The Case of the Waltese Falcon

Back in April I bought a bunch of craft books for writers in a StoryBundle charity offering curated by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. The one that left the greatest impression on me was a book by Rusch’s husband, Dean Wesley Smith, entitled Writing Novels with the Waltese Falcon.*

That was the nickname of Walter, one of the couple’s cats at the time. (A pure-bred Red-Point Birman.) Mr. Smith had grown accustomed to writing in his office while the cat napped nearby. 

I know the feeling.

My writing partner, who contributes nothing to the word count

 but still gets fed. Go figure.

In this book, we watch as Mr. Smith writes three novels. One is a ghostwriting project that he is writing for an unidentified major author. Mr. Smith has already been paid to deliver a 70,000-word book. He budgets ten days of writing, and of course he nails it, writing on average 6,895 words a day. (Day #7 he “only” writes 3,005 words. Day #9 sees his greatest output: 9,373 words.)

In the second third of the book, he writes a book in seven days (a short novel of about 43,050 words), starting with a goal of hitting 3,000 words on Day 1, and adding 1,000 words each day after that. On the 7th day, he must hit 9,000 words. He “only” hits 7,000, but by then the story has neatly concluded.

In the last third of Waltese Falcon, Mr. Smith takes a vacation to hang with his poker buddies in Vegas, and manages to write yet another short novel (37,100 words) in five days. He doesn’t own a laptop, so he humorously seats-belts his giant iMac to the back seat of his Caddy, cushioning it with pillows, and barrels off to Sin City.

You might quibble with the lengths of the last two books, but he explains that he is a devotee of the great writers of the pulp fiction era, whose novels typically clocked in under 50,000 words. He argues that publishers in the modern era began contracting longer books from writers so they could charge more for them.

More significantly, he loves challenging himself to write at speed. He never plots anything in advance—not even the ghostwriting project—choosing to “write into the dark” each time. (During the writing of the ghostwriting project, he laments not knowing where this “stupid” book is going.) But each time he figures out the plot points and wraps each of these stories to his satisfaction.

He’s proud of the seven-day book because he had just turned 65 years old at the time, and was frankly wondering if he was too old to pull off an “add-1,000-words-each-day” challenge. He clearly wasn’t.

What made the biggest impression on me as a reader and writer is how much other work he accomplishes in his regular work days. He takes careful notes of all his activity, and shares his daily schedule with us. He usually wakes at noon, checks in at the offices of his publishing business—then located on the Oregon coast—and does all the things the head of a small firm usually does. Bank runs, dealing with movers, buying office furniture, keeping up with emails and bills. (I believe that during this period he may have also owned and operated other businesses in town, such as a collectibles shop.) So that work also consumes his time. And of course he’s hanging with his wife and pets, enjoying decent lunches and dinners with Rusch and friends, and watching a whole lot of television.

Usually he gets to his writing computer about 6 p.m. and writes in bursts of 50-minute sessions into the wee hours of the morning. He estimates that he required 42 such sessions to write the 43,000-word book. “In other words,” he quips, “I typed at the blazing speed of 20.5 words per minute.”

This impressed me because like everyone on the planet, I feel that I constantly have more on my plate than I can handle. When I am feeling stressed, the first thing to go out the window is my current creative goal.

Not my writing partner, but tasked with the job
 of decimating my spinach.

Mr. Smith has a full day of work at the day job(s), but still manages to write prodigiously in his creative work. The delightful conceit of all of this is that while he is writing each of these novels, he is also blogging about and writing the larger nonfiction book that details their creation.

Which of course sent me down memory lane. Back in 2011, Denise and I signed a contract to ghost-write the memoir of a man who was big in the world of pugilism. The manly art, as history so describes it.

At the time we signed, I was busy working on another ghostwriting project. Denise had finished the research and was drafting the book that would become The Girls of Atomic City. We did not have time to write the fight book just yet, but we did have time to schedule regular phone interviews with our client. This we did, once or twice a week, dutifully recording each call using the audio-record function that was a nice feature of old versions of MS Word.

Cut to February 2012. Both Denise and I had sent our manuscripts to our respective editors. Submission usually means that we have about a month to fritter away while the editors read the MS and write their editorial letters.

Great, I thought. Now we can finally put our heads together and write this damn fight book!

Not so fast. At the last minute, our agent poached Denise to ghost-write yet another memoir for a veteran Hollywood actress. The contract had been signed months ago, but the first writer bailed and left behind little copy that was usable. “I’m begging,” the agent said, and how often does that ever happen?

The money was good, and we knew what would happen.

Denise flew to Los Angeles the next day, planning to spend four weeks in the guest cottage behind the actress’s home and conduct daily interviews with her. I would write the fight manuscript, due in a month.

There are two things in the world I know nothing about: music and sports. But I am a Paganini and Gehrig in those domains compared to my knowledge of punching big men repeatedly in the face. Not to worry: Everything I needed was contained in 20 to 25 audio recordings, and my crappy handwritten notes. Or so I hoped.

Every day I stationed myself in front of the computer from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. I took breaks and ate decently, but not as well as I probably should have. The problem with journalistic nonfiction is that you can barely write a paragraph or even a sentence without checking your facts. I sprinkled a ton of TKs in the text as I went, jotting down questions, and researching on the web during my breaks.

At night after I wolfed down dinner, I sat in the living room and listened to our audio recordings. Transcribing them faithfully would take far too much time, so I did the next best thing: I took short notes as I listened, marking the timestamps so I could go back and listen during my writing sessions if I needed to check facts or get the client’s exact phrasing correctly. I nearly wept when I discovered that one of those files was corrupted!

But I pushed on. Those nighttime sessions with the audio files usually took me close to midnight. I crashed into bed each night, and did it all over the next day.

Keeping track along the way.

I do not regard what I’m telling you as something to brag about, by the way. Each time I have told this story, I always say that it was like waiting too long to research a college term paper and then trying to cram it all in one night. Not good.

The thing is, it worked! Averaging 5,700 words a day, I had 40,000 words by the end of the first week. I was frankly astonished that it could be done. I was sure that I’d made mistakes, misspelled the names of the client’s colleagues, or screwed up his family chronology. Nervously, I hit pause on the writing for two days to reread and proof everything. The client was ecstatic to get the first half of his book, and within a few days, responded to all my queries. Those answers added about 4,000 words to the manuscript before the end of the second week.

By the time he was due to fly to Asia on the Thursday of the second week, he had a first draft as it stood, at 70,083 words. (I have no doubt that he told everyone on that flight—in a private jet?—that they really ought to keep the noise down because he was, ahem, busy Reading His Future Upcoming Bestselling Book. Fifty percent of the clients I get are like that.)

After I hit that 70K, I relaxed, for two reasons. One: I knew from past experience that clients always add more to a book when they read. And two, I also know that publishing contracts allow for a variance of 10 percent up or down. The contract asked for an 80,000-word book, but the editors would accept 72,000. The client could cough, and we’d hit 2,000 words more.

I really only had to write that first 70,000 to prime the pump. When the client read the manuscript, he was inspired to riff on topics that we had never touched upon. Before he was back in the states, he was firing off long emails expanding on anecdotes in the book. 

When he got back, he overnighted a pencil edit with still more recollections. We easily met the deadline at the end of the month with 78,393 words. The biggest chunk, that 70,000, was largely written over a 14-day period of time, with one day and a morning off to proof. 

Still, that’s about 5,800 words a day for me.

The biggest pain point for me were those damn audio files. Call me crazy, folks, but since 2012, has technology changed significantly, or what?

Today you can easily upload an audio file and have an instant transcript. At no time in my journalism career has that been possible until the last couple of years. You either laboriously transcribed audio yourself, or you paid someone else to do it. I could never afford hiring out. The rates were exorbitant because such services were aimed at the physician dictation market.

But you know what’s funny? A dead, lifeless transcript could possibly have meant more work for me. The key to the project was reliving our conversations each night before bed. When the client got stubborn about sharing his vulnerabilities, I could hear one of us—usually Denise—pushing him, saying that if he wanted people to understand what he had gone through in his life, he had to be honest.

I heard his voice crack a few times, but he always came clean. And I swear, I felt that as I wrote it. To this day, the reviews he gets for that book online all reference the sensitive side of his character that so few people knew existed.

That was my only experience with writing at speed. But the Waltese Falcon experiments got me thinking I should try something similar again. I’m 15,000 words into a nonfiction project that I’ve wanted to do for a long while. Currently, my average daily output is only about 3,000 words, but I’m not beating myself up. In summer, after all, I am apparently only a part-time writer yet a full-time farmer. But I want to get this done before I go on the road again for Denise’s book tour.

When the nonfiction speed test is over, I hope to try a fiction project. I’ll let you know how it goes. 

I will leave you with one last scene that made me laugh. On one of those nights in a casino in Vegas, Mr. Smith and his buddies encounter two very drunk girls who ask what they do for a living. He responds:

“I sit alone in a room and make shit up.”

* * *

* Writing with the Waltese Falcon has since been revised slightly and re-released as three titles: Writing a Novel in 10 Days: 2026 Edition; Writing a Novel in 7 Days: 2026 Edition; Writing a Novel in Five Days 2026 While Traveling.

Two fun pieces of news:

* Since I saw you last, a country western star released a single entitled Girls of Atomic City, inspired by Denise’s book. Did not know this was happening until a friend sent us the press release.

* Denise’s book, Obstinate Daughters, is now a National Bestseller.

Talk to you soon!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Déjà Vu, 1776

"Study the Past,"
National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

Since June 22, my wife has been promoting her new nonfiction book about the American Revolution. At the events where I’ve tagged along, I’ve experienced a curious sense of déjà vu.

Very déjà, oh so vu.

Starting in 2009—17 years ago—she and I hit the road around this time each year to visit a number of gift shops and bookstores in the former 13 colonies to hawk one and eventually two of our Revolutionary-era history titles.

Our travels took us as far north as Boston and as far south as Georgia. We usually visited sites associated in some way with the Declaration, the Revolutionary War, and the lives of the Signers. Instead of the local Barnes & Noble, we were more likely to be signing at the home of Long Island signer William Floyd, whose home and estate is today managed by the National Park Service. In Philly, we signed in a building across from the Liberty Bell. In Boston, we signed at a shop in the Old State House, which sponsors an annual reading of the Declaration of Independence each Fourth of July.

At the Independence Visitor Center Store, Philadelphia.

Since summer is prime travel season, on those trips we encountered countless tourists. Most often, they were Moms, Dads, and their families on their summer road trip. 

Sometimes, we encountered visitors from overseas whose vacations just happened to coincide with Fourth of July week. I imagine the foreign tourists trying to comprehend why the strangers in this strange land were decked out in red, white, and blue earrings, sneakers, face paint, and T-shirts, and why the slightest hint of evening darkness brought the clangorous pops and sizzles of distant fireworks.

Still…this year’s travels have felt special, and not because of Denise’s book. It was not just any Fourth, after all. This year the US is celebrating its 250th anniversary, so my déjà vu is at least two layers deep. 

On one hand, I remember our 2009-2012 bookstore trips and I remember America’s Bicentennial year, 1976.

That's me in the center, my two brothers at right and left.

Remember, both my parents were garment workers. I recall my Mom hand-stitching the costumes you see in this image, using a Butterick sewing pattern. The outfits were for a parade our school participated in. She also baked and decorated the cakes you see in front of us, the layer cake and the flag sheet cake on the right.

I consumed every children’s book about the Revolution, hoping to soak up as many details as I could of colonial life. Chief among the books I devoured were by the children’s author-illustrator, Robert Lawson: Ben and Me: An Astonishing Life of Benjamin Franklin by His Good Mouse Amos (1939) and Mr. Revere and I: Being an Account of Certain Episodes in the Career of Paul Revere, Esq. as Revealed by his Horse (1953). And there was a charming book about Ben and his grandson living abroad in the year 1776, entitled Poor Richard in France by F.N. Monjo (1973). My fascination with Ben Franklin dates to that era.

Yes, I still have them.

Those books omitted the fact that over the course of his life Franklin owned seven human beings. He later changed his mind about slavery, and devoted the last years of his life to the abolitionist cause.

In her introduction to her new book, Denise tells her 1976 story. She was a few years younger than me. She tells of watching a parade amid red, white, and blue fire hydrants. She was particularly taken by the men and boys playing fife and drums. (Years later, she would master the flute.) Any women and girls she spotted in patriotic reenactments were dressed like Holly Hobby and were either sewing flags, churning butter, or doing laundry.

Surely, she thought, there’s gotta be more for girls to do than that. As you might imagine, that was the spark that led to her current book.

The Betsy Ross story, which is the biggest story Americans remember of a woman contributing to the Revolutionary War, is probably myth. Yes, she did make flags, but it’s impossible to prove that she made the first American flag. Her flag-making was not the most interesting fact about her. Far more interesting is that she buried three husbands, lived into her eighties, and ran a successful business as an upholsterer at a time when doctors and lawyers had trouble paying their bills. I don’t know why I didn’t learn that in elementary school. Was the word businesswoman deemed too difficult for kids in the 1970s?

American patriotism and jingoism are fraught with problems because so much of it is driven by the stories we learned in childhood. What appears in school curricula are the easy facts we know will entice kids and keep them engaged in the story. It’s also what will mollify schools and parents. What is not ever said is that we hope that children will check back in when they’re old enough to learn the fuller story, whatever it is, for better or worse.

Unless that kid grows up to be a dedicated reader, their knowledge of the past will remain stuck at the grade-school level.

The founders expected that citizens would stay informed. But even they would probably not have expected voters to be devoted readers of multi-volume works of history. In their day, the average citizen got the news via word of mouth, public readings, broadsides, and newspapers. And yes, there was just as much propaganda then as now.

But hey—I still look back fondly on those long summer road trips we took nearly 20 years ago. Over time, the booksellers we met on our annual pilgrimage became like friends who looked forward to our visits.
I especially treasured the time we spent in the National Archives, where the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are housed. Usually on those visits, we’d stow our bags in the gift shop downstairs, then go up to reacquaint ourselves with the so-called Charters of Freedom. You press a button to illuminate the documents, which otherwise repose in darkness.

The letters are faint, but they are still there.

We got so friendly with the publicity person in that building that we were permitted to film a naturalization ceremony in the Rotunda one year. What a moving experience! Under giant murals depicting dead white men, men and women of all races and color raised their right hands and pledged to support and defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

One fellow, Dennis, ran the gift shop in the building. He’d set us up with a table outside the shop, and bring us boxes of books to have us start signing stock. Then he’d sprinkle the signed editions around the store.

One year, just as we were packing up, he presented us with adorable pair of goodie boxes he had designed and filled just for us. I was astonished by his kindness.

Bookseller's gift:
On the Road Writer Survival Kit
The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
"Take this, write something, have a nosh..." —Allen Ginsberg

Another year, as we hawked our books, we were told that David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States (AOTUS) appointed by Obama in 2009, would be coming down to meet us. 

Imagine my surprise when this man stepped off the elevator and walked toward our table, carrying in his hands a copy of my children’s book on the life of Fibonacci. Turns out, the man everyone called the Collector-in-Chief was also a math geek. He introduced himself and asked for my signature. I was so nervous I nearly flubbed the spelling of his name.

The tourists who moved me the most were always kids.

Families that were recent immigrants to the US often appeared at our table in one large group, speaking another tongue, urging their youngest member to step forward and speak. Indian and Pakistani families stand out in my memory because of the ladies’ dress. But we met a lot of newcomers from eastern Europe and South America as well.

“I would like to buy your book,” the child of these families would say.

“Would you like us to make it out to you?”

Nervously, the kids would look to their parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts, and older siblings. As a group, the elders would nod. Thus emboldened, the kid would announce loudly, “Yes, please!”

By 2011, after we had been doing this a few years, I really loved the kids who announced proudly that they had read our first book on the signers of the Declaration and now wanted the one on the Constitution. We didn’t write those books for kids, but they were decent works of popular history, and funny to boot. Sometimes a child would quote a pun or a one-liner we’d forgotten we’d made.

A special spot in my heart is reserved for those kids who announced that history was their favorite subject. Ditto the ones who told us that they themselves were writers or writers in training. (Some of the girls carried their handwritten works in progress in their backpacks, which they were happy to show us.)

As we signed their books, the kids peppered us with questions:

“How long did it take you to write the book?”
“Do you write them on a computer?”
“Do you go to a library to look things up?”
“Are you married?”
“Do you have kids?”

In other words, they basically asked the same questions grown-ups ask writers, only far more seriously. 

And as we answered, both of us thought of the kids we were once. Kids of 1976. The Bicentennial. Kids eager to learn the history of the place we called home.

At the end, we always had a gift for those kids. 

“Would you like a sticker?”

Of course they said yes, as did their older siblings, who I was quite certain would think wearing a red, white, and blue flag, rainbow, or field of stars on one’s cheek wasn’t cool.

Writing is hard. Selling what you write is harder. But sometimes all the work and all the research you've done comes together nicely, and the result is a single product in the hands of one person who will take its words to heart. E Pluribus Unum.

Exterior, National Archives

* * * 

Thanks for reading. See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Anyone Can Write: Be a Lion! Be a Pirate!

 

Write like this.

If you have kids or grandchildren, you have probably encountered the animated Pixar movie, Ratatouille, about a French rat whose dream is to cook his filthy little heart out. The film’s mantra, expressed by a legendary chef who is deceased through much of the story, is “Anyone can cook.” Chef Auguste Gusteau’s egalitarian dictum drives the plot of the film, and inspires and ultimately uplifts our rodent star, Remy.

Gusteau’s words pop into my head every time I re-read Brenda Ueland’s charming book, If You Want to Write. I don’t re-read many books, especially books about writing, but I do find myself turning to Ueland every year and I get something out of it each time. For many years I kept a few extra copies in the office to share with friends.

This time I picked it up because I had re-read a short story I’d written a few years ago that I now felt certain was, as long as we are on a French theme, merde.

I can’t believe I sent this to an editor!

What was I thinking?

No wonder they rejected it!

And like that.

That’s when I knew it was time to dig out Brenda and dip into her wisdom. Her book first saw the light of day in 1938. Ueland was born to Norwegian Americans who settled the American midwest. A judge for a father, a suffragette for a mother. Ueland lived and worked in New York City in the early teens of that century, counting among her friends radical writers such as John Reed and Louise Bryant, and the playwright Eugene O’Neill. (Watch Warren Beatty’s film Reds, to get up to speed.)

I can’t tell you much about Ueland’s literary output. She wrote for the major magazines of her days such as Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, in addition to newspapers and radio shows. She married three times and had many lovers. Some of her short pieces have been published in collections. She walked nine miles a day on her best days, and treasured that time because it’s when she did her best thinking.

When she returned home to Minneapolis after Greenwich Village, she wrote a column for the Minneapolis Times, and—lucky for all writers everywhere—began teaching writing classes in 1934. Not at Iowa. Not at Harvard. Not at Yaddo. Her pulpit was the YMCA in the Twin Cities.

Her students were men and women, rich and poor, sales clerks and housewives, hopeful magazine writers, self-important men of business, and people on the edge. Many of them had grown up in farm country, and carried memories of that life. They came each night to listen and learn and try their hand at something they had always dreamed of.

It is clear that Ueland learned as much from them as her students learned from her. After giving a speech at a local writers’ conference one year, she received so many comments from admirers that she finally compiled her observations and lessons into a slim volume that lifts me every time I turn to it.

How could you not be cheered by the very first chapter, which echoes Chef Gusteau, entitled: “Everybody is talented, original and has something important to say”?

The book is eighteen chapters and only 179 pages long. She’s a fan of William Blake and quotes or references him 45 times. She has consumed all of Van Gogh’s letters, and quotes or discusses him 17 times. There are asides on de Musset, Plotinus, Mozart, Tolstoy, Kreisler, Saint-Beuve, Ibsen, Inge, and an interesting scene featuring Sandburg, about the time he visited her in Minnesota and they took a chilly stroll around her beloved Lake Calhoun.

In other words, as she warns us early on, her book is technically about writing, but she is really speaking about anything you long to do. Her true subject is the creative life, for creation, she reminds us, is at the heart of what it means to be human.

Her thesis: As children we learn to tell stories and we’re fantastic confabulists. We intuitively know how to shape a tale with a beginning, middle, and end. Then we get older and freeze up when we sit down to write. Why? By then legions of teachers have made writing seem far too serious. If we dare to set a pencil to paper, we have been schooled, we must follow rules or...we will fail.

Ueland taught her students to set down their words as plainly as possible. If they learned to get out of their own way, they would get to the heart of their stories. “Art is infection,” she says. (Another chapter title.) If the writer feels passionate about what they commit to the page, the reader cannot help to feel it too.

Her favorite Van Gogh story: At first he did not know he wanted to be a painter. He lived in London, studying to be a preacher. Sitting in his dingy flat, he peeked out his window at the rainy night. A lamppost, a star—that was all. In the midst of writing a letter to his brother, he stopped and wrote, “It is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And he proceeded to draw on the page of his letter what he saw in front of him. Ueuland writes:

[T]he moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it.

Why don’t we all do as Von Gogh did? she asks.

“[B]ecause we have been discouraged into thinking what we feel about the sky is not important.”

She did not critique her students’ work. No. In chapter eight, when she begins to share samples of their writing with us, she explains her process. Congratulate them. Celebrate their wins. Then, ask them questions:

I am blessed with a fascinated, inexhaustible interest in all my pupils—their thoughts, adventures, failures, rages, villainies and nobilities. “Tell me more. Tell me exactly what you feel when you tried to kill the man.”…“You say ‘his muscles rippled through his shoulders.’ Did they really ripple? Did you really see that?” Then the young novelist’s excited defense: “Yes, they did! His muscles were so big they seemed to burst the seams of his coat!” Myself: “Well say that! Hurrah! Put it that way. That’s alive, great!”

In another section, she shares the work of a young Irish woman who works in a stultifying sub-basement as a department store stenographer. The lass writes a simple essay about a trip she has taken to Wayzata, Minnesota. It’s so rich, your heart breaks reading it. Van Gogh could not have rendered Wayzata more beautifully.

Ueland then quotes passages from flashy magazine stories of her day. She singles out sections she feels have fallen short because the writers did not adhere to her first rule: be true to yourself. They got caught up in writing what they thought would sound literary, and she can sense it.

No, she says. Write from the heart. Write simply. Write what you feel or know to be true. Only that will connect with readers.

Now, look, I did not say that this was a book about how to write fiction. Yes, she does touch on the topic, and even proudly quotes a fun passage by a student who has written a mystery. But to me, every time I read the book I come away feeling that her true gift was helping students overcome their fear and craft fine personal essays.

If I were teaching a group of new writers, this would be the text I’d read to inspire myself, and them. I read Ueland to more fully understand my compulsion to embark on this insane career. If someone were just starting out and asked me for advice, I’d hand them this book, and have.

Just reading the titles of her chapters fills the room with light:

Chapter 2: “Imagination is the Divine Body in every Man”—William Blake 

Yes, that is the title of the freaking chapter.

Chapter 7: Be careless, reckless! Be a lion, be a pirate, when you write 

Chapter 14: Keep a slovenly, headlong, impulsive, honest diary

Chapter 18: “He whose face gives no light shall never become a star”—William Blake

I will warn you that she was also a writer of her time. When she celebrates Columbus in a footnote, calling his discovery the gift of imagination, Tonstant Reader nearly frowed up. I may be wrong, but none of the luminaries she cites in her inspirational stories are women. She does, however, celebrate the work of her female students.

She supported herself and her daughter on her writing after her first marriage ended. She knew the life of a single mother, but she urged her female students to make time for their writing, believing that committing to one’s dreams set a fine example for one’s kids.

“If you would shut the door against your children for an hour a day and say: ‘Mother is working on her five-act tragedy in blank verse!’ you would be surprised how they would respect you. They would probably all become playwrights.”

She describes a funny scene in which she poses for some young girls for three days while they paint her portrait. She remarks how quiet the children were while they were “playing”—and how interesting the final, unschooled works of art were.

(Sidenote: What adults can learn about art from children is the theme of a new book—Don't Call it Art, by Austin Kleon, that I've been hearing about all week. Funny that I should re-encounter this anecdote by Ueland around the same time.)

Ueland set a swimming record in her eighties. She was 93 when she died in 1985. By then, she’d been knighted by the King of Norway and written some six million words. That figure awed me once. It still does, but I now see it as a reasonable allotment for someone who supported herself her whole life by her pen. Yet I cannot help thinking that her true worth was measured by how she enriched the lives of her students and helped them to see that their voices mattered.

Judging from the number of different versions of this book found online, I surmise that it is now in the public domain. If you do seek it out, choose the editions published by Graywolf Press, the nonprofit publisher in Minnesota that has been entrusted by the Ueland estate to keep this work in print since the 1980s. You don’t want to go wrong; the book is filled with delicious footnotes that poor publishers can easily screw up. If You Want to Write is Graywolf’s bestselling book, for good reason.

My copy.

The current Graywolf edition.

* * * 

BSP: My wife's new book arrives next Tuesday. I hope you check it out.

See the video on YouTube.

Learn more at Denise's website.

Check it out on Bookshop.org, not the place run by the billionaire.

See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

joedenise.com

I Am Graduating Still

 

It’s the season of Dads and grads. My phone has blown up recently with pictures of young people in caps and gowns, sent by their proud parents. On a rainy weekday early this month I found myself in an auditorium watching a member of our family receive her hood for a PhD she’d been working on since the pandemic.

It had been a long time since I’d attended such a ceremony, so I was surprised to find myself become emotional. That’s something you’d expect to do at weddings and funerals. I forgot that education—the yearning to strive, learn, get better—is a powerful trigger for me.

In this case, I was struck with a memory from my past.

Freshman year of journalism school. I’m sitting in the seminar portion of my larger COM107 class—the first course every journalism student takes—when the professor makes a bold statement.

He says that journalism as we know it, as we’ve practiced it since the turn of the century, is on the ropes. Thought leaders now say that a person who enters the profession can expect to make seven significant career pivots in their lifetime.

We were kids. We knew nothing. His statement went right over our heads.

Then he broke it down.

I am not saying that you will have seven jobs in your lifetime. Doing the same thing seven times in a row. No.

Oh—I thought. That’s exactly what my baby brain thought you meant.

In the course of your lifetime, he went on, you will shift to radically different careers. Maybe you start out as a reporter for a newspaper, but eventually you will write press releases for an electric company, you will run marketing for a huge bookstore chain like Barnes & Noble, you will start your own public relations firm, and by the time you retire you’ll be running the fundraising arm for your local theatre company. That’s what I mean.

This happened in a classroom in the early 1980s, which meant that even Prof. Babcock—who was then and remained for decades after, a towering figure in communications research—could not foresee the impact the Internet would have on journalism. Newspapers began their death spirals when Craigslist arrived in 1995. Suddenly people had a free or free-ish place to take their classified ads, which newspapers had monopolized and charged through the nose for since the dawn of print. The loss of that revenue, and the revenue from display ads, cost newspapers dearly.

Back in 2026, as I waited for the graduation ceremony to start, I ticked off the jobs I’d had. I’d gone to school for magazine journalism. I knew I couldn’t hack daily journalism. I was a features writer at heart. I would write for the glossies, thought I.

If you squint at my resume, you would see a career that probably defied Professor Babcock’s thesis.

I wrote for children’s magazines for my first two jobs, then I jumped to a dot-com (undreamt-of in Babcock’s philosophy), then went freelance and wrote for a string of magazines before segueing to books and ghostwriting. Aside from the blip represented by that website, my career did not at all conform to a seven-career shift.

At heart I am still a writer and editor.

Babcock’s prediction came true only in the new skills I was forced to master. By the time I had books to promote and clients to woo, the practice of typing up a resume and dropping it off at the neighborhood printer to be—ha!—expensively typeset and run off on fancy paper was laughable.

The early 2000s I had to learn how to design a website. By 2009, when my wife and I published a book on the signers of the Declaration of Independence, we were designing t-shirts. (One for every signer! Collect all 56! Geez, was that a crazy idea).

Social media meant learning how to shoot photos, add text to them, and send them out into the world, often with appended music.

You know—to do the job most publishers had stopped doing.

When publishers ran a quick 'n' dirty ebook sale of one of our titles, we dropped everything and designed a promo ad to distribute on social media, the way an advertising director might do.

We learned how to pitch our books to bookstores and non-stores, landing new accounts the way sales reps would.

We learned to approach radio stations and book reviewers, the way publicists would.

Today, if you look at the website of the school I attended, they announce with some puffery that they are preparing students for careers in digital journalism. They have stopped the charade that they are teaching for a one-track career. Graduates, they say, must be ready to tell stories across multiple platforms.

Every year, when I do our taxes, I am amazed by the sheer number of software programs our household subscribes to. And I’m sure you, my fellow 21st Century scribes, are in a somewhat similar situation. Some more than others, no doubt.

It is only when I step back and recall that I entered my freshman dorm toting an electric typewriter…

It is only when I recall that the journalism school taught us to set type by hand, just to give us a feel for the origins of that quaintly ancient technology…

It is only when I recall that the journalism school later ditched that very same type lab—sold off all those wooden trays of backwards lead letters to the art school across the street, retired the elderly pressman who ran the hand-cranked press…and filled the lab space with gleaming IBM personal computers in my senior year…

It is only then that I can appreciate the shift in time.

This came to me in a flash, all at the start of that graduate school ceremony, and I could not shake the grateful thought that I am graduating still.

A while back, I decided to build an online store for our books and stories. Many writers have done this, and it felt like a good, long-term goal. If nothing else, it would be a place to refer all those people who ask, “What’s the best place to buy your books?” (They say this as if they haven’t wandered into a bookstore in ages, which—sigh—they probably haven’t.)

It took me two years, but the store is finally live. It took that long because I needed to learn or relearn a lot of new skills. Guess what? (The Declaration Signer t-shirts are back!) Next up: I am teaching myself to record my short stories. I have bolted the microphone to the dining room table.

Why would anyone want to stop learning?

A person my wife interviewed for her first narrative nonfiction book arrived in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the 1940s to work as a lab chemist on the Manhattan Project. Few employees in the Secret City knew what they were working on, but Virginia, a trained scientist, surmised the truth. How could she not?

I miss Virginia. I enjoyed getting to know her during the writing of that book. She was kind enough to let us live at her home while Denise conducted her research so we didn’t have to keep shelling out for hotels.

By then Virginia was in her late eighties, walked with two canes, was partially blind, and wore two hearing aids. Each morning she headed to her office to wake her Mac. She had her screen zoomed to the highest setting so she could read the news in 120-point type. She prized her e-reader because the technology allowed her to do the same with books.

On one of those visits, she told us that she had enrolled in an exciting new class for the coming semester at the senior center. The instructor was a young physicist from the national lab.

“What’s the course?” we asked.

“The history of transuranic elements,” she replied.

God willing, I will be like her someday: Approaching my ninth decade and still learning. The only way to be, as far as I am concerned.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

A Library of One's Own

 

Books I have not read.

In the beginning they were all library books, and they were manageable. At the library across the street from the public school, a kid could borrow up to five books, max, which was good, because those early selections were short picture books that I breezed through quickly, often in the car on the way home. Typically, I chose books our teacher had read to us in class. Now I wanted to turn the pages myself and take as much time as possible to digest them.

After I absorbed the story, I’d start over again, this time studying every single image and imagining how the illustrators had done their work. Think about the crosshatching in books by Maurice Sendak. You could get lost in those lines.

One of the books from those days—Stupid Marco by Jay Williams, about a moronic prince who cannot tell his right hand from his left—was beautifully illustrated by a Dutch illustrator named Friso Henstra. Scritchy-scratchy lines galore. Can you imagine anyone permitting a kid to read a book today whose protagonist is labeled stupid on the front cover?

Eventually, I’d bring the books back and get a whole new stack. I could do this as many times as I wanted, and no one ever gave me guff about it. It cost nothing, and in the end the books went back where they belonged.

Neat. Tidy.

When I started buying paperbacks at the local bookstore, I bought to fill in the gaps in the library’s collection. But I still followed the same logical process: buy, read, buy another.

Neat. Tidy.

In other words, books were borrowed or purchased in order to be read now. They never came home and stayed untouched. This was the greatest of all rules. I read what I bought, and I read what I borrowed.

There was no such thing as unread books.

I continued this practice well into college and slightly beyond. Then, for some reason, the Neat-Tidy system broke down. Books entered my apartment and stayed unread for a good long time. They stacked up on the bookshelf. Or in piles near the couch. On my bedside table. On my desk. I rationalized their acquisition because I knew I would get to them in time, because I always had.

Soon books entered the dwelling unread and stayed that way for years. For some reason, I was okay with this. I did what anyone in my position would do: I blamed Otto Penzler.

When I was fresh out of college, somehow I learned of the Crime Collector’s Club (CCC) that Penzler operated out of his Mysterious Bookshop in Manhattan, the location with the charming spiral staircase. You signed up, you sent him money, and every month he mailed you a new hardcover book.

These were special. They were autographed by the author. I had never heard of such a thing. It was the most marvelous thing ever. When I finally got around to reading the book, it didn’t matter that there were no pictures; I could ogle the writer’s handwriting on the title page as I read. Wow.

Sometimes you could opt for a second book on Otto’s monthly offer! Holy smokes. More books to paw over and stack up for future reading.

Thank you, authors. Thank you, publishers. Thank you, Otto.

A friend once asked about Otto’s CCC and marveled that I was willing to spend a princely $17.95 a month on hardcover books. “That’s expensive!” she spluttered. She was right. We were journalists living on crappy incomes. In my defense, I wasn’t yet married, nor did I have the mouths of babes to feed. What was I going to do with my meager earnings anyway? Eat? Pay rent?

The Japanese have a word for this bookish behavior: tsundoku. It means piling up reading materials that go unread. Apparently no judgment is implied when a case of tsundoku is diagnosed. The situation just is.

I have developed coping mechanisms over the years. I had to. I am not an animal. Pound for pound, unless you have taken up a side hobby like blacksmithing, welding, or the letterpress arts, books are apt to be the heaviest things you will ever own. A single move will impart a critical lesson: you are, in effect, paying twice for all the books you have and haven’t read. From time to time, I painfully pick my way through the stacks and decide: Am I ever really going to read this? If the answer is no, out the door it goes.

I have given away books, lent them, donated them. The piles still grow. Nowadays, when I pick them up, they come with stories their makers never intended. This copy of Irish short stories is the one I bought for my Irish lit class in college. I remember how charming the professor was when he read Yeats aloud in a pleasing Irish brogue. By chance is he still alive, I wonder? Here, also, are countless copies of signed books by friends. Looking back, I should not have been so impressed by the signed books Mr. Penzler sold. If you write, in time you amass friends who also write. You amass their books as well. Now, fully a third of my living room bookshelves are devoted to signed copies. And yes, I have to admit, many of those are unread too.

Once, while walking the dog, I happened upon one of those Little Free Libraries, and discovered a first edition of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and nearly wept. Ages ago, while living in Hoboken, I once had my own first of that book. I’d bought it when it first came out. (Tom and I go way back. In journalism school, we were taught that he was a god, and for a while I subscribed to this notion.) I had enjoyed the book the first time around, but I had donated it after some years and always regretted it. Here it was, in North Carolina, in a perfectly fine dust jacket. What was I supposed to do, not take it home and stick it on a pile?

For a while there, my wife and I eagerly consumed Marie Kondo’s classic, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and dutifully followed its prescribed steps. We decluttered our kitchen! We decluttered our clothing closets, our garage, the outdoor shed. Kondo’s system was brilliant. Pick up an item and ask yourself, “Does this spark joy?” If the answer is no, you know what to do.

She instructed you to carefully purge your way from objects of little sentimental value to the most. (Family heirlooms and photographs are the last thing you purge.) We never applied her principle to books. My wife refused to. She insisted that Kondo, a Japanese author who had once worked at a shinto shrine before becoming a professional organizer, didn’t actually understand books. It seemed as if tsundoku, in her personal cosmology, came loaded with judgment. At that stage in our process, we donated Kondo’s book and never looked back.

I have learned over time to not gratuitously add to the pile. I feel a helpful wave of shame when I attend bookstore events. Such lovely authors! (But I simply cannot buy another book, can I? No! You have too many! More than you will ever read in the time remaining!) Then comes the other voice: You can’t support another writer? What kind of writer are you?

I used to be appalled when I saw how many people departed bookstores, empty-handed, after a reading. Now I understand.

In 2022, when my father died in California, my brother asked if I wanted Dad’s multi-volume set of Popular Mechanics guides for the practical handyman. If I Venmoed him some money, my brother would pack all sixteen volumes in a box—

“Absolutely not!” I shouted into the phone.

I was outvoted by my wife, who thought it might be hilarious to have such books.

Great. I squeezed them in among the cookbooks in the den, and flip through them when I need to repair a faucet or refurbish a crappy cabinet, as I did last weekend. Why would I use the internet to research how to remove decrepit hardware, and to sand, buff and carefully pound in finishing nails when I had a perfectly good book on my shelf—which predated the internet and possibly the invention of television—that demonstrated the precise steps necessary to turn another inherited piece of crap into an exquisite, eye-catching piece upon which to store more piles of unread books?

There is a moment in many of those country house mysteries where the inspector interviews an insomniac suspect who says he came downstairs in his bathrobe at 3 a.m. to get a book out of his host’s library, and encountered another suspect who was descending the servant’s staircase to fetch a sandwich.

Bull, I used to think, when I encountered such characters. Who wakes up at 3 a.m.? And who goes into someone else’s private library to borrow a book? And while we’re at it, Inspector, do you not find it at all odd that Lord Squidgecombe packed a bathrobe to visit someone’s country house for the weekend? How convenient! Almost as if he were expecting to need an alibi!

But you know what? Decades later, I get it. Not the bathrobe part, but the reading of new, enticing, strange books in the middle of the night. It certainly beats tossing and turning. If you have a sandwich handy, so much the better.

Five decades after I entered my first library, the one across the street from the public school, I have built my own. Amid the occasional duds and tripe, it’s filled with wonders, most of them forgotten or unappreciated by me. When I happen upon one of these, I’m a kid again and feel as if I’ve just picked out another gem. Please say you understand.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Case of the Silent Fan

My young nephew recently landed the job of his dreams after a two-year stint in the NBC Page program. The job seems perfect for him. As long I can remember, he’s been obsessed with movies and screenwriting. Now he’s working in the industry. Hearing his dad talk about his son’s new gig reminded me of one of my first job interviews, which unwittingly touched upon our beloved genre.

Not my nephew.

Cue dream sequence music and SFX.

Doodly-do, doodly-do…

I am fresh out of college, living back at my parents’ home in New Jersey, and scouring want ads in the New York Times.

Oh—here’s one! A major publisher is looking for editorial assistants. This is not a surprise to me. I have a degree in journalism, but I am deeply uninterested in writing for newspapers. (Newflash: this is the 1980s, folks. Newspapers still exist.) In the fields of magazine journalism and book publishing, being someone’s editorial assistant is how one breaks into these two specialized fields. I am prepared to editorially assist the heck out of anyone who will have me.

I phone the number in the newspaper. Somewhere in the Big Town, the phone rings. The person asks a few questions, and instructs me to bring my résumé and my sunny disposition to 175 Fifth Avenue on the appointed day and hour.

Wowza! I have a job interview!

I ride the bus from the Jersey side to the Port Authority bus terminal. I walk 20 blocks south because I know nothing of city buses or subways. It’s summer, so my button-down shirt and blazer are probably soaked by the time I get there. But this is a dream sequence, so I arrive looking pristine. Even my résumé is perspiration-free.

Reasonable facsimile of Joe upon arrival
at job interview.

I am standing in front of the famous Flatiron Building. I may have heard of it in my reading but this is the first time I have ever been there. The human resources person chats me up, asks about my majors in school, and then tells me she would like to introduce me to the book editor who will be needing an editorial assistant very, very shortly.

She mentions the editor’s name, but I am a) nervous/anxious/self-conscious beyond belief, and b) hearing impaired, and wear gigantic hearing aids that I am sure astronauts can spot from space. It is quite possible I did not wear the hearing aids today because, well, see a) above.

The editor’s name goes in one ear and out the other. Vaguely, the name sounds like Jon-Kon, which may have been a character in the Star Wars franchise. The human resources woman and I ride the steam-driven elevator to another floor, while she tells me that this particular editor is quite special.
Because she has her own imprint.

I am a twenty-one-year-old college graduate and I am an idiot, which the remainder of this discussion will fail to disprove. I don’t know from imprints. I don’t know what they are or why I need to know this word.

For 15 of the last 21 years I have been busy doing homework, sleeping, watching TV, and reading. Books, baby, books! That’s me. I don’t know from stinkin’ imprints.

Minutes later, I am sitting in the tiny office of a small woman with short-cropped hair and wide, smiley eyes.

“Editing is the easy part,” she tells me after a bit. “If you were an English major, this will come easy. But contracts? That’s where the young people go wrong. Can you add and subtract?”

Yes, absolutely, I tell her.

“Can you type a sentence word-for-word that is right there in front of you on the desk?”

Yes, of course, I tell her.

“See? That’s all that’s necessary. Now...authors. Most are very nice. Very interesting. But a few are... difficult. Here are some of the books we edit here…”

She went rooting on the shelf behind her. One by one, she passed the books to me. I glanced, I boggled, and I placed them on a stack on the desk in front of me.

Nervously.

Because, you see, they were all, every one of them, mysteries.

As it happened, I read mysteries. Lots. In fact, you might say that sitting on my duff reading mysteries was the only skill I had acquired in my young life.

The editor was glad to make my acquaintance. She wanted me to meet the young person who was leaving her post, so that I could understand what the job entailed. If I got the job, I would be reading slush piles, recommending books I liked to Jon-Kon, dealing with her correspondence, typing up contracts, seeing that packages got from her to literary agents and vice versa.

And once in a while, if I had the aptitude for it and the desire, I might be permitted to acquire the books I liked and carry them from manuscript to finished book. With Jon-Kon’s assistance and supervision, of course.

The outgoing editorial assistant repeated much of what her employer had said. And yes, she said, she had in fact acquired and edited some books on her own. It wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t really her cup of tea.

“Why are you leaving?” I asked.

“Oh—I got another job,” she said. “Across the street. See that bank down there? Right there. It pays better.”

(The editorial assistant salary was $12,000, about $36,000 today.)

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This woman, who was only a few years older than me, was leaving what I imagined was a dream job to work at a bank rather than acquire and edit the work of mystery writers? What the living heck?

I had so much more to learn about the world.

The editorial assistant asked if I had any other questions. I didn’t. I bid her and Jon-Kon goodbye.
That was it. I went downstairs and told the human resources person that this truly seemed like a dream job. I said little more.

She said she would be in touch.

Of course, she was not. Not ever.

What do they tell kids fresh out of college? They have to be persistent. They must be go-getters! Two things no one would ever say of me. And yet, for several days in a row, I phoned their office and tried to persist and go-get as best I could, to no avail. With each call, I must have seemed more desperate. 

Because by then I had glanced at some of the hardcover books in my meager collection and spotted a curious thing printed at the bottom of those spines or else on the back.

A Joan Kahn Book.

Depending on who is relating the history, Ms. Kahn may have been the first editor to have her own imprint. Her name on the cover of the books she edited—by Dick Francis, Tony Hillerman, Patricia Highsmith, and so on—signaled to readers who had never heard of this particular author that they were nevertheless in for a good time.

In her remarkable career, which stretched from 1946 to 1989, Ms. Kahn collected two awards from the Mystery Writers of America, the Ellery Queen Award for editing, and upon retirement a special Edgar to recognize her incredible contribution to the genre. She died in 1994 at age 80.

In my memory, she lives on as the person who asked so brightly on the day of my greatest mistake if I could add and subtract.

What was my mistake, you ask?

Perhaps you have guessed it.

I’ll give you a moment to mull it over. You have all the facts. I have laid them before you as best I could, omitting nothing. A foolish kid walks into a job interview, realizes that this represents his fondest wish—to work in the world of mystery fiction—and what does he say?

To the human resources woman? To the outgoing editorial assistant? To the great Jon-Kon herself?

Does he utter a single thing about his interest, nay, obsession with mysteries? Does he mention his favorite authors? Does he reference his subscriptions to the digest magazines? His growing stack of Armchair Detectives? The beat-up first edition of a Philo Vance hardcover that he found at a flea market that still has an intact oh-so-cool foldout map of the murder scene?

Nope.

Not a peep. Not a word. I entered their offices as a complete zero and exited shortly after without raising that number a whit.

That’s why, strangely, at this time of year, when students are about to collect their parchments in droves and head out into the world to seek their fortunes, my only real advice for them is drawn from a movie I watch every Christmas, The Family Stone.

In it, Luke Wilson consoles his brother’s uptight girlfriend, played by Sarah Jessica Parker. He wishes she would learn to make peace with her quirky self and not try to be so perfect, so appropriate, all the time.

“Here’s the thing, Meredith,” he tells her. “You have a freak flag. You just don’t fly it.”

Even if you’re young, you’ve earned that flag. Most of us have. It’s the thing that makes you you. Flying it is letting the world know who you are.

And yeah, I know that a job interview is probably one of the last places to let one’s fandom leak out. But geez, when a stranger announces to you that their greatest delight in the world is digging into a nice, juicy murder, read the room and unfurl the colors, you sweet, beautiful nerd.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

What do NBC Pages actually do? Watch Joe’s nephew and find out.

Tales from the Jungle

I don’t recall how I first heard of Frank Gruber’s 1967 book, The Pulp Jungle. It’s one of those books that, once you’ve heard about it, you start seeing references everywhere in the writing community. For me, the hype, if you can call it that, always seemed to touch upon three points:

1. If you want to know what it was like to write during the heyday of the pulps, this is the book to read.

2. The book is out of print, and you’ll pay through the nose to snag a copy.

3. Nearly every review I’ve read shares Gruber’s famous lunchtime soup ritual, which neatly encapsulates just how impoverished he was while trying to break into New York City publishing in the 1930s.

I won’t keep you waiting on these points, since I am obliged by the Pulp Jungle code of ethics to disclose them all:

1. Yes, this is the book to read to get a sense of the pulp fiction lifestyle as practiced by writers in the 1930s and 40s, and slightly beyond.

2. Yes, finding an original copy of the book is costly, with prices starting around $50 and quickly shooting into the hundreds. One rare book dealer has for sale a copy of the MS once owned by the author for about $1,300. But now, thanks to Fiction House Press, you can buy a paperback copy for $15.

3. I’ll save the soup story for later. I promise.

Not gonna lie: It’s a weird little book. Gruber tells us in the opener that in 1960 he took a call from a professor at UCLA. Was he THE Frank Gruber who had penned classics of the pulp era? You see, the university was about to launch a Black Mask exhibit…

The call triggers a wave of nostalgia, and Gruber realizes that it has been two decades since he’d written his last story for Black Mask, twenty-seven by the time he got around to writing this brisk, 189-page memoir. Pulp Jungle feels strangely incomplete. For one thing, it ends abruptly in an odd place, and some of the chapters feel rushed as well, almost as if its creator could not be bothered to give it a thorough editing before sharing it with the world. If that does not embody the spirit of the pulp era, I don’t know what does.

Gruber estimates that between 1934 and 1941 he wrote between 600,000 and 800,000 words a year, the equivalent of seven to 10 modern novels a year. In his lifetime, he wrote about 400 short stories, 60 novels, and 200 screenplays for television and the movies (most for projects that were never filmed). He wrote detective stories, adventure stories, love stories, westerns, spy novels, and “spicy” stories (which I take to mean erotica). By the way, I think he grossly undercounts his short story output. In one year alone in the 1930s, he wrote 176 stories. But let's go with 400. It's his book.

Born in Minnesota, he’d longed to write as a boy, after reading a slew of Horatio Alger stories. After a stint in the U.S. Army, he sold his first short story at age 23 for $3.50. In 1927, he landed his first job editing an agricultural newspaper, and eventually moved to a publisher in Iowa, where he edited as many as five of those agri-rags. In between, he wrote and sent rounds of stories to the pulps in New York City.

Just as we do today, as soon as a story was rejected, he sent it in the mail to another editor, using the barely one-decade-old Writer’s Digest as his guide. Between 1932 and 1934, he reports, he wrote about 620,000 words of fiction but never earned a living wage. His dream of becoming a writer plays havoc with his family budget, for in the early decades of the twentieth century, ceaseless rounds of postage cost a fortune.

If he were actually on the ground in New York City, he theorizes, he’d save money on stamps, deliver each manuscript by hand, and meet a ton of editors in the process. In 1934, when the agri-papers tank as a result of the Depression, Gruber sees his chance. He sends his young wife to live with her parents, and boards a train to the Big Apple lugging a suitcase, a typewriter, and $60.

Times are tough. Rent in New York City is exorbitant compared to rent back home. (Upon arrival, he shells out $10.50 for a week’s rent at a hotel.) Over the next seven months, he shares hotel rooms and apartments with other writers. When he gets locked out of one apartment for being late with the rent, he rides the subway all night, trying to keep from nodding off. But golly, at least he wasn’t paying for those damn stamps.

To make ends meet, Gruber patronizes Automats, squirts hot water into a bowl, squeezes in several packets of ketchup, sprinkles crushed soup crackers over the liquid, and slurps it up with a spoon. Instant tomato soup! Cost: $0. He did this for days at a time to stave off hunger.

He estimates that there were about 150 pulp magazines headquartered in New York City, which boggles the mind when you think of the paucity of story markets today. He asserts that 300 writers lived in the New York area who had cracked those markets, with thousands more living in the hinterland wanting in on the action.

The magazines hit the stands with lovely names like Ace Detective, Ace Sports, Ace Western, Ten Detective Aces, Adventure, Argosy, Detective Fiction Weekly, Dime Detective, Dime Western, Double Action Western, Love Story, Weird Tales, Western Story, and Western Trails. The “kings” were Doc Savage and The Shadow, published by Street & Smith, and of course, Black Mask.

What surprised me was how often Gruber phoned editors to ask if he could stop by to introduce himself and pitch his work. Many blew him off, erecting walls between themselves and the legions of writers who craved access to their offices. Gruber speaks about sneaking past secretaries and assistant editors to find his marks. In some cases, the editors said yes! Off he confidently went to shake hands, talk about his work, the places he’d written, and lob ideas. Sometimes the editors would bite; often they kindly sent him on his way.

It took me a long time to finish this fairly short book because I was frequently pausing mid-sentence to research the names he drops. Many of the editors and writers were unknown to me. In some cases, the big-name editors struck me as different versions of the editors I knew in New York publishing: Highly educated people who had attended upscale universities but who, for whatever reason or lack thereof, had pursued career paths that led straight into the ink-stained trenches.

Joseph Shaw, for example, attended Bowdoin, won an Olympic medal for fencing, served his country in WWI—and eventually edited Black Mask, filling its pages with the work of Hammett, Chandler, and Gardner. Gruber tried many times to crack Shaw’s market. With each rejection, Shaw graciously dissected the pieces to explain why he had declined them, warmly encouraging Gruber to submit something else.

Black Mask nevertheless struggled to survive, and when “Captain” or “Cap” Shaw wouldn’t take a pay cut, he was dismissed and replaced by Fanny Ellsworth, the daughter of a New York banker, and a Barnard graduate who would later in life earn a doctorate in Turkish Studies. Among the writers Ellsworth lured to her pages was Cornell Woolrich.

We watch Gruber struggle to sell his work, and cringe as he dodges landlords, hotel clerks, and bill collectors. When he has missed a series of meals, he fondly recalls an incident in 1932, while he still lived in the midwest. A magazine for salesmen had mistakenly mailed him duplicate payments for a pair of stories, and Gruber had mailed the extra check back with a note explaining the error. 

Now, in 1934, Gruber answers his hotel door one Sunday afternoon, half expecting to be berated by his current hotelier. But no, standing in the hall is a well-dressed giant of a man, who enters and studies Gruber’s digs. “I always wanted to see how a starving writer lived,” says Aron M. Mathieu, who is the owner and editor of the sales magazine whose check Gruber returned two years ago. By chance, Mathieu is also the editor of Writer’s Digest. For two years Mathieu has been curious to meet the writer who returned that check:

“He swore roundly even then that I was the only downright honest writer he had ever heard of. He insisted that no writer on earth, especially one who was as close to the howling wolves as my letter had indicated, would have done such a thing. So that was why he was now visiting me.”

Would Mr. Gruber care to join him for lunch? Mathieu’s treat, of course. Gruber was so hungry that he was out the door like a dog whose ears perk up at the sound of the word treat. Over lunch at Schrafft’s and for three hours later, Mathieu expounded on his new concept: an annual publication that listed market opportunities, in detail, for writers. It would be called…Writer’s Market. If Gruber would consent to collect the data and send it to Cincinnati, Mathieu would pay a munificent $90, with a $40 advance. Gruber leaves Mathieu’s hotel with two beautiful twenties in his wallet.

Cha-ching!

Next, out of the ether, after six months and a raft of rejections, an editor phones on a Friday. His magazine is going to press Saturday, and he needs to fill a gaping hole. Could Gruber write a 5,500-word story overnight? Why, sure, he could! He delivers the story, and scurries back to his digs to wait for news of its acceptance. He never hears a peep. Only when he stops by the magazine days later does the editor tell him, oh, we pay on Fridays. The editor had forgotten to phone.

“It was already on the press. Good story. Do me another next month.”

Double cha-ching!

After that, Gruber’s luck changes. He summons his wife from the midwest, and they set up house in the Big Town. In 1935, he earns $10,000, which amounts to $238,000 in 2026. Soon he is comparing his income to that of doctors and lawyers. But that does not mean his output decreases. No. If anything, he’s maintaining the same number of words, just shaking it up with new opportunities in Hollywood.

His list of friends, editors, and acquaintances grows. He meets Lester Dent and befriends Carroll John Daly—who most credit as the creator of the first series private eye, Race Williams. One night, Gruber and his writer pal Steve Fisher go out on the town with the introverted mama’s boy, Cornell Woolrich, and prank him by grossly inflating their Black Mask earnings. The next day, editor Fanny Ellsworth phones and chastise Gruber for messing with poor, sensitive Woolrich’s head:

“He came tearing in here this morning yelling that I was paying Gruber, Fisher and Torrey four cents a word and he was getting only one and a half cents and he was never going to write for the magazine again!”

In another anecdote that I’ve seen shared in many reviews, Gruber attends a party at the Brooklyn apartment of a writer named George Bruce. Thirty or so guests pack the place, having a blast until about 10 pm, when Bruce suddenly remembers that he promised to deliver a 12,000-word story to an editor tomorrow. His guests offer to clear out, but Bruce won’t hear of it. While the party rages on, he sits at his electric typewriter and dutifully pounds out his story. Four hours later, the manuscript is completed, and Bruce rejoins the party and celebrates by knocking back a dollop of gin. Do the math. That is 3,000 publishable words an hour.

On a drive out west, Gruber stops at the home of Erle Stanley Gardner, who seems like a good egg, and, in those days when communication was far from instantaneous, Gardner happily informs our memoirist that an editor back east wants to buy a western novel that Gruber has written.

Gruber is less charmed by other writers he meets. He nearly comes to blows with Raymond Chandler, who badmouths Fisher, one of Gruber’s oldest writer friends, over a screenwriting dispute. (Chandler would never look Gruber in the eye again, but Gruber insists that that never stopped him from enjoying Chandler’s writing.) A mutual friend, Fred MacIsaac, introduces him to Thomas Wolfe, who bores Gruber to tears speaking all night of his own greatness.

Some time later, Gruber tells us, MacIsaac commits suicide. After years of success in the pulps, he has been unable to sell a story for six months. That’s when it hits you. These people mastered the craft not for awards or acclaim or for personal fulfillment. They did it to put food on the table, to support themselves and their families. If their words did not earn bread, then what good were they? It’s easy to see how a writer might have extended that equation to their own self-worth.

In Hollywood, Gruber meets Frederick Schiller Faust, who wrote under countless pen names but was probably best known as Max Brand, the creator of Dr. Kildare. Gruber describes him as a six-foot-three, two-hundred-pound man who did not so much write scripts as he did conceive stories that were later scripted by other writers. Faust showed up for work at the studio every day with a thermos of whiskey. When he drained the booze by 1 p.m., Faust snuck out for a liquid lunch, followed by a few drinks in the afternoon at a local watering hole.

Drink stoked his courage. He had grown tired of merely writing adventure stories. He craved adventure itself. He longed to live it! By now, it’s the 1940s, and a second World War is raging in Europe. In a bungalow on the Warner Brothers lot, a booze-stoked Faust shares with Gruber and Fisher the news that a military friend has fixed it so Faust can travel as an embedded reporter with infantry fighting in Italy. Off goes the great Max Brand, to launch a new career for himself as a war correspondent for Harper’s Magazine. Six weeks later, he’s dead at age 51.

By contrast, Gruber lives to witness the passing of an era that enriched writers and delighted readers. I get the sense that he’s melancholy about the death of the pulps, but he never admits as much.

Somewhere, before this book launches itself off a cliff, Gruber comes close to offering the secrets of his success. He enumerates, for instance, The Seven Basic Western Plots. And he spells out his “foolproof,” eleven-point method for writing the perfect mystery. Since we are all about mysteries, allow me to share with you the secret. Are you ready?

Colorful hero.

Theme.

Villain.

Background.

Murder method.

Motive.

Clue.

Trick.

Action.

Climax.

Emotion.

Ta-da! I bet you’re trembling with excitement. Now you can go forth and write your own mystery!

Yes, Gruber does give us a tiny bit more. He devotes exactly one paragraph to each point. Just one. Because why waste time dragging it out longer than necessary?

Perhaps that’s how he felt about his memoir. He had said all he had to say, so stopped he writing and sent it off to an editor. The end. He lived only two years more, but somehow managed to write eight or nine books before departing for his next great adventure.

* * * 

You can also read parts of Gruber's book via the Internet Archive.

Thanks for reading! See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com