“Look, Nick—I don’t know if I can help you or not.”
Lieutenant Joseph Scanlon opened his hands in the classic gesture of “coming up empty.” He had been in my office that Friday morning for almost an hour, while I had run through everything I could tell him about Parker Foxcroft and the events leading up to Parker’s murder. He leaned forward in his chair, hunching his shoulders, his forehead creased in a frown that quickly slipped into a wicked grin.
“Here you go again, Nick, as a recent president was fond of saying.”
“Hey, Joe—man, this is definitely not the way I like to spend my time—or yours. I didn’t choose to be mixed up in this business. But I do need help.” Did I protest too much? I don’t think so. I was beginning to feel beset, even paranoid. But as Sam Spade would have said if he’d been in the book business, when someone kills your editor, a publisher’s supposed to do something about it…
“I can see that. However, I can’t really stick my nose into a murder in another precinct than my own. Especially when I’m on leave.”
“Isn’t there anything you can do?”
He was silent for a few moments. Then: “Well, maybe I can get some information for you, if that would help. Sergeant Falco was with me at the Police Academy, and I’ve sort of kept in touch. Given him a call every so often—had a drink with him once in a while—that sort of thing. He might be willing to share what he knows. After all, I’m still more of a cop than a civilian.”
“Make that ‘author,’ Joe.”
“If you say so, Nick. And I suppose I might do a bit of digging into the life and times of Parker Foxcroft, if that would help.”
I felt an immediate surge of relief. It seemed to me that if not home free, at least I was no longer alone, I had help. And I couldn’t help but also feel elated that I was once again faced with a real mystery, and not just another paper puzzle.
“By the way, Joe—have you done anything about getting representation?”
“No, not yet.” I had suggested more than once, since Scanlon had turned in the first draft of his book, that he ought to have an agent. I know—even Shakespeare had something to say about them: “Let every eye negotiate for itself and trust no agent.” However, when it comes to the publishing business, I cannot help but think of Joe Scanlon as a naïf among rogues, a true babe in the woods. I am not implying that I would cheat him, heaven forfend—but I want him to make as much money from his book as possible, and that means a whopping paperback reprint deal, movie and television sales—all beyond my power to generate, but always possible with an accomplished agent.
“Have you got anyone in mind?” Scanlon said.
“Yes. Kay McIntire.” Actually I didn’t have anyone in mind, but hers was the first name that popped into my mind, I suppose because I had a lunch date with her in two hours. “I’ll speak to Kay about representing you.”
“I’d appreciate it, Nick.”
God, how wonderful! Scanlon was still appreciative. That is because publication—and possibly fame—still awaited him. In this virginal state, authors are almost always grateful for whatever favors are done them, and so they should be. After all, no one asked them or any other author to write their first novel. As Thomas Wolfe put it: “Nobody discovered me. I discovered myself.”
Scanlon and I parted with his promise to report to me as soon as he had information from Falco—though not before I reminded him that his revised manuscript was due on the first of August.
“I’m on schedule, Nick,” he said.
I took his elbow and steered him toward the door. “Good man,” I said.
Some observers of the publishing scene have argued that lunch is the most important part of anyone’s day, and that nothing either preceding or following the midday meal is of any consequence. I have myself divided publishing folk into two types: those who must be pressed for decisions before they have gone to lunch, and those who are best approached after lunch. Which type am I? Definitely the former. After the wine has been poured, I do not trust myself to be a hardheaded businessman.
Lunch that Friday, however, was an exception. After it was over, I could hardly wait to get Herbert Poole to ink a contract.
The three of us—Poole, Kay Mclntire, and I—met in the waiting room off the front door of the Century—more exactly, the Century Association. The club was given its name because its progenitors, in the year 1847, invited an even hundred gentlemen engaged in or interested in letters and the fine arts to join; forty-two accepted and became Founders; another forty-six joined during the first year. Nowadays there are many times one hundred—up to twelve hundred, to be exact—on the membership roster.
If The Players is my second home, my pit stop, so to speak, then the Century is where I hold court. I am a member as my father was a member, and probably for that reason; it was his favorite haunt. It is everything, I suppose, that people who don’t care for private clubs, the populists, would despise. An imposing Stanford White building hardly two blocks from Grand Central Station. A great many overstuffed leather chairs, in which occasionally a member may be found sleeping. A security system at the door as good as any, probably, in the halls of government. Uniformed servitors, most of them African-American, who seem to have been there since the Crash of 1929. It does not have bedrooms, like the Yale and Harvard clubs, though there is a basement with a few billiard and pool tables—hardly any of them ever used these days—and a splendid library. The service is prompt, efficient, and unobtrusive. I am not aware of any scandal connected with the club, and publicity is shunned like a carrier of the HIV, although one brouhaha over the club’s sale of a $2-million painting in order to pay for much-needed renovations did make the local papers, and the original refusal to admit one of my publishing colleagues—a woman—as a member broke into print as well, along with a few very proper names.
We climbed the marble stairs to the spacious second floor, and soon were seated around a low coffee table in a large foyer adjoining the Member’s Bar and facing the spacious East Room, me with the usual vodka martini, Kay with a margarita, and Poole contenting himself with a club soda and lime. I can be comfortable lunching with an abstainer, but I do prefer to feel that my guests, like me, are enjoying the quiet satisfaction brought by that first drink of the day.
I was eager to get down to business, but mindful of the courtesies I owed my two guests, I made small talk for a while. Anyway, the Century, like The Players, frowns on business discussions, which of course go on there all the time. As a consequence, the club has had to admit women members, after a century of gentlemanly discrimination, though it had to be practically dragooned into doing so. The sole ladies’ before “liberation” was on the ground floor somewhere near the coatroom. Several others have since been constructed.
“Kay,” I said, “I have an author who’s looking for an agent, and I’ve already recommended you.” I told her then about Joe Scanlon.
“Well,” she said, “I do have a fairly full stable of writers just now…”
“Couldn’t you squeeze in one more?”
“But, I was going to say, your man sounds interesting.”
“He is that, all right—and a good writer.”
“I’ll meet with him anyhow, and we’ll see what happens.”
While we were talking, I took the opportunity of looking over Herbert Poole, who showed a polite interest in the conversation Kay and I were having. I made Poole out to be in his early or mid-thirties, just shy of six feet, lean, and good-looking in a fashion-model way, the kind of looks I usually don’t pay much attention to. I like a face that shows more wear and tear, a face that has been around the block a few times. His voice was deep and rather grave—with just a touch of the Old Dominion in it—pleasing to my ear.
“Working with a real cop must be interesting for you,” he remarked when there was a brief silence.
“It is that,” I admitted, but I was thinking of Parker Foxcroft, not of Joe Scanlon’s book.
“It’s a novel?” said Poole.
“Yes, but not what you’d expect, a police procedural. It’s a novel about a criminal lawyer whose client is accused of murder—rather like a latter-day Perry Mason.”
“As Kay has told you, Mr. Barlow,” Poole said, leaning in her direction, “I’m intrigued by the idea of writing a mystery.”
“It never ceases to amaze me how many mainstream writers are,” I said. “How many writers, period. What do you suppose the fascination of the genre is?”
“I rather think that it’s the satisfaction of writing about something outside themselves and their egos, their ordinary or extraordinary problems.” It was Kay who spoke, and I nodded in agreement. “In the straight novel, character is all-important; in the mystery it’s story. There’s always a story, usually a strong one. It must always have a beginning, a middle, and an end—and in the end, the criminal is caught, and the crime is solved. Q.E.D. Everyone is satisfied, the reader as well as the writer.”
“That’s not to say that character isn’t important in a mystery,” I said. “What character in fiction is more memorable than Sherlock Holmes, for example?”
“I wonder,” said Poole, “if anyone has ever written a mystery in which the criminal is not caught, and the crime has not been solved.”
“It’s been done,” I said, “and there are crime novels in which the criminal is sympathetic—the hero, in fact. Patricia Highsmith’s hero Ripley, for one. Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder, for another. But it would probably prove frustrating for the reader in most cases. I speak as one myself. I don’t like loose ends; I want things neatly tied up.”
“I’m not saying I’m going to write one like that,” Poole said in his limpid drawl. “Like most authors, I write of what I know best.”
“In the case of your current best-seller,” I said, “sex.”
Poole smiled. “I prefer to think of it as love, Mr. Barlow.”
“Please—call me Nick. And I stand corrected. Love, certainly.”
At this point Kay interrupted us. “Herbert has an idea which I think may appeal to you, Nick.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“What I would like to do,” Poole said, “is spend some time in your office, like a fly on the wall, so to speak. I’d like to meet and talk with your Joe Scanlon, for one—and any other mystery writers who might show up. I’d like to know how you managed to crack the Jordan Walker murder case, too.”
“Well…”
“I promise I won’t get in your way, or interfere with any of your normal business days. When you want me out of the way, I’ll make myself scarce. And meanwhile I’ll be making notes and writing.”
Kay was wrong; I did not cotton to the idea. I like authors well enough—in their place. In mine, however, only when necessary. “Well…” I said, doing my best to think of a way to soften my refusal, “at the moment…”
“You’d rather not,” Poole suggested.
“Precisely.”
“Perhaps at a later date?” said Kay.
“We’ll see.”
Meanwhile, as I reminded Kay, there was the little matter of the contract.
“Ordinarily we’d go to auction, Nick, but this is quite unusual. We’ll take into account the fact that Herbert has never written a mystery, and will need editorial guidance and help from you. The advance I’ll ask for is lower than we’d usually expect to see. However, we’ll want ninety percent of the paperback rights as well as the usual foreign and domestic rights.”
I knew what Kay meant by that. One hundred percent of the performing rights, first and second serial rights, book club edition, large-print edition, library edition, abridgment, condensation, digest—
“Data storage transmission and retrieval,” I said aloud.
“And electronic publishing in the teletext, video text, or any other form whether now in existence or hereafter developed.” Kay finished the sentence for me. We both spoke the language of contract fluently.
“Only ten percent of the paperback money,” I said. “I wonder if I’ll be able to live with that.”
“Tell you what,” said Kay. “You go back to your office and figure out what you would expect to make from hardcover sales alone, and give me your suggested advance figure based on that number—and a straight fifteen percent royalty from the sale of the first copy.”
“Fair enough, Kay.”
“We ought to be able to come up with a mutually satisfactory offer by this afternoon.”
“I would like that.” I glanced down at the three empty glasses on the table. “Another round?”
“Not for me,” said Poole, and Kay also shook her head.
“Then let’s lunch,” I said, and led the way through a set of double doors into what is called the Library Dining Room. The walls are, in fact, lined with books of all kinds, vintages, and imprints—rather like what you would expect to find in the library of a well-stocked country house.
We put in our orders; all three of us chose the fish of the day, which was blackened catfish. The sommelier brought a bottle of a good Montrachet, and while we wined and dined, Herbert Poole enlightened me on how it felt to go from obscurity to fame in one giant leap.
It felt, he said, “like winning the lottery. I don’t think any of my earlier books ever sold more than five or six thousand copies. The first one sold even fewer than that.”
“But this one—?”
“Is completely different in style and subject matter—and that has apparently made all the difference.”
I raised my wineglass. “I congratulate you,” I said. We touched glasses lightly and drank.
“To the muse of mystery,” said Poole, and we toasted that as well.
Nor was Herbert Poole displeased when at least two of the members recognized him on the way out—whether from his jacket photograph or an appearance he had put in on the “Today” show, we did not know.
Kay proved to be right. What we came up with later that day was an advance Barlow & Company could live with, and one that Herbert Poole would not be ashamed to see on his income tax forms.
And I could go out to Connecticut for the weekend with a modest triumph to my name as well as a disaster. Scratch Parker Foxcroft and add Herbert Poole.