In those early days, I wrote an Alex Cross book every year. That’s it. Just one novel. What a slacker I was.
But I was starting to be kind of a minor big-deal writer and I got to go on book tours. Very large book tours. As many cities as I was game to visit. Sometimes I would do three five-hundred- to one-thousand-person signings in a day.
The cool thing was that most of the people who came to the signings really liked my writing. They especially loved Alex Cross and, eventually, Lindsay Boxer and the Women’s Murder Club. And then young adults got into the Maximum Ride series.
I visited Lexington, Kentucky, on one of the tours. There was a very long line snaking around the Joseph-Beth bookstore. I sign books quickly, talking all the while, but this was going to be a two- to three-hour event.
At around the halfway point, an attractive, nicely dressed woman edged up to the signing table. She spoke in a soft voice, almost a whisper. I noticed that her hands were trembling. I leaned in and asked her if she was all right.
She said she was fine; she was great, actually. Just very nervous. Then she confessed that Along Came a Spider was the first book that she’d ever read in her life. She hadn’t even learned to read until her early twenties. She thanked me and said she was a big reader now. Then she started to cry, and we held hands for a few seconds. I thanked her for coming and told her she had made my day. She really had. I’ve never forgotten our minutes together at Joseph-Beth.
Every day on the tour brought new surprises, both good and bad.
I have signed Nook covers, Kindle covers, bookstore sales slips, backs of hands, breasts, sneakers, menus, golf balls, baseballs, and hundreds of ball caps…yes, I’ve signed breasts. Golf balls actually present more of a challenge. They’re so small, so round, so hard. Are you reading this, Tiger Woods? Are you nodding your head and smiling a little?
In Fort Worth, Texas, I reluctantly agreed to autograph a sheet that was going in the coffin of the husband of a very persuasive and bereaved widow.
A sweet fourteen-year-old in Boston asked me to sign and personalize Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas, her grandmother’s favorite novel. That afternoon the girl was heading to a local funeral home to put the book in her grandma’s casket before she was buried.
I went on a TV show one time in Birmingham, Alabama, which is the home of Books-A-Million. The host said that he hadn’t read Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas, the book I was there to promote, but he’d given it to his wife the night before. He had gone off to bed and left her reading.
As he told me live on Birmingham TV, “My wife came into our bedroom at two this morning. She apologized for waking me. Then she said the most amazing thing: ‘I’m sorry for getting you up, but I just finished that book, and I had to come in here and tell you how much I love you!’”
Some coldhearted folks might roll their eyes, but I find that kind of emotion hard to come by and hard to resist. Maybe it’s just the small-town kid in me bubbling up again, but that’s my deal.