Ed Gorman writes:
I didn't seriously try writing a novel until I gave up drink and drugs when I was thirty-three. I'd sold a great number of crap short stories to various crap markets but the kind of concentration a novel required didn't fit into my schedule of devoutly wished oblivion.
My first real try resulted in one of my literary stories being accepted for a Scribner's anthology about alcoholism, a subject I was all too familiar with. After the story was published, the editor called and asked if I'd ever written a novel. I said no. He encouraged me to try.
I spent six months working over and over the 100 pages he asked to see. Some of the writing was pretty good but I discovered that though I'd sold a number of literary stories to extremely minor literary magazines, and even had a large section of my poetry published, I had lost interest in literary fiction. Too much navel-gazing. Literature for me would always be those who came before. My generation of lit writers didn't interest me much. I wanted to write what I mostly read, suspense.
After dozens of false starts over the next seven years, I wrote a dark mystery novel set against my years in advertising (Newsday headlined it: A Hate Letter To Advertising). I did it in a month. My friend Max Collins gave me many suggestions for revising it and tried to get me an agent. I tried, too. After a year of agents turning me down, I sent it directly to the St Martin's slush pile, where a young editor named Brian DeFiore (now a prominent agent) fought for it in editorial meetings and finally got approval to buy it after a few months.
There was nothing remarkable about its fate. While Ballantine picked up the paperback rights, and while over the years it has been reprinted in six languages, it quickly faded from sight.
A few years later it got a small movie option. The producer who called said that he wanted to make it because it was a perfect balance "of sorrow and rage." He said he figured it had to have been written by a drunk because he was drying out and recognized himself in the narrator. I laughed and told him that one prominent agent had turned it down in a three sentence letter that included the line "The protagonist is more psychotic than than the killer."
He may have been on to something there.
Ed Gorman, one of today's most prolific writers, has written a number of novels in different genres, in addition to innumerable short stories and anthologies.
