Some Die Hard

by Stephen Mertz

  But she didn't seem too broken up about it, and that made me like her even more.

  She gave a self-conscious smile. "I don't know. I don't think it would have suited me that well. I guess I'm just the working girl type."

  "At least Tommy won't get it. He's already under arrest as an accessory after the fact in your dad's killing."

  Her face clouded. "What will happen to him, Rock?"

  "I wouldn't worry. He's already singing to anyone who'll listen, trying to ease the heat off himself. Medwick's been suspended from the force and will probably be indicted for helping to cover up the Paul Harmon kill, and Murray Zucco's already long gone, although there's a warrant out for him. Tommy was in the room with him when he ordered two of his boys to abduct and murder Stanley Hochman."

  She looked sideways at me and gave me a small grin. "That's what I'd call a clean sweep. Congratulations!"

  I sighed theatrically. "I'm just surprised it took me so long. Two whole days!"

  "Rock, when did you first suspect it was George Bishop who killed my father?"

  I reached over and began massaging the back of her neck. "I'll let you in on a little professional secret, angel," I said. "I went out to that field last night with a feeling that it was Bishop, but that was all. But I was fairly certain that someone would show up, and when it was George it just confirmed my hunch."

  "Well okay, when did you first get your hunch?"

  I thought about that a moment, then I said, "Probably last night when I went to visit him at his house. He gave me a real big spiel about how money had corrupted the Court family, and he didn't have a good thing to say about any of you. He lumped your whole clan together, and that just didn't sit right.

  "Sure, Tommy's a bad apple. But you're not. You knew as soon as your father was dead that you wouldn't get a penny out of his old will, but you still urged me to stay around and investigate. All you cared about was finding the killer, if there was one. And your father—sure, he had his faults, and maybe substituting money for other things, like the love of his children, was one of them. But he wasn't a bad man, and I liked him.

  "Bishop told me more about himself with that speech than he did about any of you. He showed me his own frustrations and envy and ability to hate. Like I said, it just didn't sit right." I continued massaging her neck. "Any other questions?"

  Driving with one hand, she reached around back with the other and touched my wrist with her fingertips.

  "Just one. Rock, would you take me out to dinner tonight? Out someplace, a quiet place, where we could just laugh and talk like normal people? Where we could just have fun and not think about...all the things that have happened?"

  "I'd be glad to take you out to dinner, Susan Court," I said truthfully. "Tonight, or any other night." I smiled. "I guess I'm just crazy about working girls."

  As an answer to that she gave my wrist a squeeze and the sudden, vibrant warmth of her coursed through me, carrying with it both a promise, and a need.

  An hour later we were back in Denver.

  FROM THE MANOR TORN;

  or,

  Me and Manor Books

  by Stephen Mertz

  Rough Edges Press has suggested that I contribute a few words about Manor Books, the original mass market publisher of Some Die Hard.

  Okay. Here they are, and you may quote me:

  Manor Books was a low-end New York publishing house in the 1970s, operated by a pack of thieving scuzzballs.

  Thank you, and good night.

  What’s that?

  You want to know more? Well, okay. Here’s the story of how Manor Books tried to screw me and how I screwed them right back, via long distance no less, without spending a penny.

  I wrote this novel in 1975 while I was living in Denver. Rock Dugan's first and only case. I dedicated the book to my mentor and brother writer, the late Don Pendleton, who was generous and helpful in his critique of the novel in manuscript form.

  Writing the book was fun.

  Finding a home for it with a publisher took another four years.

  During that time, while I sold a handful of stories to Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, a New York agent circulated it for consideration to a polite round of encouraging words but no acceptance. Later, having quit the agent and leaving Denver for the rural mountain life, I spotted a market report in Writers Digest. A mass market publisher in New York was looking for previously unpublished novelists who lived outside the New York area, the suggestion being that the publisher, Manor Books by name, was reaching beyond the literary and pulp cliques of the Northeast, hunting for new talent in the heartland.

  Hey, that was me!

  At the time, I owned a small second hand bookshop in Durango, Colorado; wall to wall unfinished wooden shelves packed with paperbacks. Actually had an entire room devoted to Harlequin romances. Until about five years before, Durango was strictly a cowboy and mining town. Then the hippies discovered it. The tourists came next and by the time I arrived in the 1970s, Durango’s residents included people drawn from everywhere. Writers. Artists. Musicians. Movie people (parts of Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid, among other films, were shot in the area). Everyone I hung out with was from somewhere else. We preferred the back roads and the pines and peace and quiet to the city life most of us had left behind. We were young, broke and happy. A bohemian, hedonistic, fun lifestyle. Durango was that kind of place.

  So off went Some Die Hard. (The novel’s original title was The Flying Corpse, it having been suggested that a less, uh, spectacular title might stand a better chance of acceptance.) Not only did I think Some Die Hard was a serviceable title, but so did Marvin H. Albert (as Nick Quarry) and Carroll John Daly, who had each used the same title in their day. I snail-mailed Some Die Hard over the transom (unsolicited) to Manor and it took those slicks all of a New York minute to jump on a guy living way out in the Rockies, without a telephone.

  They offered me $750.

  Honestly, I was overjoyed. After four years I felt finally vindicated as a writer. This being my first novel, though, and thinking that $750 really wasn’t that much money, I trudged through the snow over to a neighbor’s house, asked to use their phone, and called the only three published novelists I knew: Michael Avallone in New Jersey, Don Pendleton in Indiana, and Bill Pronzini in California. The unanimous advice from all three pros was to go for it. Get published. Start building a career.

  And ask for more money.

  So I did, with a collect telephone call. Editor Larry Patterson was the soul of cordiality, promptly boosting the advance up to a thousand dollars without batting an eye.

  “What the hell,” Larry was probably thinking, “we’re not going to pay the chump anyway.”

  I was not unaware that Manor Books was a bottom line concern, and so decided to use a pseudonym so as not to get boxed in as a low-rent writer. Hence, the original penname “Stephen Brett,” the surname a tribute to “Brett Halliday” (Davis Dresser), a favorite writer of the private eye stories I’d been reading since high school.

  Manor moved fast. There was money to be made. Within weeks I had a contract in hand for the astronomical sum of one thousand dollars, payment due upon publication.

  ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS!?!

  Dang. Where do I sign? My writing journal indicates that I had .54 cents to my name the day that contract arrived.

  The book was printed and bound (cheaply, with a recycled cover photo from an earlier Manor title, Tether’s End by Margery Allingham) and shipped. It was on sale within months, even in remote little ol’ Durango (the nearest cities being Albuquerque (4 hours away) and Denver (8 hours away)). Since local friends were buying my book, supposedly so were readers from coast to coast. The book was reviewed in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. The reviewer thought it was okay.

  But I hadn’t gotten paid.

  Hmm.

  Okay. I’ll call Larry.

  Quoth Larry, “Sorry, Steve. We’re a little backed up.” Blah blah blah. “The check will be in the mail
by the end of the week.”

  Except that the check wasn’t in the mail, that week or any of the following weeks.

  The months dragged on. I still didn’t have a phone. Sometimes I’d pester my neighbor, other times if I was in town I’d used one of the old-fashioned wooden telephone booths then in the lobby of Durango’s Strater Hotel. I’d think of Louis L’Amour, a local celeb of sorts in that he had a summer place three miles north of town. It was known that Louis had written some of his 1950s pulp westerns while staying at the Strater in between jobs working in the area as a wrangler for what were then called dude ranches. I wondered if Louis ever sat in the same booth in his hungry days, hustling up New York editors for overdue payment. I’ll bet he had. Now it was my turn. I was young and this was part of the adventure.

  But the bastards still didn’t send me my check.

  I was beginning to understand.

  In looking for “new novelists outside the New York area,” what Manor Books really was up to was trolling the boonies for writers who were good enough to be published but who wouldn’t have the clout or the resources to collect the money owed them. Manor would essentially be taking on books for free, walking away with 100% of the profits.

  Like I said, thieving scuzzballs.

  Among my customers at the book exchange was a nice guy with whom I’d become friends. His story was that he’d become burned out being a big city lawyer. At the time, he was on a soul search, holed up in a snowy mountain town in the middle of nowhere, honing his skills as a mime. He was an avid reader. And guess what? He still had his license to practice law in the state of New York.

  “How’s about this?” I suggested over beer and pizza down at Farquart’s. “You get me that grand the sons of bitches owe me and you can waltz in and out of my shop anytime you want and take home as many books as you want for as long as the shop exists.”

  His eyes lit up. Some killer instincts do die hard, even in one who’d rather be a mime than a lawyer.

  He said, “Here’s what we’ll do. Find out if your publisher has done this to anyone else. Then I’ll fire off a registered letter to them on my New York stationary. We’ll threaten to sue for the thousand and for damages, and if they’re doing this to other writers through the mail, we’ll threaten to charge them under Federal law with conspiracy to defraud using the US Postal System.”

  Well, all right.

  First thing I did was go down to the local book and magazine store (remember those?) that was stocked with Manor titles. I wrote down the names of the authors of those books, and then went about searching for their addresses. My primary resource was the library reference work, Contemporary Authors. I made contact with two writers: Ralph Hayes, an active and not bad pulpist living in Florida (Manor had published his Check Force series) and James Holding, the author of a western.

  Around this time I received a letter from another new writer, named James Reasoner, who’d “sold” his first novel to Manor but was having trouble getting paid and was hearing bad things about them. What did I know? I’d been reading and enjoying James’ stories in Mike Shayne, which by then had become a showcase for the emerging talent of my generation.

  The following paragraph from my return letter to James (dated 4/4/80) pretty much captures the situation at that point.

  I wrote, All that you have heard about Manor is only too true. They currently owe me a grand and the matter is now in the hands of my attorney. They were supposed to pay on publication and that was eight months ago. The lawyer gave them until April 10. But at least they sent me copies of my book! A guy named Jim Holding (not MWA’s James Holding, but his grandson) didn’t even know that his book was out until I spotted it on the stands and wrote him about it; Manor has simply clammed up on him totally to keep from being hassled about on-publication payment. I also exchanged letters with Ralph Hayes. His feeling was that Larry Patterson is an okay guy who unfortunately has editorial ambitions outstripping the company’s ability to pay promptly. Ralph’s advice (and my and Jim Holding’s experience bears this out) is to badger Patterson regularly (like every week) via collect phone calls, urging for payment.

  The windup: upon receipt of the mime’s registered letter, Manor Books promptly mailed me a check for one thousand dollars.

  I’ll let James tell you his Manor story at a time and in a manner of his choosing.

  Manor Books closed shop a few years later. Word gets around.

  The mime? Every book he took out of the book exchange, he brought back after he’d read it so I could sell it again. So the whole deal didn’t really cost me a penny. I knew good people in Durango in those days.

  Everyone got what they deserved, and what more can you ask for? Oh, and there remains the novel. It’s good to have Some Die Hard available again. I hope you enjoyed it.