Now Write! Mysteries

ROBERT S. LEVINSON is the bestselling author of nine novels, including A Rhumba in Waltz Time, The Traitor in Us All, In the Key of Death, Where the Lies Begin, and Ask a Dead Man. The Elvis and Marilyn Affair was a Hollywood Press Club Best Novel winner. A regular contributor to Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen mystery magazines, his short story “The Quick Brown Fox” won the Derringer Award. His fiction has appeared in Year’s Best anthologies six consecutive years and his nonfiction in Rolling Stone magazine, Los Angeles magazine, Westways, the Writers Guild of America’s Written By, and Autograph.

The National Enquirer came calling when my first novel, The Elvis and Marilyn Affair, was published a decade or so ago, wondering how much truth there was to the romance that drove the mystery. Had, in fact, the two icons wrapped themselves in each other, the reporter wondered, and, if so, how specifically did I know so?

She had done her homework and was aware of an extensive background in the worlds of movies and music that often allowed me to rub shoulders with the high and the mighty of show business.

She knew I had hung a bit with Presley and some of his people, although never often or close enough to be considered a member of his inner circle, and I had dealt with people who’d been on a tighter-than-tight, first-name basis with Monroe.

“Whaddaya say, Bob?” she said, pressing me for some answers that would give her a strong hook and greater space for the feature story she’d be cranking out. What could I reveal that might influence her readers to race to their nearest bookstore and purchase a copy of The Elvis and Marilyn Affair?

She stopped me from saying more with an outstretched palm and pulled a copy from her stuffed tote bag. The book’s spine was broken, pages littered with those little yellow pasty things. She picked one at random, opened to the section it marked, and read aloud from an underlined passage: “I wouldn’t call it a real romance, and maybe affair would be too strong. A fling. It lasted a couple of months and then it was history. She came after him like a hurricane in a hurry. I don’t have to explain what kind of an impression it made on a youngster like El, although he already could have his pick of the girls, to have this ripe sex goddess ready to park her body beneath his.”

“In spirit, maybe? In your knowledge; writing what you know? Present under another name? You did blend real people by their real names with fictional characters who could easily be real people in disguise . . . What do you say to that, Bob?”

We went around like that for another half-hour or so, and she left no closer to learning from me if an Elvis and Marilyn love affair was any more than the figment of an author’s overripe imagination, but—

She was back at me a year later, when The James Dean Affair, the second novel in my series featuring newspaper columnist Neil Gulliver and actress Stevie Marriner, “The Sex Queen of the Soaps,” was published—

On the phone this time, challenging the root of the story, that Dean might be the link connecting the curious, often mysterious and questionable deaths of people who had been tight with the actor before he died in the fiery highway crash of his Porsche Spyder, “The Little Bastard,” among them actor Nick Adams, supposedly a suicide; actor Sal Mineo, killed during what police logged as a random street robbery; and actress Natalie Wood, who drowned in a freak accident off Catalina Island.

“Your book is the only one I’ve found that ties the deaths together, to Jimmy Dean, and challenges how they happened and why. Is that the truth in your fiction or simply more fiction in your truth?”

“You were associated at one time with the Actors Studio, knew and dealt with many of Dean’s fellow members who were his friends, as well as Lee Strasberg himself. Were they the source behind what you eventually wrote? Stories you picked up or overheard?”

I didn’t, and we sparred like that until she hung up, satisfied she had again reached a dead end in driving after some confirmation, any confirmation, from me that would make for a headline story.

My third “Affair” novel, The John Lennon Affair, had Neil, Stevie, and other fictional characters engaged with dozens of legitimate music industry luminaries, as well as Mark David Chapman, the whacky misfit who murdered Lennon.

As in the first two books, I had blended who I knew with what I knew. Some of them played larger roles than others, who wandered in and out of the story in cameos or crowd scenes, adding verisimilitude to set pieces based on fact or wholly invented, explaining in an author’s note a bit more than I’d ever let on to the Enquirer:

Readers may think they found truths encapsulated in the fiction, shards of reality that screamed out roman à clef at them, but it isn’t so, of course.

Maybe recollections worth borrowing and building upon, a little bit here, a little bit there, a collage of events and people from the past—including my time running a news bureau in a desert town next to an Indian reservation, near a gambling casino—pasted into the marvelous world of invention and imagination.

Coincidence, that’s all, if that.

I’d been pairing reality to make-believe and make-believe to reality, investing my fiction with real names and authentic events, set down by someone who had lived the experience and didn’t depend on research that too often saddled others with anecdotes originally created to burnish a celebrity’s ego; hide, ignore, disguise, or shed a favorable light on some embarrassing truth; a lie by any name.

I gave readers examples of my process in an author’s note for the fourth book in the series, The Andy Warhol Affair (originally published as Hot Paint):

The Warhol encounter built around rock idol Richie Savage that climaxes with Neil Gulliver leading Andy onto the stage at Madison Square Garden to observe Richie’s SRO concert from behind the amps happened a lot like it’s presented, except the rock idol was Shaun Cassidy and the author substitutes Neil Gulliver for himself.

For the longest time I went around thinking to myself I had invented something fresh and new, what I came to call “autobiographical fiction.” Not so. Damn it. Turns out that was me and my ego applying self-serving fiction to the truth, but—

I was in great company that dated back at least to the 1800s, when authors such as Charles Dickens, Louisa May Alcott, and even Tolstoy wrote novels that mirrored their lives, changing names and locations and re-creating events for more dramatic punch. They and dozens more who followed to some degree likened their protagonists to themselves.

Their plotlines injected events pulled from their lives without exact truths, the events adjusted for artistic or thematic purposes. Autobiographical fiction was a proven, standard, and well-worn concept long before I came along.

Beyond that, there was a category christened “historical fiction” by the ubiquitous “they,” where E. L. Doctorow and other authors paired real people with characters brought to life through the writers’ wondrous imaginations.

In Ragtime, Doctorow borrowed the lives of Henry Ford, Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, Booker T. Washington, Stanford White, and the beauteous Evelyn Nesbit. In Billy Bathgate, he had crusading New York Attorney General Thomas E. Dewey pitted against gangsters Dutch Schultz and Charles “Lucky” Luciano.

Unlike Doctorow and the other authors noted, I’ve incorporated a history I’ve lived and people I knew in leading roles more often than people I only knew about. That may be the one fresh element I brought to the genre in my four Affair books and the five mysteries/thrillers published since. I don’t know if there’s a name for what I’ve done. I don’t know that it needs a name. What’s in a name, anyway?

EXERCISE