NINE

Momentum

1

DEAN PUBLISHED FIVE SCIENCE FICTION NOVELS IN 1972, along with two of his Gothics, four short stories, and his first suspense novel, which captured the era’s conflicted social and political attitudes.

The military draft was being phased out and Secretary of State Kissinger had declared that peace was at hand in Vietnam. All in the Family, a television show depicting conflicts between youth and the status quo, was the leading program. It showed an undercurrent of nationwide cynicism, for which current events had given good cause: Five men who broke into the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate complex were arrested. There was suspicion of complicity by Nixon’s campaign officials, and director John Mitchell suddenly resigned. The possibility that the president or his staff might have initiated a crime seemed too far-fetched, and Nixon was re-elected president by a near-record landslide. He then announced his own special investigation of the Watergate affair. By 1974, he, too, would resign when tapes revealed his part in a cover-up.

Daw Books, Donald A. Wollheim’s eponymous new venture after leaving Ace, published A Darkness in My Soul, which Dean dedicated to “G” (Gerda). In it, he expresses his belief that love is the remedy for madness, while personal transformation requires reorienting from self toward others.

It is the year 2004, in a world of warfare and plague. There exist two genetically engineered individuals with special talents, Sim and Child. The military uses Sim’s psychic abilities to explore the mind of Child, a deformed genius, for the purpose of gaining strategic superiority. In this highly Freudian novel, Sim goes into Child’s subconscious — which is portrayed as a physically detailed place — but he is completely unprepared for the chaos he encounters. He soon realizes that Child has merged with the mind of God and that they are all trapped together in insanity.

Sim perceives that God is an entity that cannot organize Himself toward any good use. “God was a hugely powerful pool of psychic energy without a manipulatory system; a car without wheels.”1Sim becomes a new god, more rational and benevolent. He resolves everyone’s problems, but soon realizes why God had gone insane: He was lonely. Subsequently Sim shares his divinity with a friend, but they eventually grow bored so, for entertainment, they manipulate human beings into wars. The nihilistic “darkness in the soul” that Sim had known prior to his experience as God returns full force.

This novel demonstrates Dean’s early perception that violent people are something less than human. Their weakness is their need for power and their inability to value the lives of others. He indicates that authoritarian types operate out of a twisted psychosis. So, too, does God. It becomes clear that Dean’s father’s mental illness is a recurring stimulus, aligned with brutality and evil.

Another of Dean’s science fiction novels that year, Warlock, was published by Lancer, who paid an advance of $2,000.

Told in three parts, the story features a hero, Shaker Sandow, who has psionic powers. He must journey to an alien land to locate devices for the defense of Darkland. The time is some eight hundred years after humankind has settled space colonies, altered their genetics, and created new races. For Sandow, it is a personal quest as well. He needs to know whether his unusual powers had caused his mother’s death. Thus, parallel to the perilous physical journey is the story of a boy attached to his deceased mother, who fears that his existence had shortened her life.

One of Dean’s best efforts that year — and one of his favorites among his science fiction — was The Flesh in the Furnace, published by Bantam. Dean dedicated it to Harry Recard, his former college roommate, and Harry’s wife, Diane. Dean called it a “passion play in five acts of Chinese theater.” Its inspiration was the result of three events: Dean came across a fleeting image of organic puppets in a novel entitled Emphyrio; while cleaning his closets, he found his college notes on theories of dramatic impersonation, particularly Chinese theater; and he read an article about a passion play done partially in the nude. These events converged just as Dean was wondering what it would be like to devise an alien passion play and present it as seen through nonhuman eyes. The story evolved from there.

On a futuristic Earth, a puppetmaster, Petros, travels with an idiot and a troupe of living puppets that he destroys each night and then remakes in a special machine before each performance. The puppets are not merely alive, they remember and resent each recycling. Bitty Belina is the idiot’s favorite puppet. She urges him to kill Petros and help her to give the other puppets permanent form. When she has sufficient collective power, she and her band turn on the idiot and kill him.

Throughout the novel, Dean paces the story with intermittent scriptures from another culture that sound much like Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra — a quasi-biblical, philosophical narrative in which a prophet announces the imminent arrival of the Overman — the person of moral courage who can make and live by his own ethical codes — and denounces the empty religion of his time. Dean had read Nietzsche in college, and was aware of his proclamation of the death of God and the need for humankind to supplant God. In Dean’s version, the Rogue Saint Eclesian, in the Vonopoen Book of Wisdom, expresses anger toward the creator and the need for killing off the old gods. Human cruelty is the responsibility of a deity, he insists, who became careless and allowed some men to be created without souls. The puppets in the story represent humans manipulated by an uncaring God. They must resist the status quo and recreate themselves as the gods of their own existence. This same theme was to carry through in Dean’s work in many different forms for several decades.

Another science fiction novel that dealt with religious themes was Starblood, based on the novella “A Third Hand.” In this explicitly Freudian novel, Dean declares that the subconscious mind of an orderly man is full of frantic, roach-like, cannibalistic insects — the equivalent of madness. “In a conscious mind where nearly everything that had ever happened or been learned was stored methodically, nothing much was left to relegate to the subconscious mind except id desires of the most grotesque form … disordered, filthy, shot through with a living mobile rot.”2

Dean’s mother, Florence, as a young woman.

Young Dean at age 21 months with his father, Ray

Dean as an infant.

(Above, left) Dean’s maternal grandfather, John Logue. (Above, right) The house in Bedford where Dean grew up, built by his grandfather. (Courtesy of the author)

Dean as a baby, with his cousin Jim Mock and his mother.

A view of Bedford, Pennsylvania, where Dean grew up.

The main street of Bedford, featuring the building where Dean’s mother worked (foreground) and the newsstand pharmacy where he purchased science fiction paperbacks.

Dean with his mother and father, circa 1947.

Dean with his mother and father, playing outside Aunt Virginia’s house.

Dean as mascot for Bedford’s team, The Blue Devils.

Dean at age 2.

Dean at a birthday party, unaware that he is sitting across from his future wife, Gerda Cerra.

Dean with his dog, Lucky, April 1951.

Dean in third grade.

Dean in high school, 1961, age sixteen.

Dean’s high school senior yearbook photo.

In a future world plagued by the addictive drug PBT (Perfectly Beautiful Trip), Timothy is a “singularly odd case.” He has no arms or legs, only one eye, and an IQ of over 250. A mafia-like group called the Brethren subjects him to PBT, which increases his psionic powers until he can heal himself. He goes to a farmhouse in Iowa where he discovers a sinkhole in the cellar (the deepest subconscious) and an ancient spaceship with aliens on board. They tell Timothy that PBT is made from alien blood, which offers a vision of God. Timothy enjoys a camaraderie with the aliens, with whom he feels accepted.

This novel is clearly intended as a Christ allegory. Timothy is unique among members of the human race, having powers, intelligence, and vision far beyond that of any mortal. When he joins the godlike aliens, he feels safe, while humans spurn mm. The king had sent men to kill him as an infant, and then as a young adult, he had caused trouble and been persecuted. “And now, in a strange way, he had died and been resurrected.”3

“The Christian mythology offered me a great number of story ideas,” Dean admits, and several of his science fiction tales exploit these themes.

There is also a telling autobiographical detail: What Timothy had feared most in his life was loneliness — a childhood experience of Dean’s that compels him to write so much about families. Timothy’s life “had been a desperate race to be accepted, to have at least a goodly number of peripheral friends.”⁴ The aliens provide this — outsiders all, forming a familial bond.

Dean’s analysis of the human mind at this stage issued in the following ideas: The subconscious is almost like an entity that fears and detests the conscious mind, while consciousness blocks out the seamier concerns of the psyche. Thus, Dean indicates, all of us may be schizophrenic (which is a misunderstanding of the term as a dual personality). Yet splitting ourselves into two minds allows us to cope with life better than if we were integrated. Compromises are necessary. The subconscious is a madhouse of sadomasochistic desires and disgusting, ugly dreams. Probing the ego and id too deeply could result in insanity. Clearly Dean had some personal concerns.

Another of Dean’s biblical allegories, Time Thieves, was part of an Ace Double with Susan K. Putney’s Against Arcturus.

Pete Mullion, the hero, shares many of Dean’s qualities. He had been lonely as a boy and he believes that loneliness is the worst human experience. Pete is also aware (to be repeatedly expressed by characters in future novels) that the insane never suspect they are mad; it is only the sane man who questions his sanity. Pete is apolitical but dismissive of politicians. His strongest trait is the ability to assimilate anything, no matter how radical, and work within the new picture being presented.

In a story that foreshadows Strangers in its use of false memories and a gifted alien race, Pete discovers that he has been missing for twelve days. He remembers nothing. He spots men watching him and experiences telepathic powers. The men take him aboard a spaceship and explain that he had once witnessed their presence on Earth, and they had erased his memories. As they worked on him, they had unleashed telepathic powers, which they must now eradicate to prevent him from introducing these powers to others. The human species, they say, has not yet evolved to the point of being able to meet a more advanced species. They expect Pete to accept their wisdom.

However, Pete has experienced the way the powers enhance intimacy and companionship, so he resists giving them up. With them, he will never again feel lonely. He uses the full strength of his childhood fears to blast the aliens away.

This is the tale of the Garden of Eden, with a radically different ending. The aliens represent God, who offers a paradise and then, when humankind seems immature and unworthy, attempts to retrieve it. Adam and Eve did indeed lose their access to Paradise, but Dean’s protagonist is not so easily cowed. Pete grabs back from God what God had promised. Disinclined to accept the paternalistic concept that God knows best, Dean thought that we should be given the gifts and allowed to see what we can do.

2

In 1972 to 1973, Dean published ten short stories. Three were in anthologies edited by Bob Hoskins, four with Roger Elwood, two in magazines, and one with Harlan Ellison.

Hoskins’s Infinity series took “Altarboy,” “Ollie’s Hands,” and “Grayworld.” In the first, a man who executes dissidents traps their souls in the limbo of his id. When one soul threatens his power, he makes a dying Nazi into the warden of his psyche. However, the Nazi takes over and tosses him into the dungeon of his own id, where he faces the souls of those he has executed.

“Ollie’s Hands” involves a man who carries visionary gifts in his touch, such as being able mentally to bond with others. He can achieve total intimacy, but it results, paradoxically, in loneliness and isolation. He is the ultimate outsider. One day, Ollie discovers an unconscious suicidal girl in an alley and takes her home. At first, she is thrilled with his abilities, but then fears the “mesh” — the blending of their minds that dissolves her freedom. “Ollie’s Hands” was revised in 1987 for a magazine called Horror Show, and then included in Strange Highways.

“Grayworld” was a novella that moved through one dream state after another, keeping the hero disoriented. It grew into a novel, The Long Sleep, that Dean published under the pseudonym “John Hill” in 1975.

The anthology, Again, Dangerous Visions, was a sequel to Harlan Ellison’s original cutting-edge work, Dangerous Visions. “I rejected hundreds of stories, including one by Heinlein,” says Ellison, “but Dean’s work was sufficiently interesting to me that he got my solicitation. I told him I wanted the kind of story that you can’t write for a magazine, the kind of story they would reject for its subject matter. I wanted great writing, but it had to be controversial.”

Ellison differentiated between writers who played out their voice within a few books and those who started with merely yeoman work and built from there—with Dean classified as the latter. He believed Dean’s early science fiction was average, but that successive novels had demonstrated “a vigorous fluency of imagination, a strengthening grasp of concept and plot material, and an emerging style very much of his own making.”5 He foresaw that Dean would continue toward the enviable perch where he would be the only writer doing the type of stories that he does.

Dean wrote an Afterword to this story, “A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village,” in which he explains that he has tried previously to extrapolate on the Global Village philosophy of Marshall McLuhan. His novel, The Fall of the Dream Machine, had been his first attempt, followed by “A Dragon in the Land,” both published in 1969. Feeling the need to work with the concept again, he had written Hung, but that book had been extensively revised at Cameo Press. In “A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village,” he focused on both the positive and negative aspects of such a “world neighborhood” — but emphasized the negative for his character. “Surely,” he said, “there might be an end to nations, better understanding between peoples, and an end to war. But it would mean something else, too, something altogether unpleasant.”⁶ His hero is alienated from the Great Society because of medical problems. Despite how much better off most people are, this man’s existence is a nightmare. He does not fit into the brainwashed, standardized masses, and must therefore be treated harshly. There is no place for iconoclasts. Dean explains that the character “represents any man who is alienated from society for whatever reason.”⁷ This character’s only recourse is to beg for death.

In the February 1972 Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Dean published “Cosmic Sin,” a humorous detective story that revisits the parallel worlds of “Bruno.” The hero, Jake, assists the Probability Police with finding a pair of aliens who are talking cabbages and who are involved in making illegal pornography.

A small Pennsylvania magazine called Trend published “The Terrible Weapon” in 1972. In this tale, Dean offers a political scenario in which a Soviet transmission of subliminal commands across all U.S. media causes everyone to tell the truth. Corruption is revealed all the way to the president. It seems to the politicians to be the worst way to undermine the social structure that could possibly be devised.

Roger Elwood offered more diversity for stories like “Terra Phobia” in Androids, Time Machines, and Blue Giraffes, “The Undercity” in Future City, “The Sinless Child” in Flame Tree Planet, and “Wake Up to Thunder” in Children of Infinity, all of which were published in 1973.

“Terra Phobia” is about the possibility of adapting so well to long-term residence on a spaceship that leaving it to colonize becomes psychologically impossible.

“The Undercity” is narrated by a Mafia-type thug, teaching one of his progeny how his kind have adapted as the future city moved underground. Since most things that were once illegal are now available, he complains, it’s difficult to make a buck, and he outlines the unusual crimes he’s been hired to commit.

“The Sinless Child” takes place in the year 2016. A couple applies to have a child in an overpopulated world that has tight controls over reproduction. Since they want to raise the child with the Christian values of good and evil, they are considered unique enough to be allowed this experiment. After the child is born, the parents give it up to androids that resemble them — save for lacking a corrupted subconscious that could be projected onto the child. As the sinless child develops, it becomes apparent that the experiment has failed: He is so amoral that he becomes a danger.

“Wake Up to Thunder” is another story about God going mad—in the form of a computer. An Artificial Intelligence known as “Thunder” has turned humankind into mental slaves, but his powers are dissolving. Thunder has grown too large and cannot expand further without malfunction. He was a demon made by man, “a puppet master built by his own marionettes.”8

3

In January of 1973, a cease-fire agreement was signed in Vietnam, but the fighting continued. Thus far, there were forty-six thousand combat deaths, and over four hundred thousand dead civilians. One hundred and ten billion dollars had been spent, and nothing positive had come of it. Soldiers who came home were treated with contempt, partly because people were more savvy about the horrific details of this war and partly because national patriotism had weakened. Dean and Gerda watched these developments with a cynical eye. They were not militant, but they agreed that the war should end. Dean’s first suspense novel, published that year, took on these issues. Its tone was cynical and the ending pessimistic about the world’s future. “That’s how I felt in those days,” he says.

He knew young men who had gone to Vietnam: “There were people from my high school and college classes who had died there, or who came back wounded. We all saw people it had affected and the effect it had on our country. People had been asked to do something unpleasant. They went and did it, and in the end, a lot of people died for nothing. Yet I was even more appalled by how they were treated when they came home. I think for a number of years it angered me to see how one part of the country would treat another part over this issue. So I wrote Chase.”

This was the last novel that The Scott Meredith Agency represented, and Dean’s first hardcover. Ted Chichak sold it to editor Lee Wright at Random House. Dean liked her. She appreciated his work and made only minor suggestions. “She never wanted much work done,” Dean says, “and she was always boosting my ego. She insisted I’d be famous one day.” Gerda liked her, too, in part because Lee Wright exemplified a woman without children who was happy with her life. That reassured Gerda, who was becoming more certain that she and Dean would make the same choice.

Dean’s agent suggested that he use a pseudonym for this novel, since it deviated from his usual subject matter. He was not thrilled by that idea, but he came up with the name “K. R. Dwyer” — husband to “Deanna Dwyer.” “K. R.” were his own initials reversed.

Chase mirrored the thematic perspective of another K. R. Dwyer novel, Shattered, which sold four months later. As Dean wrote in the British edition of Chase, these stories “can be viewed as a two-book exploration of social and psychological conditions in the United States during the early 1970s.”9 He noted the antiwar protests and the atmosphere of paranoia and prejudice that both protagonists experience. Benjamin Chase in Chase and Alex Doyle in Shattered share a distrust of authority and a belief that politics of any persuasion could offer no satisfactory solution to social problems. Both characters are also “redeemed by their acceptance of self-reliance as the greatest of all virtues.”

In Chase, Vietnam vet Benjamin Chase is haunted by guilt over his part in Operation Jules Verne, a My-lai—type slaughter of civilians. He has allowed this atrocity to be covered up, and he even earned a congressional Medal of Honor. Haunted by his nightmares, he merely wants to be left alone. He sees a psychiatrist regularly, but otherwise lives in an attic room, taking solace in fiction, where the bad guys can’t get to him. He controls his world and gets from it only the responses that he orchestrates.

One night he witnesses a murder and then gets phone calls about his past from the killer, who calls himself “The Judge.” When attempts to get assistance from authorities fail, Chase takes justice and self-defense into his own hands. He meets a woman, Glenda, who shares some kinship with him in healing from emotional scars, and she supports his efforts. Chase discovers that the killer is part of a white supremacist group and had been a child molester. He had worshipped boyish innocence, and having been rebuffed by a boy named Mark, had rationalized his vengeful assault on Mark as a judgment from God. This was the murder that Chase had seen.

This novel is an early statement on the failure of authority figures to protect those in their care. Chase’s psychiatrist betrays him, as does his own government. Glenda had been sexually abused. The murder victim, Mark, was distanced from his parents because of their religious fundamentalism which, while seeming to offer protection, falls far short. In fact, these parents had allowed the killer to buy their son at the age of four, and their duplicity, disguised as concern for Mark’s well-being, had been instrumental in his death. Their own beliefs had betrayed and destroyed him.

In short, the only person who can really protect us is ourselves.

There are clear parallels, as Chase himself understands them, between the killer’s insane rationalizations and those of his country. This is Dean’s first published attempt in a realistic setting to equate the pathological mind with a pathological government. The killer views abuse as the work of God similar to the way the government justifies war as a tool of peace. Both decide to “deal with” a problem by using murder, but disguise it with euphemisms to evade accountability. The outer monster is inextricably linked to an inner one: “Heroes need monsters to slay and they can always find them, within if not without.”10

The New York Times called this novel a taut, well-written book, while The Saturday Review insisted it was more than a novel of suspense. “It is a brutally realistic portrait of the role of violence in our society.” Dustin Hoffman showed interest in doing a movie of it, but that project never advanced.

Dean later revised Chase to include in his 1995 collection, Strange Highways.

“I think the attitudes all remain the same,” he says. “I changed a lot of clumsy writing and tried to introduce a better visual sense to the imagery. I changed the character of Glenda because, when I wrote the original version, I didn’t have a handle on doing relationships as well as I do them now. What the book comes down to is that you can trust people as individuals, but you can’t trust them when they form large groups.”

4

Tied thematically to Chase in terms of the attitudes and experiences of the protagonists, Shattered was published at Random House the following year. Dean dedicated it to his editor, Lee Wright, “in return for much advice, kindness, and patience.”

Alex Doyle, a commercial artist, leaves Philadelphia with his eleven-year-old brother-in-law, Colin, to drive cross-country to San Francisco where Alex’s wife, Courtney, awaits them in their new house. Alex and Colin are both shy, and by the end of the novel, both must overcome this to face their fears. Unbeknownst to them, a psychopathic former boyfriend is stalking Courtney. He picks up their trail and pursues them across the country. He makes several attempts to kill them, but failing, then goes straight to Courtney. Alex compromises his pacifist beliefs to buy a gun for self-protection and must resort to violence to save the person he loves. Ultimately he realizes that, despite his beliefs, he has a latent violent streak: The killer begs for mercy and Alex kills him anyway.

Lee Wright was astonished that at the age of twenty-six, Dean could write about such a dramatic loss of innocence. She told him that he could keep writing midlist suspense novels like this for the rest of his life, but he would be a fool to do so. She believed he had the talent to move up.

The killer, George Leland, was modeled on the random killers of that era: Charles Manson, who led a pack of alienated kids against Sharon Tate and the LaBianca couple; Richard Speck, who killed eight nurses in their apartment one night; and Charles Whitman, the famous shooter in the Texas gun tower. All are viewed as symptoms of an intolerant, paranoid society, symbolized in the novel by a small-town cop who harasses Alex for having long hair and unusual clothing. Try as he might, Alex can get no help from those who are charged with the role of protection.

Warner Brothers bought the movie rights, but then turned what Dean viewed as a quintessentially American story into a French film called The Intruder, starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Mirielle Darc. The actual chase was far shorter and the suspense lagged. That this could happen to his novel when the potential was there for something better puzzled Dean. But he had been paid and there was nothing he could do.

5

After writing Chase, Dean decided to switch agents. Bob Hoskins suggested that he might be better off with Henry Morrison, who had had been with Meredith and had left in 1965 to form his own agency. Dean knew of some of his clients, and felt he was making little progress where he was. It was his impression that the Meredith Agency sent out manuscripts one after another and took whatever was offered, rather than working at building careers. He felt they had no vision for the individual writer; instead, they wanted their authors simply to write the same thing over and over. Another author, Stephen Marlowe, had once worked there and described it thus: “Scott himself really didn’t have a great love for books—he might as well have been selling shoes.”11

Dean left Meredith, and placed his next novel with Henry Morrison.

“He first got in touch with me,” says Morrison, “because I was representing writers like Robert Ludlum and David Morrell. I was doing a lot of business in science fiction and international thrillers.”

Morrison wanted to bring him into the marketplace in such a way that he would be taken more seriously on larger novels. Yet it was clear that Dean needed to write more than one novel a year to cover his expenses. It was common practice to place an author at different houses simultaneously, and since Dean was ambitious and eager to work, Morrison found opportunities for him and encouraged him to use more pseudonyms. “When an author is building some sort of base,” he explains, “you really have no idea how long it’s going to take to break out, and unless an author does it with his first book, sometimes you can work for years before he grabs everyone’s attention. As we were moving him upward, he still needed to generate income to pay his bills. One publisher couldn’t do four of his books a year, so we split him up among houses in the hope that one name would connect. I try to find a handle — something identifiable that will set an author apart from other writers — and I build on that.

“Dean as a writer is very individual and Scott Meredith considered him just another spoke in the wheel. Dean was trying to develop an individual voice and I encouraged him in that. He was not only a good writer, but he wanted to move upward on his own merit, not just by becoming a carbon copy of the big gun of the moment.”

6

The first book that Morrison sold for Dean was a caper novel, Blood Risk, which would be the first in a hardcover trilogy that featured the same character, Michael Tucker. Morrison encouraged Dean to use a pseudonym, since caper novels were a genre unto themselves—adventure/thriller novels in which the heroes are criminals. Dean had noticed that several suspense writers in those days had Scottish surnames, so he suggested a few that started with “Mac.” Barbara Norville, his editor at Bobbs-Merrill, came up with a less obvious Scottish name, “Coffey.” “Brian Coffey” then wrote five short suspense novels, four of them for Bobbs-Merrill. The cover copy stated that Coffey was a pen name for a writer whose fiction has sold worldwide “to the tune of over two million copies.”

Dean found Barbara Norville to be the most exacting editor he had had to date, and felt he learned some important things from her.

Dean’s protagonist, Michael Tucker, is a thief, but a man with his own serious code of integrity and with considerable education. Like John D. MacDonald’s hero, Travis McGee, he kills only when he must and feels great loathing for it. He steals only from thieves — or insurance companies! He lives in Manhattan, collects art, and is the son of a wealthy man, but hates his father and refuses his inheritance, because to get it he must allow his father to control him. In the first caper, he is part of a team intent on hijacking a shipment of Mafia money. The heist is blown and the mob captures one of his men, so Tucker must rescue him. With the aid of a clever blonde, he manages to get both the man and the money.

The plot is obvious and the characters nondynamic, but there are autobiographical elements present throughout. Tucker views his girlfriend, Elise, in much the way Dean viewed Gerda—as quick, clever, intelligent, and feminine. He loves his late mother, has a cynical view on politics, has frightening dreams about his father, and despises the man’s infidelities.

The second Tucker novel was Surrounded, published in 1974. It involves more clever plot twists and better character development. Tucker continues to battle his father, which puts him in greater need of money from theft. His three requirements for taking on a job are that he must be in charge, he has to like the job, and he robs thieves or institutions only, never individuals. He joins two other men to rob a Santa Monica mall after closing hours. A slip-up alerts police and they become trapped. However, when the cops go in, they find no sign of the thieves, thanks to Tucker’s ingenuity in finding a hiding place under their noses.

In 1975, the third Tucker novel, The Wall of Masks, came out. It was the last of the series, and Dean may one day revise and collect them together in a single book. This novel is the best of the three. It involves an exotic locale and has the fast pace of a thriller. Tucker learns about an imminent transaction in Mexico involving the exchange of a large sum of money for a pre-Columbian wall featuring carvings of exotic masks. As a hurricane and a corrupt Mexican general simultaneously close in, Tucker goes for the prize—the money. He leaves the wall for the Mexican government.

Dean outlined a fourth novel in this series, but felt it was too derivative of Donald Westlake’s Stark novels, so he never sent it to his editor.

7

A mainstream hardcover publication that year was a comic World War II novel, Hanging On. Dean had been reading a lot of black comedy and admired Joseph Heller’s Catcb-22—an innovative, metaphorical novel about the absurdities of war, which had become a cultural sensation. Dean believed he could write a book in this genre and he wanted to try. Morrison submitted a one-hundred-page segment with a brief outline to senior editor David Williams at M. Evans and Company. Williams took it to a sales meeting and convinced the editorial staff that the paperback rights would sell for at least $10,000, so he came back with an offer of $3,500.

“The writing was clear and well paced,” says Williams, “and a pleasure to read. It got you into the story immediately. Henry Morrison was touting the book as another Catch-22.” When Dean finished the novel and handed it in, however, Williams was a bit disappointed. He thought there were too many digressions into subplots. He broached the subject with Dean and was relieved to find him willing to rewrite. “In general, I found Dean unfailingly professional, flexible and friendly, a real pleasure to work with. He displayed gratitude for the editing I’d done.”

Dean agrees that they had a good relationship. “I got a lot of good advice from him. He’d sharpen scenes here and there. He told me that every time we enter a scene, we really need to know where we are at once. That was helpful. And I changed the ending. The book originally had extremely dark humor. About half of the characters died, but it was funny. David didn’t want that. He said it was too off-putting. On consideration, I agreed. So I rewrote it. Gerda was never convinced that was good advice; she thought the book was better with the darker ending. Over the years, I think she might have been right, but I was so eager to break into mainstream—and to do it with a comic novel was particularly bizarre — so I was eager to have it published. And I still like the gentler ending David led me toward. It’s still pointed and funny—just different.”

Set in the year 1944, the novel is the story of the army engineers and support soldiers sent behind enemy lines to keep a strategic bridge in repair. Each time they rebuild it, the Germans bomb it, so they suspect there is a traitor in their midst. When they learn that the Germans are advancing, they build a fake convent in which to hide. Throughout, each person deals with the rising tension in his or her own way: Major Kelly hangs on to his philosophy that life is a fairy tale; another man becomes a nurse, dressing in women’s clothing (which preceded the “Klinger” character in the television series M.A.S.H.); and a woman from a USO troupe puts on sex shows for the boys. By the end, they have discovered that the traitor is their own commanding officer — an authority figure with a corrupt side.

Dean was in the editorial offices discussing his next book the day the proofs of this novel arrived. “I remember his expression when I led him into my office and handed him the first copy,” says Williams. “He was slightly abashed, vulnerable, a good deal of the boy who had dreamed of being a writer still visible on his face.”

The first print run was 45,000 copies, but although the critics unanimously praised the novel, it failed to sell. Dean learned the hard way that comic novels have a tough time succeeding in the marketplace.

“The average reader had by that time become used to madcap military comedy,” Williams concluded. Nevertheless, they did sell the paperback rights for $10,000, as predicted.

M. Evans then contracted with Dean to write a second novel. They offered him his first big money — $15,000.

“I turned in an idea which they really liked, about the collapse of a major new skyscraper in Manhattan,” Dean recalls. “My concept was that this building collapsed from structural problems. It didn’t pancake, it went right over. The story was to be about rescuing the people in that building. Big sections would be intact, lying along an avenue in New York.

“However, no sooner had those contracts been signed and I started to write it than two books were announced that ended up becoming the movie The Towering Inferno. So M. Evans decided that this film had too many similarities: Big Problem in a Building. They wanted to change the contract and my agent agreed. I had to throw away seventy-five pages and come up with another idea, but they still wanted a big disaster. Since nobody had done an earthquake novel at that time, I proposed to do a novel set in San Francisco about an earthquake in modern times, using the city as a major character.”

They liked that idea, so Dean and Gerda set out on a crosscountry drive to see California. They were deeply impressed with this area, especially with all the sunshine, but Dean soon realized that writing a disaster novel about an event that comes without warning and is over in minutes was more difficult than he had anticipated. At M. Evans’ request, he sent the book in to them one chapter at a time, which he quickly learned was not a good idea. Williams was not happy with it and called several editorial conferences to try to revise it.

“They had no idea where it was going and they were always trying to second-guess me,” says Dean. “I delivered a couple hundred manuscript pages and they finally said, ‘This isn’t going to work.’ And then the movie Earthquake was announced. That was one of those shining moments of my career! So, of course, M. Evans wanted to cancel the contract or have me come up with yet a third idea.”

That was when Dean thought about setting a novel at a racetrack. He started to research the possibilities.

8

Around 1973, he and Gerda found a better apartment in Lake-wood Hills, still in Colonial Park. “It was a nice, luxury apartment and for the first time we really spent money on decor.” They moved their collection of ten thousand books from one place to the other and continued with their reading routine.

While in this home, Dean decided to go back and reread Charles Dickens, whom he first had read in college. Dickens had not captured him back then. “I rebelled against liking what I was forced to read,” he admits, “and was not motivated enough to appreciate it.” Now, however, he was ready to look again at the classics. Dickens was known for detailed characterizations, along with his depiction of social inequities and the wrongs against children inflicted by adults. Dean first tackled A Tale of Two Cities and was so moved that he ended up reading it in bed until three o’clock in the morning. When he got to the famous concluding line, he was moved to tears.

Gerda woke up, alarmed. “What happened?” she asked. “What is it?”

Dean just shook his head and said, “This book is so beautiful.”

Even years later, he believes it is the best conclusion in English or American literature. “That character is giving his life for the man who’s going to go off with the woman he loves. That he finds within himself this ability to transcend is just incredible. Dickens’ point is that politics does not elevate us and that the only way to improve the human condition is to improve the human heart and that’s the hardest thing to do. I felt that if I could ever write anything that powerful, my whole career would be justified.”

Dean then went on to read nearly everything Dickens wrote. His belief was reinforced that the best fiction is popular because it speaks to life as it is lived by the masses, not to an elite audience. He liked the inherent spirituality that Dickens’ novels expressed through the actions of individual characters.

Dean read other spiritual material as well, including books by the English novelist and Catholic convert, Graham Greene. His work blends adventure, psychological portraits, and theological dilemmas, all of which appealed to Dean, who had moved beyond his atheistic anger.

A reference in another book led him to the theological philosophy of the nineteenth century Danish thinker, Soren Kierkegaard, and he began to read some of his works. Kierkegaard’s emphasis was on the paradoxes of belief and the difficulty of living a life of Christian integrity. As the first existentialist, he emphasized the value of the individual, the role of subjectivity in perception and belief, and the impact on life of choice and responsibility. His most famous works include Fear and Trembling and Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

“I read quite a lot of Kierkegaard,” says Dean. “I picked up Kierkegaard out of a reference to something else I was reading. Why I read him more than anyone else in that period, I suppose, was that I was trying to understand mankind’s spiritual quest and whether or not I personally have one. I must have felt a kinship at that time in my life with his perspective.”

Dean finally felt that his career had some momentum and that he might make a break at any time with a big book. By the following year, he was doing well enough — five years after Gerda had made the momentous offer — that she quit her job at A.B. Dick to work for him. She had learned enough from their one foreign agent, Lenart Sane, about subrights representation and how to contact foreign agents in other areas that she was able to take on this job herself and find good subagents in territories other than Lenart’s. Between proofreading, submitting manuscripts overseas, correspondence with foreign agents, and research, she had her hands full. They were now a real team, with their efforts going into a shared vision of Dean’s growth as an author.

1Dean R. Koontz, A Darkness in My Soul (New York: Daw, 1972), p. 108.

²Dean R. Koontz, Starblood, (New York: Lancer, 1972), p. 92.

³Ibid., p. 157.

⁴Ibid., p. 120.

⁵Harlan Ellison, Introduction, Again, Dangerous Visions (New York: Signet, 1972), p. 187.

⁶Dean R. Koontz, Afterword, Again, Dangerous Visions, p. 200.

⁷Ibid., p. 201.

⁸Dean R. Koontz, “Wake Up to Thunder,” Children of Infinity, edited by Roger Elwood (New York: Franklin Watts, 1973), p. 178.

⁹Dean R. Koontz, Preface, Chase (London: W.H. Allen, 1983).

¹⁰Dean Koontz, Chase, Strange Highways, (New York: Warner, 1995), p. 551.

¹¹Profile of Stephen Marlowe, Publishers Weekly (November 18, 1996), p. 51.