty-one and she's
still in analysis."
Psychoanalysis, rather than gym or ballet, became Piesman's main form
of childhood recreation. "My brother started when he was two, I started
when I was four. By the time I was eleven, I was in group. It really was
the major activity of the household," she says.
This sort of quirkiness makes Piesman unlike any other mystery writer
out there. To begin with, she grew up as "the kind of kid who walked
around with an internal monologue in her head. I mean, I just talked to
myself incessantly, which is what writing is." Her CV, meanwhile,
came to span everything from lawyer to store walker at Saks Fifth Avenue
to a stint on Jeopardy! Of her haphazard career path, Piesman concedes,
"I'm the kind of person you just can't do anything with."
But in her writing, all the disparate pieces of her life seem to fit
together. Unlike the calculated minimalism of Chandler, Ross MacDonald,
or Dashiell Hammett, Piesman's scenes are as much vehicles for her eccentric
point of view as they are pieces of a mystery puzzle. ("She loved
muffins, but acknowledged them for the fraud that they were," she
writes in one delightfully irrelevant passage in her latest book, Survival
Instincts, published last year. "After all, if it weren't for the
word 'muffin,' everyone would be eating cake for breakfast all week.")
If this sounds out of character for a detective, Piesman would be the
first to agree. She claims no affinity for detective writing and credits
the whole idea as the brainchild of a literary agent who smelled talent.
At the time, Piesman had just coauthored her first book, that highly
successful satire titled The Yuppie Handbook. After publication, an agent
called Piesman and suggested that books by female mystery writers were
coming into vogue. Without any particular project at hand, Piesman figured
she'd give it a shot.
Not that Piesman had the slightest idea how to go about writing mystery
fiction. "I didn't really know anything about the genre," she
says. "I'm not particularly a fan of the genre and I don't like to
do research."
And so Piesman simply took a steno pad with her every morning on her
forty-five-minute commute from Washington Heights to her job at the extreme
southern tip of Manhattan. ("I wasn't going to take a laptop on the
A train, for chrissakes," she says.)
To construct a story, she used the materials immediately at hand. "I
said, 'Well, I'll write about myself and my mother.' So I looked back on
a time when my life had more plot. I had a certain romantic nostalgia for
those days when I didn't know what was going to happen next."
A few months later she had assembled her first Nina Fischman novel,
a housing-court thriller (contradictory as that sounds) titled Unorthodox
Practices. Piesman still marvels at the fact that it not only sold well
but garnered good reviews.
"Basically, I wrote the thing and got away with murder. It had
a very poor plot. It didn't have any clues. It didn't even have a murderer,
really. The murderer is some amorphous corporation that I sort of stuck
in at the end. Fortunately," she adds, "I had thirty-five years
of saved-up jokes."
Success sings an alluring tune and Piesman kept writing more Fischman
novels, even though her interest in the genre failed to catch fire. But
six mysteries have exhausted her patience and now she plans a more purely
literary work. "For someone who had such a hard time in life, I've
been pretty lucky," she says. "But I'm tired of succeeding in
a genre despite something."
For would-be thriller writers reviewing the careers of those who have
gone before, the unfortunate lesson is that those seemingly tossed-off
works dismissed as second-rate literature by the "serious" set,
but selling copies by the truckload, actually represent the end product
of years of effort, trial and error, focus, and a healthy dose of original
imagination. As if that weren't deterrent enough, the publishing world
can be heartlessly fickle and notoriously blind to quality. (Kate Flora
wears a T-shirt that says: "The Publishing Business: An Oxymoron."
Gary Goshgarian's publisher, Donald Fine, died recently, leaving Goshgarian
to renegotiate with a decidedly less interested publishing house.) That
ugly truth, at least, won't surprise television crossovers like Peter Lance,
since compared to Hollywood, publishing culture seems almost rational.
But of all the various ingredients, from talent to dumb luck, that go
into the making of a successful popular mystery, every one of Northeastern's
literary detective set agrees that raw discipline heads the roster. You've
got to be willing to write every morning on the A Train-as Marissa Piesman
still does-if that's all the time in your day. Otherwise, the world will
never get a chance to hear that terrifically clever idea for a thriller
you've been nursing all these years.
Robert Parker, as always, has the perfect quote at hand. "What
was it Auden said? 'If you have a way with the language and a burning desire
to say something and no discipline, you will hold forth in barrooms.' "
"I probably got the quote wrong," Parker adds, "but I
told you, I hate research."
David Heilbroner, L'84, a freelance writer in New York, wrote about
law school graduates living in Alaska in the November 1997 issue. He has
published two books of nonfiction and has just finished a comic novel.
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