It was funny he’d thought of the Business Exchange back in the pawnshop. That was where his life had begun.
He’d been twenty-one, on his own and out of work. On the way home from his final confrontation with the foreman, he’d stopped in a drugstore for a cup of coffee and the want ads, but the bright colors on the cover of a magazine called Double-Barreled Detective caught his eye and he bought it and read it at the counter.
The stuff was tripe. He didn’t know much about gunshot wounds (not then), but he was sure that no man on earth could floor a mob of thugs in a dingy hotel room with just his fists and with a forty-five slug in his shoulder to boot. But he assumed someone had been paid for writing the scene. He didn’t bother to go back and read the byline.
On the back page, among smudgy black-and-white illustrations advertising fertility pills and elevator shoes, he’d spotted a clip-art picture of a boxy typewriter and an order blank for a used machine from the International Business Exchange for as low as $26.95.
He’d gotten out his wallet and counted the bills inside. “How much, buddy?” he asked the man in the paper hat behind the counter.
“Dime for the cup of mud, dime for the magazine. Twenty cents, Rockefeller.”
He had two tens, a five, and two singles in the wallet. From his pants pocket he counted out two dimes and a penny. $27.21. He smacked down the dimes and a penny tip for the Rockefeller crack. That left him with five cents bus fare and just enough for the machine.
That’s how Jacob Heppleman became a writer.
His first story, “Before I Go into Shock,” ran in the December 1938 issue of Double-Barreled Detective, entitled “A Punk with a Rod.” He was paid twenty-five dollars for 2,500 words. It had taken him three months to write, two-finger fashion, on a stodgy Royal standard with a crooked d, and another month to hear back from the editor, but it returned almost a hundred percent on his investment—when the story appeared in print.
Not counting paper, ribbons, and postage. But the storefront accountant he consulted told him the expenses were tax deductible. He charged five bucks for the advice.
It was a joke; in school, had Jacob studied arithmetic more and English less, he’d be earning five bucks an hour instead of a penny a word. But it didn’t take a Euclid to know that if you wrote twice as fast you’d make twice as much, and if you winnowed three months down to three days …
Well, it was still chump change. But it beat duking it out with some ape of a foreman for six-eighty a shift and kicking back four bits to the shop steward.
Had Sir Walter Scott started out this way? Likely not; but Walter hadn’t anticipated the Great Depression.
By his twenty-third birthday, Jacob Heppleman had sold crime stories to Double-Barreled Detective, Goon Squad, Third Degree, and Silk Sheets (a racy-thriller magazine, with a woman on the cover falling out of her lingerie; he was afraid to be seen admiring it in the drugstore), and westerns to Six-Gun Sagas, Warbonnet, Tin Star, Rawhide Riders, and Badlands. When he got tired of powwows and saloons he shifted gears, but after “Amazon Maidens of the Moon” had made the rounds of Orbit, Constellation, Astounding Science Fiction, and Tales From Outer Space, and come back with dog ears and coffee rings, he chucked it.
“Custer’s Ghost” was his last oater; everyone was either a paleface or a sidewinder, and he kept losing track of where the hero left his horse. At that point his rent was paid up and he had pork chops in the icebox, so he cranked in a sheet of yellow paper and spent a month on Chinese Checkers, about skullduggery in Chinatown, a place he’d visited only once, and got sick on bad chow mein. It ran 60,000 words and was serialized in five issues of Double-Barreled Detective. He’d written his first novel.
It caught the attention of a literary agent, who spent twenty minutes on the phone explaining why he needed representation. Finally: “Look, you can be a pulp writer all your life or you can play with the big boys. I’m talking Steinbeck. Hemingway. That dame, she wrote about deer?”
“Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. The Yearling.” He almost never read in his own field anymore. “You’re serious?”
“The Hindenburg, that was serious. I’m talking im-fucking-mortality.”
He was impressed: It was the first time he’d heard anyone split a word in order to insert an obscenity. He agreed to hire the agent for a ten percent commission.
After three rejections, the agent, Ira Winderspear, placed Chinese Checkers with The Thornberry Press, an old Boston concern, recently inherited by the great-grandson of the founder, and a fan of detective fiction. Many months of revisions and rewrites followed: There were too many blackjacks, the publisher said, too many riddled bodies falling through doorways. On the final stroke of the last draft, the Business Exchange machine broke, sending the crooked d zinging past his left ear.
The book appeared in November 1941, bound in cloth with yellow-and-black Deco on the dust jacket. Sales were modest, but it was favorably reviewed in Literary Digest.
Jacob never saw the review. He was in New Jersey when that issue came out, in basic training at Fort Dix. Pearl Harbor was burning and the Second World War was on.