Private Investigations

by Victoria Zackheim

  At last, I was making a living as a writer.

  The profession and I were not a smooth fit, however. Like my previous forays into writing, journalism found me sailing amid rocky shoals. In this case, the problem was pretty much what I’d anticipated: editors wanted their writers to dig relentlessly for facts, to report the truth. They frowned upon making things up (these were the days before fake news became chic). Where was the room for creativity, for imagination? I felt stifled.

  Discouraged, I abandoned my quest for the writer’s life and did what everybody in the 1970s, be they cab driver or brain surgeon, did when confronting the least degree of job dissatisfaction. I went to law school.

  I was by no means a terrible lawyer, primarily because I could write well, and law is largely about written communication: court documents, memoranda of law, and correspondence threatening litigation. I soon learned that I didn’t have the steel to become a successful attorney.

  I had one case in which my large, heartless multinational client—not to put too fine a point on it—was sued by a young employee who’d been fired. The termination was justified, and he had no complaint there. But he’d left a box of personal items behind in his office, and they’d gone missing. He was suing for their value, a small sum, about $500.

  As a young attorney, I took the case more than seriously. I took it John Grisham seriously. On the appointed court date, I showed up with briefs, stacks of cases, and probably a musty old lawbook or two, as props if nothing else. The plaintiff presented his case, and then the judge turned to me. “The defense’s response?”

  In my best Perry Mason manner, I began to cite cases and statutes. The judge, who had no patience for nonsense like that, cut me short. She snapped, “What do you want, Counsellor?”

  “Um, dismissal, Your Honor? On the grounds of gratuitous bailment?”

  “Granted. Case dismissed.”

  I was ecstatic. I’d won my first trial. And then I looked over at the plaintiff, and he was in tears. Apparently among the missing items were one-of-a-kind photographs of his mother and his dog and other sentimental things. The glow of victory evaporated; I was stabbed with guilt. My inclination was to write him a personal check for the money he’d sought.

  Clearly, I was not meant to be a Jeffrey Toobin or Alan Dershowitz—or even a Saul Goodman of Breaking Bad fame.

  Where to go from there?

  Let me digress for a moment. All of my novels feature at least two or three surprise endings. For these to work fairly, there must be a clue seeded early in the story so that when the twist is revealed, the reader says, “You know, I saw that but didn’t think anything of it.”

  I’ve done exactly that in this essay. The clue was a sentence that appeared many paragraphs ago.

  Among the various genres I tried my hand at…

  I never said that poetry, short stories, songs, and magazine articles were the only genres I tried. From the very beginning of my quest to lead a writer’s life, I was working away at another form: popular commercial fiction. Specifically, the favorite genre of my youth: crime fiction.

  While still a full-time employee, I wrote my first murder mystery. I did most of the writing on my commute, which was close to three hours a day, plenty of time to churn out a fair amount of prose. I had one of the first laptop computers ever made. I don’t know exactly what it weighed, but it had to be close to ten pounds. Yes, the manufacturer called it a laptop, but you could also call a ten-pound barbell a laptop, and it would put your legs to sleep just as quickly as that computer did. Many times, I left the train hobbling as my circulation slowly returned.

  I kept at it, and despite the pressure of a full-time job—and numbness in the extremities—I managed to finish my first novel. I was proud as could be.

  I was wary, though, too. Leading a writer’s life meant producing a novel with some regularity and consistency. Was this book just a flash in the pan? I set it aside and over the next six months wrote a second. Then I went back and read them both, beginning to end. I learned that they were indeed consistent.

  Consistently dreadful.

  Chunky prose, convoluted and improbable plots, characters right out of a bad made-for-TV movie.

  I threw them both out.

  That was it. The mystery of becoming a writer was solved. I wasn’t meant to be one. I would devote myself to the law and represent the poor, the helpless, the downtrodden. Or represent large, heartless multinational corporations and make a lot of money. The specific direction I took didn’t matter. What was important was making the liberating choice of giving up my goal.

  And where did I find myself a week or two later? Sitting at my desk banging out a new novel.

  When I read through my final product, I decided that unlike those first two, this one was, in my opinion, probably the best commercial novel written that year. An opinion not shared by any agent or editor on the face of the earth.

  Usually the manuscript went out and vanished into the abyss, never to return on the wings of the self-addressed, stamped envelope I had dutifully included. However, several were returned. When I received the hefty envelope in the mail, it was clear that it contained not a contract and a check for $100,000 but my manuscript. I opened it up, looking forward to a pithy and helpful letter about how to repair the novel and resubmit it. What I found was this: the manuscript had been dropped on the floor of the publisher and the pages jumbled and stuffed into the envelope every whichaway. There was dust and dirt and, those being the days when one could still smoke, a cigarette butt.

  In place of that carefully crafted and helpful rejection letter, I received back only my own cover letter, upside down with a shoe print on the back. Being as naive as I was back then, I figured someone had accidentally stepped on the sheet. Now, being a bit more skeptical about publishing, I suspect the editorial staff drew straws to see who won the right to stomp on the manuscript before it was sent back.

  Another rejection of the manuscript went something like this:

  Dear Mr. Deaver:

  Thank you for your submission. I feel I must tell you that I believe this manuscript to be unpublishable.

  Very truly yours,

  [Redacted] Publishing, Inc.

  I of course focused on the positive: the “Thank you…” and the “Very truly yours.” Which I took to be signs of encouragement and sent out the manuscript again. Over and over and over. With no success.

  But that didn’t matter. I’d caught the bug by then. I was going to get published—damn the clichés—come hell or high water. I thought back to famous rejection letters of authors who had gone on to great acclaim. This is anecdotal, but I understand that F. Scott Fitzgerald received a letter that read, “You’d have a good novel if only you’d get rid of that Gatsby character.” And another one of my favorites; I’ll let my readers figure out the author and the novel: “My dear sir, I’m afraid I must ask: Does it have to be a whale?”

  But, since it wasn’t selling, I shelved that novel, which I came to call, with affection, The Unpublishable, and wrote another one.

  Something must have gone wrong somewhere because that manuscript was bought on first submission. It wasn’t a publishing event; there was no big advance, and the New York Times did not review it. But I had a contract, and a novel with my name on it was in bookstores. There was no feeling like that in the world. Another novel with that company followed, and then I moved on to a bigger, better-known publisher with a three-book contract.

  I delivered the first novel to them, and it received good notices, a movie option, and an Edgar Award nomination.

  Then, a speed bump.

  I had always told myself that if I were lucky enough to be published as a fiction writer, I would treat the craft as a business. Part of this meant never missing a deadline. But I was still working full time, and as the due date for the second book in the contract approached, I realized that I would be two months late in delivering it. What to do? As Baldrick in Black Adder would say, I came up with a cu
nning plan. I would dust off The Unpublishable, slap on a new title, and submit it to my editor. The six or so weeks it would take her to read it would give me the time I needed to finish the book I was working on.

  She would contact me and say sheepishly, “Sorry, Jeff, I’m afraid this won’t do. Do you have any other ideas?”

  Whereupon, like an illusionist, I would produce a proper manuscript, awing her with not only my fine prose but my apparent superheroic stamina and speed.

  She called me a week after I’d sent her The Unpublishable and reported that it was the best thing I’d ever written.

  Go figure.

  The challenge of becoming a writer occasionally extends off the written page. There have been several movies based on my books, and Hollywood is exponentially more mysterious than writing fiction. I love the comment by a producer that when he’s looking for a book or script to turn into a movie, he wants something that’s been wildly successful in the past… yet is completely original (which may explain the surfeit of sequels). The movies based on my books are Dead Silence with James Garner, The Bone Collector with Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, and The Devil’s Teardrop. NBC is currently shooting a TV series based on The Bone Collector.

  Hollywood is certainly ripe for experiences that might figure in this piece, since why and how a book is turned into a film are an utter mystery. But those tales will have to be penned by scriptwriters, those in the trenches. My involvement in all three movies and the TV show was cashing the check. Period. I respect filmmakers immensely and love movies, but I’m a person who does not play well with others in creative projects, and moviemaking is a form of entertainment whose engine is the collective.

  An example of why I’ve chosen this path is a rather telling anecdote about the first movie—the one that came out as Dead Silence. The original book was A Maiden’s Grave. The studio wanted the story but felt the title was too archaic and not literal enough. They wanted to call it Dead Silence. I pointed out that A Maiden’s Grave was a vital motif in the story that echoed the past and foretold what would happen toward the end of the book. It was, in short, a perfect title.

  Their response: Sorry, we want Dead Silence. In the book there were no maidens and no graves.

  I pointed out that this same studio had just produced Barbarians at the Gate, about a modern-day corporate takeover, a story that featured not a single barbarian or gate.

  They laughed at my clever rejoinder and said, “We still want Dead Silence.”

  I continued to resist.

  Whereupon they said, “The other option is that we can find someone else’s book to turn into a film.”

  And I replied, “Dead Silence has a nice sound to it.” They missed the irony completely. And we moved forward with the deal.

  Hollywood…

  For three and a half decades, I’ve produced a novel and several short stories a year, and it was exactly twenty years ago that I quit my pesky day job to become a full-time fiction writer. There were many confounding trials and setbacks along the way—and there still are (like watching bookstores close and sales erode as people turn to streaming TV and video games). Still, there’s no better profession. Think about it: I get to make up things for a living. Does it get any better than that?

  I’m sure every author has a different approach to the challenge of how to lead a writer’s life. It might be pursuing nonfiction or technical writing or graphic novels or the genres that I tried and discarded (or that discarded me!): poetry, songs, journalism, literary fiction, film.

  In my case, the answer was stunning in its simplicity: coming to write the types of books and short stories that so captivated me as a young boy spending hour after hour in the Glen Ellyn Public Library many, many years ago. Just as in good detective fiction, the plot twist in which the mystery is solved was right before my eyes the entire time.

  AN EXTRA CHILD

  – Sulari Gentill –

  THE BOX LIVED IN THE BACK OF A CUPBOARD. THAT IN ITSELF made it interesting. I suppose our flat-roofed house didn’t have an attic, so the cupboard served that purpose. In it were stored those items that had no place in the light of day but were valued or somehow important, even if the reason for that importance had been long forgotten. As a child, I would hide treasures in the cupboard and try to forget that I’d done so, just so I could rediscover them after they’d had been imbued with the magic that lingered there.

  The box, however, did not need such contrivance; it was truly an object of wonder.

  It contained evidence of a life that had become a secret, lost to an agreement to pretend.

  I am the middle of three daughters, born in Sri Lanka in a province known as Slave Island—so named because it was once a port at which the slaving ships stopped on their way to America. My parents made me an immigrant before I was two years old. Of course, I was too young to care one way or another. The boundaries of my world still stopped at my family. After a brief stint in London, we spent five years in Zambia, where my sisters and I learned to speak English. By the time I was seven, I was Australian.

  Ours was a typical immigrant family from South Asia. My parents placed a premium on education and were indifferent to sports. It made us a little odd in sports-mad Australia, but we became Australian nonetheless. We adopted the inflection and humor of our new country and navigated that line that all immigrant children walk, between the customs of where we were from and where we stood.

  As the years passed, my sisters and I stopped speaking Singhalese, and, like trees, our new growth was ever further from our roots. We unfurled and flowered in the Australian sun, thriving in the dappled shade of gumtrees. Even so, I was aware that we were alone in this wide brown land. My parents were both from large families, but we lived half a planet away from grandparents or cousins or anyone who knew our history. There were no aunts and uncles to tell us funny stories about our parents, no collection of people with similar faces. At that distance, secrets were easily kept.

  Perhaps my father sensed that the threads that connected us to the country of our birth were snapping one by one. The summer I was eight, he flew the whole family back to Sri Lanka. He rented a van, and in the weeks we were there, he took us to see every temple, monument, and ruin on the island—and Sri Lanka is not short of temples, monuments, and ruins. He was a man on a mission, taking his daughters on a cultural boot camp, fertilizing our shallow roots in this place with a grand tour of the old country. How enthusiastically he would point to ancient statues of Sri Lankan kings and remind us that there was our mother’s multiple-great-grandfather, our lofty heritage. Even as an eight-year-old, I could hear a kind of awe in his voice as he spoke of my mother’s bloodline. I found it curious. I was fiercely egalitarian by then, but the idea of being some kind of princess had an undeniable and sparkly appeal. But it was fleeting. I was too much a tomboy to be mesmerized by a metaphorical tiara for long.

  We called upon all the uncles and aunts, the cousins, the second cousins, the people who were somehow related, though no one was quite sure how. The vast estates of my mother’s people—houses large enough to seem empty—and the humbler homes of my father’s family. I was probably too young to entirely comprehend who my mother’s family was in the context of the country I’d left as an infant. The descendants of kings, they were the guardians of religion, and from their ranks had come Sri Lanka’s first prime ministers, governors, diplomats, and generals. Their sons were educated abroad, and their daughters were accomplished; they were patriots and leaders. Most impressive to eight-year-old me was a more recent ancestor whose head resided in the Tower of London, where it had been taken after he had been beheaded for leading a revolt against the British. Sri Lanka was a country in which who your family was mattered, where lines could be traced back thousands of years. As far as cultural baptisms went, it was not a mere sprinkling but an absolute dunking, undertaken in the hope that it would be enough to keep us at heart Sri Lankan, or at least keep Sri Lanka in our hearts; that our roots would be
strong enough to survive in transplantation.

  Six weeks later, we returned to Australia, a Western democracy whose kings and queens were foreign and relatively unremarked unless there was a royal wedding in the offing. Sri Lanka receded into a memory of our last grand exotic holiday, and the relatives we had met and embraced became stories again as we returned to the business of school and friends and suburban survival.

  There were photos of that holiday, of course, printed and placed in an album specially bought. But it was not that collection, the images of us on beaches, in front of temples, with various groups of relatives, to which we were drawn. Perhaps it was because they were photos of foreigners on holiday, tourists… and we knew about the box.

  It contained old photographs. Black-and-white, printed in smaller format and in different shapes from the standard four-by-six-inch prints of the day. Taken on box Brownies and in studios, long before we were born, they gave us a glimpse of our parents when they were not our parents.

  The photos of my dad’s family were taken with a borrowed camera when he was a young man. Posed photographs of his sisters in their best saris, my grandmother when her hair was gray rather than white, and my father smiling, confident, a brown-skinned Elvis on a tropical island.

  The photographs from my mother’s side were taken over a much greater span of time. Her family was wealthy enough to own cameras, to use them for more than special occasions. Pictures of Victorian children, my grandmother in curls and bows holding a hoop in front of the painted backdrop of an English garden. We were mesmerized by that photograph—the camera had caught something wistful and sad about that little girl. There was a studio photo of my grandfather inscribed to his then fiancée, hair slicked back, movie-star handsome. My grandmother as a young woman, bespectacled, unsmiling. Formal wedding photographs, a 1920s honeymoon in Egypt. Then a tribe of children on the family estate.

  The story of our grandparents laid out before us.

  These photographs invited our imaginations into their younger lives, into their stories, in a way that knowing them as our grandparents never did.