The Crime of Our Lives

by Lawrence Block

  After I’d been there a few days, two of my colleagues started a conversation they made sure I overheard. One was Henry Morrison, then handling Foreign Rights, and the other would have been either Jim Bohan, the Pro man, or Ivan Lyons, the Personal Collaboration guy. They were talking about Manhunt, and I specifically recall Henry saying something caustic about the magazine. And he roped me into the discussion: Didn’t I agree that Manhunt was fit for nothing more than lining birdcages?

  I hadn’t yet said a word about my writing, but how could I resist? “Don’t knock Manhunt,” I said. “They’re about to buy a story of mine.” And I explained how I was awaiting final word from Francis X. Lewis, as soon as he got back from Bermuda or Boise or Bellevue.

  Henry seemed to find this hysterically funny. Or maybe something else had him all giggly. I had a story to read and an author’s heart to break, and no time to pay attention.

  And why was what I’d said was so amusing?

  Here’s why:

  Manhunt didn’t have an editor named Francis X. Lewis, his name on the masthead notwithstanding. His name had recently replaced that of John McCloud, but he didn’t exist, either. The magazine was in fact edited by Scott Meredith, and this was one of the agency’s deep dark secrets. The clients from whom he bought stories didn’t know it, and the other agents he dealt with didn’t know it, and God knows I, sitting at my desk and banging away at my typewriter, didn’t have a clue.

  While I did my work, Henry ducked into the back office, eager to show up the brash new kid. When he and Sid searched the appropriate file, there was my story. Before he left for vacation, Scott had already bought it for inventory; he’d postponed telling me because the magazine was having a not uncharacteristic cash-flow problem.

  I learned all this from Sid. “Now your story runs to 2600 words,” he said, handing me a sheet of paper. “And ordinarily you’d get $52 for it. But as our client you get a hundred bucks.”

  I’d sold a story? I was being signed to an agency contract?

  I signed the thing. It was just a couple of paragraphs, with a clause stating it would renew automatically unless either party canceled it. For God’s sake, it could have included a chattel mortgage on my grandmother and I’d have signed it.

  “So the story’s sold,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Sid assured me. “You bet.”

  “My first sale.”

  “First of many, would be my guess.”

  “And I’ll be getting a hundred dollars.”

  He shook his head. “You get ninety,” he said firmly. “We get ten.”

  When I started working for Scott Meredith in the summer of 1957, I was an Antioch student on a co-op job. Come October, I was scheduled to return to Yellow Springs, Ohio, and begin my third year as a student at Antioch College.

  Of course I hadn’t mentioned this when I applied for the job. I was an innocent, God knows, but not a complete moron, and I wanted the job. And I hadn’t been there for two weeks before I realized I wanted it a lot more than I wanted a college diploma. I was learning more every day than I could pick up in a month in Yellow Springs.

  I said as much to my parents, and told them I wanted to drop out of school. I thought I’d have a fight on my hands, and was surprised by their ready acquiescence. They’d both always been very supportive of my intention to become a writer, and I think I must have picked a good time to drop out; I don’t think my father was dismayed at the idea of not having a tuition bill to pay that year.

  So I settled in as a fee man—which is what John Dobbin and I were called. Two kinds of manuscripts turned up in that office, pro scripts (from professional writers whom Scott represented on a straight commission basis) and fee scripts (from unestablished writers who paid Scott a fee to read their work). I read the fee scripts, and wrote fee reports to their authors, and that made me a fee man.

  It was, you should pardon the expression, a scam.

  Like every viable con game, it looked good to the marks. For the small sum of $5 (plus another $1 per thousand words, up to a max of $25 for a full book) they got their efforts read by Scott Meredith himself. There was a chance (a real one, but much slimmer than they might have assumed) that Scott would accept their story (or article, but a good 95% of what came in was fiction) and sell it to somebody. There was also the chance he’d tell them how to improve it, and then take it to market.

  Failing that, he’d tell them at considerable length just what was wrong with their work. His letter, single-spaced with narrow margins, would begin a third of the way down an impressive piece of letterhead, and would fill all of a second page as well. (Unless, of course, they’d written a longer-than-usual manuscript and paid a larger-than-minimum fee. The fee report for a novel ran clear to the bottom of page four. Always.)

  Now that’s a lot of words for what wasn’t that much money even in 1957. So it doesn’t sound like a bad deal, does it? So where do I get off calling it a scam?

  Well, for one thing, they weren’t getting the considered opinion of a prominent literary agent, his signature at the bottom of the second page notwithstanding. (They weren’t even getting his signature. Scott never even saw the letters. Brother Sid saw them, and signed Scott’s name to them.)

  The ones who read my fee reports were getting the thoughts of a kid who’d just turned nineteen and just sold his first story. Worse yet, they weren’t getting my real thoughts, which more often than not were that they couldn’t write their names in the dirt with a stick, and should give some serious consideration to dental school.

  Of course I didn’t tell them anything of the sort. Like everyone else who wrote fee reports, I had nothing but good things to say about the way our fee clients wrote. I always praised the writing and disparaged the plot. Fundamental structural flaws made the story unsaleable, I told them, and thus it couldn’t be rewritten, and the author’s only recourse was to start fresh with a new story and send it to us—with, of course, a new fee.

  But let me walk you through a day at the office . . .

  Once I’d walked in at nine or close to it, I’d hang up my jacket. (We wore jackets and ties to the office, but took off the jackets. I don’t think it ever occurred to me or to anyone else to show up without a necktie. At one point I acquired a black shirt with a button-down collar, and took to wearing it with a white tie. Henry, visibly embarrassed at the task forced upon him, took me aside on one such sartorial occasion. “Larry,” he said, “Scott doesn’t remember Mark Hellinger, and he’s seen a lot of gangster movies, and, um, well, maybe you could not wear a black shirt and a white tie to the office.” “Oh, okay,” I said, and the next day I showed up with the black shirt, pairing it this time with a black tie. Nobody ever said a word. And, thinking back, I wonder why we wore ties in the first place, because we had no dealings whatsoever with the public. Nobody ever saw us. Any visitors—and there weren’t many—passed directly from the waiting room to the offices in the rear, bypassing our bullpen altogether.)

  But I digress.

  Once settled in, my first order of business was to walk over to a file cabinet, where the top drawer was filled with fee submissions, arrayed in the order they’d been received. The schedule called for a two-week interval between our receipt of a submission and our reply—long enough so they could believe Scott had been able to give their effort due consideration, but not so long that they’d feel neglected.

  Each manuscript was in a file folder, and if the author of the manuscript had had prior dealings with us, all the letters he’d written would be there with it, stapled to carbon copies of our replies. If this was our first crack at him, there’d be just the new story and whatever letter he’d sent along with it.

  It didn’t take me long to learn to cherish these new people. They were so much easier to reject.

  There was a formula, you see, to the rejection letters it was my job to produce. Scott Meredith had written a book, Writing to Sell, and in it he’d channeled Aristotle and presented what he called the Plot Skeleton:
a strong and sympathetic lead character confronts a problem, his initial struggle to overcome it only deepens his dilemma, and at last through his own admirable efforts he brings things to a satisfactory conclusion.

  That’s a quick version; in the letters that went out over Scott’s signature, we often got half a page out of the plot skeleton. The more space we filled detailing the plot skeleton, the less we were required to say about the story.

  And, while the plot was always the ostensible reason for returning the story, it rarely entered into the equation. A writer could copy a plot from Chekhov, and he’d still get the story turned down on the ground that the plot was faulty. (And, on the very rare occasion when someone pointed out that the plot we’d condemned had worked just fine for Irwin Shaw or Damon Runyon or O. Henry, we’d have an answer. We always had an answer.)

  Now I’m sure many of the stories I read were inadequately plotted. But I generally knew, before I’d read more than a single page, that I was reading something unpublishable. There were times when I stopped after a page or two, wrote two thirds of my fee report, then scanned the rest of the story to find some particulars to note in explaining why his plot fell short. I made my initial decision and wrote most of my report in the basis of the clunky prose and wooden dialogue, but if I said anything about the writer’s style it was to praise it. You’re a fine writer, we assured them, one and all. Soon as you come up with a sound plot, the Pulitzer people will be knocking on your door.

  Once in a while I provided a suggestion relating to writing technique. I might confide that the writer might do better to have his characters say, for example, rather than assert, interject, comment, and otherwise exhaust the writer’s overburdened thesaurus. I was more apt to trot out a tip of that sort with writers who kept coming back for more, who’d already received a full dose of the Plot Skeleton.

  (Although that didn’t necessarily stop me from refreshing their memories. “Let me take a moment to outline that plot skeleton again, Fred, because I just can’t stress it too often . . .”)

  And every fee report began by thanking the mope for sending the story, and every one ended with the hope that we’d see new work from him soon, with the complimentary closing of All best wishes. My friend and colleague Larry M. Harris (whose name was to become Laurence Janifer, and who deserves a Memory Lane remembrance all his own) summed up our mission in a classic French verse form:

  Unlike the Ainu and the Manx

  We hide the fact that we are vicious,

  Starting our letters off with Thanks,

  Ending each one with All best wishes.

  Further evolved than bugs and fishes,

  We are polite to nuts and cranks;

  Starting our letters off with Thanks,

  Ending each one—O Nature’s pranks!

  Ending each one with All best wishes.

  I worked Monday to Friday from nine to five, with an hour off for lunch, and I spent those working hours reading stories and returning them to their authors, every last one of whom I encouraged to send us their next effort. I was expected to go through forty stories a week (or their equivalent; a $25 book counted the same as five $5 stories).

  For this I was paid $65 a week, plus an additional dollar for each additional story. (Once, just to see what I could do, I took stories home and worked evenings as well. I wound up making $125 that week. I paid $65 a month for my hotel room, so that wasn’t bad.) We were all paid in cash; every Friday Scott’s brother-in-law, the odious Murray Weller, trotted four blocks down the avenue to Manufacturers Hanover, and we got little brown envelopes holding our after-tax earnings for the week. I never did need to open a bank account, and of course nobody on the planet had a credit card yet.)

  I was in the rejection business, and it was quickly made clear that I wasn’t expected to enthuse over much of what I read. If I did in fact pass a story to Henry, and if he approved it for marketing, I got the same work credit for writing a three-sentence congratulatory note to the author as I’d get for filling two pages. But if the story came back, a heavy dose of disapproval accompanied it, and I was given to understand that I ought to raise my standards.

  For all of that, I did move a very few stories from my desk to Henry’s, and for the most part they didn’t come back. I can remember two writers by name, whose work I discovered in Scott’s slush pile. Charles M. Runyon was one; his first submission was a novel, and it looked to me like a natural for Gold Medal. Henry agreed, and so did Dick Carroll at Gold Medal, and Scott signed Runyon as a straight commission client, so from then on I only got to read his work after it was published.

  A little later on a pair of confession stories landed on my desk. The form was one I didn’t have much feel for, but I could tell pro caliber work when I saw it. I passed them on to Henry and one sold that afternoon. The other took another whole day. The woman’s name was Barbara Bonham, and she too was offered and accepted straight commission representation, and went on to have a solid career.

  There were some others, but not many. I wasn’t there to find gems on a manure pile. I was there to shovel the stuff back where it came from, and beg for more.

  But nobody out in the world realized that. Here was a big-time New York agent reading their stories and giving them tips, all for $5 a pop. Why would he do that? Why, for the reason he stated in his ads and brochures—because he wanted to discover and sign up promising writers for professional representation. After all, he couldn’t make money on $5 reading fees, could he?

  The hell he couldn’t. He was keeping almost $4 for each story, and there were two fee men in the office and one or two more who picked up scripts and worked at home, and the money was good enough for Scott to run a full-page ad every month in Writers Digest. And he sent out a lot of direct mail as well. If you submitted an unagented story to Manhunt, which he edited, you got a brochure, accompanied by a note from Scott himself: “One of your recent magazine submissions was close. This is to express interest in your material.”

  Same thing if you sent your story to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Scott had a cozy arrangement with someone in their office, and the empty envelopes that had held submissions came to us every week; Joan, our receptionist, filled her empty hours typing address labels to express interest in their material.

  Neat, huh?

  Oh, it was a pirate ship, all right, but serving as cabin boy was the best possible job for me. And in the next leg of this hike down Memory Lane I’ll tell you what was so great about it.

  In my last installment of this seemingly endless experiment in senile recollection, I promised to explain what was so great about working for Scott Meredith. After all, I was putting in forty hours a week reading inferior work and assuring the perpetrators thereof that they were talented, and that their success lay just a few dollars away. Aside from an inside perspective on white-collar moral turpitude, what valuable experience did all of this afford?

  Well, I’ll tell you. The work itself—reading that garbage, prefatory to encouraging the production of more of it—was the best writing lesson I ever got. There’s ever so much more to be learned from bad writing. You can see what’s wrong with it.

  That’s a whole lot easier than seeing what’s right with a masterpiece.

  I’ve a feeling that any job that involves reading a vast quantity of amateurish work is a good training ground for anyone with literary aspirations. Back then—and for many years afterward—magazines and book publishers were generally willing to consider unsolicited manuscripts, and the duties of junior editors commonly included reading one’s way through the haystack of the slush pile, passing on the occasional needle, and stuffing the rest into those nine-by-twelve self-addressed stamped envelopes.

  I’m sure those junior editors gained something from the experience, but far less than was available to me. It was to them what KP was to a soldier—not exactly punishment, but hardly what had moved you to put on the uniform. Slush was a task to be tackled when time permitted, and the slush reade
r’s job was to make the slush pile disappear. If one’s time was limited, one might very well return manuscripts unread, without even a glance at the first page.

  Even when time was abundant, a slush reader stopped reading as soon as the task became pointless. Once you knew you were going to return a story, why give it any more time? Send it back, and move on to the next.

  But I couldn’t do that. I too had been engaged to send these stories back where they came from, but instead of a form rejection slip, I had to provide an elaborate explanation of why the story didn’t work, along with some insincere flattery designed to encourage future submissions, accompanied to be sure by future reading fees. I didn’t have to know a lot about the story to do this, and I didn’t need to read it carefully, but I had to skim it sufficiently to bat out a few hundred words about it.

  And sometimes, of course, I did have to read the thing attentively, not merely to figure out how to reject it but to determine if rejection was in fact warranted. Although our familiarity with the work bred no end of contempt, not all of our fee clients were entirely without talent. Now and then one came upon a nice turn of phrase, a smattering of engaging dialogue, a promising plot situation. This was hardly ever enough to make the story one I’d pass up the chain to the pro man, but it forced me to pay attention to the thing, noting what worked and what didn’t.

  A wonderful education. Nowadays only a handful of publications will even look at unagented manuscripts, and I suppose that makes it hard for new writers, but when was it ever easy? The greater loss, I suspect, is to the men and women who might otherwise be employed reading the slush.

  Of course I wasn’t just reading the fee submissions. I had sold my first story, “You Can’t Lose,” to Manhunt, and while that did not make me a mystery writer overnight, it certainly pointed me in that direction. I’d read a fair amount of crime fiction over the years, but now I began reading with purpose and direction.