The answer I got was always the same, with minor variations. Yes, what I described was what they, too, had gone through, the absolute unbearable horror, but I’d quit the experience too early. Some time in the second week, they told me, your brain flips over and this becomes the reality. This becomes where you live now. And how, I wonder, do you come back from that damage?
As usual, my father could come through for someone else, in this case me. Through political friends, or VFW friends, or somewhere, he reached out to the state legislator from that district, who was of course a lawyer, and hired him to represent me. The family had to borrow money from everybody they knew, but they got me represented by the local state legislator, who was, among other things, known to be a friend and supporter of Champlain College.
In our time in jail together, my former classmate remained a basket case, weeping, tossing and turning on his cot, once crushing a whole apple in his bare hand, ever bemoaning the loss of his dream of a medical career. We had no conversations, compared no notes, made no plans, melded in no way.
Which was just as well. From this point on, everything I learned about my fellow thief made things worse. First, it turned out he already knew a fence in Plattsburgh, which he hadn’t mentioned to me, so he’d simply turned his microscope over to that guy, who at that time of year transported stolen goods to New York City for resale concealed in truckloads of Christmas trees. (I know; is nothing sacred?)
This fence, returning from the city a day early, found his wife in bed with a husband not her own. The fence beat this trespasser badly enough to put him in the hospital. However, deciding this had been an insufficient response, he then snuck into the hospital to beat the other guy up all over again, in his hospital bed, until the cops pulled him off and stuck him in the same jail where I was soon to find myself. He stayed there until the day school reopened. First thing in the morning, my partner was picked up on campus, and once he was delivered to the CID the outraged fence was released from jail without charges. My partner was interviewed in the morning, and they came for me in the afternoon. I guess they hadn’t invented omerta yet.
Once my father got the guy with clout to be my lawyer, the other guy’s family wanted him, too, and insisted when we demurred. I think they already knew their son was in more trouble than I was, because in the basement of the family home in Brooklyn several items were found bearing the oval bronze plaque marked ACUNY [Associated Colleges of Upper New York—Ed.].
Bail was of course impossible, so I had to stay there until they decided what to do with me. On the fifth day, the other guy and I were brought to court, where the judge accepted a sealed indictment against each of us. This meant, if I was not indicted for any additional crime over a period of time to be determined by the judge, the indictment would be quashed and not exist as part of my record. I would never have been arrested, never indicted. This was an outcome that left me weak with relief.
* * *
By 1958, I’d graduated from painting ceilings to an actual job, as a petty conman in a crowded office on Fifth Avenue at 47th Street. I’d answered an ad in the Times for an “associate editor at a literary agency” and wound up at an employment office, where I had to undergo a little written test.
First I was handed a short story called “Rattlesnake Cave.” Then I was told to read it and to write a letter to the author as though I were the agent. I had three choices: I could accept the story and tell the author where I expected to sell it; I could point out flaws in the story and suggest I’d like to see it again after a rewrite; or I could reject it, with reasons.
The story had been written by a professional writer, Lester Del Rey, deliberately to be full of unacceptable elements. It was framed, a story within a story, encumbered by an unnecessary narrator. It was full of dialect. The peril in the story turned out to be a fake, what is known in the trade as a paper tiger. And several more things like that. In its way, it was a masterful piece of work.
In taking this test I didn’t want to be so harsh as to reject the story outright, but I knew better than to say it could be published anywhere. I expressed willingness to see it in revised form, and then pointed out several of the ways in which it was hopeless.
This turned out to be the way to go. If you rejected the story or asked for revisions, and if you showed an understanding of the market and a feel for story and an ability of your own to put words together, you’d be offered the job. I was offered it and I took it.
The job was with the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, which was both a successful legitimate agency, with clients ranging from tough-guy paperback novelists through Norman Mailer and P. G. Wodehouse, and also a successful con game, in which advertisements in writers’ magazines offered a careful consideration and potential representation for any amateur who sent in a short story with five dollars.
By golly, I’d done that myself, back when I was sixteen! I’d sent one of my stories and five of my dollars to Scott Meredith and got back a letter that treated my story judiciously, pointed out a few flaws, and urged me to send in more stories (and money). Somehow, instinctively, I’d known with that first whiff that this wasn’t an outfit I wanted to deal with any further, but now here I was on the other side of the looking glass. From now on, I would be the guy who wrote those letters.
It was piecework. We got a dollar a short story and five dollars a novel (out of Scott’s twenty-five), and we wrote the letters to a formula that meant you never had to give any of these tales more time than they deserved.
What a lot of bad stories the amateurs dreamed up. One of the things I learned in the six months I worked for Scott was just how many ways there were to do it wrong.
At the time I went to work there, the other in-house fee reader was a sardonic soul from the other South—Florida—named Hal Dresner, who showed me the ropes and said of our boss, Henry Morrison, who was Scott’s assistant, “If Henry ever asks you if you know anything about, and mentions some kind of story, say yes. You’ll get an assignment.”
Okay, I said, and a couple of weeks later Henry said, “Do you know anything about confession stories?” “Oddly enough, yes,” I said. “Another guy and I did content analysis on confession magazines in a sociology course in college, and when we wrote to Macfadden Publishing for information they sent us a bunch of the magazines and their own survey of the readership.”
This was more information than Henry needed. He said, “You write three one-paragraph story descriptions, they pick the one they want, you write it at three thousand words for fifty dollars.”
Done. Back home, I pulled out the content analysis and simply repeated the three most common stories we’d found in the magazines, and that was the first time the publisher accepted all three outlines. I did the three stories over the weekend.
In the next few months, I mined the content analysis for further inspiration, and one morning during this time Henry said, “Do you know anything about sex novels?” “Sure,” I said, though I didn’t. “Give me two chapters and an outline,” he said. “They pay a flat six hundred dollars.”
I waited till after lunch, by which time I figured Henry would be used to the idea I had the assignment, and then I went to him and said, “When I was a kid, in the drugstore there were these little paperback books, staple-bound like TV Guide, with titles like Impatient Virgin, and the girl almost does it all the way through and finally does do it at the end. Is that what you’re talking about?” “No,” he said in disgust, and handed me three paperbacks.
These books, which had a brief existence in the late ’50s and early ’60s, just before the sexual revolution made them look like hoopskirts, were actual stories, with a dozen or so sex scenes viewed gauzily through a kind of mist. I used to call them euphemism novels, and would say it’s easy to get to fifty thousand words when you can’t call anything by its rightful name. This stuff was trash, of course, like the confession stories, but useful trash, honing narrative skills, teaching how to shape a story. They were like the workout b
efore the big game, a useful limbering of the muscles.
In April, I got six hundred dollars for my first sex novel. My wife was seven months pregnant, I had no other money and no prospects except the promise of another six hundred dollars if I wrote another of those books.
So I quit my job. I haven’t had a job since.
TWO
DONALD E. WESTLAKE, A.K.A . . .
HEARING VOICES IN MY HEAD: TUCKER COE, TIMOTHY J. CULVER, RICHARD STARK AND DONALD E. WESTLAKE
Originally published in 1977 in Murder Ink, a grab-bag anthology edited by Dilys Winn, “Hearing Voices in My Head” brings together a handful of Westlake’s pen names for a contentious roundtable discussion. Tucker Coe was the name he used for his five Mitch Tobin novels, Timothy J. Culver helmed a 1970 thriller titled Ex Officio, and of course Richard Stark was the name behind the Parker series.—Ed.
Recently gathered with a moderator inside a Japanese-made cassette recorder to discuss the state of their art were Donald E. Westlake, Richard Stark, Tucker Coe and Timothy J. Culver.
MODERATOR: The mystery story, detective thriller, roman policier, call it what you will, has been a basic influence in the history of fiction since the days of Greece and Rome. While Edgar Allan Poe is the acknowledged father of the modern detective story, it is still true that Oedipus Rex is a seminal mystery tale. Today’s novelists of crime, passion, suspense, can with pride count Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and the Brothers Grimm among their family tree. Tucker Coe, what do you think of all this?
TUCKER COE: Sounds terrific.
MODERATOR: Ah. Yes. I see. Well, umm . . . Richard Stark. As an—
RICHARD STARK: Present.
MODERATOR: Yes. As an innovator in the crime field, suspense story, call it what you will, what would you say is the outlook for the mystery tale? You have been—
RICHARD STARK: Well, I think—
MODERATOR:—an innovator, of course, in that you created Parker, a professional thief who never gets caught. Also, he is not merely a thinly disguised battler for the underdog, as were Robin Hood or The Saint or The Green Hornet. Parker’s reaction to the underdog would probably have been to kick it. Having yourself altered the thriller or mystery form, what would you say are the portents for tomorrow?
RICHARD STARK: Well, I suppose—
MODERATOR: People have declared the detective novel, the murder story itself, dead, murdered by repetition, staleness, a using up of all the potentials of the form, replaced by who knows what public fancies, whether for Comedy, History, Pastoral, Pastoral-Comical, Historical-Pastor—
RICHARD STARK: Say, wait a minute.
MODERATOR: Or, let us say, the Western, Science Fiction, the Family Saga. Nevertheless, the crime/suspense/mystery/thriller story, the tale of ratiocination, call it what you will, has continued to flourish, much like the Grand Old Lady of the Theater, the Broadway Stage, which so often has—
RICHARD STARK: Listen.
MODERATOR: —been reported dead. But, if we may borrow a phrase, Watchman, what of the night? What do you think tomorrow will bring to the thriller, the detective—
RICHARD STARK: I think it’s—
MODERATOR:—story, the roman noir, the ’tec tale, call it what you—
RICHARD STARK: Listen, you. Either I get to answer that question or I’ll damage you.
MODERATOR:—will, the essential—Eh? Oh, yes. Certainly.
RICHARD STARK: Right. Now. Uhh—What was the question?
MODERATOR: Well, the gist of the—
RICHARD STARK: Not you. Tim?
TIMOTHY J. CULVER: Future of the mystery.
RICHARD STARK: Right. There isn’t any.
MODERATOR: There isn’t any?
RICHARD STARK: The detective story died about thirty years ago, but that’s okay. Poetry died hundreds of years ago and there’re still poets. By “die,” by “dead,” I mean as a hot center of public interest. In the Thirties you could have honest-to-God detective stories, on the bestseller lists. Ellery Queen, for instance. The detective story was hot when science was new, with gaslight and then electricity, telephones, automobiles, everything starting up, the whole world seeming to get solved all at once, in one life span. World War II shifted the emphasis from gaining knowledge to what you’d do with the knowledge, which is kill people. So the big postwar detective was Mike Hammer, who couldn’t deduce his way up a flight of stairs, and the emphasis shifted from whodunit to who’s-gonna-get-it. The Mike Hammer thing leads into all these paperback hobnail vigilantes with their Thesaurus names: the Inflictor, the Chastiser, the Flaggelator. Deduction, the solving of a mystery—they don’t even put in a token appearance anymore.
MODERATOR: But does that mean you yourself have given up the mystery field, thriller field, whatever label you may choose?
RICHARD STARK: Grrrrrrrrr.
MODERATOR: Sorry. But no new Parker novel has been published since 1974. Have you given up writing crime novels, thrillers, or—um.
RICHARD STARK: Parker is a Depression character, Dillinger mythologized into a machine. During the affluent days of the Sixties he was an interesting fantasy, but now that money’s getting tight again his relationship with banks is suddenly both to the point and old-fashioned. He hasn’t yet figured out how to operate in a world where heisting is one of the more rational responses to the situation.
MODERATOR: Tucker Coe, do you agree?
TUCKER COE: Well, yes and no, I suppose. In a way. Looking at all sides of the issue, without becoming overly involved in a too personal way, if we could avoid that, insofar as it’s ever really possible to avoid personal involvement in a discussion of one’s own work, I suppose the simple answer is that for me the detective story was ultimately too restricting. Others, of course, might find possibilities I missed. I’m sure they will, and the problem was as much in me as in the choice of character and genre.
MODERATOR: Would you care to amplify that, to give us further insights into—
RICHARD STARK: Watch it. Go ahead, Tuck.
TUCKER COE: Thanks. The problem for me was that Mitch Tobin wasn’t a static character. For him to remain miserable and guilt-racked forever would have changed him into a self-pitying whiner. My problem was, once Mitch Tobin reaches that new stability and becomes functional in the world again, he’s merely one more private eye with an unhappy past. Not to name names but don’t we have enough slogging private eyes with unhappy pasts?
MODERATOR: But surely the detective story has been used as a vehicle for exploring character. Nedra Tyre, for instance. Patricia Highsmith, Raymond Chandler.
RICHARD STARK: His sentences were too fat.
MODERATOR: But wasn’t he interested in character?
RICHARD STARK: He was interested in literature. That’s the worst thing that can happen to a writer.
TIMOTHY J. CULVER: I couldn’t agree more. And let me say, I speak from a different perspective from everybody else here. These guys all write what they want to write, I write what other people want me to write. I’m a hack, I’m making a living, I’m using whatever craft I’ve learned to turn out decently professional work that I’m not personally involved with. In my opinion, the best writers are always people who don’t care about anything except telling you what’s in their heads, without boring you. Passion, plus craft. The Continental Op didn’t have to have a miserable home life or a lot of character schticks because Hammett could fill him up with his own reality.
MODERATOR: But mystery novelists are nevertheless commercial writers, aren’t they? Mr. Culver, I don’t entirely follow the distinction you’re making.
TIMOTHY J. CULVER: The difference between a hack and a writer is that the hack puts down on paper things he doesn’t believe. Dick Stark mentioned Mike Hammer. Now, Mickey Spillane wasn’t a hack, not then at least, and that’s because he really believed all that paranoid crap. But the thousand imitators didn’t believe it. You know, one time I was talking to a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and he had to leave the party early t
o go work on an article for one of the scholarly journals. I asked him what it was about, and he said it didn’t matter, just some piece of crap. “But I have to keep turning them out if I want tenure,” he said. “It’s pretty much publish or perish in this business.” “It’s about the same in mine,” I told him.
MODERATOR: Frankly, Mr. Culver, you sound to me like a cynic.
TIMOTHY J. CULVER: I act based on my opinion of the world, so I am a realist.
MODERATOR: Donald E. Westlake, from your vantage point, would you say that Mr. Culver seems to be a realist?
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Sure he is. A realist is somebody who thinks the world is simple enough to be understood. It isn’t.
TIMOTHY J. CULVER: I understand it well enough to get by.
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Meaning you can tie your own shoelaces. Terrific.
MODERATOR: Gentlemen, gentlemen. Um, Mr. Westlake, you yourself began with the traditional detective novels, did you not?
DONALD E. WESTLAKE: The first story I ever wrote was about a professional killer knocking off a Mob boss. I thought it would be nice to make the setting a fancy office, as though the Mob boss were a lawyer or a doctor. I was eleven years old, the story was about two hundred words long, and all that happened was this guy walked in, stepped around the bodyguards, shot the Mob boss at his desk, and then walked out again. But the point was the long detailed description of the office. I was in love with what I suppose was my first discovery as a writer: that there was something marvelous in a contrast between setting and action. A mismatch between What and Where could create interest all by itself. Of course, now I realize it was comedy that had taught me all that—the fart in church, for instance, a favorite among children—but I never thought comedy was what I was good at. All through school, I was never the funniest kid, I was always the funniest kid’s best friend. I was a terrific audience.
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